And why is that bad? Would you rather have sociopaths committing armed robbery or selling bogus software?
a) They won't give up their established entreprises when they branch out to piracy.
b) I'd rather that software pirates not use violent means to get payment for their merchandise or guard their turf, like drug dealers do now.
Anyway, I'm a little tired of the way sociopaths tend to dominate every discussion of criminal penalties. Most criminals aren't sociopaths, and trying to design your criminal justice system around sociopaths is stupid. That system is supposed to deter and rehabilitate, and those are things you can't do with outright sociopaths.
You're right -- most criminals are not. However, 30% of all violent criminals meet the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy, and nearly all violent criminals who were not convicted for crimes of passion meet the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy/antisocial personality disorder.
By pushing the penalties for non-violent crimes to a level appropriate to violent crime, incidental criminals will be priced out of the labor market by hardened criminals who don't mind doing 7 years. Violence will increase.
A good point -- the marginal cost of serious (e.g., violent) crime goes down if you're already doing a mandatory drug minimum or get the book thrown at you for stuff like this. It just encourages sociopaths to enter previously innocuous rackets.
Also, if he pays restitution, what's the point of the jail sentence?
Well, let's do an apples-to-apples comparison. If you buy a Thinkpad from EmperorLinux.com pre-installed with Ubuntu, then plug in an iPod, will it Just Work?
Frankly, I don't know. I suspect that as a portable music player things will go swimmingly, but there's not iTunes for Linux so you can't do the whole music purchase thing.
As another informed citizen, I very much disagree with your assessment of the Kelo decision. The 5th amendment reads:
[...] nor [...] deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
The 14th amendment explicitly effects the same clause to the states.
You seem to read this phrase as "it's okay to take private property, as long as it's with due process of law; private property should be taken only for public use if it's with just compensation." This leaves a loophole that private property can be taken for private benefit, it it's been properly legislated.
I disagree for the following reasons:
* The tradition of sovereignty in which the Constitution was written clearly elevates the property rights of citizens, particularly the right to own land.
* The 14th amendment also makes explicit equal protection of citizens. Specifically, no gov't can make legislation that disparages the rights of some citizens compared to others.
Consequently, one returns to the standard of "public use" for the legislated seizure of property. IMO, the Supreme Court overreached in conflating public use with public benefit. Property should only be taken for use by the general public or facilities of the gov't.
And then you can become a professor/researcher at the school and continue to get paid piddling amounts for someone with your talents. Which might be okay if you had free choice in what you wanted to investigate, but you don't have free choice. You have to write proposals and sell your ideas to various committees and sponsors and fight your way through some vicious office politics on the way. So in the end you don't work on what you want to, but instead settle for what you can get approved.
A research career is far more entrepreneurial than simply having a career in the private sector. You find funding, recruit talented employees, and deliver a novel product, all bound by a vision that is entirely your own. So it's not the Socratic ideal of sitting around and debating with colleagues all day, but it's not bad. Moreover, the kind of projects you work on are of a very different character than in the private sector. Here intellectual significance is the return, not dollars; if you find this deeply appealing, grad school is for you.
If you need a second chance. But if grad students are folks who needed a second chance to get it right, what does that say about their abilities?
It's rarely a matter of ability -- if you can get into an elite grad school, people much more experienced and probably smarter than you think quite well of you. Rather, it's a matter of focus. Undergrad for most people is a mash of general education, work in your major, sex, booze and extracurriculars, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Grad school is a chance to do it right, all the way, both to honor the subject and be useful as a researcher.
Because I always wanted to be the guy who got paid piddling amounts of money to do a lousy job of teaching students, all of whom clearly understand that I'm doing a lousy job.
If you do a lousy job of teaching, than you are a lousy teacher. I and most of my grad school peers get consistently high marks from our tuition-paying students. We love our field, and it comes through in conveying our knowledge to others.
It should be noted that the power for the federal government to fund scientific research is granted under the accepted interpretation of the "general welfare" clause of Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution.
This should be distinguished from pork, which by definition does not provide a "general" benefit.
BoA is just trying to gain operational efficiency. They might have chosen the wrong strategy, but that's besides the point -- it's their mistake to make.
I wonder how many people here have 401(k)'s, and wish their own holdings to perform their fiduciary responsibility and increase share value? What about purchasing consumer goods which are highly affordable because they use cheap labor in other countries, who are glad for the opportunity? I'm not sure the Slashdot horde would even exist without sub-$1000 computers.
I'm just wondering if all this fire and brimstone is merely lip service, or if people really are willing to reduce their purchasing power to save their fellow man from competing with furriners.
They use traditional breeding, a technique that humans have been using for millennia to produce domesticated animals with desirable attributes. If anything, breeding cats to be hypoallergenic is more noble than usual reasons for selective cat breeding.
Furthermore, humans play God all the time. We have treatments for diseases (genetic ones even), shape the land, and create synthetic substitutes for fabrics, transportation, etc. etc. for stuff that isn't optimal. Even if they were to directly engineer the genome, it would follow in the grand tradition of humans not settling for what God provides us -- because it sucks.
Right now scopes can't go into the small intenstines -- this would fill a significant gap in present diagnostic capability. Currently, wireless imaging capsules are used.
Unlike IBM, Lenovo doesn't compete with Microsoft on the software end of things, so they don't need to use their hardware to push other products. Also, they want to differentiate their package from the Apple+OS X solution in the high-end laptop market, now that they're both Intel.
A shame, though -- AFAIK, Thinkpads continue to be sturdy, functional, elegant machines under Lenovo.
The US can complain that its government is ignoring the Constitution. Warrantless National Security Letters, NSA eavesdropping, etc. are all violations of the 4th amendment. If the US starts demanind encryption keys, it will be a violation of the 5th amendment: you can seize my computer, but you cannot compel me to use my mind to help you analyze the evidence.
What bothers Americans about the UK is that there is no Bill of Rights -- no codification of the slippery slope, and the risk of democracy becoming a tyranny of the majority.
For the US to maintain it's economic leadership (per capita income, services, law and order) its per capita economic output must continue to grow. This is done by innovation -- creating new ideas, having more power at your fingertips. Taxachussetts has a doubly heavy burden because of its heavy gov't (not unlike France).
There are two solutions to this problem: pouring money into R&D, and opening the floodgates of immigration of the highly qualified workers into the US, to take advantage of those R&D dollars. Unfortunately, the current federal administration isn't on board with either of these, and the tech community is split on the latter.
Not that I agree with the OP, but the mechanism you propose is much easier said than done. Only the gov't has that much "capital" -- they can use force. Even then, there is always a samizdat, an "indy" media.
Assumed here is that there is always a demand for truth.
Most famous scientists and thinkers exhibited precociousness as children, but didn't do significant work until they were adults. Beethoven wrote sonatas at 13, but he was no Mozart. Oppenheimer was an impressive amateur geologist as a teen, but he didn't distinguish himself in physics until his PhD. Green, of Green's functions, ran a bakery. Norbert Weiner, a victim of an obsessive father, did his most brilliant work in cybernetics late in his career.
On a purely statistical basis, the vast majority of prodigies will become adults of high intelligence who won't do much to the shatter the world, but hopefully will lead happy lives.
Most prodigies do not become highly gifted adults, and most highly gifted adults were not prodigies. To succeed as a gifted adult, one must undergo a certain kind of transformation.
(Robert J. Sternberg, "The Uneasy Fit of the Precocious And the Average," The New York Times, March 12, 2002.)
MIT has really gone down hill on this front since the late 80s (link). I caught the tail end before that Krueger kid drank himself to death in '98. Since then, the administration has leveraged the event to change the student landscape: more "well-rounded" admittees, tighter alcohol controls, and less housing choice -- a more Ivy League-like model. I think it's a shame... you can fix the problems (e.g., real-world competence) without making MIT less distinctive and fun. As a prelude to my graduate education, MIT was perfect.
As for the women, those at MIT were fit, sharp, non-skanky, and often quite beautiful -- no other campus I've visited/attended matches up. (De gustibus non disputandum, etc.)
[...] in future with a PAL doing it itself MSI-stylie.
I'm not familiar with those acronyms.
But I get the gist of it -- thanks for discussing with me. I will be watching autopackage's progress with keen interest. In particular, a distro based on autopackage, showcasing its ease of use and developer friendliness, might hasten its adoption.
* Is it necessarily desirable to attempt to install every feature possible?
* When a user complains that some feature is not working in a package, what then?
I think some user interaction has a role here. Autopackage should query the user on what conditional deps to install, as well as report any unsatisfied deps. This way, the user knows what feature is or is not installed, and why. He can then file a request upstream, either himself or through the maintainer of the primary package; maybe forward a bug report from some "Advanced" dialog.
There is still the issue of higher order dependencies, but even Portage has yet to have a transparent solution for that....
Not falling back when things are missing isn't really an option, the aim is to make installs as easy as possible so having minimal dependencies is crucial. Requiring people to have features XYZ compiled in is rather Gentooish: most non-technical users won't understand what this problem is let alone how to fix it.
I was thinking that this could be handled transparently: user wants some feature in a package, then autopackage fetches the right dependency chain to make this work. The difficulty here is that each of packages in the dep chain must exist, or there must be a facility to build it.
Tracking user prefs, yes maybe. Right now user interaction is banned so we can support drag/drop installs though. Hmm.
Something to think about.
I use Gentoo/Portage because I can manage these issues with USE flags, rebuilding and simple-to-write ebuilds; Red Hat/RPM was painful because I found myself writing my own spec files. If autopackage can handle these problems while still delivering binaries, I'm sold.
Slashdot Mirror
May be of interest:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU
a) They won't give up their established entreprises when they branch out to piracy.
b) I'd rather that software pirates not use violent means to get payment for their merchandise or guard their turf, like drug dealers do now.
You're right -- most criminals are not. However, 30% of all violent criminals meet the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy, and nearly all violent criminals who were not convicted for crimes of passion meet the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy/antisocial personality disorder.
(A good article on these topics.)
By pushing the penalties for non-violent crimes to a level appropriate to violent crime, incidental criminals will be priced out of the labor market by hardened criminals who don't mind doing 7 years. Violence will increase.
A good point -- the marginal cost of serious (e.g., violent) crime goes down if you're already doing a mandatory drug minimum or get the book thrown at you for stuff like this. It just encourages sociopaths to enter previously innocuous rackets.
Also, if he pays restitution, what's the point of the jail sentence?
Don't call me a constructionist, I just explicate what is written! :)
Well, let's do an apples-to-apples comparison. If you buy a Thinkpad from EmperorLinux.com pre-installed with Ubuntu, then plug in an iPod, will it Just Work?
Frankly, I don't know. I suspect that as a portable music player things will go swimmingly, but there's not iTunes for Linux so you can't do the whole music purchase thing.
The 14th amendment explicitly effects the same clause to the states.
You seem to read this phrase as "it's okay to take private property, as long as it's with due process of law; private property should be taken only for public use if it's with just compensation." This leaves a loophole that private property can be taken for private benefit, it it's been properly legislated.
I disagree for the following reasons:
* The tradition of sovereignty in which the Constitution was written clearly elevates the property rights of citizens, particularly the right to own land.
* The 14th amendment also makes explicit equal protection of citizens. Specifically, no gov't can make legislation that disparages the rights of some citizens compared to others.
Consequently, one returns to the standard of "public use" for the legislated seizure of property. IMO, the Supreme Court overreached in conflating public use with public benefit. Property should only be taken for use by the general public or facilities of the gov't.
A research career is far more entrepreneurial than simply having a career in the private sector. You find funding, recruit talented employees, and deliver a novel product, all bound by a vision that is entirely your own. So it's not the Socratic ideal of sitting around and debating with colleagues all day, but it's not bad. Moreover, the kind of projects you work on are of a very different character than in the private sector. Here intellectual significance is the return, not dollars; if you find this deeply appealing, grad school is for you.
It's rarely a matter of ability -- if you can get into an elite grad school, people much more experienced and probably smarter than you think quite well of you. Rather, it's a matter of focus. Undergrad for most people is a mash of general education, work in your major, sex, booze and extracurriculars, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Grad school is a chance to do it right, all the way, both to honor the subject and be useful as a researcher.
If you do a lousy job of teaching, than you are a lousy teacher. I and most of my grad school peers get consistently high marks from our tuition-paying students. We love our field, and it comes through in conveying our knowledge to others.
I was just reading this:
DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism by Jaron Lanier.
While acknowledging Wikipedia's usefuless, criticizes its exalted status among the digitally connected.
(IANAL)
It should be noted that the power for the federal government to fund scientific research is granted under the accepted interpretation of the "general welfare" clause of Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution.
This should be distinguished from pork, which by definition does not provide a "general" benefit.
BoA is just trying to gain operational efficiency. They might have chosen the wrong strategy, but that's besides the point -- it's their mistake to make.
I wonder how many people here have 401(k)'s, and wish their own holdings to perform their fiduciary responsibility and increase share value? What about purchasing consumer goods which are highly affordable because they use cheap labor in other countries, who are glad for the opportunity? I'm not sure the Slashdot horde would even exist without sub-$1000 computers.
I'm just wondering if all this fire and brimstone is merely lip service, or if people really are willing to reduce their purchasing power to save their fellow man from competing with furriners.
They use traditional breeding, a technique that humans have been using for millennia to produce domesticated animals with desirable attributes. If anything, breeding cats to be hypoallergenic is more noble than usual reasons for selective cat breeding.
Furthermore, humans play God all the time. We have treatments for diseases (genetic ones even), shape the land, and create synthetic substitutes for fabrics, transportation, etc. etc. for stuff that isn't optimal. Even if they were to directly engineer the genome, it would follow in the grand tradition of humans not settling for what God provides us -- because it sucks.
Right now scopes can't go into the small intenstines -- this would fill a significant gap in present diagnostic capability. Currently, wireless imaging capsules are used.
Unlike IBM, Lenovo doesn't compete with Microsoft on the software end of things, so they don't need to use their hardware to push other products. Also, they want to differentiate their package from the Apple+OS X solution in the high-end laptop market, now that they're both Intel.
A shame, though -- AFAIK, Thinkpads continue to be sturdy, functional, elegant machines under Lenovo.
The game in capitalism is not to make money, but to build equity. A job is nothing.
You don't have to be a CEO or born with a silver spoon in your mouth to understand this, and gain from it.
Individuality and inspiration are grossly undervalued resources in many Asian cultures. So is reason, but it's not as obvious.
The US can complain that its government is ignoring the Constitution. Warrantless National Security Letters, NSA eavesdropping, etc. are all violations of the 4th amendment. If the US starts demanind encryption keys, it will be a violation of the 5th amendment: you can seize my computer, but you cannot compel me to use my mind to help you analyze the evidence.
What bothers Americans about the UK is that there is no Bill of Rights -- no codification of the slippery slope, and the risk of democracy becoming a tyranny of the majority.
For the US to maintain it's economic leadership (per capita income, services, law and order) its per capita economic output must continue to grow. This is done by innovation -- creating new ideas, having more power at your fingertips. Taxachussetts has a doubly heavy burden because of its heavy gov't (not unlike France).
There are two solutions to this problem: pouring money into R&D, and opening the floodgates of immigration of the highly qualified workers into the US, to take advantage of those R&D dollars. Unfortunately, the current federal administration isn't on board with either of these, and the tech community is split on the latter.
Not that I agree with the OP, but the mechanism you propose is much easier said than done. Only the gov't has that much "capital" -- they can use force. Even then, there is always a samizdat, an "indy" media.
Assumed here is that there is always a demand for truth.
On a purely statistical basis, the vast majority of prodigies will become adults of high intelligence who won't do much to the shatter the world, but hopefully will lead happy lives.
(Robert J. Sternberg, "The Uneasy Fit of the Precocious And the Average," The New York Times, March 12, 2002.)
I use GNOME, but my heart is in GNUstep. Now that camaelon is working, they just need some apps.
Right now my must-have apps are Evolution, Epiphany, Gaim, Gnumeric and Rhythmox. If GNUstep gets suitable equivalents, I'll be all over it.
I'd also be interested to know if GNUstep has any equivalent to HAL, gnome-volume-manager, gnome-vfs, etc.
You are correct.
MIT has really gone down hill on this front since the late 80s (link). I caught the tail end before that Krueger kid drank himself to death in '98. Since then, the administration has leveraged the event to change the student landscape: more "well-rounded" admittees, tighter alcohol controls, and less housing choice -- a more Ivy League-like model. I think it's a shame ... you can fix the problems (e.g., real-world competence) without making MIT less distinctive and fun. As a prelude to my graduate education, MIT was perfect.
As for the women, those at MIT were fit, sharp, non-skanky, and often quite beautiful -- no other campus I've visited/attended matches up. (De gustibus non disputandum, etc.)
I'm not familiar with those acronyms.
But I get the gist of it -- thanks for discussing with me. I will be watching autopackage's progress with keen interest. In particular, a distro based on autopackage, showcasing its ease of use and developer friendliness, might hasten its adoption.
* Is it necessarily desirable to attempt to install every feature possible?
....
* When a user complains that some feature is not working in a package, what then?
I think some user interaction has a role here. Autopackage should query the user on what conditional deps to install, as well as report any unsatisfied deps. This way, the user knows what feature is or is not installed, and why. He can then file a request upstream, either himself or through the maintainer of the primary package; maybe forward a bug report from some "Advanced" dialog.
There is still the issue of higher order dependencies, but even Portage has yet to have a transparent solution for that
I was thinking that this could be handled transparently: user wants some feature in a package, then autopackage fetches the right dependency chain to make this work. The difficulty here is that each of packages in the dep chain must exist, or there must be a facility to build it.
Something to think about.
I use Gentoo/Portage because I can manage these issues with USE flags, rebuilding and simple-to-write ebuilds; Red Hat/RPM was painful because I found myself writing my own spec files. If autopackage can handle these problems while still delivering binaries, I'm sold.