Having only just skimmed the article, I may have missed some imprtant points, but it seems they are basing this discovery on DNA analysis, which all well and good as far as it goes. What is no doubt valid is that this method yields a classification, but what is less certain - or perhaps highly uncertain - is whether this classification reflects the evolutionary phylogeny of the organisms in the study.
The big problem here is that DNA similarities probably only really match descendancy (or evolutionary relationship) well, when we talk about eukaryotes; this is because eukaryotes have sex: they go through cycles of meiosis/mitosis and all that, in which they recombine their genes in very rigorous way which ensures that DNA is inherited from predecessors. Prokaryotes don't have sex - instead they have different forms of lateral gene transfer, in which genes are acquired from many, seemingly unrelated organisms. The result of this is that the gene pool WITHIN what we perceive as 'a single species' of bacteria, like Eschericia coli, can be wildly different. Presumably there are genes within a single strain, that are fairly constant, and might be used to trace progeny, but I don't think anybody knows which they are yet.
First off, let me clarify: I can actually see the value of good advertising, and there are adverts that I have enjoyed in the past, mostly the ones that manage to be humorous. A good example in UK is the a chain of opticians called Specsavers; they are not actually particularly good, in my view, but the adverts are fabulous. Another one is for a roadside assistance provider (RAC? Blue Flag?) where a guy fills up with the wrong fuel and has a nightmare fantasy about his girlfriend writing a song called 'Piggy Eyes'. Heady stuff.
But the industry should pull their socks up and police their own ranks, because 90% or more is utter, vile crap, that only serves to drive people away from the products they advertise. Or failing that, governments should do it for them, harshly and draconically. It isn't just about protecting consumers, it is about protecting legitimate businesses and their legitimate advertising as well.
Well, good advice, to be sure, but really, just grow up, everybody. When you are teenager, you do embarrassing things - that is what the teens are for. When we grow up, one of the things need to learn is to forgive ourselves and learn to live with having left a trail of evidence. With the right kind of attitude, it can be a great source of experience and humour; it really isn't a big deal - and it ought to be asset.
The problem isn't that we are stupid when we are teenagers - at that age, you need to experiment in order to find out about things, and you have a right to make errors and be forgiven. The real problem is when these things are blown out of all proportion, by employers, political enemies or by the shallow end of the press - I mean, look back at the continuous smear campaigns against one president after another. Does it really matter that Dubya once yelled 'Fuck you' after his mother? Does it matter that Clinton once smoked a joint and maybe even enjoyed it? Of course not - what matters is what they do when they are in office.
I can think of several reasons - different sides of the press are not averse to being selective of their sources, depending on which conclusion they are pursuing, for one thing. There are strong industry interests at play here - the producers of insecticides want to find that they are not guilty, the big bee-keepers want to hear that it has nothing to do with the way they cart bees around etc. So, you cherry-pick your data.
Secondly, it is often seen, in long-running illnesses and epidemics, that there are periods of remission before it starts going the wrong way again. If bee-numbers are up this year, that may be all it is; we will know in the coming years.
I think the truth is that we are seeing a long, slow decline; we won't lose all honey bees in the world, but the industrial scale bee keeping, particularly in the US, will be severaly challenged, and will probably have to change their business model fundamentally, from carting their monocultures around with a heavy load of varroa mites, viruses etc, to being much more locally based. It has for many decades been a common practice to rely only on a very limited number of bee strains with specific properties, like high productivity, low swarming and low agression. It isn't really a surprise that we now find all bee colonies susceptible to emerging diseases, I think. And, of course, queen bees have been posted all over the globe, helping the spread of infections.
This is just a minor part of the more widespread problem, that originates with the industrialisation of agriculture: the tendency to have enormous estates of monocultures. The chemical industry are one of the major culprits in this, in that they have made it possible to mask problems with insect plagues and depletion of nutrition; we must, by necessity, come to a point where these things no longer are effective, and then it is likely to come crashing down. A sensible way out of this would, in my opinion, be to get away from gigantic monocultures and possibly also commercial production for global export.
If honey bees are thriving, then why is honey still so expensive?
Even if honey bees are now thriving, which may or may not be the case, honey tends to be harvested in batches that follow the year; so if there are plenty of honey bees this year, we wouldn't expect to see a lot of honey until near the end of the year. On top of that, producers and resellers have a profound interest in keeping the price high for as long as possible; which is why prices go up a lot faster than they come down.
It launched with one of the most challenging of languages,...
Nothing challenging about Chinese - it is pronounced like it's spelled, as the old joke goes. Seriously, though, Chinese is relatively easy to learn, even beyond the elementary stage. There are no grammatical inflections in the way we have in Indo-European languages, for one thing, the grammatical rules are simple and regular (unlike in English), and transcriptions like pinyin represent the sound of the spoken language well, unlike in English: there are many words in the English vocabulary that are pronounced differently from what you'd expect from the spelling, whereas there are virtually none in Chinese.
What does The Great Firewall have to do with this particular problem.
It is about China - of course the Great Firewall has to be mentioned, otherwise, what's the point of anything? Otherwise we would have to mention things like democracy, freedom of speech or Tibet, and that would be even less relevant. (Note: this was an attempt at sarcasm)
Surely this device has nothing whatsoever to do with a mass-spec?
Of course not - in fact, already the headline should arouse suspicion that somebody in the chain of communication hasn't got a clue: "... chemical composition of anything...". There no instrument at all in existence on this planet capable of doing this. It may be reasonably easy to measure the relative abundances of chemical elements and their isotopes in a sample, but not with a simple 'near infrared spectrometer', I would have thought, and as for analysing such a spectrum to get the 'chemical composition of anything', the fact is that there are millions or billions of common molecules arounds - such as proteins - and we do not have any simply understanding of what their spectral fingerprint might be. Single atoms have well-defined, discrete spectra, but complex molecules may not even have discrete spectra.
On top of that - even if we were able to calculate and measure spectra perfectly, and assuming that the very limited 'near infrared' bandwidth is sufficient to distinguish all molecules, the analysis part is likely to require massive processing power. All in all - a load of hyped up nonsense.
I think perhaps a large part of it is that managers feel insecure about managing somebody who is older and more mature - we are brought up to see parents and the older generation as authority, and despite teenage rebellions etc, it sticks deep. In some companies they seem to have cracked it; probably the trick is to get older, more experienced people in as 'team granddads' (I should probably say 'grandparents' in this days and age), who not only have a lot of knowledge to give workwise, but also have the ability to interact with the younger colleagues in a way that contemporaries can't.
As I have become 'old' (hey, I'm still capable of some movement), I find that my colleagues in their 20es to 30es ('mere infants' as I call them) sort of gravitate to me for all sorts of advice, not always work related. Whether it is actually useful is another matter, but I think it serves to reassure or maybe as a testing ground for new thoughts. When you are in your teens, you have a lot of ideas, inspirations and opinions, but not enough experience, so you use your parents as a safe option for trying out your most outrageous behaviours (I certainly did), and when you get a bit older, you expand this to other people that are older than yourself. I think that is a very valuable function, that is often missing in an office.
While I agree with the gist of what you say, to some extent, I think your wording is unfortunate. Being ignorant means, by definition, to not know about something, so we are all born ignorant - that's why I prefer to use the term 'stupid' as something distinct from 'ignorant': stupid is when you learn to ignore facts to protect a belief, that would otherwise be proven false. I am ignorant about a lot of things, but I'm not stupid (I hope), because I don't refuse to change my views and beliefs if facts prove me wrong.
That's an easy choice, at least. I'd rather have nothing than help feeding a buch of parasites, considering that most of what gets streamed is empty calories with artificial flavours.
On a different note - with your skills at pleasing the crowds with sweet words, surely you must be in advertising yourself? What advertiser still haven't managed to grasp is that when people avoid adverts, it isn't because they are subversives with a communist agenda tryig to take away fundamental rights. They are simply sick of advertising and advertisers that show no respect for anybody, unless they are forced to at gunpoint. Advertisers appear to shamelessly lie, cheat, invade our privacy and steal time and space from us - and the effect is that most of us loathe advertising, and most of us subconsciously or consciously decide to place our shopping elsewhere.
Hopefully, in the future, businesses will learn to not spend money on idiotic advertising that only alienates their customers, but I'm not optimistic.
- and choosing to be an asshole, as you call it. Is being an 'asshole' by choice justified when you want to score easy points slagging off a society that you don't really seem to know much about? I'm sure we all know there are serious problems on many levels in China - as there are in most countries in the West - but unlike many countries in the West, the Chinese government are actually addressing them. You may not agree with the way they have prioritised the momentuous task ahead, but then it isn't your call either. It is easy to sit in your armchair and have great opinions about things you are not personally responsible for finding a practical solution to - not just whether some other nation should intruduce 'democracy' or 'freedom of whatever', but also the stupid questions about 'why didn't they just....' when some expensive satelite fails etc etc. Fortunately it can't cause much harm, and one can shrug it off, but sometimes the stupidity of it just gets too irritating.
I don't mind genuinely insightful criticism, especially because insightful people know how to offer constructive criticism.
Yup. Let's spend thousands of dollars worth of man-hours and paperwork and court time over 10 cents worth of electricity.
RTFA - this is not about something trivial as that; this guys was ABSTRACTING electricity!! Fortunately they got him before he got to the extended metaphors; a close call. Too damn close for comfort!
The real problem with Javascript is that it is code that gets pushed to your browser from an essentially unknown source. It doesn't matter if it is fast or not, it gets pushed at you in a situation where you are not in a position to make a good decision about what this software is and whether you want it or not. My own, somewhat awkward solution is to use NoScript and not allow any Javascript as a default. Most sites work OK without, and for those that don't, I have the control I need to make a decision about things.
Javascript can be a brilliant tool and if used correctly, can make a web application run like a desktop application; but I have been around far too many obscenely abusive Javascripts to allow it unlimited access to my system. It isn't a lot of fun, when you have to go to a console to kill off your browser because some idiot has served you a looping Javascript.
This idea came to suddenly in a flash! How about we send the immigrants into space?! It would solve the crisis with The Hordes Of Immigrants Looming Over Us To Steal Our Jobs and benefit space exploration. I can see no downside! There is no downside!!
Part of the reason that some of us take pride in our low-tech solutions is because we can achieve results above and beyond that of others even if we don't have any resources.
There's that, of course. But I think a very significant part of doing things by hand, with simple means, is that you enjoy the actual process, being able to apply your skills and achieve something that isn't trivially easy, but requires insight into what you are doing.
Years ago I worked for an American company, and I got to talk to one of the vice-presidents about fishing. To me fishing is something about trying to land a single fish or maybe two with a bit of cleverness and local knowledge, but to him it consisted in owning a 60 foot vessel on one of the big lakes, equipped with sonar, trawl etc etc. Or take bread making - you can probably make a good bread in one of these automatic breadmakers, but I can't imagine why I would want to skip the most enjoyable part of it.
Then, of coruse, every crime becomes a life sentence, even those undertaken while say still a hormone addled teenager.
Doesn't seem very just to me.
Sadly, justice as defined by the law is not necessarily just in a moral sense; it only means that it follows the law as currently practiced. What is too often lacking is the reality of full restitution - that you can be forgiven your past sins. I think it is fundamentally important that criminal justice happens in public, so that people can see that crimes are properly and consistently prosecuted, and the punishments are neither too harsh nor too lenient.
As for things becoming a life sentence - whether it is fair or not, what is done stays done, we can't change the past. In the more serious cases this reflects the fact that lasting damage has been done to a victim; and even if the may seem trivial, the victim is likely to feel significant distress that goes far beyond the objective loss suffered. I've been on the receiving end of petty crime several times, and although I am usually a very robust person, you can't help feeling violated and upset; and it doesn't help knowing that whereas you have lost a valued possession with memories attached, the thief is going to flog it for next to nothing. So, is it really always so unfair that you can't shake off the consequences of your actions?
Apart from that, in many countries you do in fact get rid of your past as far as the justice system is concerned; in UK, for example, many sentences will be 'spent' after a number of years, in the sense that they no longer occur on your criminal record, and you are no longer barred from things like applying for citizenship. It may not mean that there are no longer people who will remember that you were the one who did the crime, but then it is up to you to go and amend your relationships.
To me this sounds like the not uncommon hype that seems to follow the release of indifferent 'horror' movies. Like the one called something like 'The Human Centipede', which was supposed to be the most incredibly extreme horro movie ever. Only, it turned out to be a flop, hardly worth a shrug, something that could have been thought up by a couple of teen-agers and filmed on a smartphone.
I don't know, maybe I've grown too critical with age - I've stopped having night-mares because I tend to wake up and think "What is this crap?" because the story is too thin and the effects are unrealistic.
Back to TFA: molestation isn't rape. Without reading the article, I'd guess based on the sentence that the offense of the guy in question was pretty small. Maybe a grope on the train or something, happens pretty often on those crowded Japanese commuter trains. Is that also worth murder?
Well, without reading the article, you don't know if what they call molestation would be called child rape in our part of the world. To enlighten the debate a little: "The Japanese Penal Code sets a minimal age of consent of 13" (from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) - which to means that the court would be biased towards assuming consent, unless the girl was very young. Japan is also a society that still has a great deal of sympathy towards the rights of men is realtion to women.
From the article:
"He harbors remorse over the incident and is leading a new life. The search results prevent him from rehabilitating himself," the man's defense counsel claimed, adding, "Publicizing past criminal information with a person's real name doesn't serve the public's needs, and is therefore illegal."
Google had earlier refuted the plaintiff's claim, saying, "It was a vicious crime exploiting a child in order to satisfy his own sexual desire. The crime has attracted much criticism from the international community as well as a great deal of interest from parents."
What is interesting here is Google's statement; they are normally very competent when it comes to covering their own arse, so they would not come out with such a harsh statement unless they fellt sure it would stand up to scrutiny. The defence lawyer's statement, on the other hand, is vapid nonsense, as far as I can see. Just imagine anybody else getting away from their past with that excuse, even if all they had done was shoplifting a bottle of cheap wine. When we do something wrong, it stays with us; criminal cases are public: justice must be SEEN to be done.
One of the things that immediately puts me in alert mode is that name 'Liquid Metal', capitalised, no less. Understanding of what a glass actually is, is realtively new, of course, and something that is likely to become very useful in the future, but why make a phone with frame made of it? If it is indeed as good and durable as all that, is it actually going to be relevant? Smartphones are 'old' almost as soon as they go on sale, since the technology is still developing quickly, and unless the hardware etc can be upgraded easily, having an expensive phone like this is no more than a toy for the rich and stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Having only just skimmed the article, I may have missed some imprtant points, but it seems they are basing this discovery on DNA analysis, which all well and good as far as it goes. What is no doubt valid is that this method yields a classification, but what is less certain - or perhaps highly uncertain - is whether this classification reflects the evolutionary phylogeny of the organisms in the study.
The big problem here is that DNA similarities probably only really match descendancy (or evolutionary relationship) well, when we talk about eukaryotes; this is because eukaryotes have sex: they go through cycles of meiosis/mitosis and all that, in which they recombine their genes in very rigorous way which ensures that DNA is inherited from predecessors. Prokaryotes don't have sex - instead they have different forms of lateral gene transfer, in which genes are acquired from many, seemingly unrelated organisms. The result of this is that the gene pool WITHIN what we perceive as 'a single species' of bacteria, like Eschericia coli, can be wildly different. Presumably there are genes within a single strain, that are fairly constant, and might be used to trace progeny, but I don't think anybody knows which they are yet.
First off, let me clarify: I can actually see the value of good advertising, and there are adverts that I have enjoyed in the past, mostly the ones that manage to be humorous. A good example in UK is the a chain of opticians called Specsavers; they are not actually particularly good, in my view, but the adverts are fabulous. Another one is for a roadside assistance provider (RAC? Blue Flag?) where a guy fills up with the wrong fuel and has a nightmare fantasy about his girlfriend writing a song called 'Piggy Eyes'. Heady stuff.
But the industry should pull their socks up and police their own ranks, because 90% or more is utter, vile crap, that only serves to drive people away from the products they advertise. Or failing that, governments should do it for them, harshly and draconically. It isn't just about protecting consumers, it is about protecting legitimate businesses and their legitimate advertising as well.
Well, good advice, to be sure, but really, just grow up, everybody. When you are teenager, you do embarrassing things - that is what the teens are for. When we grow up, one of the things need to learn is to forgive ourselves and learn to live with having left a trail of evidence. With the right kind of attitude, it can be a great source of experience and humour; it really isn't a big deal - and it ought to be asset.
The problem isn't that we are stupid when we are teenagers - at that age, you need to experiment in order to find out about things, and you have a right to make errors and be forgiven. The real problem is when these things are blown out of all proportion, by employers, political enemies or by the shallow end of the press - I mean, look back at the continuous smear campaigns against one president after another. Does it really matter that Dubya once yelled 'Fuck you' after his mother? Does it matter that Clinton once smoked a joint and maybe even enjoyed it? Of course not - what matters is what they do when they are in office.
...not as a compendium of the beauty and complexity of the English language.
This rings particularly true, when we talk about French, of course.
I can think of several reasons - different sides of the press are not averse to being selective of their sources, depending on which conclusion they are pursuing, for one thing. There are strong industry interests at play here - the producers of insecticides want to find that they are not guilty, the big bee-keepers want to hear that it has nothing to do with the way they cart bees around etc. So, you cherry-pick your data.
Secondly, it is often seen, in long-running illnesses and epidemics, that there are periods of remission before it starts going the wrong way again. If bee-numbers are up this year, that may be all it is; we will know in the coming years.
I think the truth is that we are seeing a long, slow decline; we won't lose all honey bees in the world, but the industrial scale bee keeping, particularly in the US, will be severaly challenged, and will probably have to change their business model fundamentally, from carting their monocultures around with a heavy load of varroa mites, viruses etc, to being much more locally based. It has for many decades been a common practice to rely only on a very limited number of bee strains with specific properties, like high productivity, low swarming and low agression. It isn't really a surprise that we now find all bee colonies susceptible to emerging diseases, I think. And, of course, queen bees have been posted all over the globe, helping the spread of infections.
This is just a minor part of the more widespread problem, that originates with the industrialisation of agriculture: the tendency to have enormous estates of monocultures. The chemical industry are one of the major culprits in this, in that they have made it possible to mask problems with insect plagues and depletion of nutrition; we must, by necessity, come to a point where these things no longer are effective, and then it is likely to come crashing down. A sensible way out of this would, in my opinion, be to get away from gigantic monocultures and possibly also commercial production for global export.
If honey bees are thriving, then why is honey still so expensive?
Even if honey bees are now thriving, which may or may not be the case, honey tends to be harvested in batches that follow the year; so if there are plenty of honey bees this year, we wouldn't expect to see a lot of honey until near the end of the year. On top of that, producers and resellers have a profound interest in keeping the price high for as long as possible; which is why prices go up a lot faster than they come down.
It launched with one of the most challenging of languages,...
Nothing challenging about Chinese - it is pronounced like it's spelled, as the old joke goes. Seriously, though, Chinese is relatively easy to learn, even beyond the elementary stage. There are no grammatical inflections in the way we have in Indo-European languages, for one thing, the grammatical rules are simple and regular (unlike in English), and transcriptions like pinyin represent the sound of the spoken language well, unlike in English: there are many words in the English vocabulary that are pronounced differently from what you'd expect from the spelling, whereas there are virtually none in Chinese.
What does The Great Firewall have to do with this particular problem.
It is about China - of course the Great Firewall has to be mentioned, otherwise, what's the point of anything? Otherwise we would have to mention things like democracy, freedom of speech or Tibet, and that would be even less relevant. (Note: this was an attempt at sarcasm)
Surely this device has nothing whatsoever to do with a mass-spec?
Of course not - in fact, already the headline should arouse suspicion that somebody in the chain of communication hasn't got a clue: "... chemical composition of anything ...". There no instrument at all in existence on this planet capable of doing this. It may be reasonably easy to measure the relative abundances of chemical elements and their isotopes in a sample, but not with a simple 'near infrared spectrometer', I would have thought, and as for analysing such a spectrum to get the 'chemical composition of anything', the fact is that there are millions or billions of common molecules arounds - such as proteins - and we do not have any simply understanding of what their spectral fingerprint might be. Single atoms have well-defined, discrete spectra, but complex molecules may not even have discrete spectra.
On top of that - even if we were able to calculate and measure spectra perfectly, and assuming that the very limited 'near infrared' bandwidth is sufficient to distinguish all molecules, the analysis part is likely to require massive processing power. All in all - a load of hyped up nonsense.
I think perhaps a large part of it is that managers feel insecure about managing somebody who is older and more mature - we are brought up to see parents and the older generation as authority, and despite teenage rebellions etc, it sticks deep. In some companies they seem to have cracked it; probably the trick is to get older, more experienced people in as 'team granddads' (I should probably say 'grandparents' in this days and age), who not only have a lot of knowledge to give workwise, but also have the ability to interact with the younger colleagues in a way that contemporaries can't.
As I have become 'old' (hey, I'm still capable of some movement), I find that my colleagues in their 20es to 30es ('mere infants' as I call them) sort of gravitate to me for all sorts of advice, not always work related. Whether it is actually useful is another matter, but I think it serves to reassure or maybe as a testing ground for new thoughts. When you are in your teens, you have a lot of ideas, inspirations and opinions, but not enough experience, so you use your parents as a safe option for trying out your most outrageous behaviours (I certainly did), and when you get a bit older, you expand this to other people that are older than yourself. I think that is a very valuable function, that is often missing in an office.
Interesting choice of name, though: The Impact Team (TIT). What were they thing of?
People aren't usually born ignorant
While I agree with the gist of what you say, to some extent, I think your wording is unfortunate. Being ignorant means, by definition, to not know about something, so we are all born ignorant - that's why I prefer to use the term 'stupid' as something distinct from 'ignorant': stupid is when you learn to ignore facts to protect a belief, that would otherwise be proven false. I am ignorant about a lot of things, but I'm not stupid (I hope), because I don't refuse to change my views and beliefs if facts prove me wrong.
Commercials or nothing morons.
That's an easy choice, at least. I'd rather have nothing than help feeding a buch of parasites, considering that most of what gets streamed is empty calories with artificial flavours.
On a different note - with your skills at pleasing the crowds with sweet words, surely you must be in advertising yourself? What advertiser still haven't managed to grasp is that when people avoid adverts, it isn't because they are subversives with a communist agenda tryig to take away fundamental rights. They are simply sick of advertising and advertisers that show no respect for anybody, unless they are forced to at gunpoint. Advertisers appear to shamelessly lie, cheat, invade our privacy and steal time and space from us - and the effect is that most of us loathe advertising, and most of us subconsciously or consciously decide to place our shopping elsewhere.
Hopefully, in the future, businesses will learn to not spend money on idiotic advertising that only alienates their customers, but I'm not optimistic.
...just social commentary on China
- and choosing to be an asshole, as you call it. Is being an 'asshole' by choice justified when you want to score easy points slagging off a society that you don't really seem to know much about? I'm sure we all know there are serious problems on many levels in China - as there are in most countries in the West - but unlike many countries in the West, the Chinese government are actually addressing them. You may not agree with the way they have prioritised the momentuous task ahead, but then it isn't your call either. It is easy to sit in your armchair and have great opinions about things you are not personally responsible for finding a practical solution to - not just whether some other nation should intruduce 'democracy' or 'freedom of whatever', but also the stupid questions about 'why didn't they just ....' when some expensive satelite fails etc etc. Fortunately it can't cause much harm, and one can shrug it off, but sometimes the stupidity of it just gets too irritating.
I don't mind genuinely insightful criticism, especially because insightful people know how to offer constructive criticism.
Well, say what you will, it IS a strangely appropriate name: SIMP, all considered.
This is like asking if maybe telepathy would work better on Uranus
Well, all I can say is, it hasn't worked on mine.
Yup. Let's spend thousands of dollars worth of man-hours and paperwork and court time over 10 cents worth of electricity.
RTFA - this is not about something trivial as that; this guys was ABSTRACTING electricity!! Fortunately they got him before he got to the extended metaphors; a close call. Too damn close for comfort!
The real problem with Javascript is that it is code that gets pushed to your browser from an essentially unknown source. It doesn't matter if it is fast or not, it gets pushed at you in a situation where you are not in a position to make a good decision about what this software is and whether you want it or not. My own, somewhat awkward solution is to use NoScript and not allow any Javascript as a default. Most sites work OK without, and for those that don't, I have the control I need to make a decision about things.
Javascript can be a brilliant tool and if used correctly, can make a web application run like a desktop application; but I have been around far too many obscenely abusive Javascripts to allow it unlimited access to my system. It isn't a lot of fun, when you have to go to a console to kill off your browser because some idiot has served you a looping Javascript.
Regrettably, the efforts to Lunaform the Earth are at a more advanced stage ;-)
This idea came to suddenly in a flash! How about we send the immigrants into space?! It would solve the crisis with The Hordes Of Immigrants Looming Over Us To Steal Our Jobs and benefit space exploration. I can see no downside! There is no downside!!
Part of the reason that some of us take pride in our low-tech solutions is because we can achieve results above and beyond that of others even if we don't have any resources.
There's that, of course. But I think a very significant part of doing things by hand, with simple means, is that you enjoy the actual process, being able to apply your skills and achieve something that isn't trivially easy, but requires insight into what you are doing.
Years ago I worked for an American company, and I got to talk to one of the vice-presidents about fishing. To me fishing is something about trying to land a single fish or maybe two with a bit of cleverness and local knowledge, but to him it consisted in owning a 60 foot vessel on one of the big lakes, equipped with sonar, trawl etc etc. Or take bread making - you can probably make a good bread in one of these automatic breadmakers, but I can't imagine why I would want to skip the most enjoyable part of it.
Then, of coruse, every crime becomes a life sentence, even those undertaken while say still a hormone addled teenager.
Doesn't seem very just to me.
Sadly, justice as defined by the law is not necessarily just in a moral sense; it only means that it follows the law as currently practiced. What is too often lacking is the reality of full restitution - that you can be forgiven your past sins. I think it is fundamentally important that criminal justice happens in public, so that people can see that crimes are properly and consistently prosecuted, and the punishments are neither too harsh nor too lenient.
As for things becoming a life sentence - whether it is fair or not, what is done stays done, we can't change the past. In the more serious cases this reflects the fact that lasting damage has been done to a victim; and even if the may seem trivial, the victim is likely to feel significant distress that goes far beyond the objective loss suffered. I've been on the receiving end of petty crime several times, and although I am usually a very robust person, you can't help feeling violated and upset; and it doesn't help knowing that whereas you have lost a valued possession with memories attached, the thief is going to flog it for next to nothing. So, is it really always so unfair that you can't shake off the consequences of your actions?
Apart from that, in many countries you do in fact get rid of your past as far as the justice system is concerned; in UK, for example, many sentences will be 'spent' after a number of years, in the sense that they no longer occur on your criminal record, and you are no longer barred from things like applying for citizenship. It may not mean that there are no longer people who will remember that you were the one who did the crime, but then it is up to you to go and amend your relationships.
To me this sounds like the not uncommon hype that seems to follow the release of indifferent 'horror' movies. Like the one called something like 'The Human Centipede', which was supposed to be the most incredibly extreme horro movie ever. Only, it turned out to be a flop, hardly worth a shrug, something that could have been thought up by a couple of teen-agers and filmed on a smartphone.
I don't know, maybe I've grown too critical with age - I've stopped having night-mares because I tend to wake up and think "What is this crap?" because the story is too thin and the effects are unrealistic.
Back to TFA: molestation isn't rape. Without reading the article, I'd guess based on the sentence that the offense of the guy in question was pretty small. Maybe a grope on the train or something, happens pretty often on those crowded Japanese commuter trains. Is that also worth murder?
Well, without reading the article, you don't know if what they call molestation would be called child rape in our part of the world. To enlighten the debate a little: "The Japanese Penal Code sets a minimal age of consent of 13" (from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...) - which to means that the court would be biased towards assuming consent, unless the girl was very young. Japan is also a society that still has a great deal of sympathy towards the rights of men is realtion to women.
From the article:
"He harbors remorse over the incident and is leading a new life. The search results prevent him from rehabilitating himself," the man's defense counsel claimed, adding, "Publicizing past criminal information with a person's real name doesn't serve the public's needs, and is therefore illegal."
Google had earlier refuted the plaintiff's claim, saying, "It was a vicious crime exploiting a child in order to satisfy his own sexual desire. The crime has attracted much criticism from the international community as well as a great deal of interest from parents."
What is interesting here is Google's statement; they are normally very competent when it comes to covering their own arse, so they would not come out with such a harsh statement unless they fellt sure it would stand up to scrutiny. The defence lawyer's statement, on the other hand, is vapid nonsense, as far as I can see. Just imagine anybody else getting away from their past with that excuse, even if all they had done was shoplifting a bottle of cheap wine. When we do something wrong, it stays with us; criminal cases are public: justice must be SEEN to be done.
One of the things that immediately puts me in alert mode is that name 'Liquid Metal', capitalised, no less. Understanding of what a glass actually is, is realtively new, of course, and something that is likely to become very useful in the future, but why make a phone with frame made of it? If it is indeed as good and durable as all that, is it actually going to be relevant? Smartphones are 'old' almost as soon as they go on sale, since the technology is still developing quickly, and unless the hardware etc can be upgraded easily, having an expensive phone like this is no more than a toy for the rich and stupid.