This argument has effectively shot down your first argument! Since the claims are evaluated against empirically verified reality (note the past tense) this is why they are commonly rejected until more evidence comes to light. Hence you cannot use this to separate the mediocre idiots from the great minds without insisting that the "great minds" go out and find more evidence which is what Einstein was complaining about.
Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?
Exactly how does this surrender any sovereignty? As I understand it there is no restriction on what law they pass only that, once the government have passed a law, they just need to tell the EU what they did. Only if the EU had to agree to it would become an issue of sovereignty. The fact that the government forgot to report is their own fault. Perhaps they were all busy attending to more important matters like cleaning their moats and repairing their floating duck houses?
I do not think there are many individuals who do not think current copyright law "is wrong".
I think it is wrong that it last for the authors life plus 70(?) years. Why should the author's children and grandchildren continue to make income from their ancestors work? Children of builders don't get income from the buildings their parent built why should authors and other creators be different? Twenty years is long enough to discourage people from just waiting and for the creator to earn money. This should be a fixed term, regardless of the author's lifespan, to regard the fixed value of their work. A book does not get more valuable just because the author lives longer!
I think it is wrong to use copyright to restrict fair use rights such as backups and media shifting.
I think it is wrong to use copyright to enforce artificial market restrictions such as the region restrictions on DVDs, forced viewing (disabled skip/FF) of advertising and other deliberate crippling of technology.
I think that you are confusing the purpose of copyright with copyright law. I think the AIM of copyright is admirable but I think that copyright LAW broken because it is more about ensuring large revenue stream for publishers and less about a balanced contract between the consumer and the author.
Commissioned works, live performance attendence fees, and donations are how it will work.
Interesting since this is, of course, the way it used to work several hundred years ago before copyright came on the scene. The other interesting aspect is that instead of always aiming for the mass market there will now be a new market aiming at the tastes of the rich who can afford to commission works just as there was in the past. Of course mass market tastes are still catered to by live performances. Should be interesting to see whether this actually happens. I wonder if history will regard copyright as just a blip?
Yes, actually. We can tell the great minds from the mediocre idiots by the degree of correspondence that their ideas have with empirically verified reality.
Ok well until recently nobody had seen upward lightning and strange glowing sprites so. before that, those who said that they had seen them were clearly wrong because their statements did not correspond with empirically verified reality. Right?
The problem with your approach is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
does the theory match known empirical data? Is there actually a theory at all? Does it make new predictions that are testable? If so, then we might have something of worth.
...and who exactly is going to take the considerable amount of time and effort needed to check their theory against the huge amount of data and results that have already been collected? The only reason for doing this is because you think that the idea has some merit and you decide that using non-scientific principles based on arbitrary criteria such as you outline. People will never agree on these criteria and so hence there is a problem....
I ask because I've known a number of people into those topics and I can tell you they do not think they are making it up.
Whether they are consciously, or unconsciously making it up does not matter. Unless you truly believe that there are aliens from outer space visiting the US to abduct people and Europe to make crop circles their brains must be making it up. If it is unconscious then perhaps there is some science in trying to understand why the brain does this.
For the conscious cases we know why they do it: they get kicks form people taking them seriously. Hence the best thing to do is have a very heavy dose of skepticism when dealing with such phenomena.
I personally have seen apparitions, left my body, experienced vivid episodes of clairvoyance, and on a handful of occasions had visions of random future events which came to pass.
...and how many times have you had visions of events which did not come to pass? If I toss a coin in the air then 50% of the time I can predict the result correctly but that is hardly unexplainable! I am not trying to say that there are no phenomena that science cannot explain - afterall we only know what about 4% of the Universe is made of so we can hardly claim to understand it all or even most of it. However have you thought about why you keep thse observations to yourself (except for posting them on Slashdot!). Could it be that really, deep down, you yourself have doubts that what you observed actually happened exactly as it appeared to?
If you read my post carefully you would note that I did not generalize: I was careful to say that the vast majority were idiots making stuff up (consciously or unconsciously) but that some were probably genuine unexplained phenomena of the non-psychological kind. My point is simply that it is almost impossible to determine which are the important ones that should be investigated properly. In science you need to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out!
Einstein was right: "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds...."
That's great. Any idea how we can tell the great minds from the mediocre idiots? There are people telling us that they have been abducted by aliens, can predict the future from tea leaves and that drinking water can cure you (homeopathy) amongst other things. The reason that people do not get believed is not some great scientific conspiracy it is simply that their signal gets lost in the overwhelming noise of idiots making stuff up. Scientists have better things to do than going around checking out every nut job that comes up with something on the off chance that this might be genuine.
It is a shame, because things do get missed and sometimes the short-sightedness of the "establishment" can indeed be a factor (an excellent example is John Harrison). However if you have to blame someone for why people are not believed blame the crystal ball gazers who make it almost impossible to determine those who are genuine.
Even better - if you take away all the corporate sponsorship and money floating around athletics not only will the drug/hormone/... problems go away, or at least be reduced, but so will all the silliness about high tech swimsuits, hinged skates, running shoes etc.
If we are going to let the money stay then at least remove all the doping rules and lets see how fast a drugged up human really can run before their heart explodes.
Strange. I've rarely had them confuse force and energy - it is power and energy that seems to be the hardest to get right. You still haven't explained the choice of vector chapter ordering though.i
Physicists always assume that equations use self-consistent units
...and when stating an equation that would be correct. However Newton's second law is usually written down in words and then converted into an equation since it aids comprehension. Also, since a common problem with US texts is the presence of old medieval units, there is actually a need to state that this works for SI units only.
At the first mention of N2L, he specifically states "We are presently restricted to the case where the forces of interest are parallel to the direction of motion."
Exactly and why is that? Newton's second law has no such restriction and if you teach vectors beforehand there is no need for it. Even when I first learnt NII at school the direction was mentioned. This is an important part of NII and it is simply wrong to ignore it.
Thanks for pointing that out - I had missed that Newtonian Mechanics was not all contained in the Newtonian Physics book. As you say that is a taste issue and people will vary.
However I think the point about the chapter ordering is not taste but pedagogical in nature. Why do you not cover vectors at the start of the book? I don't see how you gain anything from putting them in so late and you end up loosing a lot of understanding when you are covering Newton's laws as well as basic kinematics. The same goes for saying things like "force is not energy". If you teach them what energy is then they will know it is not a force. Pointing out common errors is one thing but they do need to know what the two quantities actually are first.
All that being said I would definitely say that yours is the best "open source" physics book that I have seen. I don't think it is as good as the best commercial offerings (in my opinion) but it is better than some of them and it is definitely cheaper than all of them! I'll certainly point my students to your site though since tastes vary and they may like your text better than the course one.
The New trend of customized text books. where you can get mixed version of the book (only the chapters you need) and because you are making a mix you get royalties from the sales.
I looked into that once but never saw any mention of getting royalties. In fact the reason I looked into it was to see if we could strip out some of the book sections that we did not want to save the students money but the costs of producing the custom version meant that the savings were practically nothing.
Free Textbooks as samples or as thanks for having your classes use them
I've only ever got free textbooks to evaluate the text or, if we adopt a text, to work from to set reading assignments etc. If the publisher did not provide it for free then the University would be purchasing it for me to use and the cost would be passed on through tuition. Either way it will still be "free" for me since I need it to do my job as a professor so why would that make me more likely to pick one publisher over any other? In fact I would actually PREFER an electronic text since then I woud not have to either lug around or store these insanely large text books.
Professors are excellent saps for such tricks or marketing.
I would agree with that in principle but not for the reasons you give. My reasoning is simply that we are in an academic environment and not a business one. Hence we don't know all the latest marketing tricks because we have not been exposed to them. This is part of the reason why I am always on edge talking to marketing reps from publishers because I'm never entirely sure whether I am being spun the latest line or actually being presented with a product that will benefit my students.
Thanks for the tip and I'm glad you liked the book but, after just a brief reading, it fails my "Newton's Law test". Stating and explaining Newton's laws of motion is something every first year physics text must do and so it gives a good, single topic to quickly compare books.
Here is approximately what the laws should be:
A body will remain at rest or in motion with a constant velocity unless acted upon by an external force.
When a force acts on a body it produces an acceleration in the direction of the force which is proportional to the magnitude of the force and inversely proportional to the mass of the body.
For every action there is an equal, and opposite, reaction.
What this book has is:
If the total force on an object is zero, its center(sic) of mass continues in the same state of motion.
a=Ftotal/m, where m is an object's mass, Ftotal is the sum of the forces acting on it, and a is the acceleration of the object's center of mass.
??? They seem to have forgotten this one...oh they put it in a separate chapter for some reason here it is: "Forces occur in equal and opposite pairs: whenever object A
exerts a force on object B, object B must also be exerting a
force on object A. The two forces are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction."
Newton's first law is not too shabby - expect that "state of motion" is not defined until the next paragraph and why introduce something new when you do not need to?
Newton's second law is imprecisely stated since F=ma ONLY for SI units and they forget to mention this. If you do not use SI then you will need a constant stuck in there which is why it is best to say "proportional". They also never mention direction which is an important concept since force and velocity are vectors (nor do they use vector notation in the text)...but that is because they don't cover vectors until AFTER Newton's laws!
Newton't third law is again ok, just very wordy and should be alongside the other laws.
Finally they spend an inordinate amount of time explaining what force is not such as "a force is not energy" which is great only they have not actually explained what energy is yet...in fact that chapter is entirely missing as is the one on momentum. In fact these are my biggest gripes: half the book is missing (energy, momentum, rotational motion) and the ordering of the chapters is insane. How can you have the chapter on vectors AFTER the chapters on velocity and forces when these are vectors?
That presumes a correlation between intelligence and honesty.
No it assumes a correlation between understanding risk vs. reward and intelligence. Risking your future by getting a criminal conviction does not sound like a good idea if the reward is a DVD.
I have never heard of any prof ever getting a kickback from a publisher and I have certainly never been offered one myself....and I ever were offered one I guarantee I'd pursue the appropriate action against the offending publisher. Frankly I, and a lot of my colleagues, find the frequent new editions where nothing but the problem numbers change to be a huge rip-off for the students and we would love to do something about it.
I'm certainly not suspicious of "free" books...but have you ever actually looked at the texts which are available? at least for physics? I have, and while I am not a fan of the big, glossy 1st year physics text books they are far superior to the free offerings available. The free books are generally unedited, full of mistakes, have few to no chapter problems or worked examples and/or are written by an author trying to push some bizarre methodology or point of view. They are simply are not suitable as a course text. They are not, at all, like Open Source software where the code is generally of higher quality than the commercial stuff just less polished.
Perhaps if things were to somehow get organized like an Open Source project then things would be a lot better since it would allow faculty members to write a chunk of the book and the central maintainer could then act as editor. However the number of people with adequate expert knowledge, plus an Open source-like attitude plus the inclination and time to write such a chunk is low enough that without a very high profile it would be hard to achieve critical mass...and without critical mass how do you achieve a high profile?
If you have any suggestions I would be very interested to hear them....
...but in Space 1999 the moon did not explode nor did it kill all the Earthlings. There was an explosion ON the moon and, because the writers had never heard of physics, it magically pushed the moon off into a different solar system each week. Space 1899 would have been a better name - at least they didn't have relativity then.
I would certainly not want to touch a Uranium rod with my bare hands. It is not the radioactivity you need to worry about but the toxicity of the metal.
One immediate use that springs to mind is shoplifting - at least assuming that it blocks RFID tags. Although hopefully those kids smart enough to figure that out would also be smart enough not to shop lift. Of course a more positive use for the rest of us would be a passport pocket to block remote reading of your biometric data.
Prisons are there to punish criminals. If society protection was the first point we would have institutions that take care of criminals...
I know that this is a popular view: my point is that we should look at prisons differently. Clearly they are not pleasant and hence some type of punishment but I believe that we should, instead, think of them as protecting us, or at least giving us a break, from the actions of their inmates. We would only have institutes to put people on the "right path" if we knew how to do that with any reliability and I don't think that we do (although I'm sure psychiatrists might disagree). Hence I would say the lack of rehabilitation for many offenders is simply our failing for not knowing how to fix the problem (or for letting it get so bad for people in the first place).
What the prison system does is preventing crime. And it does it VERY well. Most people are NOT criminals.
I agree that tt prevents crime....but it does this by keeping the serious offenders isolated from society so they can no longer rape, pillage, murder etc. There is no reason that the fact that prison is extremely unpleasant and deters people from committing crimes means that it must be regarded as a punishment. In much the same way that, in the UK, there is a heavy tax on tobacco to pay for the increased health care costs of those who smoke. This is not a punishment for smoking but it certainly acts as a deterrent. Hence I would rather state your last sentence as "I bet the crime rate would be WAY higher if there were no consequences.". You can have unpleasant consequences without it having to be a punishment.
Because you can't punish people forever. Nor can you predict who will re-offend and who will not.
I'm arguing that prison should be regarded as society protecting itself and NOT as a punishment i.e. we are not trying to punish them per se we are trying to ensure that they are no longer a threat to innocent people. You are correct - we cannot be sure who will reoffend - but we can study who does reoffend and attempt to see if there is a discernable pattern. We could then use that pattern to help decide who we do, and do not, release. This might mean that some people who would not reoffend are not released but (assuming the justice system worked and they are guilty) that is the price they pay for their actions.
Effectively we need to ask ourselves, as a society, how much risk are we willing to take in an attempt to rehabilitate someone? This is a debate that we should be having in the open with the pros and cons both being discussed rather than the current model which is based on politicians trying to score political points.
prison is most certainly punishment, as evidenced by the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, not cruel and unusual "protection for society".
I realize that this is the common view. My point is that I believe that is the wrong way to look at it. If we take that point of view then we run into all these ethical questions about whether we are violating the criminal's rights. If you look at it from the protecting society then things become more balanced: we should not let a repeat rapist out of prison because they are likely to hurt someone else. In such a case society's rights trump the individuals: of course you have to be careful and maintain a balance between the two (otherwise you'll make things even worse) but at the moment it is far too skewed to individuals.
Are perpetrators of so-called crimes of passion a threat to society at large?
Arguably yes, they are. Most people do not have such an extreme reaction to provocation. If they do then what other provocation might set them off? What happens if they find a new girlfriend? Are their remaining relatives safe? They might not be as dangerous as a random serial killer but it is hard to argue that they are not dangerous at some level. In addition it would be dangerous not to respond since they might well escalate it into something more serious.
...but by that logic we should be ban from *any* social contact, which is clearly both impossible and absurd.
No it is not - that is what prisons are for. They block most social contact in order to protect society. If we think that there is a good chance of a repeat offence given social contact then prison is where they should be kept. As you mention a lot of "sex offenders" and not, using any sane definition, sex offenders but for those that are then keeping them in prison to protect society should be an option.
The entire premise is irrational. If there is such a large chance of the violent offenders re-offending then why are they being let out of prison? The primary reason for prison is to protect society not to punish. If politicians think that these people are still dangerous then it is illogical to let them back into society. Letting them back with all these restrictions is simple stupid: it does nothing to protect society and prevents the criminals from reintegrating and possibly leading a somewhat normal life.
Published before the parental controls were implemented... it's a big difference.
Not if you don't know when those parental controls will be published and have no recourse if they are delayed. Besides in order to look the word up you actually have to know it first so it is hardly exposing them to a rude word that they have not already seen is it?
Slashdot Mirror
This argument has effectively shot down your first argument! Since the claims are evaluated against empirically verified reality (note the past tense) this is why they are commonly rejected until more evidence comes to light. Hence you cannot use this to separate the mediocre idiots from the great minds without insisting that the "great minds" go out and find more evidence which is what Einstein was complaining about.
Surely such a surrender of sovereignty was exactly the sort of thing Thatcher opposed?
Exactly how does this surrender any sovereignty? As I understand it there is no restriction on what law they pass only that, once the government have passed a law, they just need to tell the EU what they did. Only if the EU had to agree to it would become an issue of sovereignty. The fact that the government forgot to report is their own fault. Perhaps they were all busy attending to more important matters like cleaning their moats and repairing their floating duck houses?
I do not think there are many individuals who do not think current copyright law "is wrong".
I think it is wrong that it last for the authors life plus 70(?) years. Why should the author's children and grandchildren continue to make income from their ancestors work? Children of builders don't get income from the buildings their parent built why should authors and other creators be different? Twenty years is long enough to discourage people from just waiting and for the creator to earn money. This should be a fixed term, regardless of the author's lifespan, to regard the fixed value of their work. A book does not get more valuable just because the author lives longer!
I think it is wrong to use copyright to restrict fair use rights such as backups and media shifting.
I think it is wrong to use copyright to enforce artificial market restrictions such as the region restrictions on DVDs, forced viewing (disabled skip/FF) of advertising and other deliberate crippling of technology.
I think that you are confusing the purpose of copyright with copyright law. I think the AIM of copyright is admirable but I think that copyright LAW broken because it is more about ensuring large revenue stream for publishers and less about a balanced contract between the consumer and the author.
Commissioned works, live performance attendence fees, and donations are how it will work.
Interesting since this is, of course, the way it used to work several hundred years ago before copyright came on the scene. The other interesting aspect is that instead of always aiming for the mass market there will now be a new market aiming at the tastes of the rich who can afford to commission works just as there was in the past. Of course mass market tastes are still catered to by live performances. Should be interesting to see whether this actually happens. I wonder if history will regard copyright as just a blip?
Yes, actually. We can tell the great minds from the mediocre idiots by the degree of correspondence that their ideas have with empirically verified reality.
Ok well until recently nobody had seen upward lightning and strange glowing sprites so. before that, those who said that they had seen them were clearly wrong because their statements did not correspond with empirically verified reality. Right?
The problem with your approach is that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
does the theory match known empirical data? Is there actually a theory at all? Does it make new predictions that are testable? If so, then we might have something of worth.
I ask because I've known a number of people into those topics and I can tell you they do not think they are making it up.
Whether they are consciously, or unconsciously making it up does not matter. Unless you truly believe that there are aliens from outer space visiting the US to abduct people and Europe to make crop circles their brains must be making it up. If it is unconscious then perhaps there is some science in trying to understand why the brain does this.
For the conscious cases we know why they do it: they get kicks form people taking them seriously. Hence the best thing to do is have a very heavy dose of skepticism when dealing with such phenomena.
I personally have seen apparitions, left my body, experienced vivid episodes of clairvoyance, and on a handful of occasions had visions of random future events which came to pass.
If you read my post carefully you would note that I did not generalize: I was careful to say that the vast majority were idiots making stuff up (consciously or unconsciously) but that some were probably genuine unexplained phenomena of the non-psychological kind. My point is simply that it is almost impossible to determine which are the important ones that should be investigated properly. In science you need to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out!
Einstein was right: "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds...."
That's great. Any idea how we can tell the great minds from the mediocre idiots? There are people telling us that they have been abducted by aliens, can predict the future from tea leaves and that drinking water can cure you (homeopathy) amongst other things. The reason that people do not get believed is not some great scientific conspiracy it is simply that their signal gets lost in the overwhelming noise of idiots making stuff up. Scientists have better things to do than going around checking out every nut job that comes up with something on the off chance that this might be genuine.
It is a shame, because things do get missed and sometimes the short-sightedness of the "establishment" can indeed be a factor (an excellent example is John Harrison). However if you have to blame someone for why people are not believed blame the crystal ball gazers who make it almost impossible to determine those who are genuine.
Even better - if you take away all the corporate sponsorship and money floating around athletics not only will the drug/hormone/... problems go away, or at least be reduced, but so will all the silliness about high tech swimsuits, hinged skates, running shoes etc.
If we are going to let the money stay then at least remove all the doping rules and lets see how fast a drugged up human really can run before their heart explodes.
Irony...or am I the only one who finds it ironic that an internet addiction centre has a web site?
Strange. I've rarely had them confuse force and energy - it is power and energy that seems to be the hardest to get right. You still haven't explained the choice of vector chapter ordering though.i
Physicists always assume that equations use self-consistent units
At the first mention of N2L, he specifically states "We are presently restricted to the case where the forces of interest are parallel to the direction of motion."
Exactly and why is that? Newton's second law has no such restriction and if you teach vectors beforehand there is no need for it. Even when I first learnt NII at school the direction was mentioned. This is an important part of NII and it is simply wrong to ignore it.
Thanks for pointing that out - I had missed that Newtonian Mechanics was not all contained in the Newtonian Physics book. As you say that is a taste issue and people will vary.
However I think the point about the chapter ordering is not taste but pedagogical in nature. Why do you not cover vectors at the start of the book? I don't see how you gain anything from putting them in so late and you end up loosing a lot of understanding when you are covering Newton's laws as well as basic kinematics. The same goes for saying things like "force is not energy". If you teach them what energy is then they will know it is not a force. Pointing out common errors is one thing but they do need to know what the two quantities actually are first.
All that being said I would definitely say that yours is the best "open source" physics book that I have seen. I don't think it is as good as the best commercial offerings (in my opinion) but it is better than some of them and it is definitely cheaper than all of them! I'll certainly point my students to your site though since tastes vary and they may like your text better than the course one.
The New trend of customized text books. where you can get mixed version of the book (only the chapters you need) and because you are making a mix you get royalties from the sales.
I looked into that once but never saw any mention of getting royalties. In fact the reason I looked into it was to see if we could strip out some of the book sections that we did not want to save the students money but the costs of producing the custom version meant that the savings were practically nothing.
Free Textbooks as samples or as thanks for having your classes use them
I've only ever got free textbooks to evaluate the text or, if we adopt a text, to work from to set reading assignments etc. If the publisher did not provide it for free then the University would be purchasing it for me to use and the cost would be passed on through tuition. Either way it will still be "free" for me since I need it to do my job as a professor so why would that make me more likely to pick one publisher over any other? In fact I would actually PREFER an electronic text since then I woud not have to either lug around or store these insanely large text books.
Professors are excellent saps for such tricks or marketing.
I would agree with that in principle but not for the reasons you give. My reasoning is simply that we are in an academic environment and not a business one. Hence we don't know all the latest marketing tricks because we have not been exposed to them. This is part of the reason why I am always on edge talking to marketing reps from publishers because I'm never entirely sure whether I am being spun the latest line or actually being presented with a product that will benefit my students.
What this book has is:
Newton's first law is not too shabby - expect that "state of motion" is not defined until the next paragraph and why introduce something new when you do not need to?
Newton's second law is imprecisely stated since F=ma ONLY for SI units and they forget to mention this. If you do not use SI then you will need a constant stuck in there which is why it is best to say "proportional". They also never mention direction which is an important concept since force and velocity are vectors (nor do they use vector notation in the text)...but that is because they don't cover vectors until AFTER Newton's laws!
Newton't third law is again ok, just very wordy and should be alongside the other laws.
Finally they spend an inordinate amount of time explaining what force is not such as "a force is not energy" which is great only they have not actually explained what energy is yet...in fact that chapter is entirely missing as is the one on momentum. In fact these are my biggest gripes: half the book is missing (energy, momentum, rotational motion) and the ordering of the chapters is insane. How can you have the chapter on vectors AFTER the chapters on velocity and forces when these are vectors?
That presumes a correlation between intelligence and honesty.
No it assumes a correlation between understanding risk vs. reward and intelligence. Risking your future by getting a criminal conviction does not sound like a good idea if the reward is a DVD.
I have never heard of any prof ever getting a kickback from a publisher and I have certainly never been offered one myself....and I ever were offered one I guarantee I'd pursue the appropriate action against the offending publisher. Frankly I, and a lot of my colleagues, find the frequent new editions where nothing but the problem numbers change to be a huge rip-off for the students and we would love to do something about it.
I'm certainly not suspicious of "free" books...but have you ever actually looked at the texts which are available? at least for physics? I have, and while I am not a fan of the big, glossy 1st year physics text books they are far superior to the free offerings available. The free books are generally unedited, full of mistakes, have few to no chapter problems or worked examples and/or are written by an author trying to push some bizarre methodology or point of view. They are simply are not suitable as a course text. They are not, at all, like Open Source software where the code is generally of higher quality than the commercial stuff just less polished.
Perhaps if things were to somehow get organized like an Open Source project then things would be a lot better since it would allow faculty members to write a chunk of the book and the central maintainer could then act as editor. However the number of people with adequate expert knowledge, plus an Open source-like attitude plus the inclination and time to write such a chunk is low enough that without a very high profile it would be hard to achieve critical mass...and without critical mass how do you achieve a high profile?
If you have any suggestions I would be very interested to hear them....
...but in Space 1999 the moon did not explode nor did it kill all the Earthlings. There was an explosion ON the moon and, because the writers had never heard of physics, it magically pushed the moon off into a different solar system each week. Space 1899 would have been a better name - at least they didn't have relativity then.
I would certainly not want to touch a Uranium rod with my bare hands. It is not the radioactivity you need to worry about but the toxicity of the metal.
One immediate use that springs to mind is shoplifting - at least assuming that it blocks RFID tags. Although hopefully those kids smart enough to figure that out would also be smart enough not to shop lift. Of course a more positive use for the rest of us would be a passport pocket to block remote reading of your biometric data.
Prisons are there to punish criminals. If society protection was the first point we would have institutions that take care of criminals...
I know that this is a popular view: my point is that we should look at prisons differently. Clearly they are not pleasant and hence some type of punishment but I believe that we should, instead, think of them as protecting us, or at least giving us a break, from the actions of their inmates. We would only have institutes to put people on the "right path" if we knew how to do that with any reliability and I don't think that we do (although I'm sure psychiatrists might disagree). Hence I would say the lack of rehabilitation for many offenders is simply our failing for not knowing how to fix the problem (or for letting it get so bad for people in the first place).
What the prison system does is preventing crime. And it does it VERY well. Most people are NOT criminals.
I agree that tt prevents crime....but it does this by keeping the serious offenders isolated from society so they can no longer rape, pillage, murder etc. There is no reason that the fact that prison is extremely unpleasant and deters people from committing crimes means that it must be regarded as a punishment. In much the same way that, in the UK, there is a heavy tax on tobacco to pay for the increased health care costs of those who smoke. This is not a punishment for smoking but it certainly acts as a deterrent. Hence I would rather state your last sentence as "I bet the crime rate would be WAY higher if there were no consequences.". You can have unpleasant consequences without it having to be a punishment.
Because you can't punish people forever. Nor can you predict who will re-offend and who will not.
I'm arguing that prison should be regarded as society protecting itself and NOT as a punishment i.e. we are not trying to punish them per se we are trying to ensure that they are no longer a threat to innocent people. You are correct - we cannot be sure who will reoffend - but we can study who does reoffend and attempt to see if there is a discernable pattern. We could then use that pattern to help decide who we do, and do not, release. This might mean that some people who would not reoffend are not released but (assuming the justice system worked and they are guilty) that is the price they pay for their actions.
Effectively we need to ask ourselves, as a society, how much risk are we willing to take in an attempt to rehabilitate someone? This is a debate that we should be having in the open with the pros and cons both being discussed rather than the current model which is based on politicians trying to score political points.
prison is most certainly punishment, as evidenced by the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, not cruel and unusual "protection for society".
I realize that this is the common view. My point is that I believe that is the wrong way to look at it. If we take that point of view then we run into all these ethical questions about whether we are violating the criminal's rights. If you look at it from the protecting society then things become more balanced: we should not let a repeat rapist out of prison because they are likely to hurt someone else. In such a case society's rights trump the individuals: of course you have to be careful and maintain a balance between the two (otherwise you'll make things even worse) but at the moment it is far too skewed to individuals.
Are perpetrators of so-called crimes of passion a threat to society at large?
Arguably yes, they are. Most people do not have such an extreme reaction to provocation. If they do then what other provocation might set them off? What happens if they find a new girlfriend? Are their remaining relatives safe? They might not be as dangerous as a random serial killer but it is hard to argue that they are not dangerous at some level. In addition it would be dangerous not to respond since they might well escalate it into something more serious.
...but by that logic we should be ban from *any* social contact, which is clearly both impossible and absurd.
No it is not - that is what prisons are for. They block most social contact in order to protect society. If we think that there is a good chance of a repeat offence given social contact then prison is where they should be kept. As you mention a lot of "sex offenders" and not, using any sane definition, sex offenders but for those that are then keeping them in prison to protect society should be an option.
The entire premise is irrational. If there is such a large chance of the violent offenders re-offending then why are they being let out of prison? The primary reason for prison is to protect society not to punish. If politicians think that these people are still dangerous then it is illogical to let them back into society. Letting them back with all these restrictions is simple stupid: it does nothing to protect society and prevents the criminals from reintegrating and possibly leading a somewhat normal life.
Published before the parental controls were implemented... it's a big difference.
Not if you don't know when those parental controls will be published and have no recourse if they are delayed. Besides in order to look the word up you actually have to know it first so it is hardly exposing them to a rude word that they have not already seen is it?