I can see that you are too invested in your own beliefs to be swayed by logic and will resort to complaining about what you have learned to associate with words "life sentence" not being the same world wide.
That's a bit odd, considering that I'm opposed to a punitive criminal justice system, and that I think that rehabilitating most prisoners shouldn't even take 10 years let alone a lifetime in prison. Perhaps if they have some physical mental defect and cannot be rehabilitated to a non-dangerous state as a result it might be appropriate to institutionalize them indefinitely, but that isn't something that could be determined at the time of sentencing.
Every one of my replies has been to object to calling a 10-year sentence a life sentence. Every one of your replies has talked about the crazy US justice system, which is a non-sequitur.
Politicians are there to ask questions, scientists are there to answer them. Politicians have no business telling scientists how to do their job, which is what they are doing here.
Tend to agree. I don't see any problem with the public commissioning a study to be designed with the goal of supporting or refuting a particular cyclical climate change hypothesis. Pre-ordaining the conclusion on the other hand is a waste of money, and just a really expensive form of propaganda.
Well, there is always the liquidation value of the company, which perhaps is the most real value a stock can actually have. However, few stocks trade anywhere near that value, and companies which probably should be liquidated tend to operate on in optimism slowly bleeding away even that value until nothing remains.
You're right about one thing, the solution is for these people to get education/skills in order to rise above these types of jobs.
I think that training budgets have the potential to take somebody who is successful in one high-skill job and make them successful in a different high-skill job, such as when an industry takes a downturn and there is more demand for software engineers than civil engineers, etc.
I don't think training budgets are likely to turn the average blue collar worker into the average white collar worker. Maybe some of them never had the opportunity to receive a decent education (primary education is a great place to invest), but many had access to such an education and simply didn't get much out of it. I'm still all for more access to training because the US makes much of its income on high-skill labor and such specialized jobs are very vulnerable to innovative disruption. Rather than trying to prop up careers that should die, we should instead support those in those careers so that they can switch to a more productive one.
I think basic income is a better solution for those who can't hold down a better job, as well as stronger work laws. Sure, many jobs will be eliminated in favor of robotics, and that is fine - those whose jobs are eliminated can live on basic income.
It costs money to feed those prisoners. Or do you want them to starve to death in an abandoned marine base?
Just open the cell doors then, or take them to the US on the next ship carrying people home. Presumably the guards aren't serving life sentences so they do have regular ships taking people back.
Honestly, if it were up to me I'd significantly reform the entire system. I'd rather focus on making criminals into productive members of society, not in punishing them. Capital punishment represents the ultimate failure to rehabilitate, as does life in prison.
For me the answer to "how long a sentence is appropriate?" is "how long does it take?" I probably wouldn't let anybody out until they have a job and have procured a place to live, and have demonstrated their ability to lead a normal life for some period of time. At least not for serious crimes. For less serious crimes I'd probably have a more probation-like system.
Regarding judging guilt though - convicting the innocent is the ultimate miscarriage of justice, and I'm all for anything that helps prevent this regardless of the nature of the crime or proposed punishment. I wouldn't spend money only on those convicted of capital crimes here.
Are you suggesting that we should simply accept throwing people in prison for life and not granting them as many appeals as are afforded to those sentenced to death?
Throwing an innocent person in prison is a travesty of justice - of course they should be given as much opportunity to appeal as those sentenced to death. That being the case, there should be no cost difference.
Are you aware that it costs more to the tax payers to kill prisoners than to keep them incarcerated for the rest of their life?
That seems like a bogus argument to me. There is no reason that it has to cost more - it just happens to. Change the rules and it will cost less.
I can entirely see the argument in changing the nature of our justice system. I don't really see self-imposed costs like endless appeals as being anything but a distraction.
Besides, I'm all for spending $1M rehabilitating a criminal who was caught doing $10k in damages.
In most civilized countries, life sentence means something between 10 and 30 years, long enough to count as severe punishment that completely changes person life without the downsides you mention.
You're quibbling over definitions. When people say that they should be locking up murderers for life, they mean locking them up for life. If they wanted to lock them up for 10 years, they'd suggest doing that, and then people wouldn't be arguing that such a prisoner has nothing further to lose.
Like what happened with sodium thiopental? Except it totally didn't?
The free-market is not a panacea, not matter how badly you want it to be.
Well, there needs to be a substantial market. I don't know what the relative use of the drugs are. If the US previously imported 200 vials a year of the stuff and it was blockaded, I doubt somebody is going to spin up a plant to make it. However, the summary talks about this stuff being used 50M times/year. That seems like an awfully big market to ignore in a country like the US where you can charge anything you'd like.
Guess what, the U.S. has spy agencies and their job is to spy. It just confirms they're doing an effective job, which is rare in government.
Think about what would happen if this weren't signals intelligence.
Imagine if US agents were routinely captured breaking into offices of senior leaders rifling through filing cabinets. That would be considered a SERIOUS diplomatic incident.
It also highlights the weaknesses in cell phones. For the most part they involve security by obscurity, which isn't good for something that broadcasts all of its data by radio.
Without taking stand on the death penalty, I have to ask, why can't we make anaesthetics here, instead of buying it from overseas? is there some law that says we have to buy everything from overseas and not allow American workers to earn a living?
Indeed, that would happen on its own if the Germans cut off the supply of the drug. Hospitals would still need it, so other suppliers would step in to provide it.
That board with a nail in it may have defeated us.
But the humans won't stop there. They'll make bigger boards and bigger nails, and soon, they will make a board with a nail so big, it will destroy them all!
I can tell you, the Same $10.000 a month is charged if it's running at full capacitiy or if it's sitting there unused. Therefore the amount of data transferred HAS NO COST, it is essentially free, the cost is for instantaneous bandwidth availability.
Yes, but HOW MUCH bandwidth availability does the ISP need?
They could just rent 1 T1 line for the entire ISP and give all their customers full unlimited access to it. Or they could rent multiple TB/sec and do the same. These two options do NOT cost the same.
If they don't charge or limit bandwidth in any way, then customers will tend to use more of it, and the ISP will constantly have to buy more upstream bandwidth, and then they'll have to increase their costs on all customers until they lose all their customers except for those who were looking to buy an OC-3 or whatever anyway.
Perhaps total transfer is not the right way to meter bandwidth, but it really does need to be metered unless you actually want to pay the full $10k/month or whatever.
I could easily shape my traffic in a way that I could transfer 4TB in one month and cost my ISP less money than someone transfer 10GB. I just do all of my transfers during off-peak hours.
Then structure the costs in accordance with the real costs. Charge for peak use, or peak use within certain timeframes, or whatever.
If I were in charge I'd turn bandwidth provision into a utility. It would not get you internet access or provide any kind of data service. All it would do is accept packets from your home and deliver them to a central office. You'd probably just pay by the type of connection if you had your own wire. If you went over shared wires then you'd pay by peak/total use as appropriate. The cost would be VERY cheap - nobody is dealing with spam, providing general support, whatever. All the service does is relay bits between your home and a central office. Then I'd charge for colo space in the central office and anybody could stick anything they want there, and run whatever wires they want there.
So, if you got your internet from Fred's Internet Service, Fred would put a router in the CO and after following Fred's instructions your home router would be sending your packets to Fred's router. The utility would get the packets between these two points billing you for use, and anything beyond that is between you and Fred.
Fred could pay $100/month to the utility plus whatever his upstream costs are and deliver service to anybody in a small city. For a large city he might need to put his gear in a few colo facilities. He doesn't have to worry about the last mile at all - maintenance of that is governed by a utility SLA and the utility gets paid for keeping the lights on (how often does your power/phone go out?).
The result is that the average customer can have their ISP needs handled by thousands of competing options, from AOL-like combined services, to ones that cater to technical types, to business-oriented ones, etc. You could buy whatever kind of service you wanted.
The key to fixing broadband is to break the services vs last-mile vertical integration. Give the last-mile monopoly to a utility (municipal or private - but REGULATED HEAVILY), and then let the free market work in the part that isn't a natural monopoly.
I'm pretty sure the neutrons just come from within the core. The core is constantly bombarded by its own neutrons - it just needs to be at a supercritical density for that to lead to a sustained chain reaction.
Just download the PPDs from their website and load them into CUPS/windows/etc and it JUST WORKS. I've never had a printer "just work" on linux before this one. Sure, the non-postscript version is a bit cheaper, but not having to deal with vendor drives is a major plus. You could probably print to this thing from everything from a VAX to Windows 25 whenever that comes out.
Just leave the CD it comes with in the shrinkwrap - generic drivers work fine for postscript, are fully-featured, and won't leave 27 new icons on your desktop and 5 daemons running 24x7.
The fact that arguments over money are, the last I heard, still a leading cause of break-ups tells me people aren't talking about the important stuff beforehand.
Either that, or talking about the important stuff beforehand doesn't prevent later arguments over the same things later.
We invest a lot in people for relatively few productive years of service. Imagine if you could train someone up and they'd be viable in that job for 50 years.
Agree, but I also see a downside to that - even more specialization. Today new kids out of college have trouble competing against people with 25 years of experience. Imagine when the job listings all call for at least 150 years experience in a specific domain!
The need for extensive training also makes it much harder to move the workforce around - it becomes a much bigger problem when people lose their jobs/etc.
However, I do agree that longevity is something most people would prefer all the same!
The other side of this is that problems associated with aging are extremely debilitating. Even if everybody still keeled over at 85 it would be a HUGE benefit if they were as sharp as they were at age 40 when they died.
Sure, you have to make wise decisions in life or your life deserves to suck.
Are you suggesting that getting married one of those unwise decisions? If you get married, your ability to achieve financial independence is for the most part entirely out of your own control.
As I see it, the real problem here is the utter lack of financial education in America, whereby otherwise smart people live in really financially stupid ways in their 20s. I sure as heck did. Your employer will have you over a barrel until you both learn to live well below your means, and learn what to do with the money you save. These are simple things to learn compared to an engineering degree!
Sure, simple to learn, but pretty hard to actually practice unless you're single, or unless you happen to marry somebody who also values living within means (usually means not having kids, or certainly not indulging them, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
I can see that you are too invested in your own beliefs to be swayed by logic and will resort to complaining about what you have learned to associate with words "life sentence" not being the same world wide.
That's a bit odd, considering that I'm opposed to a punitive criminal justice system, and that I think that rehabilitating most prisoners shouldn't even take 10 years let alone a lifetime in prison. Perhaps if they have some physical mental defect and cannot be rehabilitated to a non-dangerous state as a result it might be appropriate to institutionalize them indefinitely, but that isn't something that could be determined at the time of sentencing.
Every one of my replies has been to object to calling a 10-year sentence a life sentence. Every one of your replies has talked about the crazy US justice system, which is a non-sequitur.
Politicians are there to ask questions, scientists are there to answer them. Politicians have no business telling scientists how to do their job, which is what they are doing here.
Tend to agree. I don't see any problem with the public commissioning a study to be designed with the goal of supporting or refuting a particular cyclical climate change hypothesis. Pre-ordaining the conclusion on the other hand is a waste of money, and just a really expensive form of propaganda.
Well, there is always the liquidation value of the company, which perhaps is the most real value a stock can actually have. However, few stocks trade anywhere near that value, and companies which probably should be liquidated tend to operate on in optimism slowly bleeding away even that value until nothing remains.
You're right about one thing, the solution is for these people to get education/skills in order to rise above these types of jobs.
I think that training budgets have the potential to take somebody who is successful in one high-skill job and make them successful in a different high-skill job, such as when an industry takes a downturn and there is more demand for software engineers than civil engineers, etc.
I don't think training budgets are likely to turn the average blue collar worker into the average white collar worker. Maybe some of them never had the opportunity to receive a decent education (primary education is a great place to invest), but many had access to such an education and simply didn't get much out of it. I'm still all for more access to training because the US makes much of its income on high-skill labor and such specialized jobs are very vulnerable to innovative disruption. Rather than trying to prop up careers that should die, we should instead support those in those careers so that they can switch to a more productive one.
I think basic income is a better solution for those who can't hold down a better job, as well as stronger work laws. Sure, many jobs will be eliminated in favor of robotics, and that is fine - those whose jobs are eliminated can live on basic income.
And what does any of that have to do with calling a 10 year sentence a life sentence?
Everything you said is probably true, but it doesn't make calling a 10-year sentence a life sentence any less idiotic.
It costs money to feed those prisoners. Or do you want them to starve to death in an abandoned marine base?
Just open the cell doors then, or take them to the US on the next ship carrying people home. Presumably the guards aren't serving life sentences so they do have regular ships taking people back.
No, that's just frontier justice countries like US that base their justice system on concept of vengeance rather than concept of rehabilitation.
What does the idiotic US justice system have to do with the idiotic notion of calling a 10-year sentence a "life sentence?"
Honestly, if it were up to me I'd significantly reform the entire system. I'd rather focus on making criminals into productive members of society, not in punishing them. Capital punishment represents the ultimate failure to rehabilitate, as does life in prison.
For me the answer to "how long a sentence is appropriate?" is "how long does it take?" I probably wouldn't let anybody out until they have a job and have procured a place to live, and have demonstrated their ability to lead a normal life for some period of time. At least not for serious crimes. For less serious crimes I'd probably have a more probation-like system.
Regarding judging guilt though - convicting the innocent is the ultimate miscarriage of justice, and I'm all for anything that helps prevent this regardless of the nature of the crime or proposed punishment. I wouldn't spend money only on those convicted of capital crimes here.
The President is the Commander in Chief of the military. But he can't spend a dollar that hasn't been budgeted by Congress.
He doesn't have to spend any money.
It costs money to keep a base open - not to not keep a base open.
Are you suggesting that we should simply accept throwing people in prison for life and not granting them as many appeals as are afforded to those sentenced to death?
Throwing an innocent person in prison is a travesty of justice - of course they should be given as much opportunity to appeal as those sentenced to death. That being the case, there should be no cost difference.
Are you aware that it costs more to the tax payers to kill prisoners than to keep them incarcerated for the rest of their life?
That seems like a bogus argument to me. There is no reason that it has to cost more - it just happens to. Change the rules and it will cost less.
I can entirely see the argument in changing the nature of our justice system. I don't really see self-imposed costs like endless appeals as being anything but a distraction.
Besides, I'm all for spending $1M rehabilitating a criminal who was caught doing $10k in damages.
In most civilized countries, life sentence means something between 10 and 30 years, long enough to count as severe punishment that completely changes person life without the downsides you mention.
You're quibbling over definitions. When people say that they should be locking up murderers for life, they mean locking them up for life. If they wanted to lock them up for 10 years, they'd suggest doing that, and then people wouldn't be arguing that such a prisoner has nothing further to lose.
Like what happened with sodium thiopental? Except it totally didn't?
The free-market is not a panacea, not matter how badly you want it to be.
Well, there needs to be a substantial market. I don't know what the relative use of the drugs are. If the US previously imported 200 vials a year of the stuff and it was blockaded, I doubt somebody is going to spin up a plant to make it. However, the summary talks about this stuff being used 50M times/year. That seems like an awfully big market to ignore in a country like the US where you can charge anything you'd like.
Guess what, the U.S. has spy agencies and their job is to spy. It just confirms they're doing an effective job, which is rare in government.
Think about what would happen if this weren't signals intelligence.
Imagine if US agents were routinely captured breaking into offices of senior leaders rifling through filing cabinets. That would be considered a SERIOUS diplomatic incident.
It also highlights the weaknesses in cell phones. For the most part they involve security by obscurity, which isn't good for something that broadcasts all of its data by radio.
Without taking stand on the death penalty, I have to ask, why can't we make anaesthetics here, instead of buying it from overseas? is there some law that says we have to buy everything from overseas and not allow American workers to earn a living?
Indeed, that would happen on its own if the Germans cut off the supply of the drug. Hospitals would still need it, so other suppliers would step in to provide it.
That board with a nail in it may have defeated us.
But the humans won't stop there. They'll make bigger boards and bigger nails, and soon, they will make a board with a nail so big, it will destroy them all!
I can tell you, the Same $10.000 a month is charged if it's running at full capacitiy or if it's sitting there unused. Therefore the amount of data transferred HAS NO COST, it is essentially free, the cost is for instantaneous bandwidth availability.
Yes, but HOW MUCH bandwidth availability does the ISP need?
They could just rent 1 T1 line for the entire ISP and give all their customers full unlimited access to it. Or they could rent multiple TB/sec and do the same. These two options do NOT cost the same.
If they don't charge or limit bandwidth in any way, then customers will tend to use more of it, and the ISP will constantly have to buy more upstream bandwidth, and then they'll have to increase their costs on all customers until they lose all their customers except for those who were looking to buy an OC-3 or whatever anyway.
Perhaps total transfer is not the right way to meter bandwidth, but it really does need to be metered unless you actually want to pay the full $10k/month or whatever.
I could easily shape my traffic in a way that I could transfer 4TB in one month and cost my ISP less money than someone transfer 10GB. I just do all of my transfers during off-peak hours.
Then structure the costs in accordance with the real costs. Charge for peak use, or peak use within certain timeframes, or whatever.
If I were in charge I'd turn bandwidth provision into a utility. It would not get you internet access or provide any kind of data service. All it would do is accept packets from your home and deliver them to a central office. You'd probably just pay by the type of connection if you had your own wire. If you went over shared wires then you'd pay by peak/total use as appropriate. The cost would be VERY cheap - nobody is dealing with spam, providing general support, whatever. All the service does is relay bits between your home and a central office. Then I'd charge for colo space in the central office and anybody could stick anything they want there, and run whatever wires they want there.
So, if you got your internet from Fred's Internet Service, Fred would put a router in the CO and after following Fred's instructions your home router would be sending your packets to Fred's router. The utility would get the packets between these two points billing you for use, and anything beyond that is between you and Fred.
Fred could pay $100/month to the utility plus whatever his upstream costs are and deliver service to anybody in a small city. For a large city he might need to put his gear in a few colo facilities. He doesn't have to worry about the last mile at all - maintenance of that is governed by a utility SLA and the utility gets paid for keeping the lights on (how often does your power/phone go out?).
The result is that the average customer can have their ISP needs handled by thousands of competing options, from AOL-like combined services, to ones that cater to technical types, to business-oriented ones, etc. You could buy whatever kind of service you wanted.
The key to fixing broadband is to break the services vs last-mile vertical integration. Give the last-mile monopoly to a utility (municipal or private - but REGULATED HEAVILY), and then let the free market work in the part that isn't a natural monopoly.
I'm pretty sure the neutrons just come from within the core. The core is constantly bombarded by its own neutrons - it just needs to be at a supercritical density for that to lead to a sustained chain reaction.
Did you reply to the note in the talk page? The standard practice on Wikipedia is to plead your case on the article's talk page after getting reverted
Maybe people who want to donate their time don't want to engage in a big debate about whether their donation is helpful. Not everybody enjoys arguing.
As an aside, the 1650EN is a GREAT printer.
Just download the PPDs from their website and load them into CUPS/windows/etc and it JUST WORKS. I've never had a printer "just work" on linux before this one. Sure, the non-postscript version is a bit cheaper, but not having to deal with vendor drives is a major plus. You could probably print to this thing from everything from a VAX to Windows 25 whenever that comes out.
Just leave the CD it comes with in the shrinkwrap - generic drivers work fine for postscript, are fully-featured, and won't leave 27 new icons on your desktop and 5 daemons running 24x7.
Getting married to a fool is a foolish decision
Or an ignorant one.
The fact that arguments over money are, the last I heard, still a leading cause of break-ups tells me people aren't talking about the important stuff beforehand.
Either that, or talking about the important stuff beforehand doesn't prevent later arguments over the same things later.
We invest a lot in people for relatively few productive years of service. Imagine if you could train someone up and they'd be viable in that job for 50 years.
Agree, but I also see a downside to that - even more specialization. Today new kids out of college have trouble competing against people with 25 years of experience. Imagine when the job listings all call for at least 150 years experience in a specific domain!
The need for extensive training also makes it much harder to move the workforce around - it becomes a much bigger problem when people lose their jobs/etc.
However, I do agree that longevity is something most people would prefer all the same!
The other side of this is that problems associated with aging are extremely debilitating. Even if everybody still keeled over at 85 it would be a HUGE benefit if they were as sharp as they were at age 40 when they died.
Sure, you have to make wise decisions in life or your life deserves to suck.
Are you suggesting that getting married one of those unwise decisions? If you get married, your ability to achieve financial independence is for the most part entirely out of your own control.
As I see it, the real problem here is the utter lack of financial education in America, whereby otherwise smart people live in really financially stupid ways in their 20s. I sure as heck did. Your employer will have you over a barrel until you both learn to live well below your means, and learn what to do with the money you save. These are simple things to learn compared to an engineering degree!
Sure, simple to learn, but pretty hard to actually practice unless you're single, or unless you happen to marry somebody who also values living within means (usually means not having kids, or certainly not indulging them, etc).