Willing participants are having trouble modifying their behaviour with best of today's medicine and counseling. See relapse rate of psychological counseling and psychiatric treatment. What makes you think we have a chance with potentially unwilling subjects?
We don't have to waste money in "research". Let willing patients succeed first. Alchemy has a better future than your ideas.
Well, if it doesn't work, then keep them locked up until it does. I'm not suggesting that we should turn criminals loose.
However, it is probably worth noting that mental health issues get second-class treatment at least in the US. They aren't treated like real medical issues for the most part, and treatments are usually limited to a few pills that are fairly indiscriminate in their impact. I'd think that for somebody with deep-seated problems that we'd probably need to use methods that would be outright illegal today. You can't just take prisoners and subject them to torture while showing them pictures of suffering people until they start to shake every time somebody stubs their toe. I'd like to hope that there are less drastic measures that would also work, but while I'm no fan of subjecting prisoners to pain, I don't think that what we do with them already is in any way superior.
But mostly, the purpose was an attention grab, to demonstrate how stupid it is to encourage US companies to develop lift capabilities and then turn around and buy Russian made engines on a sole source contract.
If these really are essential for national defense, then they should be sourced entirely within the US, or they should at the very least have a number of suppliers from a diverse set of nations (so that no matter what side of a war we end up on, somebody is still willing to sell them to us). That's why Israel deals with both the US and Russia - they're too small to build EVERYTHING themselves so they diversify so that neither "side" can cut them off entirely.
The US is large enough that there really is no excuse for sourcing items of a strategic nature from anywhere else. I could see buying foreign parts when doing proof-of-concept experiments, since you aren't relying on them operationally. However, anything that goes into production should have a US source. It isn't anything personal against anybody - it just isn't wise for ANY nation to depend on others for matters essential to defense.
I don't know. If someone rapes my daughter then slits her throat and throws her lifeless body in a ditch, is that the same thing as my putting a bullet in his head when I find him after he's "rehabilitated" and free a year or two later?
If he actually has been rehabilitated, then, yes. Actually, even if he hasn't been rehabilitated your actions aren't justified unless they are in self-defense.
I think not and most of society thinks not as well. To the law it's the same but if the law doesn't do it's job that's what will start to happen.
Sure, most of society is as sick as you are. I'm under no illusions that there would actually be reform.
Either give people justice or they'll take it.
Consider carefully what you're suggesting. I think your attitude is unjust. Does that mean that I would be justified in taking it upon myself to pass judgment upon you?
Been reading too much science fiction? Such a "treatment" is exactly that - fiction. A "test" to figure out what a person likes, is a fantasy.
Nobody has really tried to come up with a rehabilitation program, so it is a bit early to give up. Of course, even researching such a program would probably be illegal currently, so things have to change before there can be any progress.
What if they don't want to be rehabilitated?
Non-cooperation with the rehabilitation program would be cause to lock you up until you cooperate.
Why would they not "cooperate", at least apparently? Sociopaths can be legendary actors. Though one good effect of this policy will be that there will be a great evolutionary pressure on humans to be better actors. Hollywood will thank you.
Such a rehabilitation program would necessitate having a test that did not depend on voluntary/conscious cooperation. It would be necessary to be able to detect acting. I don't see any reason why this shouldn't be possible.
The only reason states are changing the methodology is because protesters have been fairly effective in curtailing supplies of the materials used previously.
I was under the impression that the lack of drugs used for the death penalty, was mainly the result of a decision by the Italian government to not allow a US company to produce their drugs in Italy and subsequently a decision by a Dutch company to not sell its drug recipe/patent to a US company.
Were those decisions lobbied by US protestors? Your sentence makes it sound like they were, but this would be first I'm hearing about it.
Well, in this case the protesters include a number of foreign governments as well. The Italians and Dutch haven't been filing lawsuits to find out who is supplying the drugs used in the new cocktails - those are US-based efforts. If the court had ordered the disclosure of the manufacturer, then I'm sure foreign governments would have put pressure on that manufacturer.
Sorry, but you come across like a tad naive person. What do you mean 'then we rehabilitate them'?? How's this done??
For starters, people need to agree that this is the goal. We also have to agree that changing somebody's personality is ethically preferable to locking them up and letting them out just the way they already are.
Since we don't really take rehabilitation seriously I'm sure there is a lot that could be learned, probably for a lot less than we current spend on locking people up repeatedly.
In any case, I'm sure the solution would involve psychological conditioning and testing. You used the example of a muderer/rapist, so you start by understanding the urges that make the guy inclined to behave that way, and find a way to measure them. Then you condition them, likely by rewarding good reactions to stimuli, and negatively reinforcing undesirable reactions. That might be as little as giving/revoking privileges, or it might involve things like pain. Then you use technologies like fMRI/etc to detect how their brain reacts to stimuli to assess progress.
It is entirely possible that not everybody can be rehabilitated - they would basically end up being locked up or monitored for the rest of their lives. Others might be erroneously discharged from rehabilitation and end up committing a repeat offense. I don't think perfection needs to be achieved for this to be successful - the current process is incredibly broken and would not be difficult to improve upon.
In order for something like this to work we as a society need to get from a place where we accept prison rape but find brainwashing abhorrent, to the very opposite is true. I think that prison is an incredible waste of life. If shocking somebody for six months gets them to a point where they can be a happy and contributing member of society that employers can hire without fear of theft or an office shooting, then I think that this is better than giving them a bed to sleep on for 15 years and looking the other way when they misbehave as long as they don't bother any ordinary citizens.
The use of popular, but garbage programming languages...Dishonourable mention also goes to XML...
Uh, if you're using xml as a programming language, you're doing something wrong. XML is a way to store structured data with fairly extensive support across many applications/languages/etc. The fact that it can be validated independently from any implementation that uses it is a great feature.
Sure, it is rather verbose, but if you're reading it by hand you're probably doing something wrong except in trivial cases.
Yup. This is most of my job, and I think I do a pretty good job at it, but it is a constant battle to get the time allocated to the project to do this job right.
Everybody just wants to get something done. The problem is that with this attitude the main thing the project accomplishes is spending the right amount of money on time, which is usually the metric that is easiest to measure. Then nobody can understand why nobody wants to use the system.
Getting the specs right is 80% of the battle. Good developers are also important as I've seen too many that will pull a "well, there wasn't a specific performance requirement that the time to tab from one field to the next be less than 30 seconds." Ditto for UI design - good requirements are useless if the coders just slap together something completely unintuitive, unless you want the UI to be dictated in the specs (which is usually a mistake unless done as a separate step from actually figuring out what the system needs to do). Still, those systems where the only solution is to toss and do-over are almost always the result of faulty requirements.
I think rehabilitation is good for crimes other than capital ones. Murder, the taking of life by an individual, creates so much damage to families and society as a whole as to require at the least a life sentence. Otherwise you end up with vigilantism as people seek their own justice. So the state handles it or you end up with something like the "Hatfields & McCoys" where it's a rifle blast from the woods or a knife to the ribs in a bar.
Revenge will only go so far. Somebody commits a crime and is rehabilitated. So, somebody else tries to kill them and they get rehabilitated. This can only go so far before the entire population has been rehabilitated, and then nobody will be inclined to seek revenge.
Acting on a desire for revenge is as much of a crime as the original act that provoked it.
Well, I am all in favor of that, but how do you actually DO that?
I don't have all the answers, though I suspect we could make a lot more progress on that front for far less money than we spend locking up some significant percentage of the population. I think admitting that we're doing it wrong is half the battle.
What if they don't want to be rehabilitated?
Non-cooperation with the rehabilitation program would be cause to lock you up until you cooperate. That would be indefinite in duration, even if all you did was shoplift. If a way can be devised to rehabilitate people against their will that would be another solution.
What if they like raping and killing babies (that is what one of these guys did)?
You'd need to treat them until they no longer like these sorts of things, however long that takes.
What if they pretend they were rehabilitated so that you would let them re-enter society and then they did it again? The crime that eventually got these guys on death row was only the last on their rap sheet. Some people are deemed fit to re-enter society and then go back to the prison several times over.
Clearly such an approach necessitates a need for a way to determine whether somebody is actually rehabilitated.
I'm sure the system won't be foolproof. Some people will be let out and re-offend, but that happens in probably the majority of cases today already, so we could hardly make things worse.
Today rehabilitation is viewed as a voluntary activity for minor offenders as an alternative to prison. I think we need to look at it as either an involuntary process, or if you're allowed to opt-out you're basically agreeing to life in prison for committing even a misdemeanor.
In such a system, somebody who likes to kill kids might be forced to undergo rehabilitation until an fMRI shows the right parts of their brain lighting up when they are shown pictures of dead kids, or whatever. This wouldn't be just a matter of answering some questions correctly in an interview. Rehabilitating criminals requires understanding the root cause of their criminality, and correcting it. Certainly we don't have the technology to do this today in all cases, but I suspect we could do far more once society accepts that involuntarily changing people's personalities is preferable to locking them up forever or executing them.
What evidence do you have that most iTunes account have a non-expired credit card connected? The comparison is between "active" Amazon accounts, and any iTunes account. That doesn't really seem like apples-to-apples. I have an iTunes account and I don't think I've used it in years, and it certainly does have valid payment info, unlike my Amazon Prime account. I'd hardly consider that one data point evidence of anything, but you need to compare like things.
Also, I doubt that many people who would actually buy something from Amazon don't already have Amazon accounts. The only reason Amazon isn't selling directly in their application is that Apple forbids it.
To that extent, it's not shocking when some rules are arbitrary, based on nothing in the "real world", and it's not surprising that everyone is looking for a way to cheat.
I think the trading system is a set of arbitrary rules that approximate a market in the same sense that our legal system is an arbitrary set of rules that approximate justice.
Courts have become a matter of ensuring that a process is followed and they're very effective at that, but justice is more of a byproduct of the system than the goal. In the same way the SEC is about ensuring that the rules of the exchanges are followed, and fair markets are more of a byproduct than the goal.
HFT is another sound argument for Network Neutrality. Fair open markets can not exist on top of a network where superior bandwidth and latency decide market winners instead of legitimate market forces.
While I can see a few parallels, HFT is really an entirely different beast. This isn't about deliberate throttling of traffic. This is more about companies building private microwave relays and such to try to shave a few miles off of runs like Chicago-NYC to get a few nanoseconds less latency in communications, or implementing their algorithms in ASICs. I've even heard people talking about digging deep cables since it is shorter to go through the earth than on top of it.
Nobody would do this sort of thing to shave a few nanoseconds off of their ping time for a video game.
My feeling is that we're going about it all wrong, and talking about the death penalty only makes sense once you can get agreement on just what the purpose of the justice system is in the first place.
In my thinking, people commit crimes because they have a behavioral impulse combined with some kind of stimulus that exceeds their ability to control their own behavior, or they have an antisocial behavior that leads them to choose not to control their behavior.
If any of those factors is "fixed," then no crime will take place. If somebody is only prone to killing their wife if they're sick, have three days of argument in a row, and their kid dies the day before, then as crazy as it sounds they're actually fine to let loose on the street without any rehabilitation at all since something like that will almost certainly never happen to them again. If somebody is prone to kill somebody anytime they sneeze, then if you remove that impulse then they're again safe to let loose in public. If somebody just doesn't have a good sense of self-control, or if they deliberately choose to act in antisocial ways, then if you change their attitude or teach them how to handle their emotions, then they are again safe to let out.
If you accept that the solution to crime is to fix the criminal so that they are no longer a criminal, then locking somebody up for life or executing them only makes sense if you find criminals that are impossible to fix.
Honestly, I think that is only the tip of the iceburg. The whole idea of punishing criminals seems pointless to me. How about rehabilitating them? If somebody is innocent, then we rehabilitate them and in theory that should go pretty quickly since they weren't particularly prone to committing crimes in the first place. If somebody is a likely criminal, then rehabilitation should involve whatever it takes to make them no longer a likely criminal. That doesn't necessarily mean locking them up at all, unless they're so prone to criminal behavior that having them out on the streets is a danger to society.
Getting rid of the death penalty is like arguing that it is better for an innocent person to be raped in prison for the rest of their life instead of being executed. It kind of misses the point, and I don't think the way we run prisons in the US is appropriate for even the guilty, let alone the innocent.
Yup, this is basically the whole "intelligent design" thing in a different form.
People want to teach the biblical creation account in school, but got shot down by every court in the nation 50 years ago (go figure). So, they have to carefully construct the argument so as to try to present it as something new so that courts have an excuse to look the other way.
If an inmate challenged an execution on the grounds that the state has no authority to perform an execution, they'd be shot down. So, instead arguments are made about the process, but those advancing these arguments would not be satisfied with any process - they are opposed to execution in any form.
The only reason states are changing the methodology is because protesters have been fairly effective in curtailing supplies of the materials used previously. Now states are moving towards undisclosed methods with undisclosed suppliers so that it is hard for protesters to target them. They're also generally using materials that are important for healthcare in general so that it is not possible to disrupt their supply. It is a big cat and mouse game. There won't be any kind of standardization of the process since a stable process can potentially be disrupted. So, expect more events like this one until somebody decides to go back to firing squads and hanging.
I'm not a fan of the death penalty myself, but the whole argument around untested methods is just a smoke screen. The whole system of punishment needs a complete overhaul. The death penalty isn't just inhumane, it is based on a flawed premise. How the inmates get executed is fairly unimportant in the big scheme of things - it is like debating whether you'd rather get run over by a car going 35mph or 75mph.
They scan the information you give them. How else do you expect your mail to reach its destination if they don't read the delivery address?
That's like getting mad at the internet because the routers inspect the IP packet headers.
They photograph the outside of the envelope, so that it can be traced (to a degree) even absent a return address. It is called the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program. They aren't just reading the delivery address.
Well, to be fair the USPS only scans the outside of every single piece of mail they handle...
You mean the metadata?
No, they keep an image of the outside of every envelope that goes through the mail system. An actual photograph.
This was implemented after the 9/11 anthrax mailings, so that any envelope lacking a return address could be traced back to its origin. While it doesn't get too much discussion here, it is fairly well-documented - just google for "Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program."
The fact that they need to read but not retain the address on each envelope in order to deliver it only makes sense.
If it cuts into profits, someone will want to cut costs - and corners. That's what frightens me, personally. Not that we can't make things secure, technically. It's human nature at it's worst that will cause a reactor to blow up or be blown up, not problems due to lack of understanding of the science behind it.
That is a political problem. Just make private ownership of nuclear reactors illegal and it is solved. There may be other ways of solving it as well - the government might just be responsible for reactor security, but not maintenance/operation.
Don't get me wrong - I don't see it happening anytime soon either, and I'm sure we'll just maintain the status quo until we either run out of oil or Manhattan is underwater. However, the issue is that various interests profit from the status quo, not that there isn't a solution to it.
Sure, but I imagine they have virtually all the credit card numbers Apple has, which was the point...
Obviously they don't, as Apple has a much more worldwide presence. So I don't see how that is your "point."
Have any actual numbers on that? I suspect that the vast majority of Apple's customers are in the US. They're not nearly as popular in Asia/etc as they are in the US. In Europe they are moderately popular, but then again so is Amazon.
In any case, Amazon's actions clearly indicate that at least they don't find value in paying a 30% markup on every transaction just to have access to that "exclusive" Apple customer base.
Also, even the most powerful strategic bombs don't come close to the contamination caused by a reactor belching its contents into the environment. The largest nuclear bomb weighted 27 tons, the fuel load alone of a normal reactor is over 100 tons (plus there might be pools full of spent fuel rods nearby for additional contamination).
Somehow given the choice of 100 tons of mess located on the property of a damaged nuclear reactor, or 27 tons of fissionables mixed with a thousand tons of dirt lofted into the stratosphere in the vapor state raining out over half the country, I think most would take the former. Certainly anybody within 10 miles of the blast site would prefer the gigantic dirty bomb scenario you describe.
But hey, I'm not arguing for not safeguarding nuclear waste. I'm just saying that compared to global warming and producing energy, security of a couple of plant sites is a much easier problem to solve.
Frankly, the idea of a company opening my private mail for me, reading it, scanning it in, then making it available...
You mean like the USPS?
Well, to be fair the USPS only scans the outside of every single piece of mail they handle (retaining an actual photo of the mail, not just OCR'ed contents). They only scan the inside if somebody asks them to, and only for a particular address. This is far more likely to be due to feasibility than due to some kind of concern for privacy.
A COA can be approval for anything. There is no inherent limitation on weight. The FAAs website is chalk full of PR half truths. Source: I've received a COA for a >25 lb aircraft.
More importantly, there is no legal binding policy regulating drones at all, at least not as far as I can find.
The FAA has clearly stated that they don't want people flying drones for commercial use without a license. However, they never created a regulation to that effect, so it is really nothing more than a suggestion, and not legally enforceable.
It should also be reminded that Rome did persist for a thousand years after Romulus Augustulus was deposed in the West; in the form of the Byzantine Empire.
I'm by no means a historian, but from the little I've learned about the early middle ages my sense is that between the Byzantine Empire and the Carolingian Empire there is a great deal of continuity from the Roman Empire to the modern world. There is a reason that Latin was so commonly used despite rarely being spoken by the common man up to the modern era (heck, private schools still make kids learn it).
Another reply brings up the Papacy. I'm not sure I'd really call that "Rome" in the sense that it used to be, but it is true that the role of the Pope was far greater in the early middle ages, and that there was a constant power struggle between the secular rulers and the church. There was a great deal of interdependence as well, as the church had to rely on secular leaders for actual military power, and the guys who actually did all the accounting/etc for the rulers were basically clergy.
When I began to study this stuff a little I was amazed by how little schools teach about this thousand year period of history from the decline of the Roman Empire up until the later middle ages. Kids spend all kinds of time memorizing the names of Kings, but very little appreciating just where those Kingdoms came from. Everybody has probably heard of Charlemagne, but I imagine few could actually tell you what territory he actually ruled over (at least, not in the US - perhaps in Germany they take it more seriously).
People are paranoid that these processes will be used to make nuclear weapons. Seems like the solution to that is to just locate the facilities in military bases, which routinely handle fully functional nuclear weapons already. For nations that do not possess nuclear weapons the nations which do have them could offer to reprocess the waste for free, since the process is energy positive anyway.
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Willing participants are having trouble modifying their behaviour with best of today's medicine and counseling. See relapse rate of psychological counseling and psychiatric treatment. What makes you think we have a chance with potentially unwilling subjects?
We don't have to waste money in "research". Let willing patients succeed first. Alchemy has a better future than your ideas.
Well, if it doesn't work, then keep them locked up until it does. I'm not suggesting that we should turn criminals loose.
However, it is probably worth noting that mental health issues get second-class treatment at least in the US. They aren't treated like real medical issues for the most part, and treatments are usually limited to a few pills that are fairly indiscriminate in their impact. I'd think that for somebody with deep-seated problems that we'd probably need to use methods that would be outright illegal today. You can't just take prisoners and subject them to torture while showing them pictures of suffering people until they start to shake every time somebody stubs their toe. I'd like to hope that there are less drastic measures that would also work, but while I'm no fan of subjecting prisoners to pain, I don't think that what we do with them already is in any way superior.
But mostly, the purpose was an attention grab, to demonstrate how stupid it is to encourage US companies to develop lift capabilities and then turn around and buy Russian made engines on a sole source contract.
If these really are essential for national defense, then they should be sourced entirely within the US, or they should at the very least have a number of suppliers from a diverse set of nations (so that no matter what side of a war we end up on, somebody is still willing to sell them to us). That's why Israel deals with both the US and Russia - they're too small to build EVERYTHING themselves so they diversify so that neither "side" can cut them off entirely.
The US is large enough that there really is no excuse for sourcing items of a strategic nature from anywhere else. I could see buying foreign parts when doing proof-of-concept experiments, since you aren't relying on them operationally. However, anything that goes into production should have a US source. It isn't anything personal against anybody - it just isn't wise for ANY nation to depend on others for matters essential to defense.
I don't know. If someone rapes my daughter then slits her throat and throws her lifeless body in a ditch, is that the same thing as my putting a bullet in his head when I find him after he's "rehabilitated" and free a year or two later?
If he actually has been rehabilitated, then, yes. Actually, even if he hasn't been rehabilitated your actions aren't justified unless they are in self-defense.
I think not and most of society thinks not as well. To the law it's the same but if the law doesn't do it's job that's what will start to happen.
Sure, most of society is as sick as you are. I'm under no illusions that there would actually be reform.
Either give people justice or they'll take it.
Consider carefully what you're suggesting. I think your attitude is unjust. Does that mean that I would be justified in taking it upon myself to pass judgment upon you?
Been reading too much science fiction? Such a "treatment" is exactly that - fiction. A "test" to figure out what a person likes, is a fantasy.
Nobody has really tried to come up with a rehabilitation program, so it is a bit early to give up. Of course, even researching such a program would probably be illegal currently, so things have to change before there can be any progress.
What if they don't want to be rehabilitated?
Non-cooperation with the rehabilitation program would be cause to lock you up until you cooperate.
Why would they not "cooperate", at least apparently? Sociopaths can be legendary actors. Though one good effect of this policy will be that there will be a great evolutionary pressure on humans to be better actors. Hollywood will thank you.
Such a rehabilitation program would necessitate having a test that did not depend on voluntary/conscious cooperation. It would be necessary to be able to detect acting. I don't see any reason why this shouldn't be possible.
The only reason states are changing the methodology is because protesters have been fairly effective in curtailing supplies of the materials used previously.
I was under the impression that the lack of drugs used for the death penalty, was mainly the result of a decision by the Italian government to not allow a US company to produce their drugs in Italy and subsequently a decision by a Dutch company to not sell its drug recipe/patent to a US company.
Were those decisions lobbied by US protestors? Your sentence makes it sound like they were, but this would be first I'm hearing about it.
Well, in this case the protesters include a number of foreign governments as well. The Italians and Dutch haven't been filing lawsuits to find out who is supplying the drugs used in the new cocktails - those are US-based efforts. If the court had ordered the disclosure of the manufacturer, then I'm sure foreign governments would have put pressure on that manufacturer.
Sorry, but you come across like a tad naive person. What do you mean 'then we rehabilitate them'?? How's this done??
For starters, people need to agree that this is the goal. We also have to agree that changing somebody's personality is ethically preferable to locking them up and letting them out just the way they already are.
Since we don't really take rehabilitation seriously I'm sure there is a lot that could be learned, probably for a lot less than we current spend on locking people up repeatedly.
In any case, I'm sure the solution would involve psychological conditioning and testing. You used the example of a muderer/rapist, so you start by understanding the urges that make the guy inclined to behave that way, and find a way to measure them. Then you condition them, likely by rewarding good reactions to stimuli, and negatively reinforcing undesirable reactions. That might be as little as giving/revoking privileges, or it might involve things like pain. Then you use technologies like fMRI/etc to detect how their brain reacts to stimuli to assess progress.
It is entirely possible that not everybody can be rehabilitated - they would basically end up being locked up or monitored for the rest of their lives. Others might be erroneously discharged from rehabilitation and end up committing a repeat offense. I don't think perfection needs to be achieved for this to be successful - the current process is incredibly broken and would not be difficult to improve upon.
In order for something like this to work we as a society need to get from a place where we accept prison rape but find brainwashing abhorrent, to the very opposite is true. I think that prison is an incredible waste of life. If shocking somebody for six months gets them to a point where they can be a happy and contributing member of society that employers can hire without fear of theft or an office shooting, then I think that this is better than giving them a bed to sleep on for 15 years and looking the other way when they misbehave as long as they don't bother any ordinary citizens.
The use of popular, but garbage programming languages...Dishonourable mention also goes to XML...
Uh, if you're using xml as a programming language, you're doing something wrong. XML is a way to store structured data with fairly extensive support across many applications/languages/etc. The fact that it can be validated independently from any implementation that uses it is a great feature.
Sure, it is rather verbose, but if you're reading it by hand you're probably doing something wrong except in trivial cases.
Yup. This is most of my job, and I think I do a pretty good job at it, but it is a constant battle to get the time allocated to the project to do this job right.
Everybody just wants to get something done. The problem is that with this attitude the main thing the project accomplishes is spending the right amount of money on time, which is usually the metric that is easiest to measure. Then nobody can understand why nobody wants to use the system.
Getting the specs right is 80% of the battle. Good developers are also important as I've seen too many that will pull a "well, there wasn't a specific performance requirement that the time to tab from one field to the next be less than 30 seconds." Ditto for UI design - good requirements are useless if the coders just slap together something completely unintuitive, unless you want the UI to be dictated in the specs (which is usually a mistake unless done as a separate step from actually figuring out what the system needs to do). Still, those systems where the only solution is to toss and do-over are almost always the result of faulty requirements.
I think rehabilitation is good for crimes other than capital ones. Murder, the taking of life by an individual, creates so much damage to families and society as a whole as to require at the least a life sentence. Otherwise you end up with vigilantism as people seek their own justice. So the state handles it or you end up with something like the "Hatfields & McCoys" where it's a rifle blast from the woods or a knife to the ribs in a bar.
Revenge will only go so far. Somebody commits a crime and is rehabilitated. So, somebody else tries to kill them and they get rehabilitated. This can only go so far before the entire population has been rehabilitated, and then nobody will be inclined to seek revenge.
Acting on a desire for revenge is as much of a crime as the original act that provoked it.
How about rehabilitating them?
Well, I am all in favor of that, but how do you actually DO that?
I don't have all the answers, though I suspect we could make a lot more progress on that front for far less money than we spend locking up some significant percentage of the population. I think admitting that we're doing it wrong is half the battle.
What if they don't want to be rehabilitated?
Non-cooperation with the rehabilitation program would be cause to lock you up until you cooperate. That would be indefinite in duration, even if all you did was shoplift. If a way can be devised to rehabilitate people against their will that would be another solution.
What if they like raping and killing babies (that is what one of these guys did)?
You'd need to treat them until they no longer like these sorts of things, however long that takes.
What if they pretend they were rehabilitated so that you would let them re-enter society and then they did it again? The crime that eventually got these guys on death row was only the last on their rap sheet. Some people are deemed fit to re-enter society and then go back to the prison several times over.
Clearly such an approach necessitates a need for a way to determine whether somebody is actually rehabilitated.
I'm sure the system won't be foolproof. Some people will be let out and re-offend, but that happens in probably the majority of cases today already, so we could hardly make things worse.
Today rehabilitation is viewed as a voluntary activity for minor offenders as an alternative to prison. I think we need to look at it as either an involuntary process, or if you're allowed to opt-out you're basically agreeing to life in prison for committing even a misdemeanor.
In such a system, somebody who likes to kill kids might be forced to undergo rehabilitation until an fMRI shows the right parts of their brain lighting up when they are shown pictures of dead kids, or whatever. This wouldn't be just a matter of answering some questions correctly in an interview. Rehabilitating criminals requires understanding the root cause of their criminality, and correcting it. Certainly we don't have the technology to do this today in all cases, but I suspect we could do far more once society accepts that involuntarily changing people's personalities is preferable to locking them up forever or executing them.
https://twitter.com/asymco/status/460724885120380929/photo/1 - Apple has almost four times as many (iTunes) accounts as Amazon, most of them with a credit card connected.
What evidence do you have that most iTunes account have a non-expired credit card connected? The comparison is between "active" Amazon accounts, and any iTunes account. That doesn't really seem like apples-to-apples. I have an iTunes account and I don't think I've used it in years, and it certainly does have valid payment info, unlike my Amazon Prime account. I'd hardly consider that one data point evidence of anything, but you need to compare like things.
Also, I doubt that many people who would actually buy something from Amazon don't already have Amazon accounts. The only reason Amazon isn't selling directly in their application is that Apple forbids it.
To that extent, it's not shocking when some rules are arbitrary, based on nothing in the "real world", and it's not surprising that everyone is looking for a way to cheat.
I think the trading system is a set of arbitrary rules that approximate a market in the same sense that our legal system is an arbitrary set of rules that approximate justice.
Courts have become a matter of ensuring that a process is followed and they're very effective at that, but justice is more of a byproduct of the system than the goal. In the same way the SEC is about ensuring that the rules of the exchanges are followed, and fair markets are more of a byproduct than the goal.
HFT is another sound argument for Network Neutrality. Fair open markets can not exist on top of a network where superior bandwidth and latency decide market winners instead of legitimate market forces.
While I can see a few parallels, HFT is really an entirely different beast. This isn't about deliberate throttling of traffic. This is more about companies building private microwave relays and such to try to shave a few miles off of runs like Chicago-NYC to get a few nanoseconds less latency in communications, or implementing their algorithms in ASICs. I've even heard people talking about digging deep cables since it is shorter to go through the earth than on top of it.
Nobody would do this sort of thing to shave a few nanoseconds off of their ping time for a video game.
My feeling is that we're going about it all wrong, and talking about the death penalty only makes sense once you can get agreement on just what the purpose of the justice system is in the first place.
In my thinking, people commit crimes because they have a behavioral impulse combined with some kind of stimulus that exceeds their ability to control their own behavior, or they have an antisocial behavior that leads them to choose not to control their behavior.
If any of those factors is "fixed," then no crime will take place. If somebody is only prone to killing their wife if they're sick, have three days of argument in a row, and their kid dies the day before, then as crazy as it sounds they're actually fine to let loose on the street without any rehabilitation at all since something like that will almost certainly never happen to them again. If somebody is prone to kill somebody anytime they sneeze, then if you remove that impulse then they're again safe to let loose in public. If somebody just doesn't have a good sense of self-control, or if they deliberately choose to act in antisocial ways, then if you change their attitude or teach them how to handle their emotions, then they are again safe to let out.
If you accept that the solution to crime is to fix the criminal so that they are no longer a criminal, then locking somebody up for life or executing them only makes sense if you find criminals that are impossible to fix.
Honestly, I think that is only the tip of the iceburg. The whole idea of punishing criminals seems pointless to me. How about rehabilitating them? If somebody is innocent, then we rehabilitate them and in theory that should go pretty quickly since they weren't particularly prone to committing crimes in the first place. If somebody is a likely criminal, then rehabilitation should involve whatever it takes to make them no longer a likely criminal. That doesn't necessarily mean locking them up at all, unless they're so prone to criminal behavior that having them out on the streets is a danger to society.
Getting rid of the death penalty is like arguing that it is better for an innocent person to be raped in prison for the rest of their life instead of being executed. It kind of misses the point, and I don't think the way we run prisons in the US is appropriate for even the guilty, let alone the innocent.
Yup, this is basically the whole "intelligent design" thing in a different form.
People want to teach the biblical creation account in school, but got shot down by every court in the nation 50 years ago (go figure). So, they have to carefully construct the argument so as to try to present it as something new so that courts have an excuse to look the other way.
If an inmate challenged an execution on the grounds that the state has no authority to perform an execution, they'd be shot down. So, instead arguments are made about the process, but those advancing these arguments would not be satisfied with any process - they are opposed to execution in any form.
The only reason states are changing the methodology is because protesters have been fairly effective in curtailing supplies of the materials used previously. Now states are moving towards undisclosed methods with undisclosed suppliers so that it is hard for protesters to target them. They're also generally using materials that are important for healthcare in general so that it is not possible to disrupt their supply. It is a big cat and mouse game. There won't be any kind of standardization of the process since a stable process can potentially be disrupted. So, expect more events like this one until somebody decides to go back to firing squads and hanging.
I'm not a fan of the death penalty myself, but the whole argument around untested methods is just a smoke screen. The whole system of punishment needs a complete overhaul. The death penalty isn't just inhumane, it is based on a flawed premise. How the inmates get executed is fairly unimportant in the big scheme of things - it is like debating whether you'd rather get run over by a car going 35mph or 75mph.
They scan the information you give them. How else do you expect your mail to reach its destination if they don't read the delivery address?
That's like getting mad at the internet because the routers inspect the IP packet headers.
They photograph the outside of the envelope, so that it can be traced (to a degree) even absent a return address. It is called the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program. They aren't just reading the delivery address.
Well, to be fair the USPS only scans the outside of every single piece of mail they handle...
You mean the metadata?
No, they keep an image of the outside of every envelope that goes through the mail system. An actual photograph.
This was implemented after the 9/11 anthrax mailings, so that any envelope lacking a return address could be traced back to its origin. While it doesn't get too much discussion here, it is fairly well-documented - just google for "Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program."
The fact that they need to read but not retain the address on each envelope in order to deliver it only makes sense.
If it cuts into profits, someone will want to cut costs - and corners. That's what frightens me, personally. Not that we can't make things secure, technically. It's human nature at it's worst that will cause a reactor to blow up or be blown up, not problems due to lack of understanding of the science behind it.
That is a political problem. Just make private ownership of nuclear reactors illegal and it is solved. There may be other ways of solving it as well - the government might just be responsible for reactor security, but not maintenance/operation.
Don't get me wrong - I don't see it happening anytime soon either, and I'm sure we'll just maintain the status quo until we either run out of oil or Manhattan is underwater. However, the issue is that various interests profit from the status quo, not that there isn't a solution to it.
Obviously they don't, as Apple has a much more worldwide presence. So I don't see how that is your "point."
Have any actual numbers on that? I suspect that the vast majority of Apple's customers are in the US. They're not nearly as popular in Asia/etc as they are in the US. In Europe they are moderately popular, but then again so is Amazon.
In any case, Amazon's actions clearly indicate that at least they don't find value in paying a 30% markup on every transaction just to have access to that "exclusive" Apple customer base.
Also, even the most powerful strategic bombs don't come close to the contamination caused by a reactor belching its contents into the environment. The largest nuclear bomb weighted 27 tons, the fuel load alone of a normal reactor is over 100 tons (plus there might be pools full of spent fuel rods nearby for additional contamination).
Somehow given the choice of 100 tons of mess located on the property of a damaged nuclear reactor, or 27 tons of fissionables mixed with a thousand tons of dirt lofted into the stratosphere in the vapor state raining out over half the country, I think most would take the former. Certainly anybody within 10 miles of the blast site would prefer the gigantic dirty bomb scenario you describe.
But hey, I'm not arguing for not safeguarding nuclear waste. I'm just saying that compared to global warming and producing energy, security of a couple of plant sites is a much easier problem to solve.
Frankly, the idea of a company opening my private mail for me, reading it, scanning it in, then making it available...
You mean like the USPS?
Well, to be fair the USPS only scans the outside of every single piece of mail they handle (retaining an actual photo of the mail, not just OCR'ed contents). They only scan the inside if somebody asks them to, and only for a particular address. This is far more likely to be due to feasibility than due to some kind of concern for privacy.
A COA can be approval for anything. There is no inherent limitation on weight. The FAAs website is chalk full of PR half truths. Source: I've received a COA for a >25 lb aircraft.
More importantly, there is no legal binding policy regulating drones at all, at least not as far as I can find.
The FAA has clearly stated that they don't want people flying drones for commercial use without a license. However, they never created a regulation to that effect, so it is really nothing more than a suggestion, and not legally enforceable.
It should also be reminded that Rome did persist for a thousand years after Romulus Augustulus was deposed in the West; in the form of the Byzantine Empire.
I'm by no means a historian, but from the little I've learned about the early middle ages my sense is that between the Byzantine Empire and the Carolingian Empire there is a great deal of continuity from the Roman Empire to the modern world. There is a reason that Latin was so commonly used despite rarely being spoken by the common man up to the modern era (heck, private schools still make kids learn it).
Another reply brings up the Papacy. I'm not sure I'd really call that "Rome" in the sense that it used to be, but it is true that the role of the Pope was far greater in the early middle ages, and that there was a constant power struggle between the secular rulers and the church. There was a great deal of interdependence as well, as the church had to rely on secular leaders for actual military power, and the guys who actually did all the accounting/etc for the rulers were basically clergy.
When I began to study this stuff a little I was amazed by how little schools teach about this thousand year period of history from the decline of the Roman Empire up until the later middle ages. Kids spend all kinds of time memorizing the names of Kings, but very little appreciating just where those Kingdoms came from. Everybody has probably heard of Charlemagne, but I imagine few could actually tell you what territory he actually ruled over (at least, not in the US - perhaps in Germany they take it more seriously).
People are paranoid that these processes will be used to make nuclear weapons. Seems like the solution to that is to just locate the facilities in military bases, which routinely handle fully functional nuclear weapons already. For nations that do not possess nuclear weapons the nations which do have them could offer to reprocess the waste for free, since the process is energy positive anyway.