This would only be true in the case of a premeditated murder. In the case where a spur-of-the-moment crime of passion or rage has occured, there would be no such forethought, but a lot of scrambling afterwords to try and mitigate the damages.
How exactly would it accomplish this properly though? Call home periodically to get a kernel hash? Have a built-in hash check? If you want to allow the kernel to be updatable (which at times, is necessary), then you are going to have to allow the kernel to be "tampered with" somehow. A crack, virus, or other program might just masquerade as a patch to allow the on-disk kernel to be modified.
Sad, but quite possibly true. That or kidnapped, but in this period of time usually something would have been heard of her. However, having the van ditched a few miles from the local neighbourhood doesn't seem like something a smart man would do if trying to avoid being caught, but then again there are many types of smarts, and even smart people do irrational things.
Other than his aptitude for coding, and the fact that his filesystem is one of my favorites, I don't know a whole lot about Reiserfs.
I'm extrapolating greatly here, but if he's a common geek-type, perhaps she left or ran away because he was paying too much attention to work and not the relationship - though that doesn't explain leaving the child behind. There's a comment from her divorce lawyer, so I'm assuming they were breaking up, and there is mention of physical abuse (though in divorce cases it isn't uncommon to have such accusations).
What about Hans himself, had he filed a missing-persons report? Why and how are they preventing his lawyer from reaching him? Innocent until proven guilty, but I would like to know more of the history on this.
I wonder if a better understanding of speech recognition - and having accurate voice models - would allow us to tweak or advanced articifical speech programs? While they probably won't do too much to help a computer understand the actual structure of a sentence (word recognition and pronunciation), it might allow them to produce words or sentences that flow more realistically or have more realistic peaks stresses on various words/syllables.
I've seen some decent ones, and the OS ones aren't better than the common paid-for emulation I've seen, but both could use improvement.
Um, what I was trying to indicate is generally those who make the video clips (of themselves/friends doing stupid things) are the ones that post them online. Somebody else might not be able to take said clip and use it elsewhere without breaking copyright, but it's perfectly legit for the person doing the hosting - unless they receive a request by somebody seen in said clip for removal (nudes, embarrassment, and 'star wars kid' type incidents).
Speaking of the Star Wars Kid, imagine if somebody had made a YouTube page on him...
YouTube seems to contain the world's collection of video clips that would fall under the style of "America's funniest home videos" or "jackass." There are plenty of uncopyrighted clips of people doing stupid things, or particular sports of interest (biking, bogging, snowmobiling, etc). I'm sure there's a lot of copyrighted material, but there's also a lot of other stuff (even if it is kinda lame) that people share amongst friends.
I would have reported that particular store. Whether used by the store or by another customer, the item cannot be sound as new. It would fall more under the category of the "floor model" items you see at bigger stores.
Or just attach them to various games. If a game is known to need a hardware update, ship it something that checks the current kernel/firmware version and does an easy update. The big issue would be around
a) Making sure nobody powers down the unit mid-upgrade (bad)
b) Making sure the upgrade doesn't create new bugs (really bad)
Canada, actually. I've found that while it is possible to get some local items acted upon, having protests with groups numbering in the thousands to near or exceeding ten thousand still has little effect upon the provincial or federal politicians.They prefer to close their doors and shut the people out, no meetings, no comment. Perhaps it's different in the UK, and if it is, I'm happy to see that it is elsewhere.
Yes it is. People are made examples of with every traffic ticket. Sometimes, if a specific crime is on the rise, larger punishments than normal may arise.
Thoughtcrime is in your head. The premise was that cops with brain-scanners could read your mind as you thought seditious thought. This was out-load-and-person, in a public forum dedicated to the victim, calling for further violence against his family. I couldn't say yes or no as to whether the idiot who posted it was kooky enough to try something, or gather others, but I could see people such as KKK members and other gathering to this call.
When somebody is stuffed in jail for thinking - just thinking - of something, then it will be thoughtcrime. When he's arrested for mentioning it to a friend or two, that's still a step beyond. When he posts on a FUCKING FORUM, visible to the world, and setup by the family's victim, it is not thoughtcrime. When the posting calls for violence against the family, it's can go beyond even hatespeak into the areas of conspiracy to commit murder (not used). You don't know if that's what the guy intended, I don't know, but personally I'm pretty damn happy that they slammed him before he ended up on front page news for following it through.
3 years, there's a criminal system and that's the punishment it decided on. Maybe you can judge on that. If you think what the guy did, threatening the family in an area dedicated to the victim - akin doing the same at a funeral - is something he, or anyone else should be allowed to do, then I'd say the world outcome is no better than Orwell's. In fact, with the increasing amount of people desensitized to this sort of things, that's likely exactly you'll get.
Regardless, it's not fucking thought-crime, at least not in the oft-quoted Orwell variety.
Now some bastard may mod me down because I dropped an F-bomb too many times, but perhaps those who keep using the same b.s. cliches will at least learn WHEN they apply.
I don't know about attempted murder, but I believe it might fall closer to "conspiracy to commit murder" - which I believe is an actual charge. There's a fine line between a nasty "what if" scenario and a conspiracy at times.
He got what he deserves, it just seems that nowadays every case is taken beyond it's own merits...
You know, you could make a slippery-slope arguement about pretty much anything if you really wanted...
Yes, and believe it or not, in most places that prohibit "hate speech", hateful speech is still allowed. If I'm voicing a private opinion that group X is bad, or I call my neighbour an ethnic slur (such as my grandparents' neighbour, who refers to him as hitler because he's German) it's a personal attack, but not covered as hate speech. Now, if I pipe up to a group of people (such as a posting on a highly visible internet site) that person X should be hurt or killed, etc, it's hate speech.
Similarly, I could probably get away with saying that the government should be overthrown. If I was publicly declaring the beheading of key government members, that might be a bit different, but in practice some of these things seem to be given more tolerance for highly public features, so saying "Bush should be shot" in a group of people would probably be tolerable, but perhaps not shouting it out wih posters in downtown *Vancouver. Many laws can be abused, and hate-speech laws may be, but I haven't seen any cases so far where it ha.
If your idea is in regards to inflicting pain up or killing innocent people... then maybe it's not such a good idea. It's still not illegal until you start trying to spread it about, at which point it's not a thought, and not thoughtcrime.
Lots of good things come from share ideas, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't stomp on the bad ones. I can't think of many that involve the death or maiming of innocents as "good" thoughts.
With exemption for the smaller local fish, such as mayors, etc, I - nor anyone in my social circle - have never personally had dinner with, shook hands with, met, or otherwise associated with somebody whom is or has been in the upper balances of government. Moreover, if I had, said person would be very unlikely to have had any time for me.
Why? Because I'm not rich, famous, influential. I am a normal citizen, possibly about average financially for my age, but by no means wealthy nor powerful. Don't kid yourself that I am other common folk are on the same scale as most politicians in this manner, as most come from wealthy or otherwise heavily influencial and/or powerful families.
The last time I heard of a more common man in government in this continent, it was after the people rose up and overthrew the existing government.
As for making an example of somebody, believe it or not but that is part of what the criminal system does. Not everyone gets a speeding ticket, not everyone gets a prison sentence, but the possibility that one might is supposed to be part of the dissuasive factor in the system. No, jailtime might not make this individual a better person, in fact I'd side with "probably won't", but it may dissuade others with similar notions.
Ahhhh. Well that educates me a bit, so basically it's something like an RBL for phishing sites.
What about hacked sites? The last few phishes I found, they were actually legit sites that had been hacked (one was what appears to be a school in Brazil, which had it's hoarde email service hacked to impregnate it with a phishing sub-site).
My co-worker had a bell cellphone with a companion plan. Essentially this means that both he and his wife have phones which share a plan/minutes/etc. As part of the plan, he can call his wife's phone any time and vice-versa.
In theory anyhow
In practice, he would have to call the cellphone company after every bill, wasting at least 1-2 days worth of lunch break, and explain to them how it had decided to bill his phone, or his wife's for a companion-call that should have been free, and for various other little differences. In addition to this, the customer service people were rude, unhelpful, and for some reason they couldn't read a case-file or whatever to determine that it was happening month-after-month, so it usually had to get called up through a few tiers every time.
It was still going on for about 6 months when I moved to a new job, so I don't know if they're still screwing up his bills. The fact is though, and I've pointed it out on/. before, that these companies almost always seem to make money on their mistakes, never lose it. Sure, a $3 overcharge per month isn't much, and for many people it's not worth going over 5 pages of billing to determine where it was screwed up. For the company though, $3 times 100,000 customers is $300,000 a month, and in $3.6 million per month. It costs them to fix their systems, so assuming the bill wasn't deliberately overdone in the first place, why would they correct such a profitable "mistake"
Personally, the last few bills I've had screwed up in my favour (these being the employee-entered type, where they undercharge me, such as $0.05 for my burger-meal instead of $6.05) I've been honest enough to correct it and pay up. I wish these companies had a smidgeon of honesty in them, but somehow I'm betting that the CEO's would just keep seeing $3.6 million in free burgers for them...
Hmmm, well around here the telco will allow you an early-cancellation on your ADSL account if you move to an area which they won't/don't/can't support. From the sounds of their response, it might be an article of law that they need to follow, rather than a customer-service reason (BC, Canada).
However, I should be mentioned that this stuff does happen in the USA as well. If a person is wealthy+powerful enough, you can threaten, buy, "remove" or many other things to witnesses. For the police, depending on the local level of corruption or bureaucratic influence, some of these may work as well.
And if I've got one machine formatting, another fsck'ing, a third reimaging, and still yet another compiling a kernel while I happen to be reading a slashdot article or two, I hardly consider it slacking. Sure I'm doing something non-work related, but that's because all my resources are being tied up doing things that are work-related.
Coding something to play off lists of scheduled video would be rather simple. If you're decent with perl/mysql, a database with a nice front-end to enter programming details, and a scriptlet that you can launch in the morning that would start up mplayer/whatever at proper times (based on the database), and "break" screens in between would work.
Commercials are a complication. Inserting them into the middle of a show would require that you either:
a) Have your scheduler aware of the "break" times in the show, tell the player to stop, insert the commercial, then start playback of the show back at the "resume" point
b) Encode the commercials into the video ahead of time (perhaps easier, but less flexible).
There's also the hardware to consider. You're going to want:
redundant power (either an on-site generator and/or some hefty UPS's), for both your broadcasting equipment and computers.
storage: A place to store your daily/weekly queue of shows. A storage rack or a server with a good RAID-5 array might do the trick. Hot-swappable drives would be a very good idea (tm), but in the end it's not that much different from other important files
playback: A unit with the software to read the schedule, and a TV/video-out card with appropriate resolution. Technically for lower-res, a GeForce might work, but you'll want to disable the video on TV-out during loading (bootup) etc to avoid embarrassing splash-screens. You could transfer files locally as played, or stream through the network
scheduling: You'll want a front-end for people to set programming schedules. A web interface may suffice. You'll also need the scripting for the playback machine to read
encoding: As mentioned, you could do this in windows/mac and upload the files in a compatible format, but it's not all that difficult to do this in 'nix with a good encoder-card (hauppauge)
backbone: probably a 1GB/s network to communicate between your storage and playback unit. Spare NICs, cables, and switches are usually a good idea if downtown is a big issue. Maybe a backup network you could switch on in a pinch
redundancy: Something to save your butt if your storage server, network equipment, or playback machine dies
hard-copy: Something to save hard-copies of your data, so that you can re-use them later and/or load/offload them to and from your storage machine. Good quality DVD's, external storage drives kept save from shock/magnetism, or perhaps some big tapes might work. A backup array might also work, but you'll want it offsite in case of local disasters
Testing: Somebody who can check that you don't run into weird encoding errors, hard-drive/media corruption, etc
Again, a lot of this depends on your skill level. With time, money, and effort it's something I'd probably feel confident about, but most of this depends on your own ability to configure the equipment and/or do the scripting/code (or hire somebody else to do it, want my resume?)
It would have been significantly better use of their time to, say, have them go on speaking circuits at business ethics meetings, or universities
Are you freaking kidding me? You want some of the most ethically-challenged people to go out and discuss ethics as punishment? That's about as useful as when I was younger, and my parents would force my sister to apologize after breaking my stuff... you know they don't mean it, so the message is useless and somewhat hypocritical at best.
A better solution to prisons in general would be to take the cue of various other countries (and one that was, I believe, used historically) and have the prisoners serve time doing manual labour. Nothing that will seriously endanger anyone's health, mind you, but for all but the most feeble of individuals there is some productive manual task they could accomplish. Then, take the money from the work they do, and use part of it to pay the bill for their lodgings, part to restitute the victims if possible, and maybe give some bonuses to the workers who show good behavior.
Of course, in North America we're just too darn civilized to make our criminals actually do hard work, but maybe if we took a cue from countries like China in this (with slightly better conditions) prisons would actually be less of a drain on the taxpaying, productive, non-criminal citizens.
Slashdot Mirror
This would only be true in the case of a premeditated murder. In the case where a spur-of-the-moment crime of passion or rage has occured, there would be no such forethought, but a lot of scrambling afterwords to try and mitigate the damages.
How exactly would it accomplish this properly though? Call home periodically to get a kernel hash? Have a built-in hash check? If you want to allow the kernel to be updatable (which at times, is necessary), then you are going to have to allow the kernel to be "tampered with" somehow. A crack, virus, or other program might just masquerade as a patch to allow the on-disk kernel to be modified.
Sad, but quite possibly true. That or kidnapped, but in this period of time usually something would have been heard of her. However, having the van ditched a few miles from the local neighbourhood doesn't seem like something a smart man would do if trying to avoid being caught, but then again there are many types of smarts, and even smart people do irrational things.
Other than his aptitude for coding, and the fact that his filesystem is one of my favorites, I don't know a whole lot about Reiserfs.
I'm extrapolating greatly here, but if he's a common geek-type, perhaps she left or ran away because he was paying too much attention to work and not the relationship - though that doesn't explain leaving the child behind. There's a comment from her divorce lawyer, so I'm assuming they were breaking up, and there is mention of physical abuse (though in divorce cases it isn't uncommon to have such accusations).
What about Hans himself, had he filed a missing-persons report? Why and how are they preventing his lawyer from reaching him? Innocent until proven guilty, but I would like to know more of the history on this.
I wonder if a better understanding of speech recognition - and having accurate voice models - would allow us to tweak or advanced articifical speech programs? While they probably won't do too much to help a computer understand the actual structure of a sentence (word recognition and pronunciation), it might allow them to produce words or sentences that flow more realistically or have more realistic peaks stresses on various words/syllables.
I've seen some decent ones, and the OS ones aren't better than the common paid-for emulation I've seen, but both could use improvement.
Um, what I was trying to indicate is generally those who make the video clips (of themselves/friends doing stupid things) are the ones that post them online. Somebody else might not be able to take said clip and use it elsewhere without breaking copyright, but it's perfectly legit for the person doing the hosting - unless they receive a request by somebody seen in said clip for removal (nudes, embarrassment, and 'star wars kid' type incidents).
Speaking of the Star Wars Kid, imagine if somebody had made a YouTube page on him...
YouTube seems to contain the world's collection of video clips that would fall under the style of "America's funniest home videos" or "jackass." There are plenty of uncopyrighted clips of people doing stupid things, or particular sports of interest (biking, bogging, snowmobiling, etc). I'm sure there's a lot of copyrighted material, but there's also a lot of other stuff (even if it is kinda lame) that people share amongst friends.
I would have reported that particular store. Whether used by the store or by another customer, the item cannot be sound as new. It would fall more under the category of the "floor model" items you see at bigger stores.
Or just attach them to various games. If a game is known to need a hardware update, ship it something that checks the current kernel/firmware version and does an easy update. The big issue would be around
a) Making sure nobody powers down the unit mid-upgrade (bad)
b) Making sure the upgrade doesn't create new bugs (really bad)
Canada, actually. I've found that while it is possible to get some local items acted upon, having protests with groups numbering in the thousands to near or exceeding ten thousand still has little effect upon the provincial or federal politicians.They prefer to close their doors and shut the people out, no meetings, no comment. Perhaps it's different in the UK, and if it is, I'm happy to see that it is elsewhere.
No, it really isn't.
Yes it is. People are made examples of with every traffic ticket. Sometimes, if a specific crime is on the rise, larger punishments than normal may arise.
Thoughtcrime is in your head. The premise was that cops with brain-scanners could read your mind as you thought seditious thought. This was out-load-and-person, in a public forum dedicated to the victim, calling for further violence against his family. I couldn't say yes or no as to whether the idiot who posted it was kooky enough to try something, or gather others, but I could see people such as KKK members and other gathering to this call.
When somebody is stuffed in jail for thinking - just thinking - of something, then it will be thoughtcrime. When he's arrested for mentioning it to a friend or two, that's still a step beyond. When he posts on a FUCKING FORUM, visible to the world, and setup by the family's victim, it is not thoughtcrime. When the posting calls for violence against the family, it's can go beyond even hatespeak into the areas of conspiracy to commit murder (not used). You don't know if that's what the guy intended, I don't know, but personally I'm pretty damn happy that they slammed him before he ended up on front page news for following it through.
3 years, there's a criminal system and that's the punishment it decided on. Maybe you can judge on that. If you think what the guy did, threatening the family in an area dedicated to the victim - akin doing the same at a funeral - is something he, or anyone else should be allowed to do, then I'd say the world outcome is no better than Orwell's. In fact, with the increasing amount of people desensitized to this sort of things, that's likely exactly you'll get.
Regardless, it's not fucking thought-crime, at least not in the oft-quoted Orwell variety.
Now some bastard may mod me down because I dropped an F-bomb too many times, but perhaps those who keep using the same b.s. cliches will at least learn WHEN they apply.
I don't know about attempted murder, but I believe it might fall closer to "conspiracy to commit murder" - which I believe is an actual charge. There's a fine line between a nasty "what if" scenario and a conspiracy at times.
He got what he deserves, it just seems that nowadays every case is taken beyond it's own merits...
You know, you could make a slippery-slope arguement about pretty much anything if you really wanted...
Yes, and believe it or not, in most places that prohibit "hate speech", hateful speech is still allowed. If I'm voicing a private opinion that group X is bad, or I call my neighbour an ethnic slur (such as my grandparents' neighbour, who refers to him as hitler because he's German) it's a personal attack, but not covered as hate speech. Now, if I pipe up to a group of people (such as a posting on a highly visible internet site) that person X should be hurt or killed, etc, it's hate speech.
Similarly, I could probably get away with saying that the government should be overthrown. If I was publicly declaring the beheading of key government members, that might be a bit different, but in practice some of these things seem to be given more tolerance for highly public features, so saying "Bush should be shot" in a group of people would probably be tolerable, but perhaps not shouting it out wih posters in downtown *Vancouver. Many laws can be abused, and hate-speech laws may be, but I haven't seen any cases so far where it ha.
*p.s. I'm Canadian, we have hate-speech laws
If your idea is in regards to inflicting pain up or killing innocent people... then maybe it's not such a good idea. It's still not illegal until you start trying to spread it about, at which point it's not a thought, and not thoughtcrime.
Lots of good things come from share ideas, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't stomp on the bad ones. I can't think of many that involve the death or maiming of innocents as "good" thoughts.
With exemption for the smaller local fish, such as mayors, etc, I - nor anyone in my social circle - have never personally had dinner with, shook hands with, met, or otherwise associated with somebody whom is or has been in the upper balances of government. Moreover, if I had, said person would be very unlikely to have had any time for me.
Why? Because I'm not rich, famous, influential. I am a normal citizen, possibly about average financially for my age, but by no means wealthy nor powerful. Don't kid yourself that I am other common folk are on the same scale as most politicians in this manner, as most come from wealthy or otherwise heavily influencial and/or powerful families.
The last time I heard of a more common man in government in this continent, it was after the people rose up and overthrew the existing government.
As for making an example of somebody, believe it or not but that is part of what the criminal system does. Not everyone gets a speeding ticket, not everyone gets a prison sentence, but the possibility that one might is supposed to be part of the dissuasive factor in the system. No, jailtime might not make this individual a better person, in fact I'd side with "probably won't", but it may dissuade others with similar notions.
Ahhhh. Well that educates me a bit, so basically it's something like an RBL for phishing sites.
What about hacked sites? The last few phishes I found, they were actually legit sites that had been hacked (one was what appears to be a school in Brazil, which had it's hoarde email service hacked to impregnate it with a phishing sub-site).
Sometimes I think "software error" is deliberate.
/. before, that these companies almost always seem to make money on their mistakes, never lose it. Sure, a $3 overcharge per month isn't much, and for many people it's not worth going over 5 pages of billing to determine where it was screwed up. For the company though, $3 times 100,000 customers is $300,000 a month, and in $3.6 million per month. It costs them to fix their systems, so assuming the bill wasn't deliberately overdone in the first place, why would they correct such a profitable "mistake"
My co-worker had a bell cellphone with a companion plan. Essentially this means that both he and his wife have phones which share a plan/minutes/etc. As part of the plan, he can call his wife's phone any time and vice-versa.
In theory anyhow
In practice, he would have to call the cellphone company after every bill, wasting at least 1-2 days worth of lunch break, and explain to them how it had decided to bill his phone, or his wife's for a companion-call that should have been free, and for various other little differences. In addition to this, the customer service people were rude, unhelpful, and for some reason they couldn't read a case-file or whatever to determine that it was happening month-after-month, so it usually had to get called up through a few tiers every time.
It was still going on for about 6 months when I moved to a new job, so I don't know if they're still screwing up his bills. The fact is though, and I've pointed it out on
Personally, the last few bills I've had screwed up in my favour (these being the employee-entered type, where they undercharge me, such as $0.05 for my burger-meal instead of $6.05) I've been honest enough to correct it and pay up. I wish these companies had a smidgeon of honesty in them, but somehow I'm betting that the CEO's would just keep seeing $3.6 million in free burgers for them...
Hmmm, well around here the telco will allow you an early-cancellation on your ADSL account if you move to an area which they won't/don't/can't support. From the sounds of their response, it might be an article of law that they need to follow, rather than a customer-service reason (BC, Canada).
OK, and my paste buffer is messed up. Stupid middle-mouse-button, CTRL+V paste buffer difference:
wikipedia entry
grumble, grumble (please feel free to mod previous post down)
Oops, my wikipedia entry was unlinked.
Here it is.
I hadn't, but I found these sites:
News index on the case
Wikipedia entry
However, I should be mentioned that this stuff does happen in the USA as well. If a person is wealthy+powerful enough, you can threaten, buy, "remove" or many other things to witnesses. For the police, depending on the local level of corruption or bureaucratic influence, some of these may work as well.
And if I've got one machine formatting, another fsck'ing, a third reimaging, and still yet another compiling a kernel while I happen to be reading a slashdot article or two, I hardly consider it slacking. Sure I'm doing something non-work related, but that's because all my resources are being tied up doing things that are work-related.
Commercials are a complication. Inserting them into the middle of a show would require that you either:
a) Have your scheduler aware of the "break" times in the show, tell the player to stop, insert the commercial, then start playback of the show back at the "resume" point
b) Encode the commercials into the video ahead of time (perhaps easier, but less flexible).
There's also the hardware to consider. You're going to want:
- redundant power (either an on-site generator and/or some hefty UPS's), for both your broadcasting equipment and computers.
- storage: A place to store your daily/weekly queue of shows. A storage rack or a server with a good RAID-5 array might do the trick. Hot-swappable drives would be a very good idea (tm), but in the end it's not that much different from other important files
- playback: A unit with the software to read the schedule, and a TV/video-out card with appropriate resolution. Technically for lower-res, a GeForce might work, but you'll want to disable the video on TV-out during loading (bootup) etc to avoid embarrassing splash-screens. You could transfer files locally as played, or stream through the network
- scheduling: You'll want a front-end for people to set programming schedules. A web interface may suffice. You'll also need the scripting for the playback machine to read
- encoding: As mentioned, you could do this in windows/mac and upload the files in a compatible format, but it's not all that difficult to do this in 'nix with a good encoder-card (hauppauge)
- backbone: probably a 1GB/s network to communicate between your storage and playback unit. Spare NICs, cables, and switches are usually a good idea if downtown is a big issue. Maybe a backup network you could switch on in a pinch
- redundancy: Something to save your butt if your storage server, network equipment, or playback machine dies
- hard-copy: Something to save hard-copies of your data, so that you can re-use them later and/or load/offload them to and from your storage machine. Good quality DVD's, external storage drives kept save from shock/magnetism, or perhaps some big tapes might work. A backup array might also work, but you'll want it offsite in case of local disasters
- Testing: Somebody who can check that you don't run into weird encoding errors, hard-drive/media corruption, etc
Again, a lot of this depends on your skill level. With time, money, and effort it's something I'd probably feel confident about, but most of this depends on your own ability to configure the equipment and/or do the scripting/code (or hire somebody else to do it, want my resume?)It would have been significantly better use of their time to, say, have them go on speaking circuits at business ethics meetings, or universities
Are you freaking kidding me? You want some of the most ethically-challenged people to go out and discuss ethics as punishment? That's about as useful as when I was younger, and my parents would force my sister to apologize after breaking my stuff... you know they don't mean it, so the message is useless and somewhat hypocritical at best.
A better solution to prisons in general would be to take the cue of various other countries (and one that was, I believe, used historically) and have the prisoners serve time doing manual labour. Nothing that will seriously endanger anyone's health, mind you, but for all but the most feeble of individuals there is some productive manual task they could accomplish. Then, take the money from the work they do, and use part of it to pay the bill for their lodgings, part to restitute the victims if possible, and maybe give some bonuses to the workers who show good behavior.
Of course, in North America we're just too darn civilized to make our criminals actually do hard work, but maybe if we took a cue from countries like China in this (with slightly better conditions) prisons would actually be less of a drain on the taxpaying, productive, non-criminal citizens.