The problem with jail is that it's not really all that affective a deterrent, and that it costs the taxpayers money.
Violent offenders need to be in jail, simply for the safety of the public. Non-violent offenders should be punished differently. Hit them where it hurts, in the wallet. Heavy fines, with enforceable means of collection. Long probation terms (with the penalty for violating probation being more fines, rather than jail).
The problem with throwing non-violent offenders in jail is that the jails and prisons are bursting at the seams. Violent criminals are getting released early to open up bed space for people whose crimes pose much less danger to the public.
I think taking a rich man and making him dirt poor is plenty of punishment, and much less of a burden on tax payers.
True, back when I was learning C in college, it was referred to as medium level. Of course, back then we learned using Turbo C running on DOS, and doing useful things meant fiddling with the hardware.
In this day and age of Windows where hardware access is usually accomplished through several layers of APIs, the concept of a "medium level" language isn't really as useful as it once was.
However, what I found really interesting was the fact that so many of them live within a couple blocks of each other
They did a story about this on the news here a while back. The thing is that (at least here in Iowa) there is a law that prevents them from living within a certain distance of a school. They then overlayed a map of Des Moines with the locations of the schools, and highlighted that radius around them. Pretty much the entire city is off limits to these folks.
Which is fine by me.
It does illustrate, though, that we need to give careful consideration to how we define a "sex offender". Personally, I don't think that a 19 year old kid having sex with his 17 year old girlfriend deserves to be stuck with those restrictions for the rest of his life. As for the "real" sex offenders, I'm not sure we should be letting them out of prison in the first place.
I'll most likely buy one as soon as they come out, and it will very likely be my main box.
I'm happy with the multi-boot system I use right now, with one exception. I still have to keep a second fucking machine on my desk to run OSX. I'm not a big gamer, and while I do appreciate fast machines I'm not a performance junkie. I typically upgrade processors about every 2 years.
If the initial boxes have reasonable performance, and will allow me to triple boot between OSX, XP, and Linux, I'll be all over it.
(Plus, their Intel desktops should be coming out right about in the timeframe that I'll be due for an upgrade anyway.)
by opening up the OS to run on non-apple hardware, Apple would open up their user base tremendously. And possibly garner more than the small percentage of user base that they currently enjoy.
But at what cost? Such a strategy would mean revamping their entire business model, in essence, becoming a whole other company. Not only that, but by shifting focus from selling a "Mac" to selling "MacOS", they become an OS company, placing them in direct competition with Microsoft.
That's a pretty risky move for a company that is already profitable.
The problem for Apple with selling OSX for generic PCs is that it would severely cut into their hardware revenues.
Perhaps they could sell a "generic capable" version at a very high price point, then a much discounted "apple hardware only" version. I don't know if even that would be feasible, just a random thought I had.
Don't forget that by doing precicesly what you suggest, stopping the casual users and turning a blind eye to those willing to exend some effort, they could potentially tap into a much larger open source development community than they already have.
TiVo reaped great benefits from its hacker community who were, technically, violating the license agreement. Perhaps Apple will be as enlightened?
line item veto will never happen because the american people are too stupid to know whats good for them.
I can't quite agree with this. The problem with the line item veto is that it gives the President WAY too much power, and would severely disrupt our system of checks and balances, rather than strengthen it.
A much better solution is to simply ban riders altogether, and let each bill pass through the entire process on its own merits.
Of course, neither solution will ever be implemented because they would have to be implemented by Congress, the very people who depend on both riders and lack of the line item veto to get their little "favors" passed into law and ensure funding for their next campaign.
Oops, I was also going to mention that there is absolutely no need for cryotech to insure that there will still be f*ckheads in charge of the media 50 years from now.
Technology will always advance fast enough that the PHB types in charge will be afraid of it and fail to recognize opportunities that are staring them in the face.
True, and I (sort of) alluded to that when I mentioned carrier imposed bandwidth caps. For the majority of home users, though, asymmetric bandwidth isn't really a big problem, though. Those limits, though, are much more the result of decisions made by executives than they are result of any particular technological limitations.
Also, there's a good chance that the available bandwidth could end up being much more symmetric than it is now, depending on the requirements of whatever services the media fuckheads try to shove down our throats.
Still, T3 equivalent bandwidth (1.544 * 28 = 43.232 Mbps) to the home is well within reason, and probably much sooner than the 50 year timeframe being discussed.
And for those who need symmetric bandwidth, there will still be the commercial class lines available at a much higher cost, just like we can still get a T1 today when the situation calls for it.
Actually, while it won't be what we refer to today as a T3, it's not far fetched at all to think that many homes 50 years from now will have T3 equivalent bandwidth.
Current cable and DSL gear can greatly outpace the speed of a T1 (carrier bandwidth caps and reliability issues aside for the moment). The cable company here in town allows 3Mbps download speed on their cable modems, approximately double that of a T1. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that we could have 14 times that (3Mbps) bandwidth available in the home in 50 years, especially with telcos now starting to run fiber to the home.
Just look at how much bandwidth to the home has increased since 1990.
On my recent trip I did all of my e-mail through my Treo 650, even though I had a laptop back in my room. I was also able to SSH back to the office and restart a flaky dhcp server right from the convention center, rather than making the half hour walk back to my hotel.
But, like another poster said, I tend to view the Treo as a PDA with nationwide Internet access that also happens to have a phone built in, not as a phone with other stuff tacked on.
Personally, I like having all of that functionality in my pocket without having to carry a half dozen devices wherever I go. Even the camera is decent enough that I rarely bother carrying my real camera anymore.
Given that I've never heard of the show, I tend to doubt that it's the most successful of all time, although I don't have any ratings figures at my fingertips to back up my assertion.
I'd be willing to get that on a list of successful British to American comedies, Sanford and Son would rank pretty high.
Nope, didn't get lucky. I forgot to mention that on the night in question she was, in fact, working late.
As for the rest, I agree wholeheartedly, but this particular company was not the sort of place where there was a need to worry about such things. Extremely small company, and a very tight knit group. The typical corporate concerns just weren't an issue there.
As someone who admins e-mail servers, it baffles me that an e-mail is considered to be "proof" of anything in any high stakes situation.
As an example of just how ridiculous this is, I once printed a copy of the logs on my mail server that showed that a female co-worker had checked her e-mail at 6:30 PM, so that she could "prove" to her boyfriend that she really was working late. I of course, snipped the logs down enough that he wouldn't see that she checks her e-mail at precise 5 minute intervals, 24 hours a day. He bought it.
Well, yes, when it comes to a person who broke into my home and stole my property, you're damn right I'm sadistic.
And, no, I wouldn't be happier living on an uninhabited island. I live where I do because that's where I want to be. I would just like to see the difference between the "Gross" and "Net" lines on my paycheck get smaller. Especially when the people that are taking that money out of my pocket are using it so ineffectually.
Oops, I should have included pedophiles along with murderers.
I'm more than happy to kick in my share to keep both of those sorts of people off of the streets.
Any other crime? Larger fines, combined with a more rigid means of collecting said fine, would, simultaneously, be a more effective deterrent and also less costly to the taxpayers.
The solution, of course, is to get the fuckin' government off our backs. Let them go back to doing the job they're SUPPOSED to do. Build roads and put murderers in jail.
Why should MY tax dollars go to buy food and clothing for the thief that robbed MY house when I'm also paying extortion-like rates for the insurance that reimbursed me for MORE than the value of what was stolen?
To be honest, I don't want him in jail. Imprisonment is not an effective deterrent. Let me spend 10 minutes with that guy in my basement with a Louisville Slugger, ten gallons of water, and a live electrical circuit. Trust me, THAT would be a deterrent.
Ah yes, the good ol' days when a simple query for "MP3" on AltaVista would bring up page after page of ftp sites to browse through. Back when "South Park" was nothing more than "that town where the kids from Spirit of Christmas are from".
Actually, the coolest thing about online MP3s back then was that even if you had the CD, it was still much faster to download the MP3s than to rip it yourself. At the time, @Home was still running their trials, so pretty much everyone was stuck on dialup at home. Pentiums were around, but even at the company I worked for (you've heard of it, trust me.) the standard issue desktop was a 486. My 90mhz Pentium at home was, by anyone's standards, a hot rod machine. However, ripping a CD to MP3 was not only a complicated process, it could take well over a day just to do one disc.
Downloading pre-compressed MP3s over the T3 at work was, for lack of a better phrase, fucking awesome!
Oh yeah, this is also the reason that good ol' TBS (used to?) start all of their programming at X:05 and X:35.
Once you start watching a show, chances are you're not going to want to miss the ending. With this scheduling scheme, TBS "ruined" the competitions shows by forcing you to miss the first 5 minutes, increasing the chances that you would stick around for their next offering, which you could see in its entirety.
You'll also see the same tactic every night on the major networks, only executed more subtly. If you want to watch a show that's listed as starting at 9:00, most times the first scene won't actually hit the screen until 9:01 or 9:02. Not enough of an offset that most people notice, but just enough that they can "ruing the experience" of watching the competition's 9:30 offering by making you miss the beginning of it.
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We're talking about sex offenders here. Most of them make it way deeper into the system than the city lockup.
Excellent point.
I guess I'm stuck in a bit of a "PC-centric" frame of mind this morning. Or something like that.
The problem with jail is that it's not really all that affective a deterrent, and that it costs the taxpayers money.
Violent offenders need to be in jail, simply for the safety of the public. Non-violent offenders should be punished differently. Hit them where it hurts, in the wallet. Heavy fines, with enforceable means of collection. Long probation terms (with the penalty for violating probation being more fines, rather than jail).
The problem with throwing non-violent offenders in jail is that the jails and prisons are bursting at the seams. Violent criminals are getting released early to open up bed space for people whose crimes pose much less danger to the public.
I think taking a rich man and making him dirt poor is plenty of punishment, and much less of a burden on tax payers.
True, back when I was learning C in college, it was referred to as medium level. Of course, back then we learned using Turbo C running on DOS, and doing useful things meant fiddling with the hardware.
In this day and age of Windows where hardware access is usually accomplished through several layers of APIs, the concept of a "medium level" language isn't really as useful as it once was.
However, what I found really interesting was the fact that so many of them live within a couple blocks of each other
They did a story about this on the news here a while back. The thing is that (at least here in Iowa) there is a law that prevents them from living within a certain distance of a school. They then overlayed a map of Des Moines with the locations of the schools, and highlighted that radius around them. Pretty much the entire city is off limits to these folks.
Which is fine by me.
It does illustrate, though, that we need to give careful consideration to how we define a "sex offender". Personally, I don't think that a 19 year old kid having sex with his 17 year old girlfriend deserves to be stuck with those restrictions for the rest of his life. As for the "real" sex offenders, I'm not sure we should be letting them out of prison in the first place.
Most developers know that C++ is not a High Level Language.
Bzzt...
Sorry son, it most certainly is.
I'll most likely buy one as soon as they come out, and it will very likely be my main box.
I'm happy with the multi-boot system I use right now, with one exception. I still have to keep a second fucking machine on my desk to run OSX. I'm not a big gamer, and while I do appreciate fast machines I'm not a performance junkie. I typically upgrade processors about every 2 years.
If the initial boxes have reasonable performance, and will allow me to triple boot between OSX, XP, and Linux, I'll be all over it.
(Plus, their Intel desktops should be coming out right about in the timeframe that I'll be due for an upgrade anyway.)
by opening up the OS to run on non-apple hardware, Apple would open up their user base tremendously. And possibly garner more than the small percentage of user base that they currently enjoy.
But at what cost? Such a strategy would mean revamping their entire business model, in essence, becoming a whole other company. Not only that, but by shifting focus from selling a "Mac" to selling "MacOS", they become an OS company, placing them in direct competition with Microsoft.
That's a pretty risky move for a company that is already profitable.
The problem for Apple with selling OSX for generic PCs is that it would severely cut into their hardware revenues.
Perhaps they could sell a "generic capable" version at a very high price point, then a much discounted "apple hardware only" version. I don't know if even that would be feasible, just a random thought I had.
Don't forget that by doing precicesly what you suggest, stopping the casual users and turning a blind eye to those willing to exend some effort, they could potentially tap into a much larger open source development community than they already have.
TiVo reaped great benefits from its hacker community who were, technically, violating the license agreement. Perhaps Apple will be as enlightened?
line item veto will never happen because the american people are too stupid to know whats good for them.
I can't quite agree with this. The problem with the line item veto is that it gives the President WAY too much power, and would severely disrupt our system of checks and balances, rather than strengthen it.
A much better solution is to simply ban riders altogether, and let each bill pass through the entire process on its own merits.
Of course, neither solution will ever be implemented because they would have to be implemented by Congress, the very people who depend on both riders and lack of the line item veto to get their little "favors" passed into law and ensure funding for their next campaign.
Oops, I was also going to mention that there is absolutely no need for cryotech to insure that there will still be f*ckheads in charge of the media 50 years from now.
Technology will always advance fast enough that the PHB types in charge will be afraid of it and fail to recognize opportunities that are staring them in the face.
True, and I (sort of) alluded to that when I mentioned carrier imposed bandwidth caps. For the majority of home users, though, asymmetric bandwidth isn't really a big problem, though. Those limits, though, are much more the result of decisions made by executives than they are result of any particular technological limitations.
Also, there's a good chance that the available bandwidth could end up being much more symmetric than it is now, depending on the requirements of whatever services the media fuckheads try to shove down our throats.
Still, T3 equivalent bandwidth (1.544 * 28 = 43.232 Mbps) to the home is well within reason, and probably much sooner than the 50 year timeframe being discussed.
And for those who need symmetric bandwidth, there will still be the commercial class lines available at a much higher cost, just like we can still get a T1 today when the situation calls for it.
Actually, while it won't be what we refer to today as a T3, it's not far fetched at all to think that many homes 50 years from now will have T3 equivalent bandwidth.
Current cable and DSL gear can greatly outpace the speed of a T1 (carrier bandwidth caps and reliability issues aside for the moment). The cable company here in town allows 3Mbps download speed on their cable modems, approximately double that of a T1. I don't think it's unreasonable to think that we could have 14 times that (3Mbps) bandwidth available in the home in 50 years, especially with telcos now starting to run fiber to the home.
Just look at how much bandwidth to the home has increased since 1990.
Agreed.
On my recent trip I did all of my e-mail through my Treo 650, even though I had a laptop back in my room. I was also able to SSH back to the office and restart a flaky dhcp server right from the convention center, rather than making the half hour walk back to my hotel.
But, like another poster said, I tend to view the Treo as a PDA with nationwide Internet access that also happens to have a phone built in, not as a phone with other stuff tacked on.
Personally, I like having all of that functionality in my pocket without having to carry a half dozen devices wherever I go. Even the camera is decent enough that I rarely bother carrying my real camera anymore.
That's right, I forgot that Three's Company bad British roots.
Given that I've never heard of the show, I tend to doubt that it's the most successful of all time, although I don't have any ratings figures at my fingertips to back up my assertion.
I'd be willing to get that on a list of successful British to American comedies, Sanford and Son would rank pretty high.
Nope, didn't get lucky. I forgot to mention that on the night in question she was, in fact, working late.
As for the rest, I agree wholeheartedly, but this particular company was not the sort of place where there was a need to worry about such things. Extremely small company, and a very tight knit group. The typical corporate concerns just weren't an issue there.
Yeah, tell me about it.
As someone who admins e-mail servers, it baffles me that an e-mail is considered to be "proof" of anything in any high stakes situation.
As an example of just how ridiculous this is, I once printed a copy of the logs on my mail server that showed that a female co-worker had checked her e-mail at 6:30 PM, so that she could "prove" to her boyfriend that she really was working late. I of course, snipped the logs down enough that he wouldn't see that she checks her e-mail at precise 5 minute intervals, 24 hours a day. He bought it.
Well, yes, when it comes to a person who broke into my home and stole my property, you're damn right I'm sadistic.
And, no, I wouldn't be happier living on an uninhabited island. I live where I do because that's where I want to be. I would just like to see the difference between the "Gross" and "Net" lines on my paycheck get smaller. Especially when the people that are taking that money out of my pocket are using it so ineffectually.
Wow.
I'm actually having trouble figuring out which one of three aspects of you argument is more offensive.
1.) Your government mandates that they provide a certain service, and you're happy to pay whatever they charge.
2.) Your government is using their ability to pass laws as a means of driving honest, hard working people out of business.
3.) There are actually people out there STUPID enough to believe that 1 and 2 are good ideas...
I take that back. Option number 3 is clearly the most offensive.
Oops, I should have included pedophiles along with murderers.
I'm more than happy to kick in my share to keep both of those sorts of people off of the streets.
Any other crime? Larger fines, combined with a more rigid means of collecting said fine, would, simultaneously, be a more effective deterrent and also less costly to the taxpayers.
Yep, I see the problem.
The solution, of course, is to get the fuckin' government off our backs. Let them go back to doing the job they're SUPPOSED to do. Build roads and put murderers in jail.
Why should MY tax dollars go to buy food and clothing for the thief that robbed MY house when I'm also paying extortion-like rates for the insurance that reimbursed me for MORE than the value of what was stolen?
To be honest, I don't want him in jail. Imprisonment is not an effective deterrent. Let me spend 10 minutes with that guy in my basement with a Louisville Slugger, ten gallons of water, and a live electrical circuit. Trust me, THAT would be a deterrent.
Ah yes, the good ol' days when a simple query for "MP3" on AltaVista would bring up page after page of ftp sites to browse through. Back when "South Park" was nothing more than "that town where the kids from Spirit of Christmas are from".
Actually, the coolest thing about online MP3s back then was that even if you had the CD, it was still much faster to download the MP3s than to rip it yourself. At the time, @Home was still running their trials, so pretty much everyone was stuck on dialup at home. Pentiums were around, but even at the company I worked for (you've heard of it, trust me.) the standard issue desktop was a 486. My 90mhz Pentium at home was, by anyone's standards, a hot rod machine. However, ripping a CD to MP3 was not only a complicated process, it could take well over a day just to do one disc.
Downloading pre-compressed MP3s over the T3 at work was, for lack of a better phrase, fucking awesome!
Oh yeah, this is also the reason that good ol' TBS (used to?) start all of their programming at X:05 and X:35.
Once you start watching a show, chances are you're not going to want to miss the ending. With this scheduling scheme, TBS "ruined" the competitions shows by forcing you to miss the first 5 minutes, increasing the chances that you would stick around for their next offering, which you could see in its entirety.
You'll also see the same tactic every night on the major networks, only executed more subtly. If you want to watch a show that's listed as starting at 9:00, most times the first scene won't actually hit the screen until 9:01 or 9:02. Not enough of an offset that most people notice, but just enough that they can "ruing the experience" of watching the competition's 9:30 offering by making you miss the beginning of it.