You know, it's a shame Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode; U+2665 (BLACK HEART SUIT) (also known as ♥, which should appear here <>) is probably useful here... for certain very limited values of useful, of course.
Just as bizarre was that they had a payload on their first launch attempt.
The payload massed 20kg (the Falcon could have lifted about 700kg) and was built by Air Force Academy cadets. I suspect it was being launched, er, would have been launched for free. After all, you have to test rockets with something, and you may as well launch something useful rather than a dumb telemetry package.
It's as easy as that. I have about that many, and I can always find things. My mother has about twice as many, and she can always find things. You don't need high-tech solutions, all you need is a certain level of self-discipline.
High-tech solutions are also very brittle. If you have to tell the system whenever you take a book off the shelf or put it back on, then you'll lose books, because at some point you will forget, and the system will have an incorrect view of where the book is. Alphabetical ordering doesn't suffer from this nearly as much.
Plus: alphabetical ordering lets you browse. I don't know about you, but I don't want to figure out what book I want to read next by looking at a database. I want to do it by looking at the shelves, and taking them down, flipping through, looking at the cover, putting them back, etc. That's what books are all about. This is your home, not a warehouse...
Well, I've seen on a documentary that fear of snakes is cultural. A baby isn't born with fear of snakes, it acquires it from the environment. If the baby's mother show fear of snakes, the baby acquires this fear instantly and forever
My mother grew up in Australia, and is definitely afraid of snakes and spiders; I grew up in the UK, and am not (I find them rather interesting and like playing with them). I don't know whether this validates your point or not...
AFAIR, the only hard-wired fear reflexes babies have is a fear of loud noises and of falling. Everything else is learned.
Unmanned Soyuz craft keep failing (and Soyuz has killed a *lot* of ground crew). It's been luck that the manned missions have been the ones that didn't blow up.
That's actually rather an oversimplification --- the word 'Soyuz' actually refers to a whole family of spacecraft.
Firstly, there's the spacecraft themselves, the bits that actually get into orbit; these are all manned. The ones currently used as ferries to the space station is the Soyuz-TMA.
Secondly, there's the launch vehicles. There are loads of these. Manned flights typically launch on the Soyuz-FG. The accident you were talking about was a satellite launch atop the Soyuz-U launch vehicle. The last and only failure of a Soyuz-FG was in 1983, over twenty years ago, and was a launchpad fire where all the astronauts got out alive --- manned vehicles, of course, are built to much tighter tolerances than unmanned vehicles.
Trust me on this one. From one old Basic hack to another... you have to try it.
I have... wrote a big app in it (SQmail, find it on Sourceforge). Gave up and switched to Lua because it was much smaller, much faster, and much more consistant...
If you were trying to make the point that someone could easily program in Basic but not in Python, you failed to support that argument.
I'm sorry, you've missed my point completely.
I'm not trying to say that Basic is in any way superior to Python. Basic is one of the suckiest languages known to mankind.
I am trying to say that the modern computer experience is so overwhelming with new concepts and new ideas and incredibly busy, incomprehensible user interfaces that it won't occur to them that they can understand this stuff.
You can't get away from having to learn new concepts, true. What you can get away from is having to learn irrelevant new concepts before trying to learn the relevant ones. And if you're starting right from the very beginning, there are simply too many irrelevant ones to get in the way.
You say that everyone now knows what menus and such are? That's simply incorrect. There are lots of people who don't. They do, however, know what a typewriter is. Keyboards have an intrinsically shallower learning curve than a mouse does. Have you ever watched a novice, a total novice, trying to figure out a mouse? Those things are not intuitive.
You say that typing is a poor way of interacting with the computer, when instead you can simply pick menu items without having to remember them? Well, I know how to type. I know what I want the machine to do. Why should I spend ages staring at the screen trying to figure out how to get the machine to do what I want, when I can simply tell it? GUIs are not simple; GUIs are complex. That's the point of them. They are infinitely reconfigurable devices that allow a user interface specifically tailored for a particular task --- but that also means that every particular task has a different user interface.
You say that GUIs are obsolete? Well, obviously. That's why no Unix programmer will ever touch the command line...
Remember, these people are not stupid. They are willing to learn, if they feel motivated to. They will read manuals. But GUIs do not encourage learning behaviour. Instead, they encourage rote behaviour. You don't learn any underlying concepts but instead learn magic incantations where if they manipulate the pretty pictures in the right way stuff happens.
The old fashioned 8-bit micro experience was incredibly spare and unsophisticated and, frankly, very limited. But what it did do, which is the point you're not getting, and what computers these days don't do, was to strip the entire experience of dealing with a computer down to its absolute fundamentals. There were no extraneous features. There were no toys, or distractions, or anything to get between you and the machine. You were always in control. Above all, they were open-ended; they were patient vacuums waiting for you to fill them. They never tried to tell you what to do.
How old are you? Have you ever actually used one of these machines? If not, you should. It's a radically different experience from using a modern computer. If you don't like Basic, and I wouldn't blame you for it, take a look at the Jupiter Ace, which runs Forth. Because of this, I wouldn't recommend it to any novice, but just try and write a non-trivial program on it and marvel at the feeling of power that this crappy 3kB device will give you...
And this was straight into the interpreter (IDLE), but I could have easily selected "file / new" from the menu...
Sorry, what menu? What interpreter? What's an IDE? Why do I need to save this as a file before I can run it? What's a file? And you say my computer doesn't have this anyway? How do I get it? Oh, that sounds hard. Well, my computer says it's done something. What are all these little pictures on the screen? When I type nothing happens. Oh, I have to click on one. With a mouse. What's a mouse? Oh, right. Um, how do I work this? Which picture do I want? Okay, clicked. It's changed colour. Double-click, right. It's changed colour again. Faster? Uh... this is pretty hard... gah! What's all this stuff on my screen! Oh, this is an IDE? It looks really complicated. There are all these little boxes and more pictures and... tell you what, I'll use a calculator.
Contrast with your classic 8-bitter: *click* *beep* and it's ready.
I will agree that Python is a better language in pretty much every respect than Basic. But what Basic had a very low initial access cost, which Python doesn't have --- it let you do what little it would do very easily. The number of concepts you need to get your head around before you can do anything was minimal.
I think we've forgotten what a stroke of genius the original concept of Basic was. I mean, it provided a full development environment using four statements --- LIST, RUN, SAVE, LOAD. The distinction between a statement to be executed immediately and a statement that was to be stored for execution later was minimal, yet also clear and simple to understand --- you simply numbered them, and the computer would remember them in numerical order. The syntax that used a very small number of plain English words. You could just read an average line of Basic and figure out what it meant. Even the very spare user interface consisting of a blank screen and a prompt was an advantage; it's simple, it's clean, it's not shoving ideas and concepts into the user's face that the user doesn't care about, and above all, it encourages open-ended exploration. That prompt is saying to the user, "What do you want me to do?" Your average GUI is saying to the user, "These are all the things I will let you do." There's a key distinction there, that I'm afraid we're losing sight of.
Take a look at your screen. Count the number of concepts on it. If you're using a GUI like mine, there are a hell of a lot of them. Windows, files, applications, icons, the web, the net, buttons, text areas, focus management, scrollable areas, menus, the list is endless. We don't see them because we're used to them, but how can we really be surprised that people who aren't used to computers are confused and scared by them because they think they're so complicated?
This is readily understandable by anyone who knows a little maths, and more to the point, is gets the job done.
Now try and do the same thing today. Write it in Python? Lua? Perl? Visual Basic? Not only do they all require enough computer literacy to understand what a scripting language is and that you need to save documents before you can run them, but it also requires expertise in starting the system, navigating the GUI to find Notepad, figuring out where (and how) to save the result, figuring out how to run the result, figuring out how to relate any error messages back to the source... and if you give them an IDE instead, it doesn't get much better, because you end up having to arse around with projects and modules and such before you can get anything done.
Try it in Javascript and HTML, which after all all modern computers support, and life gets even worse --- not only do the standard tools suck, but you have to write in two radically different languages, at the same time, just to make anything happen.
Basic sucked, truly and utterly, but it was also simple enough to let people get started. There isn't anything like that today.
Isn't there already talk about releasing a player that supports both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray?
I suspect what's going to happen is that eventually you'll be able to get far-Eastern off-brand devices that will play HD-DVD, Blu-Ray and CDVD (name may be incorrect; the Chinese next-gen DVD standard). And everyone will be using CDVD, because it'll be the only standard that actually lets you get things done.
For those who may not know, St. Andrews is an ancient Scottish university which has a long involvement with astrophysics. When I considered going there, all those years ago, students still wore gowns in public - I wonder if they still do.
I did go there --- it's a great place (and the bright red gowns are no longer compulsory, although you get free entry to the castle if you wear your gown). I did first year astronomy before realising that my maths weren't up to it and switching to comp sci; St. Andrews has some genuinely decent telescopes despite being at sea-level in a built up area. The Greg is deeply impressive to go and see. It's amazing just how big it is.
For those who don't know, St.Andrews is the third oldest university in the UK, after Oxford and Cambridge; it was founded in 1413, and totally dominates the town. (The university owns most of the town centre.) Going there is an experience totally unlike any other university in Britain... I had a room in a hall of residence five minutes walk from the town centre, perched high on a cliff top overlooking the North Sea. Great view.
Unfortunately, like Cambridge, St. Andrews has suffered from negative publicity as a result of its taking occasional pupils from failing schools and admitting them with A level scores which would not normally allow a student to be admitted. But at least it meant that some of the Windsors got access to higher education, so perhaps the policy is defensible.
Actually, things have changed. Until very recently, British students got their tuition fees paid by the state. Not long ago, however, the British parliament voted to make them pay a proportion --- but the Scottish parliament didn't. So students who go to a Scottish university get their tuition fees paid for them. As a result, all the Scottish universities have been inundated with students, and as the highest-prestige university in the country, St.Andrews can now basically name their price.
That doesn't explain Prince William, however, who is by all accounts not very bright.
It's not -revenge-. It's a safety issue. What if said person gets out, and moves into the house next to them? Do you tell the women to suck it up and deal with it...?
Can you please read what I say?
I am not suggesting that dangerous people are released into society. I am not suggesting that I'm telling rape victims to 'just deal with it', and the only reason I can think why you should think I did say that is either not reading what I said, or else deliberately misunderstanding me.
If you can ensure that someone is no longer a danger to society, they can be released. He have the knowledge and technology to do that today. The process isn't pretty, and we're too squeamish to use it, but we're certainly capable of imposing some pretty draconian mental conditioning that would make it completely impossible for them to hurt someone, ever again. We are certainly capable of moving them somewhere else in the country and then keeping tabs on them so that they never become a threat to their victims, ever again. As far as the victim's concerned, that person will just vanish. As far as the perpetrator's concerned, they get told where to live, what job they can do, what activities they can indulge in, but other than that are pretty much left alone, provided they don't take off the tracking device. They'll probably get moved around if the victim ever ends up in that part of the country.
That's the crude way. The better way would be to actually fix whatever was wrong with the perpetrator that caused them to do whatever it was they did, and if you can do that you can also fix whatever problems the victim may end up with that mean that their own peace of mind is dependent on the imprisonment and mistreatment of another human being. I don't know if we can do that yet, not reliably. Hence the crude way.
But even the crude way will be more effective and probably vastly cheaper than the current prison system.
Stop forgetting who the victims are.
The victims are all the people who are affected. This includes the perpetrator. If you forget that, your justice system is fatally flawed.
There will always be a risk. You will have to be carefull when you let someone loose again, but that doesn't mean that it isn't the right thing to do at a certain point in time.
Indeed. You need to be careful, you need to keep an eye on them, you may need to restrict their movements, but you also need to ensure that you're infringing their rights as little as possible. They may be the ones who violated the civil bargain, but it doesn't make them any less citizens.
(There are people who will never be 'cured' of certain urges and should never be let loose)
Absolutely. And if you can't produce a secured environment where they can live (and be productive) relatively happy, the only humane thing to do is to execute them. Letting them rot for the rest of their lives in a prison is not humane.
So what you're basically saying is, do something wrong, and you lose all your intrinsic human rights? Doesn't that rather make a mockery of the word intrinsic?
And that you'd rather inflict unnecessary punishment on someone for the rest of their life simply in order to keep someone else happy, when instead you could spend a tiny fraction of the money and make sure that they're never going to hurt anybody else, never going to come in contact with any of their erstwhile victims, and you get the economic benefit of them contributing to society?
Surely any just society needs to consider all people's rights as being equally important? Isn't that what having 'rights' is, fundamentally, all about?
So, our government(s) are slowly, methodically, chipping away at individual freedoms under the guise of "protecting" us.
Actually, I don't believe they are. I don't think it's anything like as systematic; I think instead that the problem is far more fundamental --- the democratic system of government, with elections every few years, means that:
Elected officials are taught not to think in the long term. If there is a problem, they need to do something now --- and doing anything is better than doing nothing.
Non-elected officials are taught not to pay any attention to elected officials, because they're not going to be around long enough to matter.
So you end up with a series of knee-jerk reactions to every minor crisis that comes along. Your intelligence services (with their blinkered view of the real world) are pressuring you to give them greater powers so that they can gather more information; your political advisors (who only care about keeping you elected) are pressuring you to do something to keep your ratings up; you can't think of anything else to do, and doing nothing is not an option.
So I don't think there is any organised conspiracy of the New World Order trying to control the world via mind-control lasers and chips in people's heads. I think what you're seeing is simply the emergent effect as entropy builds up in your political system.
So lets say you serially raped 150 girls, and before the trial you castrated yourself... Does that mean, since you are no longer capable of ever doing it again, that you shouldn't go to jail?
Bad analogy. If you're a serial rapist, you have deep violence/anger management/power issues, and even if you're unable to physically have sex, you're still dangerous.
But once you get the proper treatment, and could be proven to no longer be a danger to society, then keeping you locked up would be cruel and unusual and totally counterproductive. The only possible reason for keeping you in prison would be for revenge.
Our local cluster of galaxies - which IIRC consists of three giant spirals and a whole bunch of small cloudlike galaxies - is unimaginatively titled the Local Group.
Ah, bring back the days of the ancient Arabian astronomers who could come up with poetic names like Mintaka, Bellatrix, Deneb, Sirius... the Local Group contains galaxies with names like:
Milky Way (I mean, what is that?)
Wolf-Lundmark-Melotte
Pisces Dwarf
SagDIG
SagDEG (Huh?)
Andromeda
Andromeda I
Andromeda II (and so on, up to V)
Fornax Dwarf (sounds obscene)
Ursa Major Dwarf
Original Ursa Major Dwarf
IC 10 (my computer's got one of those!)
NGC 6822 (wasn't that one of the ships from Star Trek)?
UKS 2323-326 (yes, you can find this galaxy on the back of your hi-fi)
And don't forget the incredibly poetic 2318-42. I mean, that name doesn't even have any friggin' letters in it. Astronomers these days have no soul.
They don't. Or more precisely, the Soyuz doesn't. It's not even in the same class.
Yeah, given a few moments thought I should have figured that out for myself. Soyuz launches a tiny capsule, the SSMEs launches a whole friggin' aeroplane...
According to the article you linked to Energia used RD-170 rocket engines, which produce 7.8 MN each. That's quite significant, and better than the F-1 according to the figures you gave. What's more, Wikipedia says that they're still in use by Sea Launch among others, which means there's a working production line.
Admittedly, I doubt they're man-rated, but it does raise the thought that NASA could probably save itself a shed-load of money by not developing its own engines and just buying RD-170s instead. It can't be purely political --- they quite happily buy RD-180s for the Atlas V.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, if you have to take off your hat to find your pants, there's something very wrong.
You know, it's a shame Slashdot still doesn't support Unicode; U+2665 (BLACK HEART SUIT) (also known as ♥, which should appear here <>) is probably useful here... for certain very limited values of useful, of course.
The payload massed 20kg (the Falcon could have lifted about 700kg) and was built by Air Force Academy cadets. I suspect it was being launched, er, would have been launched for free. After all, you have to test rockets with something, and you may as well launch something useful rather than a dumb telemetry package.
Software is like sex --- every time you find a new hole, someone's going to try to screw you through it.
I think he was channeling Psychlo...
It's as easy as that. I have about that many, and I can always find things. My mother has about twice as many, and she can always find things. You don't need high-tech solutions, all you need is a certain level of self-discipline.
High-tech solutions are also very brittle. If you have to tell the system whenever you take a book off the shelf or put it back on, then you'll lose books, because at some point you will forget, and the system will have an incorrect view of where the book is. Alphabetical ordering doesn't suffer from this nearly as much.
Plus: alphabetical ordering lets you browse. I don't know about you, but I don't want to figure out what book I want to read next by looking at a database. I want to do it by looking at the shelves, and taking them down, flipping through, looking at the cover, putting them back, etc. That's what books are all about. This is your home, not a warehouse...
My mother grew up in Australia, and is definitely afraid of snakes and spiders; I grew up in the UK, and am not (I find them rather interesting and like playing with them). I don't know whether this validates your point or not...
AFAIR, the only hard-wired fear reflexes babies have is a fear of loud noises and of falling. Everything else is learned.
Have you tried drawing around the outside with a green felt-tip pen?
That's actually rather an oversimplification --- the word 'Soyuz' actually refers to a whole family of spacecraft.
Firstly, there's the spacecraft themselves, the bits that actually get into orbit; these are all manned. The ones currently used as ferries to the space station is the Soyuz-TMA.
Secondly, there's the launch vehicles. There are loads of these. Manned flights typically launch on the Soyuz-FG. The accident you were talking about was a satellite launch atop the Soyuz-U launch vehicle. The last and only failure of a Soyuz-FG was in 1983, over twenty years ago, and was a launchpad fire where all the astronauts got out alive --- manned vehicles, of course, are built to much tighter tolerances than unmanned vehicles.
I have... wrote a big app in it (SQmail, find it on Sourceforge). Gave up and switched to Lua because it was much smaller, much faster, and much more consistant...
I'm sorry, you've missed my point completely.
I'm not trying to say that Basic is in any way superior to Python. Basic is one of the suckiest languages known to mankind.
I am trying to say that the modern computer experience is so overwhelming with new concepts and new ideas and incredibly busy, incomprehensible user interfaces that it won't occur to them that they can understand this stuff.
You can't get away from having to learn new concepts, true. What you can get away from is having to learn irrelevant new concepts before trying to learn the relevant ones. And if you're starting right from the very beginning, there are simply too many irrelevant ones to get in the way.
You say that everyone now knows what menus and such are? That's simply incorrect. There are lots of people who don't. They do, however, know what a typewriter is. Keyboards have an intrinsically shallower learning curve than a mouse does. Have you ever watched a novice, a total novice, trying to figure out a mouse? Those things are not intuitive.
You say that typing is a poor way of interacting with the computer, when instead you can simply pick menu items without having to remember them? Well, I know how to type. I know what I want the machine to do. Why should I spend ages staring at the screen trying to figure out how to get the machine to do what I want, when I can simply tell it? GUIs are not simple; GUIs are complex. That's the point of them. They are infinitely reconfigurable devices that allow a user interface specifically tailored for a particular task --- but that also means that every particular task has a different user interface.
You say that GUIs are obsolete? Well, obviously. That's why no Unix programmer will ever touch the command line...
Remember, these people are not stupid. They are willing to learn, if they feel motivated to. They will read manuals. But GUIs do not encourage learning behaviour. Instead, they encourage rote behaviour. You don't learn any underlying concepts but instead learn magic incantations where if they manipulate the pretty pictures in the right way stuff happens.
The old fashioned 8-bit micro experience was incredibly spare and unsophisticated and, frankly, very limited. But what it did do, which is the point you're not getting, and what computers these days don't do, was to strip the entire experience of dealing with a computer down to its absolute fundamentals. There were no extraneous features. There were no toys, or distractions, or anything to get between you and the machine. You were always in control. Above all, they were open-ended; they were patient vacuums waiting for you to fill them. They never tried to tell you what to do.
How old are you? Have you ever actually used one of these machines? If not, you should. It's a radically different experience from using a modern computer. If you don't like Basic, and I wouldn't blame you for it, take a look at the Jupiter Ace, which runs Forth. Because of this, I wouldn't recommend it to any novice, but just try and write a non-trivial program on it and marvel at the feeling of power that this crappy 3kB device will give you...
Sorry, what menu? What interpreter? What's an IDE? Why do I need to save this as a file before I can run it? What's a file? And you say my computer doesn't have this anyway? How do I get it? Oh, that sounds hard. Well, my computer says it's done something. What are all these little pictures on the screen? When I type nothing happens. Oh, I have to click on one. With a mouse. What's a mouse? Oh, right. Um, how do I work this? Which picture do I want? Okay, clicked. It's changed colour. Double-click, right. It's changed colour again. Faster? Uh... this is pretty hard... gah! What's all this stuff on my screen! Oh, this is an IDE? It looks really complicated. There are all these little boxes and more pictures and... tell you what, I'll use a calculator.
Contrast with your classic 8-bitter: *click* *beep* and it's ready.
I will agree that Python is a better language in pretty much every respect than Basic. But what Basic had a very low initial access cost, which Python doesn't have --- it let you do what little it would do very easily. The number of concepts you need to get your head around before you can do anything was minimal.
I think we've forgotten what a stroke of genius the original concept of Basic was. I mean, it provided a full development environment using four statements --- LIST, RUN, SAVE, LOAD. The distinction between a statement to be executed immediately and a statement that was to be stored for execution later was minimal, yet also clear and simple to understand --- you simply numbered them, and the computer would remember them in numerical order. The syntax that used a very small number of plain English words. You could just read an average line of Basic and figure out what it meant. Even the very spare user interface consisting of a blank screen and a prompt was an advantage; it's simple, it's clean, it's not shoving ideas and concepts into the user's face that the user doesn't care about, and above all, it encourages open-ended exploration. That prompt is saying to the user, "What do you want me to do?" Your average GUI is saying to the user, "These are all the things I will let you do." There's a key distinction there, that I'm afraid we're losing sight of.
Take a look at your screen. Count the number of concepts on it. If you're using a GUI like mine, there are a hell of a lot of them. Windows, files, applications, icons, the web, the net, buttons, text areas, focus management, scrollable areas, menus, the list is endless. We don't see them because we're used to them, but how can we really be surprised that people who aren't used to computers are confused and scared by them because they think they're so complicated?
The other part is that entry requirements have gotten much, much tougher. For example, here's a complete and useful program in Basic:
This is readily understandable by anyone who knows a little maths, and more to the point, is gets the job done.Now try and do the same thing today. Write it in Python? Lua? Perl? Visual Basic? Not only do they all require enough computer literacy to understand what a scripting language is and that you need to save documents before you can run them, but it also requires expertise in starting the system, navigating the GUI to find Notepad, figuring out where (and how) to save the result, figuring out how to run the result, figuring out how to relate any error messages back to the source... and if you give them an IDE instead, it doesn't get much better, because you end up having to arse around with projects and modules and such before you can get anything done.
Try it in Javascript and HTML, which after all all modern computers support, and life gets even worse --- not only do the standard tools suck, but you have to write in two radically different languages, at the same time, just to make anything happen.
Basic sucked, truly and utterly, but it was also simple enough to let people get started. There isn't anything like that today.
I suspect what's going to happen is that eventually you'll be able to get far-Eastern off-brand devices that will play HD-DVD, Blu-Ray and CDVD (name may be incorrect; the Chinese next-gen DVD standard). And everyone will be using CDVD, because it'll be the only standard that actually lets you get things done.
Now, now, conjugating verbs should be done only between consenting grammatical forms in the privacy of their own paragraph.
Remember: people have sex, and words have gender!
I did go there --- it's a great place (and the bright red gowns are no longer compulsory, although you get free entry to the castle if you wear your gown). I did first year astronomy before realising that my maths weren't up to it and switching to comp sci; St. Andrews has some genuinely decent telescopes despite being at sea-level in a built up area. The Greg is deeply impressive to go and see. It's amazing just how big it is.
For those who don't know, St.Andrews is the third oldest university in the UK, after Oxford and Cambridge; it was founded in 1413, and totally dominates the town. (The university owns most of the town centre.) Going there is an experience totally unlike any other university in Britain... I had a room in a hall of residence five minutes walk from the town centre, perched high on a cliff top overlooking the North Sea. Great view.
Unfortunately, like Cambridge, St. Andrews has suffered from negative publicity as a result of its taking occasional pupils from failing schools and admitting them with A level scores which would not normally allow a student to be admitted. But at least it meant that some of the Windsors got access to higher education, so perhaps the policy is defensible.
Actually, things have changed. Until very recently, British students got their tuition fees paid by the state. Not long ago, however, the British parliament voted to make them pay a proportion --- but the Scottish parliament didn't. So students who go to a Scottish university get their tuition fees paid for them. As a result, all the Scottish universities have been inundated with students, and as the highest-prestige university in the country, St.Andrews can now basically name their price.
That doesn't explain Prince William, however, who is by all accounts not very bright.
No diassemble!
Can you please read what I say?
I am not suggesting that dangerous people are released into society. I am not suggesting that I'm telling rape victims to 'just deal with it', and the only reason I can think why you should think I did say that is either not reading what I said, or else deliberately misunderstanding me.
If you can ensure that someone is no longer a danger to society, they can be released. He have the knowledge and technology to do that today. The process isn't pretty, and we're too squeamish to use it, but we're certainly capable of imposing some pretty draconian mental conditioning that would make it completely impossible for them to hurt someone, ever again. We are certainly capable of moving them somewhere else in the country and then keeping tabs on them so that they never become a threat to their victims, ever again. As far as the victim's concerned, that person will just vanish. As far as the perpetrator's concerned, they get told where to live, what job they can do, what activities they can indulge in, but other than that are pretty much left alone, provided they don't take off the tracking device. They'll probably get moved around if the victim ever ends up in that part of the country.
That's the crude way. The better way would be to actually fix whatever was wrong with the perpetrator that caused them to do whatever it was they did, and if you can do that you can also fix whatever problems the victim may end up with that mean that their own peace of mind is dependent on the imprisonment and mistreatment of another human being. I don't know if we can do that yet, not reliably. Hence the crude way.
But even the crude way will be more effective and probably vastly cheaper than the current prison system.
Stop forgetting who the victims are.
The victims are all the people who are affected. This includes the perpetrator. If you forget that, your justice system is fatally flawed.
Dammit, I should have remembered to quote that (although I prefer the version that uses incompetence). But yes, exactly.
Indeed. You need to be careful, you need to keep an eye on them, you may need to restrict their movements, but you also need to ensure that you're infringing their rights as little as possible. They may be the ones who violated the civil bargain, but it doesn't make them any less citizens.
(There are people who will never be 'cured' of certain urges and should never be let loose)
Absolutely. And if you can't produce a secured environment where they can live (and be productive) relatively happy, the only humane thing to do is to execute them. Letting them rot for the rest of their lives in a prison is not humane.
And that you'd rather inflict unnecessary punishment on someone for the rest of their life simply in order to keep someone else happy, when instead you could spend a tiny fraction of the money and make sure that they're never going to hurt anybody else, never going to come in contact with any of their erstwhile victims, and you get the economic benefit of them contributing to society?
Surely any just society needs to consider all people's rights as being equally important? Isn't that what having 'rights' is, fundamentally, all about?
Actually, I don't believe they are. I don't think it's anything like as systematic; I think instead that the problem is far more fundamental --- the democratic system of government, with elections every few years, means that:
So you end up with a series of knee-jerk reactions to every minor crisis that comes along. Your intelligence services (with their blinkered view of the real world) are pressuring you to give them greater powers so that they can gather more information; your political advisors (who only care about keeping you elected) are pressuring you to do something to keep your ratings up; you can't think of anything else to do, and doing nothing is not an option.
So I don't think there is any organised conspiracy of the New World Order trying to control the world via mind-control lasers and chips in people's heads. I think what you're seeing is simply the emergent effect as entropy builds up in your political system.
Bad analogy. If you're a serial rapist, you have deep violence/anger management/power issues, and even if you're unable to physically have sex, you're still dangerous.
But once you get the proper treatment, and could be proven to no longer be a danger to society, then keeping you locked up would be cruel and unusual and totally counterproductive. The only possible reason for keeping you in prison would be for revenge.
Ah, bring back the days of the ancient Arabian astronomers who could come up with poetic names like Mintaka, Bellatrix, Deneb, Sirius... the Local Group contains galaxies with names like:
And don't forget the incredibly poetic 2318-42. I mean, that name doesn't even have any friggin' letters in it. Astronomers these days have no soul.
Don't believe me? The full list's on Wikipedia.
Yeah, given a few moments thought I should have figured that out for myself. Soyuz launches a tiny capsule, the SSMEs launches a whole friggin' aeroplane...
According to the article you linked to Energia used RD-170 rocket engines, which produce 7.8 MN each. That's quite significant, and better than the F-1 according to the figures you gave. What's more, Wikipedia says that they're still in use by Sea Launch among others, which means there's a working production line.
Admittedly, I doubt they're man-rated, but it does raise the thought that NASA could probably save itself a shed-load of money by not developing its own engines and just buying RD-170s instead. It can't be purely political --- they quite happily buy RD-180s for the Atlas V.