Tim O'Reilly is O'Reilly Press... which also has an enormous online presence. People comment based on their perspective. What would be the impact of better privacy to an online business like O'Reilly Press? Would it be better for Tim's business if there were less privacy?
By the way, this study has been done several times at several times in history. I remember reading the same thing (ugly people are convicted more) 25 years or more ago. And that probably wasn't the first time someone came up with that conclusion. I'd put money that someone came to that conclusion centuries ago, etc etc etc.
This has more to do with doctors who are too full of themselves. When I was in Saint Louis I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. When I asked my doctor to explain something about it so I could learn about the condition, he told me that I didn't need to know anything and just take the medicine at the dosage he prescribed. Because I was living and working in Saint Louis and had a good insurance plan, I was able to see a specialist (an endocrinologist) fairly quickly (in Canada it is debatable if this would even be possible since specialists are fewer, and the family doctor's office has to make the appointment assuming he thinks it appropriate... which a dick head like this wouldn't).
The endocrinologist asked me if my family doctor had checked for antibodies. I said no and asked 'antibodies for what?'. He said for antibodies that might be attacking the thyroid and explained it is a good idea to figure out why someone's thyroid is failing, to make sure there was nothing that could cause other issues. He did the test and found I have a condition called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, a kind of autoimmune disease where the body goes after your thyroid (kind of like a rheumatoid arthritis of the thyroid). If you have HT, it is important to keep your TSH at the very low end of the scale using thyroid hormone replacement (levothyroxine/synthroid) to keep the body from attacking the thyroid. It really is the same lifelong daily medicine used to treat all forms of hypothyroidism, but with Hashimoto's it is important to keep track of levels, more so than other types of hypothyroidism, since with higher levels of TSH the body creates more antibodies to attack the thyroid, which can lead to other issues later on. As well, it turned out I had atypical hypothyroidism in that my TSH levels were above normal but below 10 where levels typical of the condition would be above 90 (can't remember the units). Even though the levels were somewhat low, I still require high levels of synthroid to get my levels to a safe level, on a par with a buddy of mine who had his thyroid removed due to cancer. But my family doctor didn't want to listen since he knew all and I was just a patient. If I would have left it where it was when he told me to not bother understanding or learning about my condition, I would still probably be feeling like shit, fogged out, always cold, depressed, and gaining weight, develop coronary artery disease, which will develop if HT is not properly treated. Also chances of nodules on the thyroid...
I am glad I went to the specialist since my family doctor had not prescribed high enough levels of synthroid. He didn't consider that a patient may be as intelligent or more intelligent than him, was able to understand the condition, and had a higher stake at understanding the disease, since the patient (me) was the one who had it. I fired the doctor and found a better one who was smarter and less full of himself. If you are going to be a doctor, learn from this. You don't know it all. Of course you know more than your patient, but that doesn't mean your patients are not capable of finding out things you don't know. Listen first, judge what you hear, then make a decision on whether to disregard it based on the merits of the information, not on the surety that you are smarter and know more than your patient possibly could... especially since no one can know it all, and everyone is capable of learning something that you don't.
This was in 2004 or 2005. I find the Canadian border guards at road crossings are the biggest dick heads of any other country I have entered. The ones at the airports are decent folks. I have traveled to around 14 countries (doing work in some), and crossed borders by air, car, and train.
I accidentally put my last passport through the wash (in Canada you need to get a new passport every five years, they don't renew them). When I was crossing the boarder at the Peace Arch (on Canada's Highway 99, US I-5) south of Vancouver the U.S. border guard raised his eyebrow and asked me what happened to it. I told him. He scanned it and the electronic encoding stored in the passport still worked (older style embedded magnetic strip). He passed it back and told me to dryclean it next time.
Middle ground is just that the middle. However, what I have seen from living in the U.S. for a number of years, is that it seems to me that highly Christian (and almost always right or extreme right wing) families have lots of kids. They are Christian making factories. That goes for those who live in the country and in the cities. Meanwhile, left leaning academic types (and even centrists) seems to be having fewer, if any children at all. As the country is flooded with the far right, the middle ground is skewed in that direction. Eventually, the United States will in fact start exporting crusades and conducting witch hunts. Who knows, maybe this is nature's way to balance the jihads from overseas. A human nature knee jerk reaction. Or it could be the result of America's obsession with sports over intellect, where the dumb jocks' DNA is taking over because they are seen as the best breeding partner in that primitive part of the brain. In any case, I don't like the direction the U.S. is taking.
Yeah and they will still get you if you go to a dealer. Not being an electrician, I took my car to the dealer when it was having trouble starting once winter came around and Ford charged me $100 for an electrical check which amounted to a guy taking 5 minutes to plug into the OBDII port, and another five to measure the charge on the battery. Then they told me the battery needed replacement and that it would cost something close to $300, installed. I went to Canadian Tire and bought one of their high end store brands (akin to a Sears Die Hard) for $120 and installed it myself. Bottom line, is the shops get you on over priced labour charges. If you can avoid that, you are way ahead. BTW, it was the battery.
As an example, it's my impression that if Tea Bagger^H^H^H^H^H^HParty backed radical right wing Republicans are in power, it won't matter what the person said or did in the past (i.e. a reflection of the person), as long as they spout the uber republican mantras now. If a nominee says they think Roe versus Wade was wrong, they will vote for them. If they say "born again", they will vote for them to get in. In other words, I think the principle that people make their selections and then look for ways to justify them will hold true no matter how much information people have on the subject. The internet just allows like minded people to group together and reinforce their opinions. If you are democrat or republican, you will look at web sites that agree with your thinking. So the only way the internet has damaged democracy is by making it too easy to create schisms.
If anyone has read the Dorsai series, the internet acts the same way as the proposed diaspora of people from earth will look like. For those that haven't read this sci-fi series, all the ultra religious Christians will go to one world, the Muslims to another, the mystics to another, the agnostics to another, the various political (but moderate religious) leanings to each of their own. All so they can finally make a world the way they think it should be. (The Dorsai by the way were a group of individualists who managed to settle a planet that had no great wealth of natural resources, and so, had to hire themselves out as mercenaries in order to earn money to buy off world goods... eventually becoming the best soldiers anywhere... much like the Ghurkas.) The internet is similar as people will not generally visit sites taking positions outside their own beliefs.
Yeah, the OP says the people were arrested for having the literature. That by itself is ridiculous. It is the start of the slope for arresting people for non-crimes. In the sixties some people would have arrested kids for owning Beatles albums after John Lennon's 'Jesus' remarks ("we're more popular than Jesus right now"), if they could.
In Canada we have ridiculous censorship in the form of 'hate crime' laws. They want to legislate people to not have racist feelings instead of educate them. In America which has the closest to real free speech in the world (i.e. no hate crime laws), education and ridicule of racists has lead to the first president/head of government (actual governing not symbolic like Canada's GG) in the world. Anyway, I am not looking forward to when Canada comes out with a similar law to the UKs (when the bonehead liberal dogma mixes explosively with bonehead right wing dogma) so they can start arresting people with copies of Huckleberry Finn. The slippery slope is getting slippery-er. Having literature of any kind should not be a crime. Using some of the literature to make bombs or weapons (the weapons making part), or as proof to show intent to build the weapons (they are buying the ingredients and have the instructions on how to use them, for example)... these I think are reasonable to call crimes.
For completeness sake, this is the full quote with respect to Lennon's Jesus statement: "Christianity will go.. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first -- rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."
I did some work in the Philippines in 1999. While I was there, one of the newspapers reported on a guy who took six Viagra and then paid for the services of several 'Guest Relations Officers' GROs. That, by the way, is an official term for licensed prostitutes (at the time at least, it was up to the city in the Philippines if they would allow that kind of business, officially). Anyway, the guy died the next morning from basically pulmonary edema. The newspaper interviewed the hospital staff who had the common morbid/black humour of all emergency services workers. The thing was that unlike North American (and even some European) newspapers is that they included the hospital staff's comments on this. Like, "it was a hard way to go." Or, "he should have seen it coming." etc etc. I was on my way to Hong Kong and then London that morning and reading the article on board the plane while taxiing for take off. The comments were pretty funny in my opinion (I also have a dark sense of humour), and the other passengers kept looking at me perplexed as I was laughing my ass off reading it.
What I got from this is that he is saying that there is a preponderance of 'flavour of the day, week, etc.' as far a what the new silver bullet language or tool is. And when a company has a site that is any kind of old there can often be a jumble of all these silver bullets. It is better to stick with one technology if you can so that your code base is maintainable (my main complaint with the way most agile projects are implemented... the 'documentation is the code' doesn't help much ten years from now). If you use one vendor's solution, usually it means that the technology/implementation methods stays stable, except for any added functionality the vendor may add. That way the code base is coherent and people ten years ago don't have to learn all the languages that were considered silver bullets over the same time span. Granted, it doesn't mean you need to use a solution from a closed source vendor. I'm sure there are open source ways to go. Just don't switch to the language du jour all the time. But then again, I think we have heard the same thing many times here. And we will likely hear it again since people, especially programmers, like shiny new things. Meanwhile, businesses just want things to work, and don't care how, as long as it doesn't impede their revenue stream (like happens when something breaks and you can't find a programmer who knows some framework a programmer used on their system five years ago because he/she thought it was cool).
Yeah... I'm talking about how they did things 100 years ago. Seems to me people had a lot more respect for each other back then. Mind you, back then parents would discipline their children if they disrespected ANYBODY. Bottom line is when there are significant consequences to your actions (you are held severely accountable for what you do), people behave more. Besides, I don't give a shit what the prisoners feel like in prison. I want them to feel bad. If they riot and cause destruction in the prison, shoot them. On the spot. The others will stop rioting right away. If they hurt a guard, kill them right on the spot. Why do they have rights? They decided to live outside the law, now pay the consequences. When you get out, you won't want to go back.
Using this, the U.S. government should already be in the 'shame on me' phase right now. Everyone knows how highly proprietary Sony is. This is the company that put root kits on their audio CDs to own user's computers. This is the company who introduced revolutionary products like the BETA video reorders and mini disk audio recorders, and then crippled their use or adoption because of their intense focus on "intellectual property". Anyone who buys from Sony, for whatever reason, deserves no sympathy for what they get. In fact, we should be asking what the rule is for 'fool me four or five or (approaches infinity) times'. I bought an XBox not long ago. I don't think it has the best games or features either. I looked at the PS3 for about one second (because the games it plays looked better), but turned away because of the way they shaft their customers similar to what is happening now. I learned from past mistakes. People, if you don't like what Sony did to you with your PS3s, it is your own fault for buying one. Just because Sony shouldn't do something, doesn't mean they won't. And based on track record you can guarantee they will. This is called wisdom. Wise up.
Penitentiary
Definition Penitentiary: a place for imprisonment, reformatory discipline, or punishment, esp. a prison maintained in the U.S. by a state or the federal government for serious offenders. Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/penitentiary
Root Word: Penance
Definition Penance: a punishment undergone in token of penitence for sin. (Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/penance)
The reason for a penitentiary is to make people sorry for doing something wrong to remind them not to do it again. If they were really set up to do that still, they would remove all TVs, weight rooms, suspend privileges, and impose hard labour, and corporal punishment. They would make prisons a very bad place to be so that criminals would try hard not to go back. But society is full of people who can't seem to take responsibility for their own actions any more and want to sue everyone instead of taking their lumps. Of course to maintain and justify this type of thinking, they push their thinking on others including how prisons are run now.
I used to play guitar in bars. I thought I only had to worry about my hearing.
On another note, I did some work on a pilot scale silicon smelter (6 MW). The furnace had a closed lid and when we shut it down after a test run we had to send guys in with jack hammers and a ten inch wide hose from a sucker truck to empty the furnace out before the next run (about ten or fifteen feet diameter by ten feet tall inside). The hose was a hard plastic and until they learned to tape a bare copper wire down the length of it, it generated enough static from the dry furnace material being sucked up it to cause large painful electricity arcs if they hit you. The electric arcs would jump one or two feet from various places along the length of the hose... like a big Van der Graaf generator, and usually hit you in the leg or arm feeling like you were hit with a bat and momentarily paralyzing the part (more from the pain of the intense muscle contractions from the electric shock I suspect). One time, one of the arcs, a particularly big one, jumped a good two feet from the hose and nailed a guy right in the nuts. It hit him like someone swung a bat into his groin. He doubled up and keeled over right there. He was worried for about two or three months that he was only going to shoot blanks from then on (nothing to do with us giving giving him a hard time or anything;-). He came in smiling and all happy one day and said it was all OK, everything worked, his wife was pregnant. Now they were trying to have a baby for a few months before this happened, and thinking on it, it did take several more months to get there after he was zapped... now maybe if we did a study where the participants agreed to get a smallish lightning bolt to the balls they might discover they have another contraceptive method for men. I'm not volunteering.
To quote from 'I Robot' (to put on my nerd hat), "That, is the right question. There is too much of a knee jerk reaction to this proposition. Meanwhile many here see no problem with nuclear power. A nuclear detonation would be underground and away from the actual leak. The intent is to shift rock layers not break through and create a mushroom cloud. After many, many years of test detonations there is a lot of knowledge on how to detonate a device and keep it underground. In fact, given that we aren't currently glowing due to all the underground (and even above ground) nuclear tests that have happened around the globe over sixty years, I doubt there would even be a lot of radiation released.
If they could do this quickly, they could save tens of thousands of people's jobs (fishing, tourism, etc.) and millions, or even billions of dollars of clean up costs and lost wages. They could do this much faster than drilling a relief well as they wouldn't have to do significant side drilling. Before discarding the notion completely, it would be worth considering based on cost benefit analysis and not GW Bush type gut feeling. It might not be practical, but it worth asking the question in a rational manner before discarding it. This is a bad and extreme situation.
On a side note, California DOT once considered using a nuclear bomb to blast part of mountain to make it easier to put Highway 40 through. The U.S. did examine using nuclear blasts as a way to help extract natural gas but dismissed it since it irradiated the gas too much. However in this current case, they aren't trying to form reservoirs or extract the gas. They are trying to stop it from escaping by pushing on the rock (which doesn't seem to me to necessarily have to be extremely close to the out of control well, or even the reserves).
After GW Bush opened Pandora's can of worms with respect to secret police searches and constitutional bypass operations on the heart of U.S. justice an freedom, there is a strong perception that there is NO protection from government intrusiveness in the U.S. any more. So may are now feeling that a little privacy is a lot better than none. That said, it matters whether you trust your government and form of government or not. If you do, then logically it doesn't matter if they can spy on you in the night, come search you, or put you up against a wall, because they are trustworthy and wouldn't do anything wrong. But the government is made up of people, and people of course never do any wrong. [/sarcasm]
That sucks that his vision is suffering from this. Kind of reminds me of that book 'The Man Who Fell To Earth', when the authorities Xrayed the protagonist.
There have been a number of studies recently reporting that at least some women have four types of cones (the "colour sensors") in their eyes. i.e. they can see four primary colours. The trait is called tetrachromacy.
Slashdot Mirror
Tim O'Reilly is O'Reilly Press... which also has an enormous online presence. People comment based on their perspective. What would be the impact of better privacy to an online business like O'Reilly Press? Would it be better for Tim's business if there were less privacy?
For those who don't know.... PETA: People who Eat Tasty Animals
By the way, this study has been done several times at several times in history. I remember reading the same thing (ugly people are convicted more) 25 years or more ago. And that probably wasn't the first time someone came up with that conclusion. I'd put money that someone came to that conclusion centuries ago, etc etc etc.
And other native tribes took advantage of the Europeans, getting them to help wipe out rival tribes. Iroquois/Mohawks ring a bell.
This has more to do with doctors who are too full of themselves. When I was in Saint Louis I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism. When I asked my doctor to explain something about it so I could learn about the condition, he told me that I didn't need to know anything and just take the medicine at the dosage he prescribed. Because I was living and working in Saint Louis and had a good insurance plan, I was able to see a specialist (an endocrinologist) fairly quickly (in Canada it is debatable if this would even be possible since specialists are fewer, and the family doctor's office has to make the appointment assuming he thinks it appropriate... which a dick head like this wouldn't).
The endocrinologist asked me if my family doctor had checked for antibodies. I said no and asked 'antibodies for what?'. He said for antibodies that might be attacking the thyroid and explained it is a good idea to figure out why someone's thyroid is failing, to make sure there was nothing that could cause other issues. He did the test and found I have a condition called Hashimoto's Thyroiditis, a kind of autoimmune disease where the body goes after your thyroid (kind of like a rheumatoid arthritis of the thyroid). If you have HT, it is important to keep your TSH at the very low end of the scale using thyroid hormone replacement (levothyroxine/synthroid) to keep the body from attacking the thyroid. It really is the same lifelong daily medicine used to treat all forms of hypothyroidism, but with Hashimoto's it is important to keep track of levels, more so than other types of hypothyroidism, since with higher levels of TSH the body creates more antibodies to attack the thyroid, which can lead to other issues later on. As well, it turned out I had atypical hypothyroidism in that my TSH levels were above normal but below 10 where levels typical of the condition would be above 90 (can't remember the units). Even though the levels were somewhat low, I still require high levels of synthroid to get my levels to a safe level, on a par with a buddy of mine who had his thyroid removed due to cancer. But my family doctor didn't want to listen since he knew all and I was just a patient. If I would have left it where it was when he told me to not bother understanding or learning about my condition, I would still probably be feeling like shit, fogged out, always cold, depressed, and gaining weight, develop coronary artery disease, which will develop if HT is not properly treated. Also chances of nodules on the thyroid...
I am glad I went to the specialist since my family doctor had not prescribed high enough levels of synthroid. He didn't consider that a patient may be as intelligent or more intelligent than him, was able to understand the condition, and had a higher stake at understanding the disease, since the patient (me) was the one who had it. I fired the doctor and found a better one who was smarter and less full of himself. If you are going to be a doctor, learn from this. You don't know it all. Of course you know more than your patient, but that doesn't mean your patients are not capable of finding out things you don't know. Listen first, judge what you hear, then make a decision on whether to disregard it based on the merits of the information, not on the surety that you are smarter and know more than your patient possibly could... especially since no one can know it all, and everyone is capable of learning something that you don't.
Where does it go?
This was in 2004 or 2005. I find the Canadian border guards at road crossings are the biggest dick heads of any other country I have entered. The ones at the airports are decent folks. I have traveled to around 14 countries (doing work in some), and crossed borders by air, car, and train.
I accidentally put my last passport through the wash (in Canada you need to get a new passport every five years, they don't renew them). When I was crossing the boarder at the Peace Arch (on Canada's Highway 99, US I-5) south of Vancouver the U.S. border guard raised his eyebrow and asked me what happened to it. I told him. He scanned it and the electronic encoding stored in the passport still worked (older style embedded magnetic strip). He passed it back and told me to dryclean it next time.
Middle ground is just that the middle. However, what I have seen from living in the U.S. for a number of years, is that it seems to me that highly Christian (and almost always right or extreme right wing) families have lots of kids. They are Christian making factories. That goes for those who live in the country and in the cities. Meanwhile, left leaning academic types (and even centrists) seems to be having fewer, if any children at all. As the country is flooded with the far right, the middle ground is skewed in that direction. Eventually, the United States will in fact start exporting crusades and conducting witch hunts. Who knows, maybe this is nature's way to balance the jihads from overseas. A human nature knee jerk reaction. Or it could be the result of America's obsession with sports over intellect, where the dumb jocks' DNA is taking over because they are seen as the best breeding partner in that primitive part of the brain. In any case, I don't like the direction the U.S. is taking.
Yeah and they will still get you if you go to a dealer. Not being an electrician, I took my car to the dealer when it was having trouble starting once winter came around and Ford charged me $100 for an electrical check which amounted to a guy taking 5 minutes to plug into the OBDII port, and another five to measure the charge on the battery. Then they told me the battery needed replacement and that it would cost something close to $300, installed. I went to Canadian Tire and bought one of their high end store brands (akin to a Sears Die Hard) for $120 and installed it myself. Bottom line, is the shops get you on over priced labour charges. If you can avoid that, you are way ahead. BTW, it was the battery.
As an example, it's my impression that if Tea Bagger^H^H^H^H^H^HParty backed radical right wing Republicans are in power, it won't matter what the person said or did in the past (i.e. a reflection of the person), as long as they spout the uber republican mantras now. If a nominee says they think Roe versus Wade was wrong, they will vote for them. If they say "born again", they will vote for them to get in. In other words, I think the principle that people make their selections and then look for ways to justify them will hold true no matter how much information people have on the subject. The internet just allows like minded people to group together and reinforce their opinions. If you are democrat or republican, you will look at web sites that agree with your thinking. So the only way the internet has damaged democracy is by making it too easy to create schisms.
If anyone has read the Dorsai series, the internet acts the same way as the proposed diaspora of people from earth will look like. For those that haven't read this sci-fi series, all the ultra religious Christians will go to one world, the Muslims to another, the mystics to another, the agnostics to another, the various political (but moderate religious) leanings to each of their own. All so they can finally make a world the way they think it should be. (The Dorsai by the way were a group of individualists who managed to settle a planet that had no great wealth of natural resources, and so, had to hire themselves out as mercenaries in order to earn money to buy off world goods... eventually becoming the best soldiers anywhere... much like the Ghurkas.) The internet is similar as people will not generally visit sites taking positions outside their own beliefs.
Yeah, the OP says the people were arrested for having the literature. That by itself is ridiculous. It is the start of the slope for arresting people for non-crimes. In the sixties some people would have arrested kids for owning Beatles albums after John Lennon's 'Jesus' remarks ("we're more popular than Jesus right now"), if they could.
In Canada we have ridiculous censorship in the form of 'hate crime' laws. They want to legislate people to not have racist feelings instead of educate them. In America which has the closest to real free speech in the world (i.e. no hate crime laws), education and ridicule of racists has lead to the first president/head of government (actual governing not symbolic like Canada's GG) in the world. Anyway, I am not looking forward to when Canada comes out with a similar law to the UKs (when the bonehead liberal dogma mixes explosively with bonehead right wing dogma) so they can start arresting people with copies of Huckleberry Finn. The slippery slope is getting slippery-er. Having literature of any kind should not be a crime. Using some of the literature to make bombs or weapons (the weapons making part), or as proof to show intent to build the weapons (they are buying the ingredients and have the instructions on how to use them, for example)... these I think are reasonable to call crimes.
For completeness sake, this is the full quote with respect to Lennon's Jesus statement: "Christianity will go.. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first -- rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."
I did some work in the Philippines in 1999. While I was there, one of the newspapers reported on a guy who took six Viagra and then paid for the services of several 'Guest Relations Officers' GROs. That, by the way, is an official term for licensed prostitutes (at the time at least, it was up to the city in the Philippines if they would allow that kind of business, officially). Anyway, the guy died the next morning from basically pulmonary edema. The newspaper interviewed the hospital staff who had the common morbid/black humour of all emergency services workers. The thing was that unlike North American (and even some European) newspapers is that they included the hospital staff's comments on this. Like, "it was a hard way to go." Or, "he should have seen it coming." etc etc. I was on my way to Hong Kong and then London that morning and reading the article on board the plane while taxiing for take off. The comments were pretty funny in my opinion (I also have a dark sense of humour), and the other passengers kept looking at me perplexed as I was laughing my ass off reading it.
What I got from this is that he is saying that there is a preponderance of 'flavour of the day, week, etc.' as far a what the new silver bullet language or tool is. And when a company has a site that is any kind of old there can often be a jumble of all these silver bullets. It is better to stick with one technology if you can so that your code base is maintainable (my main complaint with the way most agile projects are implemented... the 'documentation is the code' doesn't help much ten years from now). If you use one vendor's solution, usually it means that the technology/implementation methods stays stable, except for any added functionality the vendor may add. That way the code base is coherent and people ten years ago don't have to learn all the languages that were considered silver bullets over the same time span. Granted, it doesn't mean you need to use a solution from a closed source vendor. I'm sure there are open source ways to go. Just don't switch to the language du jour all the time. But then again, I think we have heard the same thing many times here. And we will likely hear it again since people, especially programmers, like shiny new things. Meanwhile, businesses just want things to work, and don't care how, as long as it doesn't impede their revenue stream (like happens when something breaks and you can't find a programmer who knows some framework a programmer used on their system five years ago because he/she thought it was cool).
Yeah... I'm talking about how they did things 100 years ago. Seems to me people had a lot more respect for each other back then. Mind you, back then parents would discipline their children if they disrespected ANYBODY. Bottom line is when there are significant consequences to your actions (you are held severely accountable for what you do), people behave more. Besides, I don't give a shit what the prisoners feel like in prison. I want them to feel bad. If they riot and cause destruction in the prison, shoot them. On the spot. The others will stop rioting right away. If they hurt a guard, kill them right on the spot. Why do they have rights? They decided to live outside the law, now pay the consequences. When you get out, you won't want to go back.
Using this, the U.S. government should already be in the 'shame on me' phase right now. Everyone knows how highly proprietary Sony is. This is the company that put root kits on their audio CDs to own user's computers. This is the company who introduced revolutionary products like the BETA video reorders and mini disk audio recorders, and then crippled their use or adoption because of their intense focus on "intellectual property". Anyone who buys from Sony, for whatever reason, deserves no sympathy for what they get. In fact, we should be asking what the rule is for 'fool me four or five or (approaches infinity) times'. I bought an XBox not long ago. I don't think it has the best games or features either. I looked at the PS3 for about one second (because the games it plays looked better), but turned away because of the way they shaft their customers similar to what is happening now. I learned from past mistakes. People, if you don't like what Sony did to you with your PS3s, it is your own fault for buying one. Just because Sony shouldn't do something, doesn't mean they won't. And based on track record you can guarantee they will. This is called wisdom. Wise up.
Definition Penitentiary: a place for imprisonment, reformatory discipline, or punishment, esp. a prison maintained in the U.S. by a state or the federal government for serious offenders. Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/penitentiary
Root Word: Penance
Definition Penance: a punishment undergone in token of penitence for sin. (Source: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/penance)
The reason for a penitentiary is to make people sorry for doing something wrong to remind them not to do it again. If they were really set up to do that still, they would remove all TVs, weight rooms, suspend privileges, and impose hard labour, and corporal punishment. They would make prisons a very bad place to be so that criminals would try hard not to go back. But society is full of people who can't seem to take responsibility for their own actions any more and want to sue everyone instead of taking their lumps. Of course to maintain and justify this type of thinking, they push their thinking on others including how prisons are run now.
I used to play guitar in bars. I thought I only had to worry about my hearing.
On another note, I did some work on a pilot scale silicon smelter (6 MW). The furnace had a closed lid and when we shut it down after a test run we had to send guys in with jack hammers and a ten inch wide hose from a sucker truck to empty the furnace out before the next run (about ten or fifteen feet diameter by ten feet tall inside). The hose was a hard plastic and until they learned to tape a bare copper wire down the length of it, it generated enough static from the dry furnace material being sucked up it to cause large painful electricity arcs if they hit you. The electric arcs would jump one or two feet from various places along the length of the hose... like a big Van der Graaf generator, and usually hit you in the leg or arm feeling like you were hit with a bat and momentarily paralyzing the part (more from the pain of the intense muscle contractions from the electric shock I suspect). One time, one of the arcs, a particularly big one, jumped a good two feet from the hose and nailed a guy right in the nuts. It hit him like someone swung a bat into his groin. He doubled up and keeled over right there. He was worried for about two or three months that he was only going to shoot blanks from then on (nothing to do with us giving giving him a hard time or anything ;-). He came in smiling and all happy one day and said it was all OK, everything worked, his wife was pregnant. Now they were trying to have a baby for a few months before this happened, and thinking on it, it did take several more months to get there after he was zapped... now maybe if we did a study where the participants agreed to get a smallish lightning bolt to the balls they might discover they have another contraceptive method for men. I'm not volunteering.
To quote from 'I Robot' (to put on my nerd hat), "That, is the right question. There is too much of a knee jerk reaction to this proposition. Meanwhile many here see no problem with nuclear power. A nuclear detonation would be underground and away from the actual leak. The intent is to shift rock layers not break through and create a mushroom cloud. After many, many years of test detonations there is a lot of knowledge on how to detonate a device and keep it underground. In fact, given that we aren't currently glowing due to all the underground (and even above ground) nuclear tests that have happened around the globe over sixty years, I doubt there would even be a lot of radiation released.
If they could do this quickly, they could save tens of thousands of people's jobs (fishing, tourism, etc.) and millions, or even billions of dollars of clean up costs and lost wages. They could do this much faster than drilling a relief well as they wouldn't have to do significant side drilling. Before discarding the notion completely, it would be worth considering based on cost benefit analysis and not GW Bush type gut feeling. It might not be practical, but it worth asking the question in a rational manner before discarding it. This is a bad and extreme situation.
On a side note, California DOT once considered using a nuclear bomb to blast part of mountain to make it easier to put Highway 40 through. The U.S. did examine using nuclear blasts as a way to help extract natural gas but dismissed it since it irradiated the gas too much. However in this current case, they aren't trying to form reservoirs or extract the gas. They are trying to stop it from escaping by pushing on the rock (which doesn't seem to me to necessarily have to be extremely close to the out of control well, or even the reserves).
After GW Bush opened Pandora's can of worms with respect to secret police searches and constitutional bypass operations on the heart of U.S. justice an freedom, there is a strong perception that there is NO protection from government intrusiveness in the U.S. any more. So may are now feeling that a little privacy is a lot better than none. That said, it matters whether you trust your government and form of government or not. If you do, then logically it doesn't matter if they can spy on you in the night, come search you, or put you up against a wall, because they are trustworthy and wouldn't do anything wrong. But the government is made up of people, and people of course never do any wrong. [/sarcasm]
That sucks that his vision is suffering from this. Kind of reminds me of that book 'The Man Who Fell To Earth', when the authorities Xrayed the protagonist.
There have been a number of studies recently reporting that at least some women have four types of cones (the "colour sensors") in their eyes. i.e. they can see four primary colours. The trait is called tetrachromacy.
They won't scan the kids, put the bombs on them. [/sarcasm] Um yes, they will scan them.
Damn... I meant dam.
This, combined with the size of this damn, leads Canada to have the largest, hairiest, and wettest beavers in the world.