I learned REAL quick that filing a complaint just gets your harassed 10x more by cops.
... And what have you done about the harassment? Talked to local media? If the cops are that bad where you live, there must be other people there getting the 'special treatment'. Sounds like one of those stupid little towns/cities with taxes that are too high and too many cops on the payroll.
You can get a basic install working on a modern laptop, but getting all the things windows users take for granted can take work. Lots of work, including installing kernel patches and patches to those patches. You also frequently have to sacrifice goats to get certain features working.
I hate to sound like a fanboy, but try Ubuntu. Admittedly, I am running Hoary (the next version, not yet released), but even Warty is pretty nice. I have it running on a Thinkpad T30, and stuff... just... works! I have not touched any kernel configuration or done much of anything, really. The only thing I've had to do which was even remotely fiddly was messing around with my built-in Cisco Aironet card to get WEP working. Beyond that, ACPI works, suspend to RAM/disk works, CPU scaling works, etc. etc.
I had been running Debian testing/unstable on this laptop, but one day decided to try Ubuntu. I haven't looked back.
But in cases where such an extreme act has occurred I don't think that parental upbringing is the totality of what's going on. Sometimes parents do everything right and still end up with a serial killer.
Look, until the kid is $LEGALLY_ADULT_AGE, they are their parents' responsibility. That's just how it works, and that is how it should work. During the day, the parents are responsible for getting Junior to the lockup (school), where the school takes responsibility for babysitting. Outside of lockup, the parents have responsibility for whatever their offspring do.
Many families have the situation in which both parents work, and are therefore unavailable to direcly monitor the activities of their offspring until after they get home. This does not absolve the parents of responsibility. If they can't ensure that their child will not be antisocial while not being babysat by them or the school, they have to do something about it. Hire a babysitter or some other surrogate who will take responsibility for monitoring the child(ren).
Most parents have the luxury of having raised children who will for the most part avoid egregiously antisocial behavior without direct supervision. Those who don't have that luxury have a responsibility to protect society from their antisocial offspring.
I know all of that goes counter to the "but it's someone else's fault!" mentality that seems to have pervaded much of Western society, but until that mentality is enshrined in law (could be coming...), parents just have to deal with the fact that they chose to reproduce, and that it's their offspring, so they have to be responsible for what their kids do.
I say all this as a parent, who takes his responsibilities as such very seriously.
That may be true, but if an ISP is blocking outgoing ports to begin with, they may well be blocking everything and only unblocking allowed ports.
Haha. And the sky might fall, too, or the sun might not come up tomorrow. Those are good concerns in theory, but in the real world that's just silly. What ISP is going to block everything but a few ports? Do you have any concept of how much pain that would inflict on the ISP's callcenter? Clearly not, or you wouldn't have made the comment.
I run a medium-sized independent ISP, and I can guarantee to you that we only block the bare minimum necessary to protect the rest of the 'net from our stupid customers. Outbound SMTP got blocked because we just don't have the resources to contact all the stupid customers who would have no idea what we're calling them about anyhow, and the various MS-specific ports got blocked inbound/outbound for the same reasons. Other than a very small number of ports, it's all fair game.
A corporate router/firewall, on the other hand, might just do what you're suggesting. In that case, however, they can just dictate policy by saying that employees should only have a certain set of software installed on their workstations, and anything that requires other ports is in violation of policy. Easy. You just can't do that as an ISP, though.
If the trojan can just pipe mail through that, it can send mail.
That's a big IF... And besides, it still helps overall, because then the ISP can detect that one particular customer is sending lots of junk. Not likely, you say? Well, I run a medium-sized independent ISP, and I can tell you that we monitor these things. Just yesterday I LARTed a customer for slamming a newsletter with attached images through his (authenticated) account. The main problems were a. the size of the emails, and b. the fact that he didn't clean/purge his list very well. No, it wasn't spam, because these addresses were collected via a signup form on his website, but the large number of non-deliverables annoyed us enough to smack him down.
the homeowner could have at least shot the guys feet, thus incapacitating him and avoiding any major organs at the same time
LOL. Have you ever used a firearm? Specifically a pistol? I'm pretty good with a rifle, but haven't done much shooting with a pistol, although I've had some training. I know how to form a proper sight picture etc. etc. It's fairly difficult to hit something as small as feet/legs from even 3 yards away, and that's when you're not stressed and facing down a guy with a bat.
There's a reason the police and military train people to shoot at the center of mass: You're more likely to hit it when you're stressed out and in fear for your life.
alternativly the guy could have backed away, left through a backdoor or something.
How do you know? Do you know that he hadn't been cornered, hadn't exhausted his possibilities? Regardless... If you break into someone's home and threaten them with a bat, they have every right to shoot you, and only in California would anyone try to argue differently.
And yet, you seem unconcerned that the poor-but-innocent are going to rot in jail, as long as they are not executed. Abolishing the death penalty is not the answer. Trying to get everyone a fair shot at a legal defense is. And saying "that's too hard" is not an excuse to stop trying.
Well, the original comment was in regard specifically to the death penalty and how it's applied in this country, not the overall state of the legal system in the US.
Your inference that I don't care about innocent people being incarcerated is incorrect, but perhaps I did not try hard enough to elucidate my position.
Of course I feel that we should work toward giving everyone a fair trial. In fact, if you'd actually read my original post, you'd see that I'm in fact not against the death penalty on principle. I believe strongly that everyone should have a right to a fair trial and equal representation. If those ideals were met, I would not have a problem with incorrigible sociopaths being executed. However, I'm a realist, and I know that it's never going to happen that way. Hence, my position that it's better to put potentially innocent people in jail for life than it is to execute anyone. At least then there's a possibility that they may find halfway competent counsel and have their conviction overturned in time.
So, abolishing the death penalty as a solution to unequal representation is grossly shorthanded.
Granted, but I'm being deliberately shortsighted. There's a hell of a lot more support behind abolishing the death penalty than there is behind reworking the justice system to guarantee everyone a truly fair trial. I never said that it was a complete solution to the inequality endemic in our legal system. You inferred that, but I never said it.
Your "logic" boggles me. We can't guarantee Johnny a fair trial, so we shouldn't put him to death (just in case he is innocent, I guess). Just let him rot in jail, which shouldn't be a nice place. He was innocent you say? Who cares?
That's not what I meant, and it's not what I said. We can't guarantee everyone a fair trial, so we shouldn't put anyone to death. If someone is really innocent, then eventually it will probably come out.
As opposed to pissing on your sneakers (whatever the hell that is)?
You quoted one part of my post and then twisted the meaning into something else and seemed to be dismissing my entire post as illogical. I figured that you were following standard/. trolling techniques. For some reason, I took the bait.
We can't guarantee Johnny a fair trial, so we shouldn't put him to death (just in case he is innocent, I guess). Just let him rot in jail, which shouldn't be a nice place.
... So what's your point? Did you have one? Or were you just looking to piss on my sneakers?
It's not that I think we should abolish the death penality because I'm worried about innocent people being executed (although an outgoing governor of Illinois was). It is a concern, but it's not my primary concern. If you'd really taken the time to understand what I'd written, instead of writing me off as a whatever-you-wrote-me-off-as, you'd see that my primary concern is that I don't feel that our legal system really guarantees everyone an equal shot at fair representation. If O.J. had had the exact same level of representation as some schmoe from Compton, I don't think there's any doubt that he'd be sitting there on death row.
I used to be pretty strongly in favor of capital punishment, because I don't believe in rehabilitation for sociopaths. As I grew up, however, I began to see that Justice in this country is largely influenced by money, and that bothers me greatly. I'd much rather see incorrigible criminals locked away until they die than to perpetuate the status quo of executing people who were unable to drum up enough cash to get a better legal team.
You twisted my words to make your petty little attack. If you are interested in a discussion then reply like an adult.
I realllly don't like this. As much as I grin about dahmer getting it, we're trying to teach prisoners how to act properly, and shanking somebody in the restroom isn't proper.
Do you honestly believe that prison is about rehabilitation? It may happen, but it's not the focus of incarceration in this country. Prison is about punishment. It's about the removal of one's freedom. It's about vengeance and payback. At the very least, it's about locking people away from society for a while. No one cares what prisoners do in prison, as long as they're locked away from the greater population for as long as possible.
You may disagree with me about the ideals behind the prison system, but I think we both can agree that the implementation in this country is closer to what I just said than it is to being about rehabilitation. It's very Old Testament, which shouldn't surprise anyone.
Remember the legalize drugs thing? I'd try to get the prisons back down to capacity, allowing more programs that might actually push reform.
Well, I agree with you whole-heartedly there. There are way too many people in prison. It's so much easier/cheaper in the short run to just lock people up than to try to deal with the underlying problems in society, though.
The problem this raises is that you can quite successfully argue that every murderer is mentally disturbed.
Sure. I agree with that sentiment. If you kill someone without a legally valid justification (self-defense, military, etc.), there's something wrong with you. I was not advocating leniency for retarded/stupid/mentally ill people... I was just raising the point that the vast majority of people on death row are in general pretty disadvantaged when it comes to intellect/money. That doesn't mean that their crimes are any less horrible. It just means that they're less likely to get fair representation in a trial for their life than someone with more smarts/more money. And that is why I believe that the death penalty is unfairly administered in this country.
Finally, while I sympathize with the victims, what purpose does capital punishment serve? I do not believe that it is an effective deterrent. If you're unbalanced enough to be killing someone, you're not going to be worrying about the death penalty. Killing a murderer does not bring back the victim. The Constitution mandates that punishment must not be cruel and unusual, so most states have settled on lethal injection as their execution method of choice. What a nice way to die. How does putting a murderer peacefully to sleep like an old dog exact vengeance on the level required to somehow avenge a brutal murder? They get a painless release from the drudgery of waking up every day and knowing that they're stuck in prison with no hope of freedom, ever.
How's this: The government pays for both prosecution and defense. Like for sports, they're both allowed an equal amount of money.
Hey, it's a great idea, but good luck getting that law passed. Remember that many in Congress were trial lawyers from both sides of the courtroom, and a lot of 'em made boatloads of dirty lucre as lawyers before they started bringing it in as Congresscritters.
I'm just curious... Are you pro-death penalty as it's implemented in this country, or just in theory? In an ideal world, I think that there is true justice in a fair and reasonable application of the death penalty. If a person is convicted by a jury of their true peers, then once they've exhausted their appeals it's toasty time for them.
My problem with the implementation in this country is that it seems all too often that if you've got enough money to pay a good legal team to raise enough reasonable doubt and/or stack the jury in your favor, you at least avoid the death penalty, and maybe even get an acquittal. If you're poor and get stuck with the schmuck from the Public Defenders' office, you're right fucked, mate.
For that reason, I believe that the death penalty should be outlawed. I can't see our legal system being reworked to guarantee truly fair trials (too much money involved), so since we can't guarantee that everyone who's on trial for their life gets a fair shake, no one should be put to death. Just lock 'em up and let them rot. If their crime was heinous enough (child rapist/killer, etc.), their prison mates will take care of them in time.
I also think that prison should be a much worse place than it is, and that Club Fed-style prisons should go away. Either that, or the entire prison system should be segregated between violent and non-violent offenders. I think it's ridiculous that "Steve the pot dealer" is stuck in a cell with "Bruno the serial rapist", while Martha crochets doilies in her comfy room.
Bah. Sorry to rant in reply to your comment. Just thinking about the death penalty got me going on the other stuff. Have you seen "The Execution of Wanda Jean"? Ask Google about it, and try to catch it on HBO or DVD sometime. It's pretty disturbing, and may cause you to reconsider your stance on the death penalty in this country. You might not change your mind, but I hope that it would at least stop to really think about your position on the subject.
There is a bit of a learning curve, but it's much more satifying to install your own packages than to just give up and throw a tarball into your nicely managed system.
Re:Uh.... does this strike anybody else as wrong?
on
NASA's Deep Impact
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you knew anything about the makeup of comets, you'd know that they're basically dirty snowballs.
Actually, we don't really know everything about the makeup of comets. In fact, that's the whole point of this mission: to find out more about what makes up comets. Our best guesses, based on data gathered during previous flybys and deductive reasoning, indicate that comets are mostly frozen water and some rocks mixed in, but we don't really know because we've never seen the inside of one.
Anyhow, it's not as if we're randomly blasting apart any and every comet that comes our way. We're not nuking Halley's Comet or anything.
As far as the mining issue is concerned, Deep Impact doesn't have anything to do with mining, directly. However, it adds to a body of research which could be used in the future. Even if comets typically don't have much more than water and some rocks, what better way to get a heck of a lot of water to Luna than to figure out a way to divert a comet into a lunar orbit? What if we need to figure out a way to divert/destroy a comet that's coming in too close for comfort? Etc. etc. It's empirical data that could be used in the future. It's not just fireworks, as you seem to be implying.
The intent of my post was not to question your intelligence, but I had to address what seemed to me to be a somewhat short-sighted and unimaginative perspective.
Re:Uh.... does this strike anybody else as wrong?
on
NASA's Deep Impact
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Possibily destroying a comet? It seems so destructive to possibly break apart something that's been circling our sun for millions of years.
Interesting set of priorities there... As for me, I can't wait until we get our act together enough to start mining all of those eons-old lumps of raw material instead of strip-mining our planet.
One could argue that spreading freedom and democracy is in our national interests, so our viewpoints are not as incompatible as you might think. After all, other countries that more or less subscribe to "our" way of governing and recognizing freedom are far less likely to be threats to us as compared to, say, hard-line theocracies like the former Taliban.
The primary distinction between our viewpoints, I suspect, is that you subscribe more to an ends-justify-the-means philosophy than I do. While there is some appeal to me for the pragmatism of that position, I feel that it's a very slippery slope to go down. Again, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, the administration may have honestly believed in an imminent threat to our national security.
What bothers me is that even now in the face of evidence refuting the claims used to justify the invasion of Iraq, our president and his team continue to gloss over the annoying details that don't fit their worldview. I feel strongly that there was some serious spin happening in the leadup to the war, and it persisted as the war progressed.
To what do you attribute the fact that so many Americans believe(d) that there was a concrete link between Saddam and Al Qaeda? Stupidity? Irresponsible journalism? I think it has a lot to do with certain key statements made by members of Bush's team.
Those are just some of the top hits I got for a quick google search for "americans believe link saddam al qaeda".
My problem is that I feel that we the people were misled. If the case for war was so compelling, why did the Bush team need to gin up the rationalizations they've been using? It just doesn't pass the sniff test. We didn't see this level of questioning and divisiveness when we invaded Afghanistan. There was a clear threat in that case, and besides, they weren't an internationally recognized sovereign state (recognition by a handful of Arab countries notwithstanding).
Whatever. We're committed for at least the next four years. My unhappiness with the current state of affairs doesn't matter now. Unless I want to take up arms and try to start a revolution, I'm just going to have to sit tight and hope for the best.
Despite what popular opinion outside the U.S. might be, we're not trying to take over the world. We do what we do because we believe in the principles of our country, and spreading democracy and freedom are noble goals.
LOL! Ok, I admire your dedication to your viewpoint, but COME ON! If you truly did serve in the Corps, I salute your service and thank you for it, but I think you've been drinking a bit too much of the Kool-Aid.
It's understandable, given the need to rationalize our presence in Iraq, and to avoid devaluing the deaths and injuries sustained by your fellow Marines. I have the utmost respect for the men and women who put themselves in harm's way because of their sense of duty. My brothers and father were all military men, for whatever that's worth (probably not much, because I chose a different path, although it was my father who forcibly dissuaded me from enlisting).
We are not in Iraq for the purpose of "spreading democracy and freedom". We are in Iraq because the current administration feels that our efforts there serve our national interests. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt (bad intelligence leading to bad decisions), we are not there to help the little Iraqi schoolgirls go to school. We're there because we have a heavily oil-dependent economy, and because forcibly establishing a US-friendly 'democracy' in Iraq helps to protect our longer-term interests. There was shaky evidence presented of a possible Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, and shaky evidence of stockpiled WMDs which might somehow have been used against us or our other foreign interests. Both of those claims have been refuted to a degree that most everyone without a vested interest accepts the reality that Saddam was vastly more of a threat to his own people than he was to the US.
The fact that Iraqis may someday enjoy freedoms greater than what they had under Saddam is completely secondary to US interests, and you'd do well to start thinking for yourself about the logic of the situation. You may not change your mind about the rightness or wrongness of our actions in Iraq, but at least you won't look like a brainwashed patsy to those who are willing to accept reality.
For the record, I approved of what we did in Afghanistan (I actually felt that we didn't do enough!). I also feel that now that we're in Iraq, it would be a mistake to turn it into a politician-directed war like Vietnam. We've got our foot in it, so we'd better clean it up. Unfortunately that means a lot more casualties on both sides, and some more "we had to destroy the city to save the city" situations like Fallujah.
I consider the practice highly offensive and I take my business elsewhere.
Don't get your knickers in such a knot. Just game the system! Have little "price club swaps" with your friends/neighbors every couple of months. Sure you'll get some extra junk mail, but that's OK. Just make up names. My cat gets lots of coupons and stuff in the mail. Now if I could just train her to do the shopping...
What we do need is a complete overthrow of established Psychiatry and Psychology to allow some real science to be brought in and taught.
That you lump these two professions together shows that you don't truly understand the distinctions between them. That's OK, you're not alone by far. In my experience, most people just assume that they're synonyms.
Here's the key distinction between the two: a Psychiatrist is an M.D., meaning that they have gone through the same 4 years of medical school as any other doctor. They are a doctor first, and have spent time in the emergency room and the ob/gyn wing and on the inpatient units. They've done surgical procedures and have likely seen patients die in the OR or ER. In most training programs, they do a whole year of nothing but medicine after they graduate from medical school.
Psychologists go to university to study theory. They have the degree of PhD. They are no more a medical doctor than your history prof or your CS prof. If I were in a car accident and there happened to be a Psychiatrist and a Psychologist driving by, I'd sure as hell rather have the Psychiatrist getting out to take a look at me while the Psychologist called the EMTs.
I don't make this distinction to denigrate Psychologists, but calling for more science in the field of Psychiatry shows that you don't really understand the field.
I have to dial the area code of people I am trying to reach who are in the same area code as me.
Get used to it. Lots of carriers in metro areas are moving to 10-digit dialing. Boston's been that way for years, and I know other big(ish) cities are doing the same thing. Now it's weird for me to see a 7-digit number, because I've gotten so used to the extra three digits.
I swear they're literally in the business of being in business. We could be selling chewing gum and they would be just as happy.
When it comes down to it, they have a choice: Work for someone else, or run their own business. If their business gives them a nice, fat, steady paycheck, they don't care what they're selling! Being "in the business of being in business" isn't as sexy as maybe running a Fortune 500, but it sure beats working for someone else who just wants you to help them buy that Lexus and inground pool.
Fair enough. I bit at the flamebait and missed the humor.
And, best of all,I learned a little bit from your post, too. You should talk to somebody about that pent-up rage, though.
Not sure what you learned from my post, but as far as the 'rage' goes, it's more just annoyance at what seemed to be a dismissive post by someone who hadn't bothered to really understand what they were dismissing. Oh, well. It's just Slashdot.
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You can get a basic install working on a modern laptop, but getting all the things windows users take for granted can take work. Lots of work, including installing kernel patches and patches to those patches. You also frequently have to sacrifice goats to get certain features working.
I hate to sound like a fanboy, but try Ubuntu. Admittedly, I am running Hoary (the next version, not yet released), but even Warty is pretty nice. I have it running on a Thinkpad T30, and stuff... just... works! I have not touched any kernel configuration or done much of anything, really. The only thing I've had to do which was even remotely fiddly was messing around with my built-in Cisco Aironet card to get WEP working. Beyond that, ACPI works, suspend to RAM/disk works, CPU scaling works, etc. etc.
I had been running Debian testing/unstable on this laptop, but one day decided to try Ubuntu. I haven't looked back.
But in cases where such an extreme act has occurred I don't think that parental upbringing is the totality of what's going on. Sometimes parents do everything right and still end up with a serial killer.
Look, until the kid is $LEGALLY_ADULT_AGE, they are their parents' responsibility. That's just how it works, and that is how it should work. During the day, the parents are responsible for getting Junior to the lockup (school), where the school takes responsibility for babysitting. Outside of lockup, the parents have responsibility for whatever their offspring do.
Many families have the situation in which both parents work, and are therefore unavailable to direcly monitor the activities of their offspring until after they get home. This does not absolve the parents of responsibility. If they can't ensure that their child will not be antisocial while not being babysat by them or the school, they have to do something about it. Hire a babysitter or some other surrogate who will take responsibility for monitoring the child(ren).
Most parents have the luxury of having raised children who will for the most part avoid egregiously antisocial behavior without direct supervision. Those who don't have that luxury have a responsibility to protect society from their antisocial offspring.
I know all of that goes counter to the "but it's someone else's fault!" mentality that seems to have pervaded much of Western society, but until that mentality is enshrined in law (could be coming...), parents just have to deal with the fact that they chose to reproduce, and that it's their offspring, so they have to be responsible for what their kids do.
I say all this as a parent, who takes his responsibilities as such very seriously.
Tommy: Proper pissed?
Turkish: Yes, before Zee Germans get there.
JerkBoB: I been drinkin' again...
Find: insufferable whiners in Washington, DC
Damn! And I just lost my mod points. That is funny stuff, man.
That may be true, but if an ISP is blocking outgoing ports to begin with, they may well be blocking everything and only unblocking allowed ports.
Haha. And the sky might fall, too, or the sun might not come up tomorrow. Those are good concerns in theory, but in the real world that's just silly. What ISP is going to block everything but a few ports? Do you have any concept of how much pain that would inflict on the ISP's callcenter? Clearly not, or you wouldn't have made the comment.
I run a medium-sized independent ISP, and I can guarantee to you that we only block the bare minimum necessary to protect the rest of the 'net from our stupid customers. Outbound SMTP got blocked because we just don't have the resources to contact all the stupid customers who would have no idea what we're calling them about anyhow, and the various MS-specific ports got blocked inbound/outbound for the same reasons. Other than a very small number of ports, it's all fair game.
A corporate router/firewall, on the other hand, might just do what you're suggesting. In that case, however, they can just dictate policy by saying that employees should only have a certain set of software installed on their workstations, and anything that requires other ports is in violation of policy. Easy. You just can't do that as an ISP, though.
If the trojan can just pipe mail through that, it can send mail.
That's a big IF... And besides, it still helps overall, because then the ISP can detect that one particular customer is sending lots of junk. Not likely, you say? Well, I run a medium-sized independent ISP, and I can tell you that we monitor these things. Just yesterday I LARTed a customer for slamming a newsletter with attached images through his (authenticated) account. The main problems were a. the size of the emails, and b. the fact that he didn't clean/purge his list very well. No, it wasn't spam, because these addresses were collected via a signup form on his website, but the large number of non-deliverables annoyed us enough to smack him down.
i really would like to have a chance to confront these disguisting people and try to make sense of their thought process
There's not much to understand.
1. Situation to be taken advantage of
2. Lack of morals/ethics
3. ???
4. Profit!
I don't like the name Bob.
How do you feel about JerkBoB?
the homeowner could have at least shot the guys feet, thus incapacitating him and avoiding any major organs at the same time
LOL. Have you ever used a firearm? Specifically a pistol? I'm pretty good with a rifle, but haven't done much shooting with a pistol, although I've had some training. I know how to form a proper sight picture etc. etc. It's fairly difficult to hit something as small as feet/legs from even 3 yards away, and that's when you're not stressed and facing down a guy with a bat.
There's a reason the police and military train people to shoot at the center of mass: You're more likely to hit it when you're stressed out and in fear for your life.
alternativly the guy could have backed away, left through a backdoor or something.
How do you know? Do you know that he hadn't been cornered, hadn't exhausted his possibilities? Regardless... If you break into someone's home and threaten them with a bat, they have every right to shoot you, and only in California would anyone try to argue differently.
And yet, you seem unconcerned that the poor-but-innocent are going to rot in jail, as long as they are not executed. Abolishing the death penalty is not the answer. Trying to get everyone a fair shot at a legal defense is. And saying "that's too hard" is not an excuse to stop trying.
/. trolling techniques. For some reason, I took the bait.
Well, the original comment was in regard specifically to the death penalty and how it's applied in this country, not the overall state of the legal system in the US.
Your inference that I don't care about innocent people being incarcerated is incorrect, but perhaps I did not try hard enough to elucidate my position.
Of course I feel that we should work toward giving everyone a fair trial. In fact, if you'd actually read my original post, you'd see that I'm in fact not against the death penalty on principle. I believe strongly that everyone should have a right to a fair trial and equal representation. If those ideals were met, I would not have a problem with incorrigible sociopaths being executed. However, I'm a realist, and I know that it's never going to happen that way. Hence, my position that it's better to put potentially innocent people in jail for life than it is to execute anyone. At least then there's a possibility that they may find halfway competent counsel and have their conviction overturned in time.
So, abolishing the death penalty as a solution to unequal representation is grossly shorthanded.
Granted, but I'm being deliberately shortsighted. There's a hell of a lot more support behind abolishing the death penalty than there is behind reworking the justice system to guarantee everyone a truly fair trial. I never said that it was a complete solution to the inequality endemic in our legal system. You inferred that, but I never said it.
Your "logic" boggles me.
We can't guarantee Johnny a fair trial, so we shouldn't put him to death (just in case he is innocent, I guess). Just let him rot in jail, which shouldn't be a nice place. He was innocent you say? Who cares?
That's not what I meant, and it's not what I said. We can't guarantee everyone a fair trial, so we shouldn't put anyone to death. If someone is really innocent, then eventually it will probably come out.
As opposed to pissing on your sneakers (whatever the hell that is)?
You quoted one part of my post and then twisted the meaning into something else and seemed to be dismissing my entire post as illogical. I figured that you were following standard
It's not that I think we should abolish the death penality because I'm worried about innocent people being executed (although an outgoing governor of Illinois was). It is a concern, but it's not my primary concern. If you'd really taken the time to understand what I'd written, instead of writing me off as a whatever-you-wrote-me-off-as, you'd see that my primary concern is that I don't feel that our legal system really guarantees everyone an equal shot at fair representation. If O.J. had had the exact same level of representation as some schmoe from Compton, I don't think there's any doubt that he'd be sitting there on death row.
I used to be pretty strongly in favor of capital punishment, because I don't believe in rehabilitation for sociopaths. As I grew up, however, I began to see that Justice in this country is largely influenced by money, and that bothers me greatly. I'd much rather see incorrigible criminals locked away until they die than to perpetuate the status quo of executing people who were unable to drum up enough cash to get a better legal team.
You twisted my words to make your petty little attack. If you are interested in a discussion then reply like an adult.
I realllly don't like this. As much as I grin about dahmer getting it, we're trying to teach prisoners how to act properly, and shanking somebody in the restroom isn't proper.
Do you honestly believe that prison is about rehabilitation? It may happen, but it's not the focus of incarceration in this country. Prison is about punishment. It's about the removal of one's freedom. It's about vengeance and payback. At the very least, it's about locking people away from society for a while. No one cares what prisoners do in prison, as long as they're locked away from the greater population for as long as possible.
You may disagree with me about the ideals behind the prison system, but I think we both can agree that the implementation in this country is closer to what I just said than it is to being about rehabilitation. It's very Old Testament, which shouldn't surprise anyone.
Remember the legalize drugs thing? I'd try to get the prisons back down to capacity, allowing more programs that might actually push reform.
Well, I agree with you whole-heartedly there. There are way too many people in prison. It's so much easier/cheaper in the short run to just lock people up than to try to deal with the underlying problems in society, though.
The problem this raises is that you can quite successfully argue that every murderer is mentally disturbed.
Sure. I agree with that sentiment. If you kill someone without a legally valid justification (self-defense, military, etc.), there's something wrong with you. I was not advocating leniency for retarded/stupid/mentally ill people... I was just raising the point that the vast majority of people on death row are in general pretty disadvantaged when it comes to intellect/money. That doesn't mean that their crimes are any less horrible. It just means that they're less likely to get fair representation in a trial for their life than someone with more smarts/more money. And that is why I believe that the death penalty is unfairly administered in this country.
Finally, while I sympathize with the victims, what purpose does capital punishment serve? I do not believe that it is an effective deterrent. If you're unbalanced enough to be killing someone, you're not going to be worrying about the death penalty. Killing a murderer does not bring back the victim. The Constitution mandates that punishment must not be cruel and unusual, so most states have settled on lethal injection as their execution method of choice. What a nice way to die. How does putting a murderer peacefully to sleep like an old dog exact vengeance on the level required to somehow avenge a brutal murder? They get a painless release from the drudgery of waking up every day and knowing that they're stuck in prison with no hope of freedom, ever.
How's this: The government pays for both prosecution and defense. Like for sports, they're both allowed an equal amount of money.
Hey, it's a great idea, but good luck getting that law passed. Remember that many in Congress were trial lawyers from both sides of the courtroom, and a lot of 'em made boatloads of dirty lucre as lawyers before they started bringing it in as Congresscritters.
I'm also pro-death penalty.
I'm just curious... Are you pro-death penalty as it's implemented in this country, or just in theory? In an ideal world, I think that there is true justice in a fair and reasonable application of the death penalty. If a person is convicted by a jury of their true peers, then once they've exhausted their appeals it's toasty time for them.
My problem with the implementation in this country is that it seems all too often that if you've got enough money to pay a good legal team to raise enough reasonable doubt and/or stack the jury in your favor, you at least avoid the death penalty, and maybe even get an acquittal. If you're poor and get stuck with the schmuck from the Public Defenders' office, you're right fucked, mate.
For that reason, I believe that the death penalty should be outlawed. I can't see our legal system being reworked to guarantee truly fair trials (too much money involved), so since we can't guarantee that everyone who's on trial for their life gets a fair shake, no one should be put to death. Just lock 'em up and let them rot. If their crime was heinous enough (child rapist/killer, etc.), their prison mates will take care of them in time.
I also think that prison should be a much worse place than it is, and that Club Fed-style prisons should go away. Either that, or the entire prison system should be segregated between violent and non-violent offenders. I think it's ridiculous that "Steve the pot dealer" is stuck in a cell with "Bruno the serial rapist", while Martha crochets doilies in her comfy room.
Bah. Sorry to rant in reply to your comment. Just thinking about the death penalty got me going on the other stuff. Have you seen "The Execution of Wanda Jean"? Ask Google about it, and try to catch it on HBO or DVD sometime. It's pretty disturbing, and may cause you to reconsider your stance on the death penalty in this country. You might not change your mind, but I hope that it would at least stop to really think about your position on the subject.
The packages I like never seem to be available on backports.org.
So build or backport 'em yourself. Builds character and stuff.
http://www.debian.org/doc/maint-guide/
There is a bit of a learning curve, but it's much more satifying to install your own packages than to just give up and throw a tarball into your nicely managed system.
If you knew anything about the makeup of comets, you'd know that they're basically dirty snowballs.
Actually, we don't really know everything about the makeup of comets. In fact, that's the whole point of this mission: to find out more about what makes up comets. Our best guesses, based on data gathered during previous flybys and deductive reasoning, indicate that comets are mostly frozen water and some rocks mixed in, but we don't really know because we've never seen the inside of one.
Anyhow, it's not as if we're randomly blasting apart any and every comet that comes our way. We're not nuking Halley's Comet or anything.
As far as the mining issue is concerned, Deep Impact doesn't have anything to do with mining, directly. However, it adds to a body of research which could be used in the future. Even if comets typically don't have much more than water and some rocks, what better way to get a heck of a lot of water to Luna than to figure out a way to divert a comet into a lunar orbit? What if we need to figure out a way to divert/destroy a comet that's coming in too close for comfort? Etc. etc. It's empirical data that could be used in the future. It's not just fireworks, as you seem to be implying.
The intent of my post was not to question your intelligence, but I had to address what seemed to me to be a somewhat short-sighted and unimaginative perspective.
Possibily destroying a comet? It seems so destructive to possibly break apart something that's been circling our sun for millions of years.
Interesting set of priorities there... As for me, I can't wait until we get our act together enough to start mining all of those eons-old lumps of raw material instead of strip-mining our planet.
One could argue that spreading freedom and democracy is in our national interests, so our viewpoints are not as incompatible as you might think. After all, other countries that more or less subscribe to "our" way of governing and recognizing freedom are far less likely to be threats to us as compared to, say, hard-line theocracies like the former Taliban.
6 -poll-iraq_x.htm c le_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000653667 m l m e.iraq/
The primary distinction between our viewpoints, I suspect, is that you subscribe more to an ends-justify-the-means philosophy than I do. While there is some appeal to me for the pragmatism of that position, I feel that it's a very slippery slope to go down. Again, giving everyone the benefit of the doubt, the administration may have honestly believed in an imminent threat to our national security.
What bothers me is that even now in the face of evidence refuting the claims used to justify the invasion of Iraq, our president and his team continue to gloss over the annoying details that don't fit their worldview. I feel strongly that there was some serious spin happening in the leadup to the war, and it persisted as the war progressed.
To what do you attribute the fact that so many Americans believe(d) that there was a concrete link between Saddam and Al Qaeda? Stupidity? Irresponsible journalism? I think it has a lot to do with certain key statements made by members of Bush's team.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-0
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/arti
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.ht
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/08/26/ti
Those are just some of the top hits I got for a quick google search for "americans believe link saddam al qaeda".
My problem is that I feel that we the people were misled. If the case for war was so compelling, why did the Bush team need to gin up the rationalizations they've been using? It just doesn't pass the sniff test. We didn't see this level of questioning and divisiveness when we invaded Afghanistan. There was a clear threat in that case, and besides, they weren't an internationally recognized sovereign state (recognition by a handful of Arab countries notwithstanding).
Whatever. We're committed for at least the next four years. My unhappiness with the current state of affairs doesn't matter now. Unless I want to take up arms and try to start a revolution, I'm just going to have to sit tight and hope for the best.
Despite what popular opinion outside the U.S. might be, we're not trying to take over the world. We do what we do because we believe in the principles of our country, and spreading democracy and freedom are noble goals.
LOL! Ok, I admire your dedication to your viewpoint, but COME ON! If you truly did serve in the Corps, I salute your service and thank you for it, but I think you've been drinking a bit too much of the Kool-Aid.
It's understandable, given the need to rationalize our presence in Iraq, and to avoid devaluing the deaths and injuries sustained by your fellow Marines. I have the utmost respect for the men and women who put themselves in harm's way because of their sense of duty. My brothers and father were all military men, for whatever that's worth (probably not much, because I chose a different path, although it was my father who forcibly dissuaded me from enlisting).
We are not in Iraq for the purpose of "spreading democracy and freedom". We are in Iraq because the current administration feels that our efforts there serve our national interests. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt (bad intelligence leading to bad decisions), we are not there to help the little Iraqi schoolgirls go to school. We're there because we have a heavily oil-dependent economy, and because forcibly establishing a US-friendly 'democracy' in Iraq helps to protect our longer-term interests. There was shaky evidence presented of a possible Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, and shaky evidence of stockpiled WMDs which might somehow have been used against us or our other foreign interests. Both of those claims have been refuted to a degree that most everyone without a vested interest accepts the reality that Saddam was vastly more of a threat to his own people than he was to the US.
The fact that Iraqis may someday enjoy freedoms greater than what they had under Saddam is completely secondary to US interests, and you'd do well to start thinking for yourself about the logic of the situation. You may not change your mind about the rightness or wrongness of our actions in Iraq, but at least you won't look like a brainwashed patsy to those who are willing to accept reality.
For the record, I approved of what we did in Afghanistan (I actually felt that we didn't do enough!). I also feel that now that we're in Iraq, it would be a mistake to turn it into a politician-directed war like Vietnam. We've got our foot in it, so we'd better clean it up. Unfortunately that means a lot more casualties on both sides, and some more "we had to destroy the city to save the city" situations like Fallujah.
I consider the practice highly offensive and I take my business elsewhere.
Don't get your knickers in such a knot. Just game the system! Have little "price club swaps" with your friends/neighbors every couple of months. Sure you'll get some extra junk mail, but that's OK. Just make up names. My cat gets lots of coupons and stuff in the mail. Now if I could just train her to do the shopping...
What we do need is a complete overthrow of established Psychiatry and Psychology to allow some real science to be brought in and taught.
That you lump these two professions together shows that you don't truly understand the distinctions between them. That's OK, you're not alone by far. In my experience, most people just assume that they're synonyms.
Here's the key distinction between the two: a Psychiatrist is an M.D., meaning that they have gone through the same 4 years of medical school as any other doctor. They are a doctor first, and have spent time in the emergency room and the ob/gyn wing and on the inpatient units. They've done surgical procedures and have likely seen patients die in the OR or ER. In most training programs, they do a whole year of nothing but medicine after they graduate from medical school.
Psychologists go to university to study theory. They have the degree of PhD. They are no more a medical doctor than your history prof or your CS prof. If I were in a car accident and there happened to be a Psychiatrist and a Psychologist driving by, I'd sure as hell rather have the Psychiatrist getting out to take a look at me while the Psychologist called the EMTs.
I don't make this distinction to denigrate Psychologists, but calling for more science in the field of Psychiatry shows that you don't really understand the field.
I have to dial the area code of people I am trying to reach who are in the same area code as me.
Get used to it. Lots of carriers in metro areas are moving to 10-digit dialing. Boston's been that way for years, and I know other big(ish) cities are doing the same thing. Now it's weird for me to see a 7-digit number, because I've gotten so used to the extra three digits.
I swear they're literally in the business of being in business. We could be selling chewing gum and they would be just as happy.
When it comes down to it, they have a choice: Work for someone else, or run their own business. If their business gives them a nice, fat, steady paycheck, they don't care what they're selling! Being "in the business of being in business" isn't as sexy as maybe running a Fortune 500, but it sure beats working for someone else who just wants you to help them buy that Lexus and inground pool.
Re: moderation...
Fair enough. I bit at the flamebait and missed the humor.
And, best of all,I learned a little bit from your post, too. You should talk to somebody about that pent-up rage, though.
Not sure what you learned from my post, but as far as the 'rage' goes, it's more just annoyance at what seemed to be a dismissive post by someone who hadn't bothered to really understand what they were dismissing. Oh, well. It's just Slashdot.