Punishment does not deter crime. Extreme punishment does not deter extreme crimes. This is one of the most common fallacies I routinely see dragged out when people try and defend the death penalty. The idea that we can somehow make people think twice about the worst crimes, rape and murder, by killing those that we find guilty has been around nearly since the idea of law. It's just as false now as it always has been. We still have crime, we still have the worst crimes. We have more of the worst crimes than countries that do not have the death penalty and have much lighter sentences by comparison. Even our none-death penalty sentences are over the top. Much of the world would consider 25 year and life sentences to be incredibly excessive for the crimes they're applied to here.
When someone is a danger to society, locking them up protects society. Spammers, no matter how annoying are not dangerous to society. Meanwhile, locking them up costs society money. So the best and most effective action that society can take is to fine them. This works especially well for these types of crimes when people are fraudulently making money. Take away all that illegally made money and then some more for our troubles.
The MPs were created specifically to perform these types of missions and duties. Regular infantrymen aren't supposed to be doing this job, and they're not trained for it either.
That's exactly right. It even happens with our constitution. Amendment 18 enacted prohibition, and over a decade later the 21st amendment nullified the 18th; but they're both still there.
I don't mean to sound insulting or presumptuous, and I don't claim to know nearly enough about you or your work to make this claim with much accuracy, but perhaps you have adult ADD? I know someone who has it, and described nearly exactly what you said. They can't block out sound/visual input well and basically any sensory input not related to the task at hand, and once they get side tracked they have a hard time being able to regain focus.
Or it could just be simple boredom/frustration/fatigue with doing a task for long stretches of time.
What's stopping you from bringing your own noise canceling headphones?
I'm not calling you a liar, and my experiences certainly don't invalidate yours, but they have not been the same as mine by a long shot. It could be as simple as you getting a lot more e-mail than me in general, of both kinds spam and legitimate. I would likely see a similar increase in spam that gets through the filters if my volume was higher. But their filtering, for my account, has been nearly perfect. I really wonder what the differences between us are. My spam is mostly pharma ads, yours looks a bit different, but obviously if it was that easy to spot the distinctions there'd be no filtering issue.
My wireless logitech keyboard works from the next room over, although a bit unreliably. It's the basic, white, model with no fancy function keys or anything. I don't think they make it anymore.
So you might need to worry about it in say, an office or school environment.
I've never once had a spam message in my Gmail inbox, it all gets caught by their spam filters and ends up in the appropriate folder. There's 150 in the spam folder right now, and they get deleted automatically after 30 days, so I get around 5 a day. That's probably just the ones google thinks are possibly spam, who knows how much they filter out that we never even see. Their filtering tech is pretty close to perfect, but it's always those last few points that are the hardest. So I seriously doubt this as yet unproven tech that claims such substantial increases in accuracy over traditional filtering. But the article was still interesting to learn more about Kirsch, his prior inventions and work, and battle with terminal blood cancer.
I am not quite sure how it was possible...but you seem to have quoted me without actually reading the text that you copied and pasted to preface your reply, which was unnecessarily rude I might add.
You're right that I never saw the horrible conditions of the communist Deutsche Demokratische Republik first hand, but I did hear of them directly from family members who did. One thing that always surprised me was how they all said the same thing about leaving; by the time they new they needed to get out it was too late to do so easily. They had friends and even relatives that called them unpatriotic, deserters, and cowards when they left. I'm not going to pay much attention to the people saying the same things to me.
Your Cuba tirade was a bit strange, I don't know what would make you think that was my intended destination. Pretty silly to assume really seeing as Cuba is a communist dictatorship and a step down in freedoms compared to the USA. But trying to show that the US is a free and prosperous country by comparing it to Cuba...do I really need to point out how sad that seems? "Yay! We're doing better than Cuba!" As a troll you're not really doing a good job, it's like you're not even trying.
Maybe I shouldn't have insulted both the Democrats AND Republicans, there's no one left to mod me up!
Best wishes to you, AC. Pity you didn't even think enough of your own words to sign them.
If our current government would have spent some time in between debating pointless things such as the question of when a fetus is considered a baby, and when it's ethical to end the pointless suffering and grotesque indignity of a human puppet show by disconnecting a feeding tube, maybe they could have found some time to fit in a discussion of the abomination of the PATRIOT act, or the legislation that mandated we track the travel habits of normal law abiding Americans in an effort to stop some vague threat they call terrorism. I'm not one bit afraid of terrorists! Stop trying to protect me from them by taking away the rights that I value.
Every day it seems I get more confirmation that I was right in deciding I should leave this country as soon as I can. A few generations ago my family came to America to escape communism in East Germany after the war, and now I'll be leaving the USA to escape the encroachment of my rights. Things aren't that bad here yet compared to many places in the world, but my family already made the mistake of waiting too long to leave once, I'm not going to make that mistake too. Better to get out early than not at all.
The Republicans are authoritarians and religious zealots, the sane ones either left their party or are such a small voice that they're completely drowned out by the chorus of insanity from the party at large. Ron Paul, who is a real Rep. and not a Neocon, doesn't look like he will be popular enough among the wealthy, the war-hawks, and the religious--or as they call it "the Republican base"--to win. The Democrats are too spineless to stand up for their core values, favoring a centrist stance to garner support from the left leaning Republicans, Independents, and various minorities and they end up acting like Republican-Light(TM). There is virtually no minority party voice in this country that anyone takes seriously. Both sides spend outrageous amount of money, although one actually attempts to pay for it by increasing taxes where the other just spends and passes the debt off to their kids and grandkids. Meanwhile no one is willing to put a stop to America's current adventure in the desert even though we're spending enough money on the war to fund what could be the best health care system in the world, even after you account for typical government waste and inefficiency. The soldiers that come back maimed, crippled, or psychologically scarred are given a standard of care that we should all be ashamed of. And then there are the ones who only come back draped in an American flag.
I would recommend everyone take a serious look at the idea of leaving the US. Figure out what it would take to leave, and how fast you could do it in. There may be a time soon when you have to put that plan into action.
Trying to understand your particular deficiency is almost like getting a blind from birth person to understand the concept of colors. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it. Being able to visualize concepts from words is such an automatic and common mechanism that I can't understand what it's like to live without it. I never read fiction on my own until high school when I discovered sci-fi and Tom Clancy. I think I read all the Heinlein books at the library starting with Starship Troopers. Vonnegut is another favorite author of mine. But my tastes and preferences I think had already been cemented BEFORE I started reading fiction. I learned to read with books my dad gave me. He was in the US Navy and loved aviation, helicopters specifically. My favorite book was a thick, hard cover technical reference of all the different helicopters used by the world's militaries. Reading about how the weapons systems were designed to defeat the armor of Soviet tanks made me curious about military technology which lead to history, politics and different government types. And remember, this was a 6-7 year old!
So I was this pedantic kid learning all this completely useless technical knowledge about helicopters and missiles and the cold war and reading nearly no fiction, but when I got to high school and actually started reading novels on my own I was still able to enjoy them without having the problem you had of not being able to make pictures in my mind. So while it's probably a good idea to give kids exposure to a wide range of reading materials, the relatively narrow selection of books I had didn't seem to do any harm to my development.
Best of luck to you trying to improve your reading ability. I can't fathom how difficult it must be, but it is an admirable and worthwhile pursuit to be sure.
I hope we're not at the point where merely having a dissenting opinion about the Google constitutes a troll post. There's a need, now more than ever for that opposition voice to be heard. Google is snatching up projects all the time, it's easy to see that their goal is complete control of the business of information management. When it's possible for a company to use Google for everything it's going to be too late to raise privacy and security concerns. Which is why we need to be having that discussion NOW. Google offers these services for free, largely, and if business begins switching over in large numbers to a Google centric data management system YOUR data and YOUR private info will end up in Google's hands just by you doing business with those companies. Now, currently I trust Google more than Microsoft to protect that, they've done nothing yet to shake that trust and they do offer some very valuable services for zero cost, but I do not want them to ever have a monopoly--in any area.
If I was spending real money on a hobby, I'd expect a reasonable amount of security. Don't even think farther than that. When you spend money online, don't you want it to be secure? That's the issue.
I'm sure there exists casual SL players. Probably some that play even less than you spend on slashdot. You can easily spend hours and sink tons of real money on any hobby, if people want to throw it away on a virtual world that's their business. Some people play WoW, I can't understand that either, but a lot of my friends play it and really enjoy it. It's worth the time and money to them because it's enjoyable. Wouldn't be to me, and I'm guessing not to you either, but that's why we're not WoW subscription holders. If I was though, I'd expect a certain degree of security when handling my transactions, credit card info, and account.
Interesting. But, you can't really tell for sure if you agree with the voices in someone else's head now can you? I'd rather have someone who says that when they need guidance they turn to facts and experts not prayer and god. I can't agree with anyone on the concept of HAVING an imaginary friend who they look to for advice, whether I agree with said imaginary person or even am capable of is slightly beside the point.
Yeah! I can't even imagine what kind of losers would spend that much time on a website.
I've never actually seen this "Second" life, and I can't imagine why people would spend real money on it, but apparently a lot of people do. It must be worth it to them for the entertainment value.
Yes, 9/11 was an absolute tragedy, but the greater trouble is how it has been used by the right wing in this country as the center piece of their fear mongering campaign to try and get voters to rally around the Republican "protectors". This religious nonsense is a side effect of them being in power, they get to push their "faith based" legislation through all the levels of government. It is an insult to our democracy.
I actually do plan on leaving the US and relocating permanently to New Zealand as soon as it is feasible for me to do so. I can pretty much do my job from anywhere there is an internet connection, and I heard the kiwis just got that working recently.
Most rational people wouldn't elect someone to public office who openly claims to psychically commune with an imaginary friend when he needs guidance on making a decision.
But by my definition, a majority of US citizens aren't rational people!
Except science could change at any time with new research. Right now, that's the best idea we've got so we go with it. It was reached by the Scientific Method, not at random. When something better comes along, we admit we didn't have it all right the first time and change our ideas. Science also is able to tolerate the concept that, "We just don't fully understand this yet, but we'll keep working on it until we do."--Religion claims to have all the answers you'll ever need and they're perfect and they will never change. The body of knowledge created by the scientific method is constantly changing, theism is a static world view.
So yes, right now we think certain things are true, but with new evidence tomorrow it might be something totally different. You don't hear religious people talking like that.
There is no sense of entitlement, although I wont deny I can be an asshole at times. I know the free ride would be over if too many people were like me, which is why I do not encourage the same behavior I practice. And when it ends--when, not if--I wont be angry because I know I wasn't paying a dime for what I was getting when I had it.
I block every ad google serves up in every location and form. Besides the nebulous value I am for data mining (and have fun mining largely encrypted data and fake/garbage demographic information), what revenue am I providing the company? They'd be lucky to break even on a freeloader like me. I guess I should be happy that stupid people exist, they're subsidizing my ad-free e-mail account and an awesome search engine.
OK. I wasn't interested in what the bible has to say, I've already read it and studied it extensively along with other religious texts, I'm interested in what you have to say. I want to listen to you. If you're not interested in talking though, I suppose all that is left for me to say is thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
The crime (spamming) costs us money as a whole, the punishment (fine) allows us to reclaim some of that money.
Punishment does not deter crime. Extreme punishment does not deter extreme crimes. This is one of the most common fallacies I routinely see dragged out when people try and defend the death penalty. The idea that we can somehow make people think twice about the worst crimes, rape and murder, by killing those that we find guilty has been around nearly since the idea of law. It's just as false now as it always has been. We still have crime, we still have the worst crimes. We have more of the worst crimes than countries that do not have the death penalty and have much lighter sentences by comparison. Even our none-death penalty sentences are over the top. Much of the world would consider 25 year and life sentences to be incredibly excessive for the crimes they're applied to here.
When someone is a danger to society, locking them up protects society. Spammers, no matter how annoying are not dangerous to society. Meanwhile, locking them up costs society money. So the best and most effective action that society can take is to fine them. This works especially well for these types of crimes when people are fraudulently making money. Take away all that illegally made money and then some more for our troubles.
The MPs were created specifically to perform these types of missions and duties. Regular infantrymen aren't supposed to be doing this job, and they're not trained for it either.
Since they're not specifically Military Police now, maybe we're going to start using private contractors for guards, a la Blackwater.
That's exactly right. It even happens with our constitution. Amendment 18 enacted prohibition, and over a decade later the 21st amendment nullified the 18th; but they're both still there.
I don't mean to sound insulting or presumptuous, and I don't claim to know nearly enough about you or your work to make this claim with much accuracy, but perhaps you have adult ADD? I know someone who has it, and described nearly exactly what you said. They can't block out sound/visual input well and basically any sensory input not related to the task at hand, and once they get side tracked they have a hard time being able to regain focus.
Or it could just be simple boredom/frustration/fatigue with doing a task for long stretches of time.
What's stopping you from bringing your own noise canceling headphones?
I'm not calling you a liar, and my experiences certainly don't invalidate yours, but they have not been the same as mine by a long shot. It could be as simple as you getting a lot more e-mail than me in general, of both kinds spam and legitimate. I would likely see a similar increase in spam that gets through the filters if my volume was higher. But their filtering, for my account, has been nearly perfect. I really wonder what the differences between us are. My spam is mostly pharma ads, yours looks a bit different, but obviously if it was that easy to spot the distinctions there'd be no filtering issue.
My wireless logitech keyboard works from the next room over, although a bit unreliably. It's the basic, white, model with no fancy function keys or anything. I don't think they make it anymore.
So you might need to worry about it in say, an office or school environment.
The difference being that I don't really care about the integrity and future of Livejournal. I do care about wikipedia however, because I use it.
It's just Twitter using his sockpuppet account to defeat Slashdot's mod system.
So yes, you were correct in deducing that he is a troll. He's probably this site's most well known one in fact.
I've never once had a spam message in my Gmail inbox, it all gets caught by their spam filters and ends up in the appropriate folder. There's 150 in the spam folder right now, and they get deleted automatically after 30 days, so I get around 5 a day. That's probably just the ones google thinks are possibly spam, who knows how much they filter out that we never even see. Their filtering tech is pretty close to perfect, but it's always those last few points that are the hardest. So I seriously doubt this as yet unproven tech that claims such substantial increases in accuracy over traditional filtering. But the article was still interesting to learn more about Kirsch, his prior inventions and work, and battle with terminal blood cancer.
That's why we're not on Digg.
I am not quite sure how it was possible...but you seem to have quoted me without actually reading the text that you copied and pasted to preface your reply, which was unnecessarily rude I might add.
You're right that I never saw the horrible conditions of the communist Deutsche Demokratische Republik first hand, but I did hear of them directly from family members who did. One thing that always surprised me was how they all said the same thing about leaving; by the time they new they needed to get out it was too late to do so easily. They had friends and even relatives that called them unpatriotic, deserters, and cowards when they left. I'm not going to pay much attention to the people saying the same things to me.
Your Cuba tirade was a bit strange, I don't know what would make you think that was my intended destination. Pretty silly to assume really seeing as Cuba is a communist dictatorship and a step down in freedoms compared to the USA. But trying to show that the US is a free and prosperous country by comparing it to Cuba...do I really need to point out how sad that seems? "Yay! We're doing better than Cuba!" As a troll you're not really doing a good job, it's like you're not even trying.
Maybe I shouldn't have insulted both the Democrats AND Republicans, there's no one left to mod me up!
Best wishes to you, AC. Pity you didn't even think enough of your own words to sign them.
If our current government would have spent some time in between debating pointless things such as the question of when a fetus is considered a baby, and when it's ethical to end the pointless suffering and grotesque indignity of a human puppet show by disconnecting a feeding tube, maybe they could have found some time to fit in a discussion of the abomination of the PATRIOT act, or the legislation that mandated we track the travel habits of normal law abiding Americans in an effort to stop some vague threat they call terrorism. I'm not one bit afraid of terrorists! Stop trying to protect me from them by taking away the rights that I value.
Every day it seems I get more confirmation that I was right in deciding I should leave this country as soon as I can. A few generations ago my family came to America to escape communism in East Germany after the war, and now I'll be leaving the USA to escape the encroachment of my rights. Things aren't that bad here yet compared to many places in the world, but my family already made the mistake of waiting too long to leave once, I'm not going to make that mistake too. Better to get out early than not at all.
The Republicans are authoritarians and religious zealots, the sane ones either left their party or are such a small voice that they're completely drowned out by the chorus of insanity from the party at large. Ron Paul, who is a real Rep. and not a Neocon, doesn't look like he will be popular enough among the wealthy, the war-hawks, and the religious--or as they call it "the Republican base"--to win. The Democrats are too spineless to stand up for their core values, favoring a centrist stance to garner support from the left leaning Republicans, Independents, and various minorities and they end up acting like Republican-Light(TM). There is virtually no minority party voice in this country that anyone takes seriously. Both sides spend outrageous amount of money, although one actually attempts to pay for it by increasing taxes where the other just spends and passes the debt off to their kids and grandkids. Meanwhile no one is willing to put a stop to America's current adventure in the desert even though we're spending enough money on the war to fund what could be the best health care system in the world, even after you account for typical government waste and inefficiency. The soldiers that come back maimed, crippled, or psychologically scarred are given a standard of care that we should all be ashamed of. And then there are the ones who only come back draped in an American flag.
I would recommend everyone take a serious look at the idea of leaving the US. Figure out what it would take to leave, and how fast you could do it in. There may be a time soon when you have to put that plan into action.
Trying to understand your particular deficiency is almost like getting a blind from birth person to understand the concept of colors. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around it. Being able to visualize concepts from words is such an automatic and common mechanism that I can't understand what it's like to live without it. I never read fiction on my own until high school when I discovered sci-fi and Tom Clancy. I think I read all the Heinlein books at the library starting with Starship Troopers. Vonnegut is another favorite author of mine. But my tastes and preferences I think had already been cemented BEFORE I started reading fiction. I learned to read with books my dad gave me. He was in the US Navy and loved aviation, helicopters specifically. My favorite book was a thick, hard cover technical reference of all the different helicopters used by the world's militaries. Reading about how the weapons systems were designed to defeat the armor of Soviet tanks made me curious about military technology which lead to history, politics and different government types. And remember, this was a 6-7 year old!
So I was this pedantic kid learning all this completely useless technical knowledge about helicopters and missiles and the cold war and reading nearly no fiction, but when I got to high school and actually started reading novels on my own I was still able to enjoy them without having the problem you had of not being able to make pictures in my mind. So while it's probably a good idea to give kids exposure to a wide range of reading materials, the relatively narrow selection of books I had didn't seem to do any harm to my development.
Best of luck to you trying to improve your reading ability. I can't fathom how difficult it must be, but it is an admirable and worthwhile pursuit to be sure.
I hope we're not at the point where merely having a dissenting opinion about the Google constitutes a troll post. There's a need, now more than ever for that opposition voice to be heard. Google is snatching up projects all the time, it's easy to see that their goal is complete control of the business of information management. When it's possible for a company to use Google for everything it's going to be too late to raise privacy and security concerns. Which is why we need to be having that discussion NOW. Google offers these services for free, largely, and if business begins switching over in large numbers to a Google centric data management system YOUR data and YOUR private info will end up in Google's hands just by you doing business with those companies. Now, currently I trust Google more than Microsoft to protect that, they've done nothing yet to shake that trust and they do offer some very valuable services for zero cost, but I do not want them to ever have a monopoly--in any area.
If I was spending real money on a hobby, I'd expect a reasonable amount of security. Don't even think farther than that. When you spend money online, don't you want it to be secure? That's the issue.
I'm sure there exists casual SL players. Probably some that play even less than you spend on slashdot. You can easily spend hours and sink tons of real money on any hobby, if people want to throw it away on a virtual world that's their business. Some people play WoW, I can't understand that either, but a lot of my friends play it and really enjoy it. It's worth the time and money to them because it's enjoyable. Wouldn't be to me, and I'm guessing not to you either, but that's why we're not WoW subscription holders. If I was though, I'd expect a certain degree of security when handling my transactions, credit card info, and account.
Interesting. But, you can't really tell for sure if you agree with the voices in someone else's head now can you? I'd rather have someone who says that when they need guidance they turn to facts and experts not prayer and god. I can't agree with anyone on the concept of HAVING an imaginary friend who they look to for advice, whether I agree with said imaginary person or even am capable of is slightly beside the point.
Yeah! I can't even imagine what kind of losers would spend that much time on a website.
I've never actually seen this "Second" life, and I can't imagine why people would spend real money on it, but apparently a lot of people do. It must be worth it to them for the entertainment value.
Yes, 9/11 was an absolute tragedy, but the greater trouble is how it has been used by the right wing in this country as the center piece of their fear mongering campaign to try and get voters to rally around the Republican "protectors". This religious nonsense is a side effect of them being in power, they get to push their "faith based" legislation through all the levels of government. It is an insult to our democracy.
I actually do plan on leaving the US and relocating permanently to New Zealand as soon as it is feasible for me to do so. I can pretty much do my job from anywhere there is an internet connection, and I heard the kiwis just got that working recently.
Most rational people wouldn't elect someone to public office who openly claims to psychically commune with an imaginary friend when he needs guidance on making a decision.
But by my definition, a majority of US citizens aren't rational people!
Except science could change at any time with new research. Right now, that's the best idea we've got so we go with it. It was reached by the Scientific Method, not at random. When something better comes along, we admit we didn't have it all right the first time and change our ideas. Science also is able to tolerate the concept that, "We just don't fully understand this yet, but we'll keep working on it until we do."--Religion claims to have all the answers you'll ever need and they're perfect and they will never change. The body of knowledge created by the scientific method is constantly changing, theism is a static world view.
So yes, right now we think certain things are true, but with new evidence tomorrow it might be something totally different. You don't hear religious people talking like that.
There is no sense of entitlement, although I wont deny I can be an asshole at times. I know the free ride would be over if too many people were like me, which is why I do not encourage the same behavior I practice. And when it ends--when, not if--I wont be angry because I know I wasn't paying a dime for what I was getting when I had it.
I block every ad google serves up in every location and form. Besides the nebulous value I am for data mining (and have fun mining largely encrypted data and fake/garbage demographic information), what revenue am I providing the company? They'd be lucky to break even on a freeloader like me. I guess I should be happy that stupid people exist, they're subsidizing my ad-free e-mail account and an awesome search engine.
OK. I wasn't interested in what the bible has to say, I've already read it and studied it extensively along with other religious texts, I'm interested in what you have to say. I want to listen to you. If you're not interested in talking though, I suppose all that is left for me to say is thanks.
Peace and happiness to you.