Perhaps the pitch of the props had been reversed on the plane -- completely possible for most prop planes -- because it was already trying to slow down and not crash.
That must be near the truth, because otherwise the plane would not have so quickly nosed over and dove. All else being equal (re: trim set to neutral for takeoff), power causes the plane's nose to climb or at least stay level.
I was out surfing and paddled into a wave. When I jumped up to my feet, I missed the sweet spot of the wave and ended up on the breaking part instead (ie. not a good location). To this day I swear the wave dropped out from under me followed by the board while I hung there in midair. Misquoting Douglas Adams, "gravity finally looked my way and wondered what the hell I was doing" and down I went. The couple of people who saw it were sure I was surfing a board made by "Acme".
That's possible: the water could pull the board downward faster than 9.8m/s/s due to surface tension. The board is somewhat 'stuck' to the surface of the water.
The same effect could explain how the water itself fell faster than 9.8m/s/s: wave action elsewhere created a suction below the water, such that atmospheric pressure above the water pressed down on it (and on the board), adding to the downward accelleration already provided by gravity.
If I punch a punching bag, the bag moves but I don't. That is because my fist has the energy which transfers to the bag. I don't go flying backwards as the article suggests.
Friction, dude. Try the experiment again on roller skates.
Insightful, but only half right. Same for the original poster.
The puncher doesn't fly backwards because his fist is gradually accellerated over a period of time (say 0.3 seconds). The Newtonian reaction to this is a backwards-pushing force that is small enough to be countered by the friction between his feet and the floor.
When the fist hits the bag, the puncher's body has no kinetic energy to speak of, but the fist does. When it hits, the fist really does transfer most of its energy, leaving it (and the rest of the puncher's body) nearly motionless.
The fist impacts the bag in a very short time (perhaps 0.05 seconds). That creates the high, weapon-like impulse that overwhelms the frictional resistance of the target's feet (or whatever), knocking the target backwards.
This sounds like an entirely rational, sensible argument. As a result, I predict that it will have absolutely zero effect on anyone in Congress.
As an alternative, I suggest you come up with some "evidence" suggesting that an asteroid impact would transform their children into mutants, preferably homosexual ones; or, that the asteroids are a Arab Terrorist Plot. Double points if the asteroid is Mexican.
Apparently you haven't been paying attention. NASA's de jure purpose is certainly the exploration of strange new worlds, and the going where no one has gone before, and so on... after all, purposes de jure must always sound good. However, NASA's de facto purpose is to distribute federal funds into specific congressional districts.
Therefore, rational and poetic arguments will win applause in Congress, but the votes will come when somebody takes the podium and presents an asteroid-detection system whose major components are situated (or at least fabricated) in the congressional districts of everyone on the appropriations committee.
You can prove intent, but intent is not enough to get a conviction: you need the act to have been committed or attempted too.
Not yet, anyway.
It seems that what is much more desperately needed than an intention-predictor, is an ironclad lie-detector. If we had a perfect truth serum, and (far more difficult to obtain) the political will to use it wholesale, the court system would be a very different place.
From what I've read so far, it seems that the hardest problem to solve on the way to a truth serum, is how to unravel the human mind's remarkable self-deception capabilities. While such are obviously vital to being happy (viz: "I am a very attractive dude, a prize for any woman!"), they are also the precondition for all the evils of religion.
The mining industry claimed that the "content and layout" of the parody site infringed copyright, but when Rising Tide removed the copyrighted photos and changed the layout, the mining industry still lodged a complaint. Is this a misuse of copyright law in order to stifle dissent?"
It must be an attempt to silence dissent, because there is no conceivable alternative reason for the mining industry to care. It's not like the parody site is selling natural gas or imported minerals or whatever in competition with local mines.
However, it is not necessarily a misuse of copyright law. The mining consortium probably invested a lot of resources into creating a unique and recognizable message for themselves, including a layout, color scheme, coordinating fonts, and so on. It's a complete package. When a parody takes that package and makes a minor alteration in order to dilute or destroy the original message, it ruins the future returns of the consortium's investment. Isn't that (at least in principle) what copyright law exists to prevent?
Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of mining companies vis-a-vis the way they allow environmenal externalities to roll off them like water off a duck's back. But this still seems like a relevant use of copyright law -- even though the goal is nefarious.
And IIRC, the liberal right of parody applies to political targets, not so much to economic targets.
"A = A" is hardly a statement loaded with meaning. Rand was a methadrine freak who claimed that if you liked Chopin over Rachmaninov, you were "denying reality".
If that's what you think her (and Peikoff's) main contribution was, you stopped reading too early. They made a lot of headway on the "problem of universals", viz-a-viz her discovery that concept-formation is measurement omission. That, and their solution to the difficulty of "border cases", is astoundingly insightful.
If the defendant's wireless router did that and a attacker across the street took over her router and made his laptop into a DMZ it would lead to this scenario. Kids, always secure your routers... unless you want to eliminate the best "but it wasn't me, honest" excuse the world has to offer.
Yes, I've even had an idea about how to accomplish this without the usual unpleasant side-effects.
Ordinary users that do not claim to have any academic credentials beyond their own knowledge are fine, ones that claim to have advanced degrees in such-and-such should be required to prove this, or at least be able to validate their credentials when asked. I have no idea how this would be done, only that it SHOULD be done.. Essjay is an excellent example as to why.
Well said. Indeed, the need for 'provability' is far larger than wikipedia. There are a million venues in which it would be beneficial for participants to be able to provably assert x about themself, without also disclosing a raft of personal information.
In other words, what is needed is a digital equivalent of tamper-proof membership cards: "I am a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses", "I am an employee of Bank of America", "I am female", "I have a Ph.D. from U-Chicago". With no necessity to reveal even a real name.
Luckily, quite a few different enterprises are working on this problem. It will be accomplished with digital signatures, and a completely decentralized web of CAs. For example, U-Chicago might run a CA that issues certificates to all of its graduates. Those graduates can then simply present their certificate, and others (in this case, Jimmy Wales) can ping U-Chicago's CA to verify that it's kosher. Or something like that.
It's going to change the world. Right now we are crazily without any decent method of verifying just one thing about an online stranger.
Did Rand's cult ever have a reputation to begin with? Rand herself was notorious for her hypocrisy. Her "philosophy" (widely rejected by academia) is full of poorly done arguments, unsourced statements, and pseudo-psychology. She never attempted to prove that she told the truth, and she never had any integrity at all outside of the trust of her cult.
If nothing else, Objectivism got a lot of traction towards the eternal problems in epistemology. The other areas of philosophy, like ethics and politics, are, in comparison, piffling.
Objectivism also deserves credit for explaining the inherent problems in all Collectivist political systems... and for giving such explanations at a time when all other voices were signing praises to the "Great Society".
I have to agree with Larry. You really do seem to be missing the point entirely, and you're repeatedly rephrasing the debate to terms that suit you. One has to ask you, though, that if you despise credentials so much, why is it that you have your resume posted on your consulting website? If you actually believed what you preach, you should just be able to tell the law firms that hire you that they should trust you, regardless of your qualifications.
He does believe it. He posted his resume because other people don't.
Indeed. The Windows 2000 codebase is, what, 7-9 years old now? These slashdotters who are railing against Microsoft must not have ever tried doing a dev / qa project for production software (including hot hotfixing of critical servers) on code that is -- in IT terms -- ancient. That's a big cost to recapture.
He continues, 'Then I want to make a three-dimensional gyroscope, to measure rotation around three different axes. Today, such products are quite big, a cube 10 centimeters on a side. We want to do this in less than a 30-millimeter cube [...]
Someone should tell him about the solid-state gyros already in use in aircraft instruments. Six years ago at Oshkosh I played with an all-electronic artificial horizon instrument. IIRC, it uses those funky crystals which exhibit piezo-type effects when rotated in space. The entire unit, including LCD, CPU, power supply, backup battery, and of course the three solid-state gyros, was a cylinder about 3"x3"x12".
Even in its infancy, the device was massively, hilariously more reliable than the steam-powered mechanical gyros that are currently standard fare for General Aviation.
And that was six years ago.
All this time, I've been thinking (quite wrongly) that the Wii's controller used these same devices.
This would be an environmetal benefit if we compare to generating the same energy by burning fossil fuel. Say coal. Burning coal is not part of the CO2 cycle - thus it adds CO2 to the atmosphere. The danger is NOT CO2; but from where the C in CO2 come frome. Why do you always get this wrong, its quite irritating.
Indeed.
Over millions of years, plant life (plus geology) gradually sequesters all of the carbon underground. And so Mother Nature has to periodically develop a technological species that can pull all the carbon back up and diffuse it.
Once it's all been removed from the Earth, the technological species will self-destruct, probably through fighting over limited energy resources. And so the plants will GOTO 10 and repeat the cycle. Our role in the carbon cycle is short and glorious.:)
That's short sighted. By dumping toxic stuff in the dump all you're doing is passing the cost of cleanup onto others, either those who don't produce or use it or to future generations.
On the contrary. Short-sightedness consists in the assumption that future generations won't have a use or a need for all the weird stuff we toss out right now. For example, think of all the effort that people went through to compost their food and yard waste. Composting is simply ultra-low-speed bacteria-assisted combustion, releasing all the carbon back into the air (much of it as greenhouse-causing methane). Whereas now we have landfill-powered generating stations that harness the bacteria-produced methane and generate power from it. The composting movement was wasteful because it was stupidly premature.
And it is equally short-sighted (or perhaps just impatient) to think it profitable to spend a fortune reprocessing now, using macro-level technology, rather than waiting for the appropriate nano- or bio-technology to deal with it later.
And that's discounting the risk of drinking water being contaminated along with other stuff such as the distruction mining causes.
Yes, it SHOULD. But right now, for most materials, it doesn't. It requires a government-imposed extra fee in order to show a 'profit'. But that profit is just a bookkeeping game to cover up what is actually and obviously a waste of resources.
Maybe if they base the amount you get back on the ease of reclaiming the materials, it would encourage more responsible manufacturing. They could set up a rating system, like a 1-10 scale for a 10-100% rebate, or something similar. It might even encourage people to get rid of old equipment sooner (I know I keep a lot of old crap laying around just in case I need it), so it should be easy to get the manufacturers involved.
The core meaning of 'unprofitable' means: consumes more energy than it produces. So when a thing fails to make money, that's the market's way of telling you that you are wasting your natural resources... your time foremost among them.
Until such time as recycling processes are actually profitable, it's better to bury the junk in a landfill. There it will stay until an engineered bacteria or nanobot or digester robot or whatever gets invented to reprocess it cheaply.
These are certainly interesting times. The Arabs had "our" oil, and now it turns out the Chinese have "our" water in their mantle. Expect to see a lot of cheap knock-off water hitting the market soon.
Actually it's nobody's oil when it's sitting uselessly underground. It doesn't belong to some Arab simply by virtue of the fact that he was born nearby. It belongs to whoever produces it from the "raw materials" of its current state.
That the Arabs nationalized all the oil wells and piping facilities after we built them, does not change the core issue.
This is similar to how the gold under the ground in America doesn't belong to America or to any particular American. A lot of it is being extracted by Canadian firms, without whom the gold would not exist in any practical form.
That's not what makes the noise. The noise is because diesel combustion is extremely rapid and violent - the characteristic diesel clatter comes directly from the explosion - this is why the parts for diesel engines are made so robust. Modern car diesel engines control the combustion much more precisely and produce very little clatter, which can mostly be heard at idle when there is no road noise.
Diesel fuel itself is thick and heavy, and won't even burn if you throw a lit match into a puddle of it. The fact that "diesel combustion is extremely rapid and violent" is because of the 18:1 compression ratio.
If you compress a diesel/air mixture to the 8:1 of a gasoline engine, it won't self-ignite in the usual way, though you might get it to burn quietly if you fired a spark plug in it.
A tiny phone speaker isnt going to do it, but some of those thumper stereos they have in those neighborhoods just might set them off.
It is true -- a thumper stereo can set off even a very advanced gunfire detector... but in a different way than you are thinking:
Car equipped with "thumper stereo" drives through a sensor-equipped neighborhood.
Quiet, mild-mannered WASP (like me) hears the stereo and so finally crosses the annoyance threshold.
WASP opens fire on car.
Gunfire sensor detects the sound and notifies the police.
Police arrive, survey the scene, and photograph the bullet-riddled car (including the now-destroyed thumper stereo).
Evidence is presented to a jury of the WASP's peers, which is statistically certain to include at least one person who has lived near a car equipped with thumper stereo.
Jury deliberates for ten minutes and then declars the incident to be "Very, very, very, very justifiable homicide".
Maybe the government shouldn't be finding new and exciting ways to do less work and employing less real people? IMHO, as soon as they start tracking us with these cameras we should start making loud gun shot noises as we shoot the lenses out.
I'd rather be watched by algorithms than by humans. Humans are woefully fallible and (worse) in denial about their own fallibility. Humans are tribalistic asshats who lose objectivity if you are different than they are -- or if you aren't different.
Of course the advantage of human surveillance is that humans are so expensive that we won't pay for enough of them to watch everyone. That fact affords me the room I need to break laws in moral ways. We'd never program the surveillance computers to grant the same leeway.
Of course that would have the further advantage of eventually getting all those stupid laws undone. The only cure for a bad law is to enforce it on everyone, as only a surveillance society could do.
Free market will never bring much benefits to the poorest people, because they have nothing to reciprocate with for the infrastructure, services and the content. It's called market failure.
That is not the actual meaning of the term 'market failure'. And government intervention into market failures has nothing to do with welfare or social class.
But to answer your general idea: it depends on your definition of 'poorest'. You'll find that very few people genuinely have "nothing to reciprocate with", if by that you mean no ability to generate an income even at 100% effort.
A broader answer to your objection is this: social systems generate wealth (and hence raise the comfort level of everyone, including the poorest) insofar as they incent individuals to pursue wealth creation. Now that we've conducted a century of bloody experiments, it is clear that self-interest (meaning: the chance to get rich through effort) is the only incentive that works reliably, works long-term, and favors the buildup of trust between strangers.
Ultimately, humans have free will and choose their own actions. Saying someone is "born bad" is equivilant to saying that they have been possessed by Satan. It's not a valid argument.
I challenge you to define 'choose'.
If it means "the behaviors selected by the person's neurons", then 'choose' is meaningless: it simply means that they do whatever their brain must (as a physical object) lawfully do in the situation. In this case, it is easy to image a corrupt brain, in the sense that the neural potentials favor sadistic outcomes.
If, however, it means "causelessly or spiritually imposing a decision upon physical matter", then you have an even bigger problem: how does anyone choose to do bad things? Is it then their spirit (or whatever) that is corrupt?
So, stating that we "choose our own actions" is useless. Actually it's worse than useless because not only does the statement fail to convey any data, but it makes it harder for a discussion to focus on the exact locus of sadistic behaviors. These days, the word 'choose' has become the ultimate hand-wave. As your statement shows, it has come to mean "Human decisions are unconnected to reality, so abandon this line of inquiry altogether."
I rather think that behavior is absolutely connected to my brain's content and state. And that is why me-the-person can be considered reliably good (or evil) -- because my behavior has a lawful cause.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it did. That isn't the question. The question is: why didn't momentum also carry his surfboard in the same arc?
The answer is: it was stuck to the surface of the water, which itself was being 'pulled' [sic] downward faster than gravity.
Indeed. Also, have you noticed that nobody in movies ever hits the spacebar or function-keys?
That must be near the truth, because otherwise the plane would not have so quickly nosed over and dove. All else being equal (re: trim set to neutral for takeoff), power causes the plane's nose to climb or at least stay level.
That's possible: the water could pull the board downward faster than 9.8m/s/s due to surface tension. The board is somewhat 'stuck' to the surface of the water.
The same effect could explain how the water itself fell faster than 9.8m/s/s: wave action elsewhere created a suction below the water, such that atmospheric pressure above the water pressed down on it (and on the board), adding to the downward accelleration already provided by gravity.
Insightful, but only half right. Same for the original poster.
The puncher doesn't fly backwards because his fist is gradually accellerated over a period of time (say 0.3 seconds). The Newtonian reaction to this is a backwards-pushing force that is small enough to be countered by the friction between his feet and the floor.
When the fist hits the bag, the puncher's body has no kinetic energy to speak of, but the fist does. When it hits, the fist really does transfer most of its energy, leaving it (and the rest of the puncher's body) nearly motionless.
The fist impacts the bag in a very short time (perhaps 0.05 seconds). That creates the high, weapon-like impulse that overwhelms the frictional resistance of the target's feet (or whatever), knocking the target backwards.
Apparently you haven't been paying attention. NASA's de jure purpose is certainly the exploration of strange new worlds, and the going where no one has gone before, and so on... after all, purposes de jure must always sound good. However, NASA's de facto purpose is to distribute federal funds into specific congressional districts.
Therefore, rational and poetic arguments will win applause in Congress, but the votes will come when somebody takes the podium and presents an asteroid-detection system whose major components are situated (or at least fabricated) in the congressional districts of everyone on the appropriations committee.
Not yet, anyway.
It seems that what is much more desperately needed than an intention-predictor, is an ironclad lie-detector. If we had a perfect truth serum, and (far more difficult to obtain) the political will to use it wholesale, the court system would be a very different place.
From what I've read so far, it seems that the hardest problem to solve on the way to a truth serum, is how to unravel the human mind's remarkable self-deception capabilities. While such are obviously vital to being happy (viz: "I am a very attractive dude, a prize for any woman!"), they are also the precondition for all the evils of religion.
It must be an attempt to silence dissent, because there is no conceivable alternative reason for the mining industry to care. It's not like the parody site is selling natural gas or imported minerals or whatever in competition with local mines.
However, it is not necessarily a misuse of copyright law. The mining consortium probably invested a lot of resources into creating a unique and recognizable message for themselves, including a layout, color scheme, coordinating fonts, and so on. It's a complete package. When a parody takes that package and makes a minor alteration in order to dilute or destroy the original message, it ruins the future returns of the consortium's investment. Isn't that (at least in principle) what copyright law exists to prevent?
Don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of mining companies vis-a-vis the way they allow environmenal externalities to roll off them like water off a duck's back. But this still seems like a relevant use of copyright law -- even though the goal is nefarious.
And IIRC, the liberal right of parody applies to political targets, not so much to economic targets.
If that's what you think her (and Peikoff's) main contribution was, you stopped reading too early. They made a lot of headway on the "problem of universals", viz-a-viz her discovery that concept-formation is measurement omission. That, and their solution to the difficulty of "border cases", is astoundingly insightful.
Yes, I've even had an idea about how to accomplish this without the usual unpleasant side-effects.
Well said. Indeed, the need for 'provability' is far larger than wikipedia. There are a million venues in which it would be beneficial for participants to be able to provably assert x about themself, without also disclosing a raft of personal information.
In other words, what is needed is a digital equivalent of tamper-proof membership cards: "I am a member of the Jehovah's Witnesses", "I am an employee of Bank of America", "I am female", "I have a Ph.D. from U-Chicago". With no necessity to reveal even a real name.
Luckily, quite a few different enterprises are working on this problem. It will be accomplished with digital signatures, and a completely decentralized web of CAs. For example, U-Chicago might run a CA that issues certificates to all of its graduates. Those graduates can then simply present their certificate, and others (in this case, Jimmy Wales) can ping U-Chicago's CA to verify that it's kosher. Or something like that.
It's going to change the world. Right now we are crazily without any decent method of verifying just one thing about an online stranger.
If nothing else, Objectivism got a lot of traction towards the eternal problems in epistemology. The other areas of philosophy, like ethics and politics, are, in comparison, piffling.
Objectivism also deserves credit for explaining the inherent problems in all Collectivist political systems... and for giving such explanations at a time when all other voices were signing praises to the "Great Society".
He does believe it. He posted his resume because other people don't.
Indeed. The Windows 2000 codebase is, what, 7-9 years old now? These slashdotters who are railing against Microsoft must not have ever tried doing a dev / qa project for production software (including hot hotfixing of critical servers) on code that is -- in IT terms -- ancient. That's a big cost to recapture.
Someone should tell him about the solid-state gyros already in use in aircraft instruments. Six years ago at Oshkosh I played with an all-electronic artificial horizon instrument. IIRC, it uses those funky crystals which exhibit piezo-type effects when rotated in space. The entire unit, including LCD, CPU, power supply, backup battery, and of course the three solid-state gyros, was a cylinder about 3"x3"x12".
Even in its infancy, the device was massively, hilariously more reliable than the steam-powered mechanical gyros that are currently standard fare for General Aviation.
And that was six years ago.
All this time, I've been thinking (quite wrongly) that the Wii's controller used these same devices.
Indeed.
Over millions of years, plant life (plus geology) gradually sequesters all of the carbon underground. And so Mother Nature has to periodically develop a technological species that can pull all the carbon back up and diffuse it.
Once it's all been removed from the Earth, the technological species will self-destruct, probably through fighting over limited energy resources. And so the plants will GOTO 10 and repeat the cycle. Our role in the carbon cycle is short and glorious. :)
Of course nuclear power will change all that...
On the contrary. Short-sightedness consists in the assumption that future generations won't have a use or a need for all the weird stuff we toss out right now. For example, think of all the effort that people went through to compost their food and yard waste. Composting is simply ultra-low-speed bacteria-assisted combustion, releasing all the carbon back into the air (much of it as greenhouse-causing methane). Whereas now we have landfill-powered generating stations that harness the bacteria-produced methane and generate power from it. The composting movement was wasteful because it was stupidly premature.
And it is equally short-sighted (or perhaps just impatient) to think it profitable to spend a fortune reprocessing now, using macro-level technology, rather than waiting for the appropriate nano- or bio-technology to deal with it later.
That particular problem has been solved.
:golf clap:
So damn witty. Can I offer you a lemon-soaked paper napkin? :)
Yes, it SHOULD. But right now, for most materials, it doesn't. It requires a government-imposed extra fee in order to show a 'profit'. But that profit is just a bookkeeping game to cover up what is actually and obviously a waste of resources.
The core meaning of 'unprofitable' means: consumes more energy than it produces. So when a thing fails to make money, that's the market's way of telling you that you are wasting your natural resources... your time foremost among them.
Until such time as recycling processes are actually profitable, it's better to bury the junk in a landfill. There it will stay until an engineered bacteria or nanobot or digester robot or whatever gets invented to reprocess it cheaply.
Actually it's nobody's oil when it's sitting uselessly underground. It doesn't belong to some Arab simply by virtue of the fact that he was born nearby. It belongs to whoever produces it from the "raw materials" of its current state.
That the Arabs nationalized all the oil wells and piping facilities after we built them, does not change the core issue.
This is similar to how the gold under the ground in America doesn't belong to America or to any particular American. A lot of it is being extracted by Canadian firms, without whom the gold would not exist in any practical form.
Diesel fuel itself is thick and heavy, and won't even burn if you throw a lit match into a puddle of it. The fact that "diesel combustion is extremely rapid and violent" is because of the 18:1 compression ratio.
If you compress a diesel/air mixture to the 8:1 of a gasoline engine, it won't self-ignite in the usual way, though you might get it to burn quietly if you fired a spark plug in it.
It is true -- a thumper stereo can set off even a very advanced gunfire detector... but in a different way than you are thinking:
I'd rather be watched by algorithms than by humans. Humans are woefully fallible and (worse) in denial about their own fallibility. Humans are tribalistic asshats who lose objectivity if you are different than they are -- or if you aren't different.
Of course the advantage of human surveillance is that humans are so expensive that we won't pay for enough of them to watch everyone. That fact affords me the room I need to break laws in moral ways. We'd never program the surveillance computers to grant the same leeway.
Of course that would have the further advantage of eventually getting all those stupid laws undone. The only cure for a bad law is to enforce it on everyone, as only a surveillance society could do.
That is not the actual meaning of the term 'market failure'. And government intervention into market failures has nothing to do with welfare or social class.
But to answer your general idea: it depends on your definition of 'poorest'. You'll find that very few people genuinely have "nothing to reciprocate with", if by that you mean no ability to generate an income even at 100% effort.
A broader answer to your objection is this: social systems generate wealth (and hence raise the comfort level of everyone, including the poorest) insofar as they incent individuals to pursue wealth creation. Now that we've conducted a century of bloody experiments, it is clear that self-interest (meaning: the chance to get rich through effort) is the only incentive that works reliably, works long-term, and favors the buildup of trust between strangers.
I challenge you to define 'choose'.
If it means "the behaviors selected by the person's neurons", then 'choose' is meaningless: it simply means that they do whatever their brain must (as a physical object) lawfully do in the situation. In this case, it is easy to image a corrupt brain, in the sense that the neural potentials favor sadistic outcomes.
If, however, it means "causelessly or spiritually imposing a decision upon physical matter", then you have an even bigger problem: how does anyone choose to do bad things? Is it then their spirit (or whatever) that is corrupt?
So, stating that we "choose our own actions" is useless. Actually it's worse than useless because not only does the statement fail to convey any data, but it makes it harder for a discussion to focus on the exact locus of sadistic behaviors. These days, the word 'choose' has become the ultimate hand-wave. As your statement shows, it has come to mean "Human decisions are unconnected to reality, so abandon this line of inquiry altogether."
I rather think that behavior is absolutely connected to my brain's content and state. And that is why me-the-person can be considered reliably good (or evil) -- because my behavior has a lawful cause.