And if my losing my house, savings, and freedom would prevent those million losses of life in Iraq, that might be a compelling argument. But it won't. Even if 100 percent of my income went to taxes, it would still be an utterly insignificant fraction of the war budget.
You would need a very high percentage of the country to stop paying their taxes to actually affect the war funding, so the real comparison is a couple of hundred million people imprisoned and reduced to abject poverty vs. a million lost lives, and that isn't as clear cut.
Even if that were possible (there are plenty of people who still support the damn thing), the government isn't like your deadbeat roommate, who if you don't give him money for beer will just have to go without. The government already runs at a deficit, spending money that they don't have. The whole Iraq war to date has been largely funded by simply throwing the notion of a balanced budget out the window and growing the national debt. In a very real way, it isn't my tax dollars paying for it at all -- it's paid for with money that the government borrowed or invented.
Ruining your life for a symbolic gesture that will have no effect on the rest of the world isn't "taking action" -- it's just being an idiot.
The problem with mirror marking a dog is that they are too easy going. People dress them up in ridiculous bows and outfits all the time, and they just go on grinning. As long as they aren't uncomfortable, they don't care what they look like.
If you put some stickers on a dog and show him a mirror, he may very well recognize himself without making any attempt to remove them. He'll just think, "I've got stickers! I must have been a good boy!"
The mirror marking test can prove self-awareness if the animal responds to seeing the marks, and doesn't respond to the "invisible" marks, as with the magpies. But it can't disprove self-awareness.
I'd never do cocaine-- taking something that has a 1/100,000 chance of killing you the first time you use it isn't my thing.
Not that I disagree with you, but a 1/100,000 chance of killing you the first time you use it doesn't sound all that scary. . . ever had peanut butter? The odds of that killing you the first time you use it are 10 times greater. (1 in 10000 chance of death, with 1 in 200 being allergic).
Anybody who'd like to could easily clone this app from scratch, since it basically does nothing, and make it available for free, if not through the app store, then through Installer.app (or whatever they changed it's name to).
The author of the real "I Am Rich" could perhaps sue for copyright infringement if he could figure out who did it, but regardless, that would allow anyone who wanted it to install the knock-off "I Am Rich" and with all the press the real one has gotten, they could appear to be one of the people that blew 1000 bucks on it -- though why anybody would want to fake being a moron is beyond me.
Granted, a knock-off copy of the app wouldn't "affirm" your wealth, in the sense that it would be a false affirmation, but then that's true of the real one too -- someone could have blown the only 1000 dollars they had in the world on it, or bought it by "mistake."
So the app's function can be performed by something inexpensive. Just like a fake Rolex, or a counterfeit designer handbag, we could soon have counterfiet "I Am Rich".
And that idea makes me happy. It's nice when stupid people identify themselves up front; it saves the rest of us a lot of time.
I would carry my secret data on it. The border agents might take my laptop, cellphone, music player, and perhaps my pants, but hopefully they will leave me my passport.
On the other hand, your analogy compares one type of deliberate physical harm with another type of deliberate physical harm. The real case involves deliberate psychological harm leading to indeliberate (arguably) physical harm. Still pretty different.
Granted. I was addressing the specific issue of whether knowing the girl was prone to depression should make any difference, and you seem to be addressing the issue of whether or not being mean to someone should ever constitute a crime. In that wider scope of discussion, my analogy is inadequate.
How about this... you're in high school, a very ugly girl asks you to a dance, and you say "No, you're too ugly." Is that criminal to you? Does it depend on whether she commits suicide that night?
No and no. But that scenario differs from the actual one in two important respects. Firstly, what you are describing is a single callous remark, delivered in a cruel, but not premeditated way. It's mean, but it doesn't constitute an ongoing campaign to torment someone. Secondly, neither of the people involved in that scenario are adults.
Anyway, the bigger issue is that there's almost no way for this type of psychological damage to be completely the fault of one person. You think Lori Drew is the first person who has ever been mean to the victim? It's been said elsewhere that the victim had extreme emotional issues before this took place. Who's to blame for those, and why aren't they being prosecuted as well? If it's purely chemical, then let's prosecute her parents for not providing adequate care.
I don't think Lori Drew was the first person to be mean to the victim. But I'm sure most of them fall into a scenario like the one you describe above -- I would wager that none of the other individuals who were ever mean to her did any planning, or made being mean to this girl into a damn project. And I'll wager none of the others were adults. It doesn't matter whether Lori Drew was the sole single cause of the girl's suicide -- few things ever have single causes. What matters is whether she was a significant enough contributing cause to be criminally liable for it, and she ought to be. It was bullying, and there's no excuse for an adult bullying a child.
To go back to your wound/murder analogy, how about if 20 people throw knives at someone and that person dies. Now the coroner determines that the victim could have survived 19 knives, but not 20. So the state picks one of the 20 people at random and charges them with murder and the other 19 with assault. Fair? If not, how is that different?
Obviously not. But that's another straw man. If you really need me to explain how it is different: Lori Drew is not one of 20 people who did exactly the same thing to the girl and then got picked "at random" as being the culpable one. She is singled out for being the most significant and immediate cause, for being the only one acting with premeditation, and for being the only one who is considered under the law to be responsible for her own actions. Instead of everybody throwing knives, lets say that a handful of schizophrenics are gathered around someone and punching him. Another person, who is NOT legally insane, comes along and stabs him. It's perfectly fair to single out the person with the knife. The schizophrenics don't know what they're doing, and while contributing to the death, are not the most significant and immediate cause.
Okay let's add another level. There is a 21st person who sat there watching. The person was still alive when the 20 knife throwers left. Instead of helping the victim, this 21st person just laughed and said "Loser, you should have dodged those knives!" and then walks away. Should that person be prosecuted for something? Now how about in the real case, all the people who *could* have helped the victim simply by being nice to her, but chose not to because she was "weird" or a "loser" that they didn't want to hang out with?
No, no they shouldn't be. I fail to see how that contradicts anything I've said.
No, I got the second part of your analogy. You said that if a person opened the bag of peanuts and didn't know the person next to them was allergic, they should not be prosecuted, but if they did know and put peanuts in their food they should. You suggested that if Lori Drew didn't know the child was troubled, she should not be prosecuted, and if she did know she should. (Or at least that that is how a future law should be written).
I'm saying that her actions should be illegal regardless of whether or not she knew the child had psychological issues -- because unlike your analogy in which you compare a complete accident to a deliberate murder, the real situation is more like comparing a deliberate wounding to a deliberate murder.
Your analogy compares an act not intended to harm with one that is intended to harm. In the real situation, there was definitely an intention to harm, and whether or not she knew the child was troubled only affects the degree to which the harm was intended.
Again, though -- while her actions should be illegal regardless, she should not be prosecuted with the bogus charges they've actually brought against her. I would think they could do better.
That's not a very compelling analogy, because if you don't know the person next to you is allergic, opening the bag of peanuts is a completely innocuous act. You are describing a scenario in which an everyday action happens to kill someone, with no intent whatsoever. In Lori Drew's case, it was a deliberate malicious action intended to cause emotional suffering that happened to kill someone. Drew may not have intended the kid to kill herself, but she definitely intended her to suffer, and that makes it rather irrelevant whether or not she knew the child was troubled.
A better analogy would be if instead of opening a bag of peanuts, you pulled out a knife and stabbed the guy next to you in the shoulder. You only intend it to be a flesh wound, but it turns out he's a hemophiliac and bleeds to death. That's definitely still a murder.
For the record, I don't want to see Lori Drew prosecuted on the bogus overly broad charges they are bringing her up on. They would set a terrible precedent. If there is really no better law to charge her under, then I would be comfortable seeing her lose a wrongful death suit instead, and spend the rest of her life effectively in indentured labor to the girl's family. But I don't get why this isn't prosecuted as child abuse or harassment.
You are conflating the notions of "Private Property" and "No Trespassing." A sign indicating that some area is private property does not mean you can't be there. It simply informs you that you are not on public land, and that the owner of the property thus has certain rights to enforce the rules of their choosing.
A shopping mall, for example, may make a rule stating that nobody under 18 can be in the mall without an accompanying guardian after 5 pm, or establish rules for where you can and cannot park your car, or ban skateboarding on the premises. A country club may ask you to leave because of your terrible BO. Whatever. The point is that it just means you are not on public land.
A "No Trespassing" sign, on the other hand, both establishes that the land is private property (or government controlled, I suppose), and that the owner's rules include "don't set foot here without my explicit consent".
"No Trespassing" usually implies "Private Property" but not vice-versa.
Well I did read the article, and it is a clear cut case of FUD. The law says only that these schools must be able to prove that the person enrolled is the person doing the work.
All that crap about requiring them to put cameras in students homes is just some disingenuous person trying to claim that that is what it would take, because they don't think colleges have that verification responsibility.
What this really comes down to is that most distance learning institutions require students to take their exams at a testing center, where they provide identification and are under the observation of a proctor. And those that don't are raising a fuss because they would prefer not to pay for that.
FUD is exactly what it is -- the are proposing the most ridiculous solution that they can think of to bring them into compliance with such a law, because they would prefer not to have to comply at all.
I was positive the boy was going to die. . . because as far as I know from my limited exposure to the comics and eager consumption of the animated series, Barbara Gordon was an only child.
Interesting coincidence, I hadn't caught that. However, I doubt it is significant -- so far they've stayed pretty true to the character names and backgrounds from the comics, and the Riddler was certainly never a lawyer named Reese. He was an inventor named Edward Nigma, and I doubt they would stray on that.
I agree with you about how this sort of thing isn't worth thinking about, but I think that it is the desire to have the code consistent rather than one way or the other that *leads* to people arguing about it in the first place. I think most developers would agree that things like this are small potatoes, but once somebody makes an issue of it, everybody is on one side or the other. It's just like that war in Gulliver's Travels between Liliput and Blefuscu, over which end of an egg should be opened first.
For example, I don't really care much if someone puts their braces on a separate line or not. I can read it easily either way. That being said, I do it one particular way, because that's the way I'm comfortable with and in the habit of. Once someone comes along and says "We're going to have a standard for this," I will fight tooth and nail to make sure MY way is the standard, because otherwise I will be constantly having to remember to do it a different way, or constantly reformatting my code. It slows me down and keeps me from getting into a good groove if I'm always stopping to "correct" my formatting.
I say things like this are so trivial, that I don't need them to be consistent. Let each developer do it however he or she likes -- it won't bother me if they do it differently than I do. Being forced to do it in a way that is unnatural for me does bother me.
And eggs should be opened on the wide end, dammit!
If you consider that radical conservatism ("Let's change NOTHING! Everything must stay as it is, even what's wrong!") is one extreme, and radical progressism ("Let's change EVERYTHING! Nothing must stay as it is, even what works!") is another, then the middle ground between these two conflicting positions is precisely keeping what works and changing what doesn't.
Sadly, no. Changing what works and keeping what doesn't is also precisely in the middle.
The reason people commit $5000 property crimes is specifically because the police no longer bother to investigate.
If the police thoroughly investigated and had a high conviction ratio on even a relatively small number of crimes, people would be less likely to try it.
I don't disagree with you in the slightest on this point. Too bad we don't live in an ideal world with an unlimited supply of manpower. How much more would you be willing to pay in taxes to get every petty theft investigated?
Yes, I had that exact thought. And I'll admit that I had taken the physical aspects of my security for granted. Automatic Login was on, and if the guy had been a little more intelligent or motivated, he'd have been able to find everything he needed to steal my identity. Fortunately he wasn't that bright, and having the machine in a state where he could use it without changing a thing led to my getting it back.
In the future, I imagine I will still leave Automatic Login turned on. . . I'll just install actual tracking software and be sure to encrypt my sensitive data from now on. The less reason you give them to reinstall, the better the tracking software will work.
In my experience (meaning this is of course only anecdotal evidence) it all has to do with their manpower vs. the likelihood of making an arrest.
In my case for example, the house was burglarized. My alarm system went off, and the police did respond, but as I understand it, they noted that the door was open, and that was it. My friend who was house sitting had to call them back to fill out a proper report with the things she could tell were missing, and when I got back into town I dropped by the precinct with a written, detailed list of everything taken. At this point they did not have anyone assigned to investigate -- they basically take a report so you can send it to your insurance company, and that's all they do. So you're right about that.
But they aren't wrong to do that, exactly -- they have limited resources, and as a citizen I don't necessarily want them wasting their time on a case with no witnesses, no suspect, and no leads. A 5000 dollar property crime doesn't exactly warrant bringing in the CSI team to look for DNA. If it did, they would need a hell of a lot of CSI teams. I'd rather they spend their time and money catching violent offenders.
But when I ended up with the IP address that could lead them to the stolen property, suddenly they were more than willing to help. They assigned a detective, who took what I had and ran with it, because suddenly the solveability of the case had gone from a low probability and high difficulty to good probability and low effort. I'm nobody important, I assure you. Just a guy that had an actual lead.
Maybe I'm giving people too much credit, but I think most police (I've met some assholes too, I assure you) really do want to help -- it's just a matter of how best to spend their limited time and budgets.
The important thing is to provide all the relevant details when you file a police report -- model, color, and most importantly serial number. If you don't file a police report, then nothing has been stolen as far as the law is concerned.
I did not have my serial number written down anywhere, but when my house was burglarized a few months ago and my Macbook Pro was stolen, Apple was able to provide me with it along with a copy of my invoice. I made sure the police report had the serial number in it, even though I did not have any special software installed for tracking it.
A few weeks later, I found a bunch of new bookmarks in my browser that I didn't recognize and I realized whatever fool had my laptop had not bothered to re-image it, and was still using my Firefox profile, which was still connected to my Foxmarks account.
So I changed them all to point to a redirect page on my own webserver, and set up a cron job to watch the logs and email me whenever it got a hit. Foxmarks dutifully synced my changes down to my stolen laptop the next time the guy opened Firefox, and suddenly I had his I.P. address. He sent it to me several times a day, and it was always from the same IP.
Now, the police in my precinct are not technical, but I called them and left a message explaining the information I had, and referencing my case number, and making it very clear that all they needed to do was get a subpoena to get the subscriber information from Comcast. It took about a week for someone to call me back to find out what the hell I was talking about, about 20 minutes on the phone for me to give him a brief "TCP/IP 101," and then about three more weeks for them to get the paperwork through the courts. But then one day the detective called me up, told me he was standing in the suspect's apartment, and asked me where to find the serial number on the laptop.
I told him how to remove the battery and find the serial number, he matched it against the police report, and I had it back a couple of hours later. The guy that was using it got charged with a felony (receiving and concealing stolen property).
All of my personal files were still on the laptop, just moved into the trash bin. Along with several pictures of the guy and his buddies mugging for the camera and throwing gang signs. (These, of course, I burned to a CD and gave to the police).
Anyway, my point is just that even though the cops are usually not remotely technical, they will follow up on this sort of thing if you are polite, take the time to explain the technology, and make sure to follow procedure by filing a detailed report as soon as your laptop is stolen.
I'll definitely be installing this software on the laptop as soon as I have a free moment -- I got lucky with Foxmarks, but it's better to be prepared than lucky.
It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. If you vote against it, your opponents will pick out all the sensible provisions of the bill that no sane person could disgree with (I'm not saying there are any in this case, haven't read the bill) and plaster the airwaves with attack ads about how you opposed all of these obviously good provisions. If you vote for it, you will be passing into the reprehensible provisions of the bill that have come along for the ride.
That's WHY the bill is written to be overly broad in the first place. It's called politics and it sucks. Doesn't help to blame "the author" either, because the damn things are authored by committee -- amend it to add this, amend it to reword that, etc.
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And if my losing my house, savings, and freedom would prevent those million losses of life in Iraq, that might be a compelling argument. But it won't. Even if 100 percent of my income went to taxes, it would still be an utterly insignificant fraction of the war budget.
You would need a very high percentage of the country to stop paying their taxes to actually affect the war funding, so the real comparison is a couple of hundred million people imprisoned and reduced to abject poverty vs. a million lost lives, and that isn't as clear cut.
Even if that were possible (there are plenty of people who still support the damn thing), the government isn't like your deadbeat roommate, who if you don't give him money for beer will just have to go without. The government already runs at a deficit, spending money that they don't have. The whole Iraq war to date has been largely funded by simply throwing the notion of a balanced budget out the window and growing the national debt. In a very real way, it isn't my tax dollars paying for it at all -- it's paid for with money that the government borrowed or invented.
Ruining your life for a symbolic gesture that will have no effect on the rest of the world isn't "taking action" -- it's just being an idiot.
The problem with mirror marking a dog is that they are too easy going. People dress them up in ridiculous bows and outfits all the time, and they just go on grinning. As long as they aren't uncomfortable, they don't care what they look like.
If you put some stickers on a dog and show him a mirror, he may very well recognize himself without making any attempt to remove them. He'll just think, "I've got stickers! I must have been a good boy!"
The mirror marking test can prove self-awareness if the animal responds to seeing the marks, and doesn't respond to the "invisible" marks, as with the magpies. But it can't disprove self-awareness.
I'd never do cocaine-- taking something that has a 1/100,000 chance of killing you the first time you use it isn't my thing.
Not that I disagree with you, but a 1/100,000 chance of killing you the first time you use it doesn't sound all that scary. . . ever had peanut butter? The odds of that killing you the first time you use it are 10 times greater. (1 in 10000 chance of death, with 1 in 200 being allergic).
Anybody who'd like to could easily clone this app from scratch, since it basically does nothing, and make it available for free, if not through the app store, then through Installer.app (or whatever they changed it's name to).
The author of the real "I Am Rich" could perhaps sue for copyright infringement if he could figure out who did it, but regardless, that would allow anyone who wanted it to install the knock-off "I Am Rich" and with all the press the real one has gotten, they could appear to be one of the people that blew 1000 bucks on it -- though why anybody would want to fake being a moron is beyond me.
Granted, a knock-off copy of the app wouldn't "affirm" your wealth, in the sense that it would be a false affirmation, but then that's true of the real one too -- someone could have blown the only 1000 dollars they had in the world on it, or bought it by "mistake."
So the app's function can be performed by something inexpensive. Just like a fake Rolex, or a counterfeit designer handbag, we could soon have counterfiet "I Am Rich".
And that idea makes me happy. It's nice when stupid people identify themselves up front; it saves the rest of us a lot of time.
I would carry my secret data on it. The border agents might take my laptop, cellphone, music player, and perhaps my pants, but hopefully they will leave me my passport.
On the other hand, your analogy compares one type of deliberate physical harm with another type of deliberate physical harm. The real case involves deliberate psychological harm leading to indeliberate (arguably) physical harm. Still pretty different.
Granted. I was addressing the specific issue of whether knowing the girl was prone to depression should make any difference, and you seem to be addressing the issue of whether or not being mean to someone should ever constitute a crime. In that wider scope of discussion, my analogy is inadequate.
How about this... you're in high school, a very ugly girl asks you to a dance, and you say "No, you're too ugly." Is that criminal to you? Does it depend on whether she commits suicide that night?
No and no. But that scenario differs from the actual one in two important respects. Firstly, what you are describing is a single callous remark, delivered in a cruel, but not premeditated way. It's mean, but it doesn't constitute an ongoing campaign to torment someone. Secondly, neither of the people involved in that scenario are adults.
Anyway, the bigger issue is that there's almost no way for this type of psychological damage to be completely the fault of one person. You think Lori Drew is the first person who has ever been mean to the victim? It's been said elsewhere that the victim had extreme emotional issues before this took place. Who's to blame for those, and why aren't they being prosecuted as well? If it's purely chemical, then let's prosecute her parents for not providing adequate care.
I don't think Lori Drew was the first person to be mean to the victim. But I'm sure most of them fall into a scenario like the one you describe above -- I would wager that none of the other individuals who were ever mean to her did any planning, or made being mean to this girl into a damn project. And I'll wager none of the others were adults. It doesn't matter whether Lori Drew was the sole single cause of the girl's suicide -- few things ever have single causes. What matters is whether she was a significant enough contributing cause to be criminally liable for it, and she ought to be. It was bullying, and there's no excuse for an adult bullying a child.
To go back to your wound/murder analogy, how about if 20 people throw knives at someone and that person dies. Now the coroner determines that the victim could have survived 19 knives, but not 20. So the state picks one of the 20 people at random and charges them with murder and the other 19 with assault. Fair? If not, how is that different?
Obviously not. But that's another straw man. If you really need me to explain how it is different: Lori Drew is not one of 20 people who did exactly the same thing to the girl and then got picked "at random" as being the culpable one. She is singled out for being the most significant and immediate cause, for being the only one acting with premeditation, and for being the only one who is considered under the law to be responsible for her own actions. Instead of everybody throwing knives, lets say that a handful of schizophrenics are gathered around someone and punching him. Another person, who is NOT legally insane, comes along and stabs him. It's perfectly fair to single out the person with the knife. The schizophrenics don't know what they're doing, and while contributing to the death, are not the most significant and immediate cause.
Okay let's add another level. There is a 21st person who sat there watching. The person was still alive when the 20 knife throwers left. Instead of helping the victim, this 21st person just laughed and said "Loser, you should have dodged those knives!" and then walks away. Should that person be prosecuted for something? Now how about in the real case, all the people who *could* have helped the victim simply by being nice to her, but chose not to because she was "weird" or a "loser" that they didn't want to hang out with?
No, no they shouldn't be. I fail to see how that contradicts anything I've said.
No, I got the second part of your analogy. You said that if a person opened the bag of peanuts and didn't know the person next to them was allergic, they should not be prosecuted, but if they did know and put peanuts in their food they should. You suggested that if Lori Drew didn't know the child was troubled, she should not be prosecuted, and if she did know she should. (Or at least that that is how a future law should be written).
I'm saying that her actions should be illegal regardless of whether or not she knew the child had psychological issues -- because unlike your analogy in which you compare a complete accident to a deliberate murder, the real situation is more like comparing a deliberate wounding to a deliberate murder.
Your analogy compares an act not intended to harm with one that is intended to harm. In the real situation, there was definitely an intention to harm, and whether or not she knew the child was troubled only affects the degree to which the harm was intended.
Again, though -- while her actions should be illegal regardless, she should not be prosecuted with the bogus charges they've actually brought against her. I would think they could do better.
That's not a very compelling analogy, because if you don't know the person next to you is allergic, opening the bag of peanuts is a completely innocuous act. You are describing a scenario in which an everyday action happens to kill someone, with no intent whatsoever. In Lori Drew's case, it was a deliberate malicious action intended to cause emotional suffering that happened to kill someone. Drew may not have intended the kid to kill herself, but she definitely intended her to suffer, and that makes it rather irrelevant whether or not she knew the child was troubled.
A better analogy would be if instead of opening a bag of peanuts, you pulled out a knife and stabbed the guy next to you in the shoulder. You only intend it to be a flesh wound, but it turns out he's a hemophiliac and bleeds to death. That's definitely still a murder.
For the record, I don't want to see Lori Drew prosecuted on the bogus overly broad charges they are bringing her up on. They would set a terrible precedent. If there is really no better law to charge her under, then I would be comfortable seeing her lose a wrongful death suit instead, and spend the rest of her life effectively in indentured labor to the girl's family. But I don't get why this isn't prosecuted as child abuse or harassment.
Just because they are the ones canceling the contract doesn't mean they won't charge you the "early termination" fee.
You are conflating the notions of "Private Property" and "No Trespassing." A sign indicating that some area is private property does not mean you can't be there. It simply informs you that you are not on public land, and that the owner of the property thus has certain rights to enforce the rules of their choosing.
A shopping mall, for example, may make a rule stating that nobody under 18 can be in the mall without an accompanying guardian after 5 pm, or establish rules for where you can and cannot park your car, or ban skateboarding on the premises. A country club may ask you to leave because of your terrible BO. Whatever. The point is that it just means you are not on public land.
A "No Trespassing" sign, on the other hand, both establishes that the land is private property (or government controlled, I suppose), and that the owner's rules include "don't set foot here without my explicit consent".
"No Trespassing" usually implies "Private Property" but not vice-versa.
Did you go to Hollywood Upstairs Medical College, too?
Well I did read the article, and it is a clear cut case of FUD. The law says only that these schools must be able to prove that the person enrolled is the person doing the work.
All that crap about requiring them to put cameras in students homes is just some disingenuous person trying to claim that that is what it would take, because they don't think colleges have that verification responsibility.
What this really comes down to is that most distance learning institutions require students to take their exams at a testing center, where they provide identification and are under the observation of a proctor. And those that don't are raising a fuss because they would prefer not to pay for that.
FUD is exactly what it is -- the are proposing the most ridiculous solution that they can think of to bring them into compliance with such a law, because they would prefer not to have to comply at all.
I was positive the boy was going to die. . . because as far as I know from my limited exposure to the comics and eager consumption of the animated series, Barbara Gordon was an only child.
Interesting coincidence, I hadn't caught that. However, I doubt it is significant -- so far they've stayed pretty true to the character names and backgrounds from the comics, and the Riddler was certainly never a lawyer named Reese. He was an inventor named Edward Nigma, and I doubt they would stray on that.
He did say he was going for Rachel. He thought he was going for Rachel. The joker lied, get it?
I agree with you about how this sort of thing isn't worth thinking about, but I think that it is the desire to have the code consistent rather than one way or the other that *leads* to people arguing about it in the first place. I think most developers would agree that things like this are small potatoes, but once somebody makes an issue of it, everybody is on one side or the other. It's just like that war in Gulliver's Travels between Liliput and Blefuscu, over which end of an egg should be opened first.
For example, I don't really care much if someone puts their braces on a separate line or not. I can read it easily either way. That being said, I do it one particular way, because that's the way I'm comfortable with and in the habit of. Once someone comes along and says "We're going to have a standard for this," I will fight tooth and nail to make sure MY way is the standard, because otherwise I will be constantly having to remember to do it a different way, or constantly reformatting my code. It slows me down and keeps me from getting into a good groove if I'm always stopping to "correct" my formatting.
I say things like this are so trivial, that I don't need them to be consistent. Let each developer do it however he or she likes -- it won't bother me if they do it differently than I do. Being forced to do it in a way that is unnatural for me does bother me.
And eggs should be opened on the wide end, dammit!
If you consider that radical conservatism ("Let's change NOTHING! Everything must stay as it is, even what's wrong!") is one extreme, and radical progressism ("Let's change EVERYTHING! Nothing must stay as it is, even what works!") is another, then the middle ground between these two conflicting positions is precisely keeping what works and changing what doesn't.
Sadly, no. Changing what works and keeping what doesn't is also precisely in the middle.
The reason people commit $5000 property crimes is specifically because the police no longer bother to investigate.
If the police thoroughly investigated and had a high conviction ratio on even a relatively small number of crimes, people would be less likely to try it.
I don't disagree with you in the slightest on this point. Too bad we don't live in an ideal world with an unlimited supply of manpower. How much more would you be willing to pay in taxes to get every petty theft investigated?
I'm sure Intel will release a patch. ;)
Yes, I had that exact thought. And I'll admit that I had taken the physical aspects of my security for granted. Automatic Login was on, and if the guy had been a little more intelligent or motivated, he'd have been able to find everything he needed to steal my identity. Fortunately he wasn't that bright, and having the machine in a state where he could use it without changing a thing led to my getting it back.
In the future, I imagine I will still leave Automatic Login turned on. . . I'll just install actual tracking software and be sure to encrypt my sensitive data from now on. The less reason you give them to reinstall, the better the tracking software will work.
In my experience (meaning this is of course only anecdotal evidence) it all has to do with their manpower vs. the likelihood of making an arrest.
In my case for example, the house was burglarized. My alarm system went off, and the police did respond, but as I understand it, they noted that the door was open, and that was it. My friend who was house sitting had to call them back to fill out a proper report with the things she could tell were missing, and when I got back into town I dropped by the precinct with a written, detailed list of everything taken. At this point they did not have anyone assigned to investigate -- they basically take a report so you can send it to your insurance company, and that's all they do. So you're right about that.
But they aren't wrong to do that, exactly -- they have limited resources, and as a citizen I don't necessarily want them wasting their time on a case with no witnesses, no suspect, and no leads. A 5000 dollar property crime doesn't exactly warrant bringing in the CSI team to look for DNA. If it did, they would need a hell of a lot of CSI teams. I'd rather they spend their time and money catching violent offenders.
But when I ended up with the IP address that could lead them to the stolen property, suddenly they were more than willing to help. They assigned a detective, who took what I had and ran with it, because suddenly the solveability of the case had gone from a low probability and high difficulty to good probability and low effort. I'm nobody important, I assure you. Just a guy that had an actual lead.
Maybe I'm giving people too much credit, but I think most police (I've met some assholes too, I assure you) really do want to help -- it's just a matter of how best to spend their limited time and budgets.
The important thing is to provide all the relevant details when you file a police report -- model, color, and most importantly serial number. If you don't file a police report, then nothing has been stolen as far as the law is concerned.
I did not have my serial number written down anywhere, but when my house was burglarized a few months ago and my Macbook Pro was stolen, Apple was able to provide me with it along with a copy of my invoice. I made sure the police report had the serial number in it, even though I did not have any special software installed for tracking it.
A few weeks later, I found a bunch of new bookmarks in my browser that I didn't recognize and I realized whatever fool had my laptop had not bothered to re-image it, and was still using my Firefox profile, which was still connected to my Foxmarks account.
So I changed them all to point to a redirect page on my own webserver, and set up a cron job to watch the logs and email me whenever it got a hit. Foxmarks dutifully synced my changes down to my stolen laptop the next time the guy opened Firefox, and suddenly I had his I.P. address. He sent it to me several times a day, and it was always from the same IP.
Now, the police in my precinct are not technical, but I called them and left a message explaining the information I had, and referencing my case number, and making it very clear that all they needed to do was get a subpoena to get the subscriber information from Comcast. It took about a week for someone to call me back to find out what the hell I was talking about, about 20 minutes on the phone for me to give him a brief "TCP/IP 101," and then about three more weeks for them to get the paperwork through the courts. But then one day the detective called me up, told me he was standing in the suspect's apartment, and asked me where to find the serial number on the laptop.
I told him how to remove the battery and find the serial number, he matched it against the police report, and I had it back a couple of hours later. The guy that was using it got charged with a felony (receiving and concealing stolen property).
All of my personal files were still on the laptop, just moved into the trash bin. Along with several pictures of the guy and his buddies mugging for the camera and throwing gang signs. (These, of course, I burned to a CD and gave to the police).
Anyway, my point is just that even though the cops are usually not remotely technical, they will follow up on this sort of thing if you are polite, take the time to explain the technology, and make sure to follow procedure by filing a detailed report as soon as your laptop is stolen.
I'll definitely be installing this software on the laptop as soon as I have a free moment -- I got lucky with Foxmarks, but it's better to be prepared than lucky.
It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't scenario. If you vote against it, your opponents will pick out all the sensible provisions of the bill that no sane person could disgree with (I'm not saying there are any in this case, haven't read the bill) and plaster the airwaves with attack ads about how you opposed all of these obviously good provisions. If you vote for it, you will be passing into the reprehensible provisions of the bill that have come along for the ride.
That's WHY the bill is written to be overly broad in the first place. It's called politics and it sucks. Doesn't help to blame "the author" either, because the damn things are authored by committee -- amend it to add this, amend it to reword that, etc.
He already told you -- Canada. (And wow, I knew their dollar was stronger than ours now, but damn. Maybe he meant litres?).
Touche'. I concede the point.