Hey, what do you have against Mike Rowe? That guy's an American hero. Not only is he the host of Dirty Jobs, one of the few good shows on Discovery channel (the other being Mythbusters), but he's also a very outspoken supporter of the trades and American blue-collar workers. He's even got a website dedicated to the issue of the decline in trades jobs/workers in America, which has been a contributing factor to the collapse of our physical infrastructure.
But, seriously, I absolutely agree with you. The domain name registration system is all fucked up. The registrars (the most successful of which typically have had close ties to the InterNIC/ICANN board) are making a killing already selling virtual goods (it's like printing money). The least they can do is to mitigate domain-squatting and domain-hijacking rather than to cooperate with and try to profit off of helping those scummy companies.
I don't know why being sick of scummy business practices make you a socialist, but if trademarks were abused in the same fashion we'd quickly start running out of legible company or product names. Oh, you want to register a company name that doesn't substitute numbers for letters or incorporate creative misspellings? That will be $5000, please.
I can understand the argument that capitalism is desirable for promoting healthy competition, driving down costs and increases product/service quality. But how do domain squatters/prospectors contribute anything positive to society? By driving the cost of decent domain names up? That benefits only the domain squatters/prospectors. They're the definition of a parasitic establishment—one whose actions benefits only themselves while harming the rest of society and draining its resources.
That may be true (I've never read the comic books. I've only recently started delving into graphic novels, though primarily for the artwork.), but then it still means that DC has much higher quality properties than Marvel. That is, of course, unless Watchmen (and Batman to a slightly lesser degree) is just a one-off and not representative of the overall quality of DC's properties.
Are there any other comic series that are similar in quality to Watchmen, either by DC or other publishers? A lot of the series that I've looked into so far (mostly Marvel and DC) seem a bit formulaic. The artwork is amazing, but the format seems to follow set rules & patterns without much deviation. I guess part of it might be that most of Marvel's properties reside in the same universe, but there's probably still some room for experimentation there.
It also seems like, in general, Japanese mangas have better-developed stories than American comics. I remember reading Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT as a child and each volume being at least 100 pages or longer—not A4 of course, and the artwork (all B&W) is no where near as good as American comics, but the greater number of panels does allow for better storytelling, I think. I mean, comics like Fantastic Four or Superman, while entertaining in their own right, just don't resonate with me as much as mangas like Akira or Ghost in the Shell. I dunno, maybe I just have different tastes, or perhaps I just haven't really seen all that comics have to offer.
That's a very good point, and I think that's probably how most industries look at it. And I do understand the logic in that, but you're still left with the problem that marketing muscle more often determines a product's success than the merits of the product itself (i.e. how much the consumer benefits from it). Though I suppose part of the problem with industries like music and games is that the market is so over-saturated that the only way to break out of the noise is to put a ton of money into marketing.
I was simply stating what my experiences have been, as the summary asked if other industries spend similar proportions on marketing versus product development. I made no comment on whether marketing is good or bad, and I would have quite liked to hear the "b-school info on the actual purpose of ads," actually. (Doesn't it make more sense to share that knowledge knowing that the rest of us lowly non-b-school-graduates aren't privy to it?)
And a friendly tip from one slashdotter to another: it's probably a good idea to try to keep a cool head when you're posting a comment. A level head means you're less likely to say something incredibly stupid or come off as a troll or some angry teenager. So stop foaming at the mouth and cheer up. =]
Indie bands suck? That's your opinion; the rest of that sentence doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Except for manufactured pop groups like O-town or Backstreet Boys, every band starts off as an indie. Majors would never invest in the money to develop a fresh new band who's never recorded a prior album or doesn't already have a well-established fan base. Very, very few bands go straight from learning how to play their instruments in their garage to signing a multimillion-dollar contract with EMI/Warner Music/Sony BMG/Universal, or one of their subsidiaries. So you probably didn't think that one through...
Meh... DC Comics' Watchmen movie has blown away any of the comic book films produced by Marvel so far. Some of the X-men films have been pretty good, but none of the other Marvel films have been all that great. I'd prefer they make fewer films, spending more time and effort on the ones they do make. I don't know if the Batman films are really based on the comic books, but the recent titles have been of much higher caliber than crap like Spider-man 3, Elektra, Daredevil, Punisher (2004), Hulk (2003), etc. The other Spider-man films, the Blade trilogy, The Incredible Hulk (2008), and Punisher: War Zone (2008) are all good action movies, but not cinematic masterpieces by any means.
At least they're starting to get the casting right, I suppose.
Yea, but torrents still don't have the selection (or diversity of subjects) of books that libraries have. I've tried to find a lot of fairly popular books, but aside from well-known classics or very very mainstream titles (e.g. Harry Potter), you'll be hard pressed to find on torrents. And even then, book torrents tend to have very short shelf-lives (no pun intended). I often come across torrents of books I'm searching for, only to find that they were posted 2-3 years ago and are long dead.
Google Book Search was such a promising project. And the company itself has proven to be trustworthy (with them resisting government subpoenas and fighting to withhold user data from government agencies, unlike some other megacorporations). I was so disappointed when it was complaints over copyright violations by publishers rather than any technological or resource limitations that crippled the project (basically killing the project as it was originally conceived). So instead of giving every child, every student, and indeed every person with a computer and internet connection, free and instant access to all the literature humanity has ever published (ie. the largest corpus of human knowledge ever compiled) in a fully indexed, cataloged, and searchable digital format, we instead just have a small dappling of publisher-provided promotional samples of old, semi-obscure texts that aren't selling that well in stores.
Somehow we decided as a society (we're supposedly a "democracy" after all) that commercial profits are more important than the huge boon to society that such a cultural & informational/educational resource would have been. It would have been less of an affront if it had been a coalition of authors who objected to the project's existence in its original form. And even if publishers are worried that this would have threatened their profits, it would have been far more preferable to work out some kind of deal in which the digital library would be publicly-subsidized, with that money being used to compensate publishers (within reason). I'd be willing to pay more in taxes to support such a project.
Just like public education caused a cultural revolution (or evolution) in our society, I imagine making published materials so much more accessible, and to so many more people, in one fell swoop would have similarly caused an intellectual revolution (internationally). Every computer would immediately become the largest library in the world. Access to books won't ever be limited by the number of physical copies available. Out of print books would never again be lost to society. And people for whom the library is currently not accessible—whether because they have none located near them, lack transportation, are bed-ridden, are blind, or have been subjected to a recent book-burning campaign—would benefit unimaginably from such a resource. I mean, you could go to rural village in a poor developing country, and as long as they had a phone line (you could even get internet access by satellite) you'd be able to set up a $300 computer with a screen reader and give the children in that village access to all the books ever published, even if everyone in the village is illiterate.
The internet itself has been a huge boon to society, but as useful as it is now, it would be a million times more useful if copyright issues took backseat to societal progress and public good.
True. And people also have to stop thinking about the web as merely a short-term/temporary medium. Even forum posts and blog comments can be archived for a very long time and be read by people years after its initial posting. Even assuming that only young people don't know the details of Turing's life, there are plenty of young people who read/., I'm sure. And an even younger generation may come across this submission in years to come. I often come across old/. stories from 8-9 years ago in google results when researching IT/science-related information.
It's always been a pet-peeve of mine that people assume everything published on the web is just going to be temporary and won't be read by anyone in the future. As a result, we have tons of throw-away image hosting services that have contributed to the sea of dead images found on blogs and forums. Really, the web can be a great cultural archive, but not if, every time you come across a web page or news posting from more than 2 years ago, all the images and embedded/linked videos are dead. Even major news sites like Autoblog don't seem to care about if the embedded video in a news story gets removed a few weeks after it gets posted.
As a consumer society, we've evolved to be more responsive to advertising/marketing than actually good products/services. That's why our society has become so (over)saturated with advertising. You may design the best product in the world, but if you don't market it correctly, and no one knows about, then it doesn't really exist. Though the internet has begun changing that through the proliferation of viral marketing—and I don't mean the marketing gimmicks created by hipster "new media" advertising agencies, but rather true word of mouth.
And while I don't have any idea about the cost of marketing versus production in the movie industry, I do have some idea of the figures for the music industry. You can record a professional quality album for as little as $6000 these days. In fact, if you're a DIY kinda person, you can do it for a lot less than that. Heck, even a lot of major label artists are opting to record outside of a professional recording studio, and instead just renting out a house or warehouse and setting up their recording equipment there (and you can actually get some pretty interesting effects this way just by trying out different speaker/mic placements throughout the building). Mastering an album may cost another $3000-4000, but this can be offset sometimes by hiring a producer who does the mastering. I won't include the cost of album design and artwork since that's very variable and could be considered part of marketing. So in total, you're looking at only about $9~10k to produce the album itself.
Now, with most indie labels, you'd hire a publicist to do the majority of the marketing for you (i.e. get your music onto radio stations, get magazine reviews, get magazine/radio interviews, etc.). You might also do in-house marketing, which mainly just involves retail relations, sending out promo CDs, perhaps calling some radio stations to promote your music, submitting one-sheets, paying for magazine ads (this can run pretty high, but is more a function of the size of the label and what you can afford), etc. If you've got distribution through one of the majors (i.e. through a label group like Megaforce) then you also have other marketing/promotion options available to you, like co-op audio booths, co-op ads, etc.
Those are the usual variables/options a mid-sized indie label typically has for promoting a new album. A publicist these days seems to cost about $3000-4000 or more per month per album. A ballpark figure for ad space might be around $3000-4000 a month for a mid-sized indie, though that usually is spread amongst multiple album. And the co-op promotion campaigns through major distributors might run as low as a couple hundred dollars each, and again depends on how much or how little you want to invest in it. Our label probably spends ~$2000 a month on the options offered by our distributor, but, again, these are very rough ball-park figures as each label has their our marketing strategies. The smaller your budget, the more efficiently you're forced to use your resources, and so you might rely primarily on in-house or free marketing (like posting torrents, posting youtube videos, myspace, etc.).
For some of the larger mid-level indies, I'd be willing to bet they spend much more on marketing than on actually producing the album. And for the majors, I have no doubt that they spend far more than 3x as much on marketing as for producing the music. Of course, this doesn't include the cost of the record contract, nor does it take into account touring support in aid of promoting an album.
I don't want to seem rude, as I'm genuinely interested in engaging in fruitful discussions—especially with people with alternate viewpoints—but it doesn't seem possible at this point, especially when I'm still reading stuff like:
Since the dead girl was clinically depressed, she probably was treated so she would not be depressed anymore, right?
or
If I lived there and told some kid that he was stupid and the kid started crying, I would probably be a criminal for doing that.
I don't know if this is a reading comprehension issue, if it's some failing on my part to communicate myself clearly (I tried my best), or if some people just prefer resorting to gross oversimplifications and strawman attacks. I will just reiterate one last time that, no one here is suggesting that hurting someone's feelings should be a crime. It might be criminally negligent to give a toddler a knife, but that doesn't mean you'll be charged with criminal negligence if a fully-cognizant adult cuts themselves with a knife you handed them. As far as specious argumentative tactics go, inapt analogies are probably among the least convincing (and the most crude).
I'm not at all familiar with X-Plane? but is the FAA-certified version already used in science & industry (i.e. by NASA, Boeing, the NTSB, etc.)? In other words, is it accurate enough to actually simulate meaningful training exercises, like certain types of mechanical/electrical/software malfunctions? Can it accurately simulate jet wash, wind shear, microbursts, etc.? I've seen the multi-million-dolar flight simulators used by NASA and major aerospace companies. They seem to be a lot more robust that anything that could be run on a desktop PC. So I'm just wondering if X-Plane is actually of sufficient quality to be useful for something like crash investigation or military training.
Also, the website mentions extensibility and being able to "hack" the software to do more. Would the military be able to customize the software to add combat training capabilities a military flight sim would no doubt need? A military flight simulator probably has some very specific requirements that you aren't going to find in a consumer product. I'm guessing they probably chose to develop their own flight sim because either it's cheaper than licensing commercial solutions, or there are no available flight sims that fit their need. The short-term costs might be higher, but they would have full control of the source code and be able to tailor it to their specific needs (like integration with classified military systems).
I assume you're not familiar at all with clinical depression or the social and legal infrastructure we have to deal with it?
Clearly there are a lot of misconceptions about how clinical depression manifests itself or should be treated. Firstly, depression is not the same as schizophrenic paranoia. By itself, it doesn't make a person act irrationally or become detached from reality. The most common form of clinical depression is bipolar disorder. Even though the disease is not clearly understood by the medical community, it's believed that a chemical imbalance underlies its pathology—serotonin is commonly pointed to as the root cause, but the illness is almost certainly the result of many other different interactions.
So how does clinical depression manifests itself in emotional disorders like bipolar disorder/manic-depression? Well, it's not terribly different from how it manifests itself in everyone else. Everyone gets depressed from time to time. Sometimes people get gloomy or melancholic over their station in life, or they may feel overwhelming sadness at the loss of a spouse or friend. Even someone who isn't clinically depressed can become so depressed that they seek to kill themselves (and some actually do). The difference is one of degree and frequency. A manic-depressive individual going through a depressive episode is much more likely to feel the extreme sadness that most people only feel when a personal tragedy has occurred. Likewise, in their manic stage, they are predisposed towards feelings of great elation that ordinarily accompany something like winning the lottery.
You can also think of it sort of like a scale of emotional disposition. On the one end of the scale you might think of the person as having blunted affect disorder, where they are practically incapable of experiencing or expressing any emotion. On the other end of the scale you'd then have extreme bipolarism, where the person easily experiences the highest of highs, but also the lowest of lows. In a way, you can almost say that manic-depressive disorder is not really a disease. It's just another segment on the spectrum of neurodiversity that makes our society so great. It would not be inaccurate to say that those who have bipolarism have a greater capacity for emotion than those who don't. They exhibit more empathy, and because of the passionate feelings they experience, they become great artists, great writers, great musicians, etc. Quite a few famous and successful people "suffer" from depression.
Part of the problem with diagnosing depression is because there really isn't a discrete cut-off between "normal" and clinically depressed. We can't just prescribe prozac to everyone every time they feel sad. So, for practical purposes, clinical depression is described as depression to such a degree as to interfere with one's ability to function normally. So if one is constantly struggling with their personal responsibilities (work, family, school, etc.) because they are feeling depressed, etc. then they are considered to have a clinical condition.
But even then it makes no sense to put anyone who's clinically depressed in a strait jacket and lock them in a padded room. The mildest forms of clinical depression can be treated with counseling or therapy. People can learn to cope with or manage their depression in such a way that it is no longer so debilitating. In more serious cases, medication is often prescribed in an attempt to correct the chemical imbalance and stabilize one's mood. Only in the most drastic cases are individuals actually institutionalized. And even then, it's typically because the individual suffers from multiple axis I/II mental disorders.
There's also a difference between immediate/acute risk and long-term/statistical risk. A person with clinical depression is not always in immediate risk of hurting themselves. If a bipolar individual is experiencing a manic episode, then suicide is likely the
I suppose any time that public opinion agrees with government action (i.e. any time that the government is acting democratically) it's a tyranny of the masses. That really can't be helped, there will always be a small minority that doesn't agree with the rest of society. As long as it's not the same group of people who are the minority every time, it's really not a problem.
Also, it's up to the judicial system to decide whether a federal/state/local statute has been violated, not you. That's what court cases are for. And there has certainly been precedence for this type of prosecution. If there's a building about to be demolished, and I see a child walk in there, and I neither stop her nor warn the demolition team, then I can still be held liable in my inaction. And that is even without malice.
Our laws are pretty stupid, but luckily they're not as stupid as you seem to think they are. They do a half-decent job of protecting the vulnerable. I mean, that's what the justice system is there for—to protect the public. Certain segments of society are more vulnerable than others, and that is why they receive greater protection under the law. Here you have a fully mentally-capable adult preying on a child with a mental disability. Children are quite emotionally vulnerable enough on their own. But when a child suffers from clinical depression and is thus runs a high risk of self-harm or suicide, then it becomes a highly dangerous and potentially lethal situation. Our legal establishment would be remiss if it did not seek to prevent such dangerous situations from arising.
No, not jail. But you should probably go back to Philosophy 101: Intro to Logic for using such a bad analogy.
Certain portions of any society's population are more easily victimized (and more vulnerable to predation or exploitation) than others. Our legal system takes that into account, as it should, and offers those groups greater protection. That is why an adult can be prosecuted if they allow an infant to drown in a bathtub, but not if instead it had been a non-physically-or-mentally-handicapped adult that drowned. It's also why it's considered a greater crime to murder someone with a handicap, a child, or a senior citizen.
The fact of the matter is, many mental disabilities make the sufferer more susceptible to suggestion or external influence. The victim in this case was an adolescent girl suffering from clinical depression. In fact, she was even on multiple mood-stabilizers. It should be quite obvious that someone in that situation is already predisposed to self-harm and suicide without others bullying them. But when someone deliberately causes psychological harm on such an individual, the situation becomes even more dangerous. In this case, it was a grown woman preying on the psychological vulnerability of a 13-year-old child, and the results proved fatal.
If I approached a man standing on the ledge of a cliff and intentionally frightened them, and as a result they lost their balance and fell to their death, I would certainly be held accountable (and charged with involuntary manslaughter). If a suicidal person is standing on a ledge on a tall building, and I tell them to jump&mdashand they do, should I not be held accountable as well? Now, in this case, the woman had to make much more of an effort to get this girl to commit suicide. I'm certain she had no intent to kill, but she is still potentially liable for involuntary manslaughter or at least criminal negligence (though not likely as this is a clear case of malicious intent).
Huh? No one said she should be charged with murder (which is what would happen if she were held responsible for what the girl did to herself). But she is still responsible for the direct consequences of her actions.
Even if the girl didn't end up committing suicide from the psychological harm that women inflicted upon her (with clear malicious intent), an adult should still not be allowed to bully a child without legal consequences. Heck, disciplinary actions are even taken on a 1st or 2nd grader who picks on another kid at school, so why would an adult doing much more harm to a child be given a free ride?
No, and I wouldn't be any happier that someone got 200 years in jail for killing my wife/girlfriend/mother. Nor would I be happy that they were tortured, or executed, or burned alive at the stake. Just because I'm grieving doesn't mean I have to be vengeful or sadistic. Would you be happy with your wife/girlfriend/mother getting 15 years in jail for a one-time mistake of falling asleep at the wheel? (Whether it causes a fatality or not is really just down to luck and thus irrelevant to how their reckless actions should be judged.)
And what if they did accidentally kill someone (perhaps they were tired and misinterpreted a signal, or a hazardous situation arose and their response time was just too slow, or maybe their night vision is not so good, and they hit a pedestrian), would you feel better then about them being locked away for a decade and a half?
That would not be involuntary manslaughter. That would be (premeditated) murder with the intent to kill, simply dressed as an accident.
Funny you should bring up Saddam Hussein—isn't he a guy notorious for passing out excessive punishments? Well, perhaps not compared to the non-secular Arab states that abide by sharia, but the type of person who brings up Saddam Hussein as some big bad bogeyman wouldn't know the difference anyway...
In any case, by your reasoning all the ATF agents involved in the Waco incident (76 people burned alive) should have been given the death penalty as mass murderers despite the fact that they had no intent to kill and there were extenuating circumstances. Oh, and what about the air traffic controller on duty during a mid-air collision between a fully-seated 747 and a cargo plane? Never mind the fact that Skyguide had understaffed the air traffic control center and his equipment had been disabled by maintenance. He was the air traffic controller, and his mistake cost a 747 full of school children their lives. And what about the Tenerife airport tower controller whose imprecise language, along with a pilot's impatience, led to one of the worst runway collisions in history? Let 'em hang?
Hopefully you will never have the misfortune of having caused the accidental death of another person. But if you ever do, whether it was a traffic accident, an industrial accident, or some kind of one-in-a-million freak accident, I assume you would have the integrity to plead guilty to murder no matter the circumstances?
I can live with incremental penalties for repeat offenses. We should make a legal distinction between a momentary lapse of judgment and habitual recklessness. But if you want to create a deterrent to repeat offenders, then you have to start out with lighter penalties that you can escalate from. Otherwise, we'll have to start resorting to the punishments in the "cruel and unusual" category.
It also doesn't make sense to wait until they've actually killed someone. Just as most drunk drivers that end up killing someone usually have a history of drunk driving, so too are other types of reckless drivers likely to have a history of recklessness before they get in a fatal incident. In fact, cops should be pulling over motorists who are texting behind the wheel even before they get in an accident. Suspending their license for a couple of months will be a nice wake-up call for them whilst getting them off the road.
All in all, it's a fairly difficult situation to balance out, isn't it?
Quite. Give it another few hundred years and maybe we'll figure it out.
But more likely we'll just do as the British did in the 18th century and relieve our desperately overcrowded prison system by sending convicts out into space in generation ships to colonize other planets or solar systems. Mars would make quite the dramatic setting for an interplanetary penal colony.
I figured that's probably what you meant. I mean, if the prison population can fill a large portion of our society's demand for menial labor, then great; but we don't need to force inmates to split rocks with pick-axes all day just for the sake of punishing them—taking away their freedom (and the luxuries of life) is punishment enough.
But also, even though it's pretty absurd to have criminals watching cable TV in their cells (I don't even have cable), I think the minor luxuries like decent food and cable TV are practical concessions. Even the most hard-nosed prison warden knows that you need to keep the population happy to control them. If decent food, some rec time, and cable TV are the bare minimum required to placate them, then that's a small price to play. Otherwise, you end up with the situation we had with the prison system in the 60's and 70's, with prison riots and other costly problems.
Even though I'd rather inmates read books rather than watch mindless television, the fact of the matter is, a lot of the inmates have never cultivated the faculties necessary to actually read books (whether they're illiterate, or lack the patience/concentration, or something else). Sure, you could probably supply them with magazines, but that would probably cost the state even more money than wiring up a prison for basic cable. Though, personally, I would give all the inmates a computer and internet access. The internet is a great educational resource, and is probably cheaper than operating a library service. Who knows? Perhaps if some of the inmates had had a computer when they were younger, they'd have gone into something other than criminal enterprises.
But the idea of prisons as a form of punishment (and therefore should be unpleasant) often conflicts with the idea of prisons as correctional facilities. A prison can be both, a correctional facility and a way to separate criminals from the rest of society (until they're no longer a danger to the public). But if you turn it into a punitive institution, then you're going to do the opposite of rehabilitate criminals.
It's been proven time and time again that abuse debases the human spirit. If you lock someone up and force them to live in miserable conditions, they will likely to grow increasingly resentful of society, becoming more dangerous by the time they're released. In the most miserable places on earth, you see the highest incidence of sociopathic behavior, of drug abuse & addiction, and of other social problems. And if you put people in such harsh conditions that they have to form or join a gang just to survive, then you're really just creating more social problems.
Even if you turn prisons into a permanent quarantine, a place to lock people up and throw away the key, it's still a corrupting influence on society. We've seen the results of the Stanford Prison experiment. I can't even imagine what would happen if you outright said to the prison guards and other officials, "your job is to make the prisoners' lives miserable." Do we want to become a sadistic society that derives satisfaction (or even pleasure) from inflicting suffering on people? How long will it be before we start chopping off the limbs of thieves and other petty criminals?
I think your heart is in the right place but perhaps haven't fully considered the consequences of instituting suffering (cruelty by any other name). Heck, in all likelihood, a lot of hard criminals you'd consider locking up developed the sociopathic tendencies they have because they grew up in "unpleasant" conditions. More of that isn't likely to cure (or deter) them. I do like the idea of community service instead of imprisonment for petty crimes though. We could reduce prison populations by just assigning menial labor to petty criminals.
Well, I wasn't really considering the economics of it; I think you have the right idea though. However, I would be more in favor of legal fines being calculated as a percentage of one's income (or personal assets). Otherwise, you'll have movie stars and other millionaires who just go on driving recklessly and accruing tickets that they have no problem paying off. A $2500 fine might be devastating for a poor college student while being nothing at all to some rich corporate executive.
If the main purpose of the justice system really is to carry out vengeance, then why not just leave it to vigilante committees? After all, mob justice is usually fairly swift and costs very little resources; our existing justice system is quite expensive and monolithic in comparison. And, in a way, mob justice/vigilantism is a very democratic means of establishing order in a society. The community as a whole decides what they will and will not tolerate in their community, and what kind of punishment to dispense.
Also, you claim that a justice system which considers motives rather than results ignores the real-world issues, but then you turn around and support feel-good legislation which focuses on punishment rather legislation that is geared towards obtaining real-world results. I absolutely agree that the results of a crime should be considered. I just don't agree with sentencing based on chance consequences. And dealing with the results of a crime poorly (in the wrong manner) is no better than not dealing with them at all. The job of repairing the damage done by a crime should not be given to prosecutors—their job is to convict criminals of their crimes and protect society from further harm by such criminals. The way this is typically done is by putting criminals in jail where they cannot harm the rest of society, and the length of time they're removed from society for is determined by the nature of the crime/criminal (i.e. how dangerous they are). A reckless texter who gets in an accident, but happens to have not killed anyone this time, is just as dangerous as a texter who gets in an accident but isn't so lucky. So it makes no sense to lock one up but not the other.
I think the justice system should have more ways to deal with the consequences of a crime than just heavier or lighter sentencing. Reparations would be a start, as that would actually address the real-world consequences of a crime. If the financial provider of a family is killed, then the justice system should see to it that the family continues to be provided for in his absence. If the money cannot be obtained from the criminal, then the justice system should have the resources to provide it some other way. If a murder victim's spouse is emotionally scarred from the crime, she should have counseling/therapy and other support resources provided to her. This would actually allow the family of victims to seek closure in a more healthy way.
There is some headway already being made to move the justice system in this direction—either through reforms, the creation of victim outreach programs, victim restitution funds, and other programs that allow victims to confront the criminals that hurt them to facilitate the process of healing. Perhaps the concept of restorative justice is still ahead of its time, but we're making progress. Even today there are family members of murder victims who choose not to pursue the death penalty or are otherwise looking past vengeance. I think that's a sign that our society is evolving culturally and ethically.
Isn't the point of saying "merely" to emphasize how lenient current legislation is—rather than to present the new law as overly severe?
My problem with this is that it could turn an otherwise law-abiding (albeit dumb) teenager into a career criminal. Spending 15-years behind bars (a rather unhealthy environment for an emotionally/mentally-developing teenager) when you should really be in school and learning to be a productive adult can have rather deleterious consequences. I know we call them corrections facilities, and supposedly criminals are all rehabilitated when they get out, but that's usually not the case when you lock up an adolescent for over a decade. You may as well keep him in there for life at that point if you want to protect society from harm.
There's a good reason manslaughter is differentiated from murder, and that involuntary manslaughter is distinguished from voluntary manslaughter. Treating one the same as the other is not the direction we should be moving in. Additionally, creating overly severe sentences can also have the effect of decreasing the effect the legislation has as a deterrent. It's hard for a normally law-abiding person to picture themselves getting put away for a decade and a half. The punishment is so absurd to a person of that lifestyle that its possibility seems more remote, resulting in them becoming more detached from the possible legal consequences of their actions.
Add to all that the fact that—aside from gangsters & murderers—no one ever thinks that they're going to end up killing someone, so a piece of legislation that only punishes drivers whose accidents cause fatalities is going to have very little effect on most texters. In contrast, you're much more likely to increase road safety if you pass a law that says any driver who is caught texting behind the wheel will get a 3-month sentence, and any accident caused by texting, fatal or otherwise, comes with a 2-4 year sentence. People can comprehend that kind of punishment. And you don't leave reckless drivers on the streets just because they got lucky this time and didn't happen to kill anyone.
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Hey, what do you have against Mike Rowe? That guy's an American hero. Not only is he the host of Dirty Jobs, one of the few good shows on Discovery channel (the other being Mythbusters), but he's also a very outspoken supporter of the trades and American blue-collar workers. He's even got a website dedicated to the issue of the decline in trades jobs/workers in America, which has been a contributing factor to the collapse of our physical infrastructure.
But, seriously, I absolutely agree with you. The domain name registration system is all fucked up. The registrars (the most successful of which typically have had close ties to the InterNIC/ICANN board) are making a killing already selling virtual goods (it's like printing money). The least they can do is to mitigate domain-squatting and domain-hijacking rather than to cooperate with and try to profit off of helping those scummy companies.
I don't know why being sick of scummy business practices make you a socialist, but if trademarks were abused in the same fashion we'd quickly start running out of legible company or product names. Oh, you want to register a company name that doesn't substitute numbers for letters or incorporate creative misspellings? That will be $5000, please.
I can understand the argument that capitalism is desirable for promoting healthy competition, driving down costs and increases product/service quality. But how do domain squatters/prospectors contribute anything positive to society? By driving the cost of decent domain names up? That benefits only the domain squatters/prospectors. They're the definition of a parasitic establishment—one whose actions benefits only themselves while harming the rest of society and draining its resources.
That may be true (I've never read the comic books. I've only recently started delving into graphic novels, though primarily for the artwork.), but then it still means that DC has much higher quality properties than Marvel. That is, of course, unless Watchmen (and Batman to a slightly lesser degree) is just a one-off and not representative of the overall quality of DC's properties.
Are there any other comic series that are similar in quality to Watchmen, either by DC or other publishers? A lot of the series that I've looked into so far (mostly Marvel and DC) seem a bit formulaic. The artwork is amazing, but the format seems to follow set rules & patterns without much deviation. I guess part of it might be that most of Marvel's properties reside in the same universe, but there's probably still some room for experimentation there.
It also seems like, in general, Japanese mangas have better-developed stories than American comics. I remember reading Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT as a child and each volume being at least 100 pages or longer—not A4 of course, and the artwork (all B&W) is no where near as good as American comics, but the greater number of panels does allow for better storytelling, I think. I mean, comics like Fantastic Four or Superman, while entertaining in their own right, just don't resonate with me as much as mangas like Akira or Ghost in the Shell. I dunno, maybe I just have different tastes, or perhaps I just haven't really seen all that comics have to offer.
That's a very good point, and I think that's probably how most industries look at it. And I do understand the logic in that, but you're still left with the problem that marketing muscle more often determines a product's success than the merits of the product itself (i.e. how much the consumer benefits from it). Though I suppose part of the problem with industries like music and games is that the market is so over-saturated that the only way to break out of the noise is to put a ton of money into marketing.
So much hostility...
I was simply stating what my experiences have been, as the summary asked if other industries spend similar proportions on marketing versus product development. I made no comment on whether marketing is good or bad, and I would have quite liked to hear the "b-school info on the actual purpose of ads," actually. (Doesn't it make more sense to share that knowledge knowing that the rest of us lowly non-b-school-graduates aren't privy to it?)
And a friendly tip from one slashdotter to another: it's probably a good idea to try to keep a cool head when you're posting a comment. A level head means you're less likely to say something incredibly stupid or come off as a troll or some angry teenager. So stop foaming at the mouth and cheer up. =]
Indie bands suck? That's your opinion; the rest of that sentence doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Except for manufactured pop groups like O-town or Backstreet Boys, every band starts off as an indie. Majors would never invest in the money to develop a fresh new band who's never recorded a prior album or doesn't already have a well-established fan base. Very, very few bands go straight from learning how to play their instruments in their garage to signing a multimillion-dollar contract with EMI/Warner Music/Sony BMG/Universal, or one of their subsidiaries. So you probably didn't think that one through...
BTW, have you turned on the radio recently?
Meh... DC Comics' Watchmen movie has blown away any of the comic book films produced by Marvel so far. Some of the X-men films have been pretty good, but none of the other Marvel films have been all that great. I'd prefer they make fewer films, spending more time and effort on the ones they do make. I don't know if the Batman films are really based on the comic books, but the recent titles have been of much higher caliber than crap like Spider-man 3, Elektra, Daredevil, Punisher (2004), Hulk (2003), etc. The other Spider-man films, the Blade trilogy, The Incredible Hulk (2008), and Punisher: War Zone (2008) are all good action movies, but not cinematic masterpieces by any means.
At least they're starting to get the casting right, I suppose.
Yea, but torrents still don't have the selection (or diversity of subjects) of books that libraries have. I've tried to find a lot of fairly popular books, but aside from well-known classics or very very mainstream titles (e.g. Harry Potter), you'll be hard pressed to find on torrents. And even then, book torrents tend to have very short shelf-lives (no pun intended). I often come across torrents of books I'm searching for, only to find that they were posted 2-3 years ago and are long dead.
Google Book Search was such a promising project. And the company itself has proven to be trustworthy (with them resisting government subpoenas and fighting to withhold user data from government agencies, unlike some other megacorporations). I was so disappointed when it was complaints over copyright violations by publishers rather than any technological or resource limitations that crippled the project (basically killing the project as it was originally conceived). So instead of giving every child, every student, and indeed every person with a computer and internet connection, free and instant access to all the literature humanity has ever published (ie. the largest corpus of human knowledge ever compiled) in a fully indexed, cataloged, and searchable digital format, we instead just have a small dappling of publisher-provided promotional samples of old, semi-obscure texts that aren't selling that well in stores.
Somehow we decided as a society (we're supposedly a "democracy" after all) that commercial profits are more important than the huge boon to society that such a cultural & informational/educational resource would have been. It would have been less of an affront if it had been a coalition of authors who objected to the project's existence in its original form. And even if publishers are worried that this would have threatened their profits, it would have been far more preferable to work out some kind of deal in which the digital library would be publicly-subsidized, with that money being used to compensate publishers (within reason). I'd be willing to pay more in taxes to support such a project.
Just like public education caused a cultural revolution (or evolution) in our society, I imagine making published materials so much more accessible, and to so many more people, in one fell swoop would have similarly caused an intellectual revolution (internationally). Every computer would immediately become the largest library in the world. Access to books won't ever be limited by the number of physical copies available. Out of print books would never again be lost to society. And people for whom the library is currently not accessible—whether because they have none located near them, lack transportation, are bed-ridden, are blind, or have been subjected to a recent book-burning campaign—would benefit unimaginably from such a resource. I mean, you could go to rural village in a poor developing country, and as long as they had a phone line (you could even get internet access by satellite) you'd be able to set up a $300 computer with a screen reader and give the children in that village access to all the books ever published, even if everyone in the village is illiterate.
The internet itself has been a huge boon to society, but as useful as it is now, it would be a million times more useful if copyright issues took backseat to societal progress and public good.
True. And people also have to stop thinking about the web as merely a short-term/temporary medium. Even forum posts and blog comments can be archived for a very long time and be read by people years after its initial posting. Even assuming that only young people don't know the details of Turing's life, there are plenty of young people who read /., I'm sure. And an even younger generation may come across this submission in years to come. I often come across old /. stories from 8-9 years ago in google results when researching IT/science-related information.
It's always been a pet-peeve of mine that people assume everything published on the web is just going to be temporary and won't be read by anyone in the future. As a result, we have tons of throw-away image hosting services that have contributed to the sea of dead images found on blogs and forums. Really, the web can be a great cultural archive, but not if, every time you come across a web page or news posting from more than 2 years ago, all the images and embedded/linked videos are dead. Even major news sites like Autoblog don't seem to care about if the embedded video in a news story gets removed a few weeks after it gets posted.
As a consumer society, we've evolved to be more responsive to advertising/marketing than actually good products/services. That's why our society has become so (over)saturated with advertising. You may design the best product in the world, but if you don't market it correctly, and no one knows about, then it doesn't really exist. Though the internet has begun changing that through the proliferation of viral marketing—and I don't mean the marketing gimmicks created by hipster "new media" advertising agencies, but rather true word of mouth.
And while I don't have any idea about the cost of marketing versus production in the movie industry, I do have some idea of the figures for the music industry. You can record a professional quality album for as little as $6000 these days. In fact, if you're a DIY kinda person, you can do it for a lot less than that. Heck, even a lot of major label artists are opting to record outside of a professional recording studio, and instead just renting out a house or warehouse and setting up their recording equipment there (and you can actually get some pretty interesting effects this way just by trying out different speaker/mic placements throughout the building). Mastering an album may cost another $3000-4000, but this can be offset sometimes by hiring a producer who does the mastering. I won't include the cost of album design and artwork since that's very variable and could be considered part of marketing. So in total, you're looking at only about $9~10k to produce the album itself.
Now, with most indie labels, you'd hire a publicist to do the majority of the marketing for you (i.e. get your music onto radio stations, get magazine reviews, get magazine/radio interviews, etc.). You might also do in-house marketing, which mainly just involves retail relations, sending out promo CDs, perhaps calling some radio stations to promote your music, submitting one-sheets, paying for magazine ads (this can run pretty high, but is more a function of the size of the label and what you can afford), etc. If you've got distribution through one of the majors (i.e. through a label group like Megaforce) then you also have other marketing/promotion options available to you, like co-op audio booths, co-op ads, etc.
Those are the usual variables/options a mid-sized indie label typically has for promoting a new album. A publicist these days seems to cost about $3000-4000 or more per month per album. A ballpark figure for ad space might be around $3000-4000 a month for a mid-sized indie, though that usually is spread amongst multiple album. And the co-op promotion campaigns through major distributors might run as low as a couple hundred dollars each, and again depends on how much or how little you want to invest in it. Our label probably spends ~$2000 a month on the options offered by our distributor, but, again, these are very rough ball-park figures as each label has their our marketing strategies. The smaller your budget, the more efficiently you're forced to use your resources, and so you might rely primarily on in-house or free marketing (like posting torrents, posting youtube videos, myspace, etc.).
For some of the larger mid-level indies, I'd be willing to bet they spend much more on marketing than on actually producing the album. And for the majors, I have no doubt that they spend far more than 3x as much on marketing as for producing the music. Of course, this doesn't include the cost of the record contract, nor does it take into account touring support in aid of promoting an album.
I don't want to seem rude, as I'm genuinely interested in engaging in fruitful discussions—especially with people with alternate viewpoints—but it doesn't seem possible at this point, especially when I'm still reading stuff like:
or
I don't know if this is a reading comprehension issue, if it's some failing on my part to communicate myself clearly (I tried my best), or if some people just prefer resorting to gross oversimplifications and strawman attacks. I will just reiterate one last time that, no one here is suggesting that hurting someone's feelings should be a crime. It might be criminally negligent to give a toddler a knife, but that doesn't mean you'll be charged with criminal negligence if a fully-cognizant adult cuts themselves with a knife you handed them. As far as specious argumentative tactics go, inapt analogies are probably among the least convincing (and the most crude).
I'm not at all familiar with X-Plane? but is the FAA-certified version already used in science & industry (i.e. by NASA, Boeing, the NTSB, etc.)? In other words, is it accurate enough to actually simulate meaningful training exercises, like certain types of mechanical/electrical/software malfunctions? Can it accurately simulate jet wash, wind shear, microbursts, etc.? I've seen the multi-million-dolar flight simulators used by NASA and major aerospace companies. They seem to be a lot more robust that anything that could be run on a desktop PC. So I'm just wondering if X-Plane is actually of sufficient quality to be useful for something like crash investigation or military training.
Also, the website mentions extensibility and being able to "hack" the software to do more. Would the military be able to customize the software to add combat training capabilities a military flight sim would no doubt need? A military flight simulator probably has some very specific requirements that you aren't going to find in a consumer product. I'm guessing they probably chose to develop their own flight sim because either it's cheaper than licensing commercial solutions, or there are no available flight sims that fit their need. The short-term costs might be higher, but they would have full control of the source code and be able to tailor it to their specific needs (like integration with classified military systems).
I assume you're not familiar at all with clinical depression or the social and legal infrastructure we have to deal with it?
Clearly there are a lot of misconceptions about how clinical depression manifests itself or should be treated. Firstly, depression is not the same as schizophrenic paranoia. By itself, it doesn't make a person act irrationally or become detached from reality. The most common form of clinical depression is bipolar disorder. Even though the disease is not clearly understood by the medical community, it's believed that a chemical imbalance underlies its pathology—serotonin is commonly pointed to as the root cause, but the illness is almost certainly the result of many other different interactions.
So how does clinical depression manifests itself in emotional disorders like bipolar disorder/manic-depression? Well, it's not terribly different from how it manifests itself in everyone else. Everyone gets depressed from time to time. Sometimes people get gloomy or melancholic over their station in life, or they may feel overwhelming sadness at the loss of a spouse or friend. Even someone who isn't clinically depressed can become so depressed that they seek to kill themselves (and some actually do). The difference is one of degree and frequency. A manic-depressive individual going through a depressive episode is much more likely to feel the extreme sadness that most people only feel when a personal tragedy has occurred. Likewise, in their manic stage, they are predisposed towards feelings of great elation that ordinarily accompany something like winning the lottery.
You can also think of it sort of like a scale of emotional disposition. On the one end of the scale you might think of the person as having blunted affect disorder, where they are practically incapable of experiencing or expressing any emotion. On the other end of the scale you'd then have extreme bipolarism, where the person easily experiences the highest of highs, but also the lowest of lows. In a way, you can almost say that manic-depressive disorder is not really a disease. It's just another segment on the spectrum of neurodiversity that makes our society so great. It would not be inaccurate to say that those who have bipolarism have a greater capacity for emotion than those who don't. They exhibit more empathy, and because of the passionate feelings they experience, they become great artists, great writers, great musicians, etc. Quite a few famous and successful people "suffer" from depression.
Part of the problem with diagnosing depression is because there really isn't a discrete cut-off between "normal" and clinically depressed. We can't just prescribe prozac to everyone every time they feel sad. So, for practical purposes, clinical depression is described as depression to such a degree as to interfere with one's ability to function normally. So if one is constantly struggling with their personal responsibilities (work, family, school, etc.) because they are feeling depressed, etc. then they are considered to have a clinical condition.
But even then it makes no sense to put anyone who's clinically depressed in a strait jacket and lock them in a padded room. The mildest forms of clinical depression can be treated with counseling or therapy. People can learn to cope with or manage their depression in such a way that it is no longer so debilitating. In more serious cases, medication is often prescribed in an attempt to correct the chemical imbalance and stabilize one's mood. Only in the most drastic cases are individuals actually institutionalized. And even then, it's typically because the individual suffers from multiple axis I/II mental disorders.
There's also a difference between immediate/acute risk and long-term/statistical risk. A person with clinical depression is not always in immediate risk of hurting themselves. If a bipolar individual is experiencing a manic episode, then suicide is likely the
For the answer to that question, see the first paragraph of the post you just replied to.
If you're confused at this point, re-read the rest of the comment (if you haven't already done so).
I suppose any time that public opinion agrees with government action (i.e. any time that the government is acting democratically) it's a tyranny of the masses. That really can't be helped, there will always be a small minority that doesn't agree with the rest of society. As long as it's not the same group of people who are the minority every time, it's really not a problem.
Also, it's up to the judicial system to decide whether a federal/state/local statute has been violated, not you. That's what court cases are for. And there has certainly been precedence for this type of prosecution. If there's a building about to be demolished, and I see a child walk in there, and I neither stop her nor warn the demolition team, then I can still be held liable in my inaction. And that is even without malice.
Our laws are pretty stupid, but luckily they're not as stupid as you seem to think they are. They do a half-decent job of protecting the vulnerable. I mean, that's what the justice system is there for—to protect the public. Certain segments of society are more vulnerable than others, and that is why they receive greater protection under the law. Here you have a fully mentally-capable adult preying on a child with a mental disability. Children are quite emotionally vulnerable enough on their own. But when a child suffers from clinical depression and is thus runs a high risk of self-harm or suicide, then it becomes a highly dangerous and potentially lethal situation. Our legal establishment would be remiss if it did not seek to prevent such dangerous situations from arising.
No, not jail. But you should probably go back to Philosophy 101: Intro to Logic for using such a bad analogy.
Certain portions of any society's population are more easily victimized (and more vulnerable to predation or exploitation) than others. Our legal system takes that into account, as it should, and offers those groups greater protection. That is why an adult can be prosecuted if they allow an infant to drown in a bathtub, but not if instead it had been a non-physically-or-mentally-handicapped adult that drowned. It's also why it's considered a greater crime to murder someone with a handicap, a child, or a senior citizen.
The fact of the matter is, many mental disabilities make the sufferer more susceptible to suggestion or external influence. The victim in this case was an adolescent girl suffering from clinical depression. In fact, she was even on multiple mood-stabilizers. It should be quite obvious that someone in that situation is already predisposed to self-harm and suicide without others bullying them. But when someone deliberately causes psychological harm on such an individual, the situation becomes even more dangerous. In this case, it was a grown woman preying on the psychological vulnerability of a 13-year-old child, and the results proved fatal.
If I approached a man standing on the ledge of a cliff and intentionally frightened them, and as a result they lost their balance and fell to their death, I would certainly be held accountable (and charged with involuntary manslaughter). If a suicidal person is standing on a ledge on a tall building, and I tell them to jump&mdashand they do, should I not be held accountable as well? Now, in this case, the woman had to make much more of an effort to get this girl to commit suicide. I'm certain she had no intent to kill, but she is still potentially liable for involuntary manslaughter or at least criminal negligence (though not likely as this is a clear case of malicious intent).
Huh? No one said she should be charged with murder (which is what would happen if she were held responsible for what the girl did to herself). But she is still responsible for the direct consequences of her actions.
Even if the girl didn't end up committing suicide from the psychological harm that women inflicted upon her (with clear malicious intent), an adult should still not be allowed to bully a child without legal consequences. Heck, disciplinary actions are even taken on a 1st or 2nd grader who picks on another kid at school, so why would an adult doing much more harm to a child be given a free ride?
No, and I wouldn't be any happier that someone got 200 years in jail for killing my wife/girlfriend/mother. Nor would I be happy that they were tortured, or executed, or burned alive at the stake. Just because I'm grieving doesn't mean I have to be vengeful or sadistic. Would you be happy with your wife/girlfriend/mother getting 15 years in jail for a one-time mistake of falling asleep at the wheel? (Whether it causes a fatality or not is really just down to luck and thus irrelevant to how their reckless actions should be judged.)
And what if they did accidentally kill someone (perhaps they were tired and misinterpreted a signal, or a hazardous situation arose and their response time was just too slow, or maybe their night vision is not so good, and they hit a pedestrian), would you feel better then about them being locked away for a decade and a half?
That would not be involuntary manslaughter. That would be (premeditated) murder with the intent to kill, simply dressed as an accident.
Funny you should bring up Saddam Hussein—isn't he a guy notorious for passing out excessive punishments? Well, perhaps not compared to the non-secular Arab states that abide by sharia, but the type of person who brings up Saddam Hussein as some big bad bogeyman wouldn't know the difference anyway...
In any case, by your reasoning all the ATF agents involved in the Waco incident (76 people burned alive) should have been given the death penalty as mass murderers despite the fact that they had no intent to kill and there were extenuating circumstances. Oh, and what about the air traffic controller on duty during a mid-air collision between a fully-seated 747 and a cargo plane? Never mind the fact that Skyguide had understaffed the air traffic control center and his equipment had been disabled by maintenance. He was the air traffic controller, and his mistake cost a 747 full of school children their lives. And what about the Tenerife airport tower controller whose imprecise language, along with a pilot's impatience, led to one of the worst runway collisions in history? Let 'em hang?
Hopefully you will never have the misfortune of having caused the accidental death of another person. But if you ever do, whether it was a traffic accident, an industrial accident, or some kind of one-in-a-million freak accident, I assume you would have the integrity to plead guilty to murder no matter the circumstances?
I can live with incremental penalties for repeat offenses. We should make a legal distinction between a momentary lapse of judgment and habitual recklessness. But if you want to create a deterrent to repeat offenders, then you have to start out with lighter penalties that you can escalate from. Otherwise, we'll have to start resorting to the punishments in the "cruel and unusual" category.
It also doesn't make sense to wait until they've actually killed someone. Just as most drunk drivers that end up killing someone usually have a history of drunk driving, so too are other types of reckless drivers likely to have a history of recklessness before they get in a fatal incident. In fact, cops should be pulling over motorists who are texting behind the wheel even before they get in an accident. Suspending their license for a couple of months will be a nice wake-up call for them whilst getting them off the road.
Quite. Give it another few hundred years and maybe we'll figure it out.
But more likely we'll just do as the British did in the 18th century and relieve our desperately overcrowded prison system by sending convicts out into space in generation ships to colonize other planets or solar systems. Mars would make quite the dramatic setting for an interplanetary penal colony.
I figured that's probably what you meant. I mean, if the prison population can fill a large portion of our society's demand for menial labor, then great; but we don't need to force inmates to split rocks with pick-axes all day just for the sake of punishing them—taking away their freedom (and the luxuries of life) is punishment enough.
But also, even though it's pretty absurd to have criminals watching cable TV in their cells (I don't even have cable), I think the minor luxuries like decent food and cable TV are practical concessions. Even the most hard-nosed prison warden knows that you need to keep the population happy to control them. If decent food, some rec time, and cable TV are the bare minimum required to placate them, then that's a small price to play. Otherwise, you end up with the situation we had with the prison system in the 60's and 70's, with prison riots and other costly problems.
Even though I'd rather inmates read books rather than watch mindless television, the fact of the matter is, a lot of the inmates have never cultivated the faculties necessary to actually read books (whether they're illiterate, or lack the patience/concentration, or something else). Sure, you could probably supply them with magazines, but that would probably cost the state even more money than wiring up a prison for basic cable. Though, personally, I would give all the inmates a computer and internet access. The internet is a great educational resource, and is probably cheaper than operating a library service. Who knows? Perhaps if some of the inmates had had a computer when they were younger, they'd have gone into something other than criminal enterprises.
But the idea of prisons as a form of punishment (and therefore should be unpleasant) often conflicts with the idea of prisons as correctional facilities. A prison can be both, a correctional facility and a way to separate criminals from the rest of society (until they're no longer a danger to the public). But if you turn it into a punitive institution, then you're going to do the opposite of rehabilitate criminals.
It's been proven time and time again that abuse debases the human spirit. If you lock someone up and force them to live in miserable conditions, they will likely to grow increasingly resentful of society, becoming more dangerous by the time they're released. In the most miserable places on earth, you see the highest incidence of sociopathic behavior, of drug abuse & addiction, and of other social problems. And if you put people in such harsh conditions that they have to form or join a gang just to survive, then you're really just creating more social problems.
Even if you turn prisons into a permanent quarantine, a place to lock people up and throw away the key, it's still a corrupting influence on society. We've seen the results of the Stanford Prison experiment. I can't even imagine what would happen if you outright said to the prison guards and other officials, "your job is to make the prisoners' lives miserable." Do we want to become a sadistic society that derives satisfaction (or even pleasure) from inflicting suffering on people? How long will it be before we start chopping off the limbs of thieves and other petty criminals?
I think your heart is in the right place but perhaps haven't fully considered the consequences of instituting suffering (cruelty by any other name). Heck, in all likelihood, a lot of hard criminals you'd consider locking up developed the sociopathic tendencies they have because they grew up in "unpleasant" conditions. More of that isn't likely to cure (or deter) them. I do like the idea of community service instead of imprisonment for petty crimes though. We could reduce prison populations by just assigning menial labor to petty criminals.
Well, I wasn't really considering the economics of it; I think you have the right idea though. However, I would be more in favor of legal fines being calculated as a percentage of one's income (or personal assets). Otherwise, you'll have movie stars and other millionaires who just go on driving recklessly and accruing tickets that they have no problem paying off. A $2500 fine might be devastating for a poor college student while being nothing at all to some rich corporate executive.
If the main purpose of the justice system really is to carry out vengeance, then why not just leave it to vigilante committees? After all, mob justice is usually fairly swift and costs very little resources; our existing justice system is quite expensive and monolithic in comparison. And, in a way, mob justice/vigilantism is a very democratic means of establishing order in a society. The community as a whole decides what they will and will not tolerate in their community, and what kind of punishment to dispense.
Also, you claim that a justice system which considers motives rather than results ignores the real-world issues, but then you turn around and support feel-good legislation which focuses on punishment rather legislation that is geared towards obtaining real-world results. I absolutely agree that the results of a crime should be considered. I just don't agree with sentencing based on chance consequences. And dealing with the results of a crime poorly (in the wrong manner) is no better than not dealing with them at all. The job of repairing the damage done by a crime should not be given to prosecutors—their job is to convict criminals of their crimes and protect society from further harm by such criminals. The way this is typically done is by putting criminals in jail where they cannot harm the rest of society, and the length of time they're removed from society for is determined by the nature of the crime/criminal (i.e. how dangerous they are). A reckless texter who gets in an accident, but happens to have not killed anyone this time, is just as dangerous as a texter who gets in an accident but isn't so lucky. So it makes no sense to lock one up but not the other.
I think the justice system should have more ways to deal with the consequences of a crime than just heavier or lighter sentencing. Reparations would be a start, as that would actually address the real-world consequences of a crime. If the financial provider of a family is killed, then the justice system should see to it that the family continues to be provided for in his absence. If the money cannot be obtained from the criminal, then the justice system should have the resources to provide it some other way. If a murder victim's spouse is emotionally scarred from the crime, she should have counseling/therapy and other support resources provided to her. This would actually allow the family of victims to seek closure in a more healthy way.
There is some headway already being made to move the justice system in this direction—either through reforms, the creation of victim outreach programs, victim restitution funds, and other programs that allow victims to confront the criminals that hurt them to facilitate the process of healing. Perhaps the concept of restorative justice is still ahead of its time, but we're making progress. Even today there are family members of murder victims who choose not to pursue the death penalty or are otherwise looking past vengeance. I think that's a sign that our society is evolving culturally and ethically.
Ah, the imprecision of language... Look up the definition of " involuntary manslaughter ."
Isn't the point of saying "merely" to emphasize how lenient current legislation is—rather than to present the new law as overly severe?
My problem with this is that it could turn an otherwise law-abiding (albeit dumb) teenager into a career criminal. Spending 15-years behind bars (a rather unhealthy environment for an emotionally/mentally-developing teenager) when you should really be in school and learning to be a productive adult can have rather deleterious consequences. I know we call them corrections facilities, and supposedly criminals are all rehabilitated when they get out, but that's usually not the case when you lock up an adolescent for over a decade. You may as well keep him in there for life at that point if you want to protect society from harm.
There's a good reason manslaughter is differentiated from murder, and that involuntary manslaughter is distinguished from voluntary manslaughter. Treating one the same as the other is not the direction we should be moving in. Additionally, creating overly severe sentences can also have the effect of decreasing the effect the legislation has as a deterrent. It's hard for a normally law-abiding person to picture themselves getting put away for a decade and a half. The punishment is so absurd to a person of that lifestyle that its possibility seems more remote, resulting in them becoming more detached from the possible legal consequences of their actions.
Add to all that the fact that—aside from gangsters & murderers—no one ever thinks that they're going to end up killing someone, so a piece of legislation that only punishes drivers whose accidents cause fatalities is going to have very little effect on most texters. In contrast, you're much more likely to increase road safety if you pass a law that says any driver who is caught texting behind the wheel will get a 3-month sentence, and any accident caused by texting, fatal or otherwise, comes with a 2-4 year sentence. People can comprehend that kind of punishment. And you don't leave reckless drivers on the streets just because they got lucky this time and didn't happen to kill anyone.