The way I see it, the more criminals in prison, the less there are on the streets.
That would make sense if you could simply divide the population into criminals and non-criminals. Unfortunately it's not that simple - people move between the two categories. So when judging whether a particular method of punishment works, we need to ask three questions:
1) Does it keep criminals off the streets?
2) Does it dissuade non-criminals from becoming criminals?
3) Does it persuade criminals to become non-criminals?
I think if I lived in a place with that rate of imprisonment, I'd be keeping my head down and avoiding controversy too.
I agree that the rate of imprisonment in the US is disturbing, but with the exception of The War on Altered States of Consciousness the US doesn't tend to lock people up for crimes that could be interpreted as self-expression. As the NY Times article points out, the main reason for the high prison population in the US is harsh sentencing - people aren't being convicted for things that are legal elsewhere (again, with the exception of drugs), but once they're convicted they are being imprisoned for longer.
And so too water is not inherently bad (and is in fact life saving in many respects) but it can also be used to drown people or "waterboard" (torture) people.
Exactly! So it would be strange to say "water is harmful" or "water is not harmful" because clearly it can be either, depending on the context. Likewise with sex: I'm not trying to say that it's always harmful, just that it's not always harmless - again, depending on the context.
Okay... I'm not sure where you learned logic, but on Earth we do it like this: if somebody makes a general statement, and somebody else gives a counterexample, the general statement has been proved false. The next step is to formulate a more specific statement that excludes the counterexample, such as "consenting sex is not harmful".
I didn't suggest that all porn involves coercion - but if any porn (or in fact any sex) has ever involved coercion then your statement that "sex is not harmful" is false.
"No, your Honour, I did not really kill all those people at the mall, that gangster next door pressured me into it! Not my responsibility, its all his fault!" is only one step removed from "The voices in my head made me do it!"
If that's only one step then it's quite a big step, because one can be proved and the other can't. If a person coerces you to commit a crime then in many cases they're also considered guilty, and in some cases you may be considered innocent.
But anyway my point wasn't that people who are coerced into something aren't responsible for it - my point was simply that people can be coerced into things that are harmful for them, so it's impossible to make blanket statements like "sex is not harmful".
Yeah, there's a lot of spam on the network at the moment - you can filter a lot of it out by setting up size-based filter rules (the Trojans vary slightly in size, but you can create rules that filter everything within a certain range).
Yup, they both ship with hardcoded lists of servers for discovering the first few peers - after that they cache the addresses of a few thousand peers so it's rarely necessary to contact the servers again unless you haven't run the software for a long time.
I used to like Mutella but it's abandonware AFAIK (last release is dated August 2004). There's a deb package for the free version of LimeWire, or you could try gtk-gnutella, a very nice GTK client with a remote command-line interface so you can leave it running at home and control it via ssh from work (not that I would ever spend my employer's valuable time doing something like that).
I'm amazed anyone is still using the Gnutella network. Have there been any improvements to it recently? Last I used it, probably 5 years ago, it was awfully slow.
Things have changed a lot in the last 5 years. A few spammy clients were causing a huge amount of traffic by periodically rebroadcasting unsuccessful searches, so the developers of various clients got together and redesigned the protocol to reduce search overhead, leaving more bandwidth for file transfers.
Recent versions of LimeWire also support the BitTorrent protocol, so you can have your cake and eat it too: decentralised search, a huge library of rare files, and fast downloads for popular files.
Another reason why college education is important is because our society has become more technical, the ability to think and have knowledge has become more important.
My own slightly jaded take on this: finishing high school shows that you have a long attention span, or to put it another way, a high boredom threshold. Finishing college shows that you have a very high boredom threshold. Finishing a PhD shows that you have an astonishingly high boredom threshold - you can spend three years obsessively focused on a single obscure problem that almost nobody else in the world gives a damn about! Why is that a skill worth having? Society has been growing increasingly specialised ever since the industrial revolution, which means the ability to focus on a very narrow task and develop a highly specialised skill set is increasingly valuable. But long-term dedication is something that's rather difficult to test at interview, which makes it an ideal candidate for certification. A bachelor's, a master's and a doctorate are essentially bronze, silver and gold medals for tolerating boredom. Of course the knowledge you acquire while studying isn't completely irrelevant, but it's secondary - why else would Google prefer someone with a PhD in astrophysics to someone with a bachelor's in CS? Because they know the person with the PhD is methodical and tenacious to an extent that would have made them unfit for life in any preindustrial society, but makes them perfectly suited to a technical job in the 21st century.
(Disclaimer: I've spent the last five years studying for my gold medal in tolerating boredom, so my perspective might be slightly myopic and/or bitter. Just in case you didn't spot that.)
I think the definition is very simple. If the universe is entirely predictable, then there cannot be free will. If truly random events can occur, then "free will" is possible, though not necessary.
OK, now define "truly random".:-)
Here's my definition of free will: behaviour that cannot be predicted far in advance by anyone (including the actor), but that can be recognised as the outcome of a decision-making process (which allows the actor to learn). The first clause excludes non-chaotic deterministic processes; the second clause excludes non-cognitive chaotic processes such as the Brownian motion in a nice hot cup of tea.
I like this definition because it doesn't rely on "true randomness" (which as far as I can tell is just a way of saying "effects that originate outside the current level of description") or a "central executive" that gives orders to the rest of the brain; it allows the brain to be what it clearly is - a decentralised, modular, subsumptive system with chaotic (i.e. deterministic but unpredictable) dynamics.
I'm surprised liquid cooling is still seen as a fringe/hobbyist technique, with water (or oil) having a much higher heat capacity than air I would have thought liquid cooling would make sense for datacentres - instead of huge electricity bills for A/C you could just plumb each rack into the building's water system (via a heat exchanger of course, I don't really want to drink anything that's passed through a server rack). Does anyone know if this has been tried, and if so why it didn't work?
I don't know whether "no black people allowed" has ever been tested in a British court - we have anti-discrimination laws for jobs, but I'm not aware of any that apply to shops (for example it's common to see "only one schoolchild at a time" on the doors of corner shops). That's not to say that I think "no black people allowed" would stand up in court, but until it's struck down and a precedent is set, rules like "no baseball caps" are likely to continue.
Has anyone tried to sue the operators of these malls on grounds of discrimination?
A mall is a private business premises, the owners have the right to refuse entry on any grounds they like. This is arguably one of the reasons local councils in Britain are so keen to convert their town centres into covered shopping malls: it makes them easier to police because you can just throw out anyone you don't like the look of, no questions asked.
The best statistics textbook I've ever come across is available free online, including applets for many statistical procedures and, more importantly, explanations of what the procedures actually mean and when they should be used.
It's not only plausible, it's real - haven't you ever had spam from money launderers who want you to act as their "overseas business agent" or whatever, moving money through your account for a small commission? I guess an identity thief could make money by selling bank accounts to money launderers even if the accounts are empty.
Most people know about cookies. What they don't know is that Flash has its own version called shared objects.
Thanks for the reminder, I heard about this a while back but had forgotten - I've just added 'rm -rf.macromedia' to my.xsession file, that should wipe out Flash cookies once per login on Linux.
1) Correct, the 2001 advice is not yet available which is why the EFF quoted the newly released 2003 advice that cites it.
2,3) Thanks for the information.
4) That's the whole point - the reference implies that all domestic DoD activity is immune.
5) Please cite your source - as far as I know the Administration has not offered any legal defence of the wiretapping or data mining programs, and has even refused (in court) to confirm or deny the existence of the wiretapping program.
6) Again, please cite your source - the 2003 advice was overturned, but what about the 2001 advice?
Well 9/11 was an attack on US soil, so where does the EFF think the "military theater" is?
How about this: there is no military theatre. Military concepts are only appropriate for war between states. When a state is fighting non-state actors embedded in its own population, using military concepts will lead to disaster; the appropriate concepts come from policing rather than war. That means counterterrorism should belong to the DoJ, not the DoD, and it should be conducted according to the Constitution.
If you are in the sort of place that needs Freenet you can be certain your ISP will report you to the government for using freenet.
I would have thought so too, but technology moves faster than the law, and governments have conflicting demands on their resources. China has the most advanced internet censorship in the world. How do people get around it? They google for proxy servers. The government could stop them if it tried, but like any government it has a lot of other demands on its time and money, so it applies the 80/20 rule and finds a cheap solution that keeps most people away from banned information most of the time.
In the sort of places that need Freenet, possession of Freenet will get you shot.
You need Freenet in the "free world" right now if you don't want the NSA to mine your web searches, phone calls, social contacts and email subject lines (none of which requires a warrant or even probable cause). Yet using Freenet in the "free world" won't get you shot (or at least I haven't been shot yet).
Then again, we also have a new buzzword for crime with ideological motives. It's called terrorism...
Yup, under UK law interfering with any electronic system for political reasons is defined as terrorism, but bombing civilian infrastructure in a "shock and awe" campaign is considered legitimate. George Orwell is no longer the appropriate literary reference - these days it's Lewis Carroll.
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That would make sense if you could simply divide the population into criminals and non-criminals. Unfortunately it's not that simple - people move between the two categories. So when judging whether a particular method of punishment works, we need to ask three questions:
1) Does it keep criminals off the streets?
2) Does it dissuade non-criminals from becoming criminals?
3) Does it persuade criminals to become non-criminals?
Prison does well on the first test, and fairly well on the second (although the worst offenders don't respond to deterrents). But it fails the third test: criminals released from prison in the UK have a higher reoffending rate than those given community sentences. That's why judges are reluctant to impose a prison sentence for a first offence: once you've gone to prison, you're likely to keep going back.
I agree that the rate of imprisonment in the US is disturbing, but with the exception of The War on Altered States of Consciousness the US doesn't tend to lock people up for crimes that could be interpreted as self-expression. As the NY Times article points out, the main reason for the high prison population in the US is harsh sentencing - people aren't being convicted for things that are legal elsewhere (again, with the exception of drugs), but once they're convicted they are being imprisoned for longer.
Exactly! So it would be strange to say "water is harmful" or "water is not harmful" because clearly it can be either, depending on the context. Likewise with sex: I'm not trying to say that it's always harmful, just that it's not always harmless - again, depending on the context.
Okay... I'm not sure where you learned logic, but on Earth we do it like this: if somebody makes a general statement, and somebody else gives a counterexample, the general statement has been proved false. The next step is to formulate a more specific statement that excludes the counterexample, such as "consenting sex is not harmful".
I didn't suggest that all porn involves coercion - but if any porn (or in fact any sex) has ever involved coercion then your statement that "sex is not harmful" is false.
If that's only one step then it's quite a big step, because one can be proved and the other can't. If a person coerces you to commit a crime then in many cases they're also considered guilty, and in some cases you may be considered innocent.
But anyway my point wasn't that people who are coerced into something aren't responsible for it - my point was simply that people can be coerced into things that are harmful for them, so it's impossible to make blanket statements like "sex is not harmful".
Obviously you've never been coerced or pressured into having sex. Good for you. Want to bet how many people in the porn industry can say the same?
Yeah, there's a lot of spam on the network at the moment - you can filter a lot of it out by setting up size-based filter rules (the Trojans vary slightly in size, but you can create rules that filter everything within a certain range).
Yup, they both ship with hardcoded lists of servers for discovering the first few peers - after that they cache the addresses of a few thousand peers so it's rarely necessary to contact the servers again unless you haven't run the software for a long time.
I used to like Mutella but it's abandonware AFAIK (last release is dated August 2004). There's a deb package for the free version of LimeWire, or you could try gtk-gnutella, a very nice GTK client with a remote command-line interface so you can leave it running at home and control it via ssh from work (not that I would ever spend my employer's valuable time doing something like that).
Things have changed a lot in the last 5 years. A few spammy clients were causing a huge amount of traffic by periodically rebroadcasting unsuccessful searches, so the developers of various clients got together and redesigned the protocol to reduce search overhead, leaving more bandwidth for file transfers.
Recent versions of LimeWire also support the BitTorrent protocol, so you can have your cake and eat it too: decentralised search, a huge library of rare files, and fast downloads for popular files.
Oh please, which rock have you been living under for the last five years? Even President Bush refers to the war in Iraq in the present tense.
I'm sure your pedantry brings great comfort to the many people who have been tortured by US interrogators.
My own slightly jaded take on this: finishing high school shows that you have a long attention span, or to put it another way, a high boredom threshold. Finishing college shows that you have a very high boredom threshold. Finishing a PhD shows that you have an astonishingly high boredom threshold - you can spend three years obsessively focused on a single obscure problem that almost nobody else in the world gives a damn about! Why is that a skill worth having? Society has been growing increasingly specialised ever since the industrial revolution, which means the ability to focus on a very narrow task and develop a highly specialised skill set is increasingly valuable. But long-term dedication is something that's rather difficult to test at interview, which makes it an ideal candidate for certification. A bachelor's, a master's and a doctorate are essentially bronze, silver and gold medals for tolerating boredom. Of course the knowledge you acquire while studying isn't completely irrelevant, but it's secondary - why else would Google prefer someone with a PhD in astrophysics to someone with a bachelor's in CS? Because they know the person with the PhD is methodical and tenacious to an extent that would have made them unfit for life in any preindustrial society, but makes them perfectly suited to a technical job in the 21st century.
(Disclaimer: I've spent the last five years studying for my gold medal in tolerating boredom, so my perspective might be slightly myopic and/or bitter. Just in case you didn't spot that.)
OK, now define "truly random". :-)
Here's my definition of free will: behaviour that cannot be predicted far in advance by anyone (including the actor), but that can be recognised as the outcome of a decision-making process (which allows the actor to learn). The first clause excludes non-chaotic deterministic processes; the second clause excludes non-cognitive chaotic processes such as the Brownian motion in a nice hot cup of tea.
I like this definition because it doesn't rely on "true randomness" (which as far as I can tell is just a way of saying "effects that originate outside the current level of description") or a "central executive" that gives orders to the rest of the brain; it allows the brain to be what it clearly is - a decentralised, modular, subsumptive system with chaotic (i.e. deterministic but unpredictable) dynamics.
I'm surprised liquid cooling is still seen as a fringe/hobbyist technique, with water (or oil) having a much higher heat capacity than air I would have thought liquid cooling would make sense for datacentres - instead of huge electricity bills for A/C you could just plumb each rack into the building's water system (via a heat exchanger of course, I don't really want to drink anything that's passed through a server rack). Does anyone know if this has been tried, and if so why it didn't work?
I don't know whether "no black people allowed" has ever been tested in a British court - we have anti-discrimination laws for jobs, but I'm not aware of any that apply to shops (for example it's common to see "only one schoolchild at a time" on the doors of corner shops). That's not to say that I think "no black people allowed" would stand up in court, but until it's struck down and a precedent is set, rules like "no baseball caps" are likely to continue.
A mall is a private business premises, the owners have the right to refuse entry on any grounds they like. This is arguably one of the reasons local councils in Britain are so keen to convert their town centres into covered shopping malls: it makes them easier to police because you can just throw out anyone you don't like the look of, no questions asked.
The best statistics textbook I've ever come across is available free online, including applets for many statistical procedures and, more importantly, explanations of what the procedures actually mean and when they should be used.
It's not only plausible, it's real - haven't you ever had spam from money launderers who want you to act as their "overseas business agent" or whatever, moving money through your account for a small commission? I guess an identity thief could make money by selling bank accounts to money launderers even if the accounts are empty.
Thanks for the reminder, I heard about this a while back but had forgotten - I've just added 'rm -rf .macromedia' to my .xsession file, that should wipe out Flash cookies once per login on Linux.
1) Correct, the 2001 advice is not yet available which is why the EFF quoted the newly released 2003 advice that cites it.
2,3) Thanks for the information.
4) That's the whole point - the reference implies that all domestic DoD activity is immune.
5) Please cite your source - as far as I know the Administration has not offered any legal defence of the wiretapping or data mining programs, and has even refused (in court) to confirm or deny the existence of the wiretapping program.
6) Again, please cite your source - the 2003 advice was overturned, but what about the 2001 advice?
How about this: there is no military theatre. Military concepts are only appropriate for war between states. When a state is fighting non-state actors embedded in its own population, using military concepts will lead to disaster; the appropriate concepts come from policing rather than war. That means counterterrorism should belong to the DoJ, not the DoD, and it should be conducted according to the Constitution.
I would have thought so too, but technology moves faster than the law, and governments have conflicting demands on their resources. China has the most advanced internet censorship in the world. How do people get around it? They google for proxy servers. The government could stop them if it tried, but like any government it has a lot of other demands on its time and money, so it applies the 80/20 rule and finds a cheap solution that keeps most people away from banned information most of the time.
You need Freenet in the "free world" right now if you don't want the NSA to mine your web searches, phone calls, social contacts and email subject lines (none of which requires a warrant or even probable cause). Yet using Freenet in the "free world" won't get you shot (or at least I haven't been shot yet).
Yup, under UK law interfering with any electronic system for political reasons is defined as terrorism, but bombing civilian infrastructure in a "shock and awe" campaign is considered legitimate. George Orwell is no longer the appropriate literary reference - these days it's Lewis Carroll.
Thanks for the nudge, I finally joined, ensuring my place in MI5's database for eternity. ;-)