Not quite. What Apple really is against is "open hardware", or, more precisely, "open OS", at least when it comes to the one (hardware and OS) they themselves sell. As for individual pieces of software, they don't care whether it's FOSS or not. On the other hand, if your FOSS license of choice happens to prevent others from uploading it to their app store, see VLC for iOS, killed, if I remember correctly, by the VLC folks themselves, what guilt do they objectively have? When an open source project selects a license that forbids end-users of closed hardware from running said project's software, that's precisely one of the "features" the project aimed for, meaning it's working as intended.
(It could be argued that the project actually intends to encourage hardware makers to not close the hardware. But that's the positive side of things, the negative being that, if the hardware maker doesn't opt to open it, end users will suffer no matter what. You can't have one without the other, the alternative being to have neither.)
Statistics also show that in 100% of the cases, homicides are linked to human beings. I'll tell you what: this is many times more dangerous than the deaths linked to the widespread use of dihydrogen monoxide. We must act to stop it, NOW!
Because God forbid website owners aggregate information for optimization purposes. After all, let's all just pretend IE is everything everyone uses, all our users male, there's no purpose in trying to figure out anything precisely, optimizing for our best wild guesses and/or for whatever industry marketers says is fine, and only evil people engage in this newfangled silliness called "math".
Jokes aside, I predict UK will see a surge in AWStats usage, plus a resurgence of very long URLs (including old-style web bugs with very long URLs).
In short: another idiotic and plainly useless law.
I still don't understand why my super-complex nth-generation Office software still asks me if I want to "Save or Discard Changes" when I quit, without showing me what has changed in the document.
And I don't understand why Excel asks me whether I want to "save changes" to a spreadsheet I opened to look at and closed without actually changing anything.
Hmm... this is a good idea for a Greasemonkey script. Something to auto-report all automatic app requests as spam, auto-block them, auto-hide them, auto-set FB to not show app requests from that person, and then, finally, auto-hide FB's "there's something hidden here" left-over DIV so you don't even know there was something there to begin with. And it probably already exists.
it's ridiculous to hold politicians to absurdly high standards and react with cynicism when they fail them.
How is "put quotes around copied text; add the author name and page within parenthesis after the text" an "absurdly high standard"?
I don't understand people who don't understand what plagiarism is. It's so simple! Typing while reading? Quotes. Typing entirely from your own mind, with all 3rd party books, articles, reports etc. closed? No quotes. Gray area? Unsure? In doubt? Quotes, and perhaps a footnote. And done!
I blame the fact that most Americans have no idea why their rights are important, or what life would be like without those rights. We are already starting to get our feet wet with this, but people need to be tossed in head first before they really understand the issues.
I remember a political text I read years ago in which the author was of the opinion that every democracy should experience a few years (or decades, as is wont to happen) of fascism to both fully appreciate the value of what's been lost as well as to learn what stupid mistakes to avoid next time around...
When you make your National ID card you must give them (all ten fingers), as well as anytime you renew it, for any reason, be it because it was stolen, because you lost them, or because it's time to renew it, which is once every 10 years (although you usually only discover it's time to renew it when you try to open a bank account and someone tells you your ID is void). The same goes for your passport, which is valid for 5 years, although most people don't have one, so this one is optional.
Don't people refuse to give them, or or use fake fingerprint skins to defeat the system?
Nope. Brazil has no recent history of extensive persecution of minorities, so the huge majority of the population doesn't mind.
Brazil has always seemed to me like the next fascist superpower, going beyond China.
Ah, I don't think so. People here mostly don't care about anything political, at all. And the governing parties, all of them, are corrupt in a purely non-ideological way, interested solely in money above anything and everything else. This isn't the kind of scenario that leads to fascism. Besides, when we had a fascist party, way back, it was as odd in its "fascistness" as anything that happens around here. I remember reading once a text by its founder, I don't remember his name, criticizing then Nazi Germany and fascist Italy for persecuting Jews and foreigners. Go figure...
By the way, I just don't get the antagony some people have about the government cadastrating people. No, it doen't lead to retriction of freedom, and is not necessary for that.
This depends on culture. It doesn't really matter when there's no persecution of certain groups nor any prospect of there ever been one, but when something like this exists, or is a concrete possibility, it matters a lot. The typical example is Nazi Germany, whose persecution of Jews was perhaps hundreds of times more effective than it'd have been for the sole reason Germany had extensive, very precise information on who was a Jew and where, exactly, all of them lived.
"Meddling with the very fabric of reality"? Gimme a break. *eye-roll*
True enough. Something that'd merely *approach* meddling with the fabric of reality would be, let's say, some kind of bomb that once detonated changed the local space-time curvature, as in, were you to bring a ruler and/or a clock and you'd notice now empty space itself was measuring differently, provided "measuring" was still a meaningful concept. To actually meddle with reality, though, you'd need something way more powerful, let's say, a way to make math itself work differently there, as in, "over there 2+2 now is 5, and 3+3 equals -1, but we don't know more because entering it means instant never-having-existed".
This can be used in a much more mundane way - a website can check if you have Adblock installed, and it can refuse to display its content to you then unless you uninstall it.
True enough, as I remember finding one site, once, years ago, that did this. In fact, it's actually easy to do in JavaScript: search the page for the relevant elements and do something upon not finding them. But it seems the absolute majority of sites out there just don't think it's worth the effort. Adblocking users are such a minority that the cost of implementing anti-adblocking measures, and keeping them updated in the ensuing arms race, is more than the expected return on investment, as adblockers are very poor adclickers anyway. Not bothering is both easier and more profitable.
Any similarity with the argument that piracy is not worth fighting against isn't mere coincidence.
To keep other people from making something better using your building blocks and leaving you out of it.
The (alleged) purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of arts. The moment it starts keeping other people from making something better, i.e., starts PREVENTING the progress of arts, its whole purpose becomes null and void. So, again: copyright? What for?
Crowd-funding is how entertainment will work in the the not too distant future, as far as creators are concerned:
0) Start by making something good, although probably for free, thus starting to build a reputation; 1) Offer to do something, for money, proportional to your reputation; 2) Get funded by the crowd; 3) Deliver a good end result, and with it improve your reputation; 4) Loop back to 1 as much as you need or want; 5) Retire.
Contrary to what protestants in general, and American ones in particular, want to believe, this isn't usually enough by any means. You see, any major literary author or work, such as Shakespeare, requires a ton of research to be properly understood, so much so you have entire academic departments dedicated to properly analyzing them. Sure, you can just take a "complete works of [author name]", read it once cover to cover, and think you understood it, but it's almost certain you didn't. Now, given major religious texts are way more complicated than "simple" literary works, the complexity expands geometrically. This is the reason why older branches of those religions usually recommend you don't directly read said texts without at least some previous preparation. It's better to first read some introductory ones to get an overall idea on the techniques used to approached the major work as well as the proper contexts, and only then dwell into it.
Please note this way to deal with such works is valid independently of whether you actually believe or not on its attached religion. Academic comparative religious studies are usually as much atheistic as everything else in academy nowadays, and yet they follow proper study patterns when dealing with such works. This is so because otherwise the results at which you'll arrive will be quite random to say the least, and overly colored by your own cultural background, always a poor way to go about analyzing anything located outside it.
By the way, please also note, for whatever it's worth, that I'm not a Christian, so this isn't preaching.
Re:That's why I like the basic Kindle
on
The eBook Backlash
·
· Score: 2
At this point I don't plan to buy any more e-books (unless they are DRM free) except in special circumstances where I use the book as a reference so much that portability (it weighs nothing extra and I can have it with me anytime I have my tablet) out weighs all the negatives of DRM.
You know that stripping the DRM out of any ebook you purchased is trivial, right? There are scripts out there to do that with minimum effort. In fact, these scripts are even available as 3rd party plugins to calibre, in which case the DRM stripping becomes transparent (you'll have to Google around though -- for obvious reasons they aren't officially supported). Add to this calibre's ability to freely convert DRM-free (and DRM-stripped) e-books from one format to basically any other format, and everything that was wrong with e-publishing has in practice been solved.
What I've been doing is creating my own ebooks from websites that have a lot of material that I need to read. I just can't read on a monitor if it's a large amount of text. This is what I do: either use a conversion website or Sigil.
Another good tool is calibre, which, among tons of other functions, such as being an e-library manager and providing the ability to automatically strip DRM out if you're so inclined (and manage to find the 3rd party plugins required), allows one to automatically download new blog entries and transfer them to an e-reader on a regular basis. As for individual long web pages, I really like Instapaper, configured to send the pages I queued to my Kindle once a week (it provides a daily option too).
American Libertarians, you mean. They've co-opted the term and twisted it to mean something other than its original meaning.
This is because American Liberals did the same with this word. Everywhere else "liberal" is a person opposed to both religious and State intervention, as well as hell-bent on defending free markets. But since that's not the meaning the word ended with in US English, the anti-authoritarian free-market advocates were without a single word to describe themselves, and thus went for the most similar sounding one they managed to find that wasn't being actively used by someone else. The other attempted terms are either two-worded ("classic liberalism", "paleo-liberalism" and "anarcho-capitalism") or completely at-a-glance unintelligible ("minarchism"), hence much less useful.
By the way: what Americans call "liberalism" is better know around the world as "social democracy".
We need to realize that cooking, cleaning, shopping, and budgetting aren't things that people just know
Which is the reason schools in Japan have classes on "home education" where one learns cooking etc., although usually only girls attend it. It's a very nice concept that other school systems should adopt, and for both sexes, evidently. Bonus points if it also includes notions on personal finances and budgeting.
If I forget to lock my door on my way out of my house one day and come home to find an "ethical" thief in my home waiting to educate me on the importance of locking my doors, you can bet that I'll be calling the police.
There's the right, there's the wrong, there's the lawful and there's the unlawful/illegal. Right and lawful aren't the same, as aren't wrong and unlawful. They should be, but they aren't. That said, there are people who tend to operate more along the right-wrong axis of the ethical plane, and those who tend to operate more along the lawful-unlawful one (and I thank D&D for the clear way in which they express this insight). From your described hypothetical reaction it's clear you're of the later persuasion (lawful-neutral perhaps?), as are, quite evidently, lawyers, judges, most CEOs etc. Hackers, however, operate mostly on the former, as would be the case with your ethical "chaotic-good" thief. And, as in the game, there's no resolution in sight for this real world clash of worldviews, the sad thing being that, whenever two "goods" battle trying to figure out which one is the "best", they both weaken, and the actual villains advance.
You do realize you are describing reform, right? Becoming less of a jerk and grasping the importance of being part of society are both ways for the problematic person to change for the better (from society's perspective).
Yes, but my point wasn't that in practical matter both perspectives diverged much. The practice in both many times overlap, although where they diverge, they do diverge a lot. It's more a question of focus as well as opportunity really: the first approach wants to protect society despite potentially damaging the individual, while the second wants to reform the individual despite potentially damaging society (in the sense that softer/smaller/shorter punishments many times allow a criminal to go back and commit more crimes, thus damaging society).
"Reforming the criminal" is not a new notion, the new notion is that increasingly severe punishment alone is not sufficient to lead to effective reform.
The new notion is that reforming should be the goal. Reforming was observed before, sure, but it was taken more as a lucky by-product in the law enforcement activity than something that could be systematically employed, as the goal of said activities wasn't (and usually isn't) this. There's also a difference in both approaches as to what is considered a small enough crime to warrant a not so severe punishment. The first approach considers the effect in society, period, so a lot of things warrant extremely harsher punishments than the second approach, who thinks first on the feasibility of reforming the criminal, would employ in a similar case. So it's important to distinguish eventual softenings of the former as a change towards the later. Being less severe because you have lots of surplus money and can thus afford being magnanimous isn't the same as being softer because that's more conducive to reforming the criminal.
As such, I see no reason how practicality could decide the question of the use of the death penalty, as it seems to me just as practical (or even a smidgeon less practical, I admit) than real life imprisonment.
I myself have no defined position on the death penalty, but I know more or less the different arguments, and it seems to me they all can be reduced to two basic and incompatible opinions regarding what the punitive branch of the justice branch is for.
The first, and oldest, is the notion that the punitive branch goal is simply to protect society, what it accomplishes by removing from it those who violate (that) society rules. In this case society, which is what MUST be defended, is understood as a set of agreements on how one person should behave with another so that everyone can go on with their lives without causing trouble for each other and helping each other so that the end result is a net gain for everyone. So, if someone is being problematic, you punish him lightly so that he notices he's being a jerk and start behaving; if he does something more serious, you ostracize him temporarily (this ostracism can be literal in small enough societies, as you literally make the person get out of the village/tribe/whatever and taste living on his own, without the benefit of community support, so that he can start grasping how very much important being in it is -- and if he dies while "out", well, that's his problem); if he does something much more serious, you either ostracize him permanently (which, depending on context, is about equal to killing him), or disable him so that he cannot do that kind of damage to society anymore (this can take the form of amputation/castration, which, in more civilized societies, takes the form of lobotomy, chemical castration, inserting sensors to track the person every move, telling everyone who he is via public sex offender list etc.); and if his danger to society is understood be so extreme that you absolutely cannot take the risk of him remaining around, the next logical step is the death penalty, as it's the definite form of removal. Notice then that, from this perspective, being in any way nice to the criminal isn't part of the requirements at all. In fact, as long as he's being punished, or is an illegal alien, he's thought of as someone from without society, hence not deserving of any of societies niceties, which only actual society members deserve.
The second, and newest, is the notion that the punitive branch goal is to reform the criminal. This is similar to the above in many practical matters, since in many cases you remove the person from society, but the difference is that he's still considered part of it, hence deserving of protections, rights etc. As for the punishments, they're thought of as a means to an end whose focus is first the individual, and only secondarily society proper. As such, harsh punishments are usually frown upon and go unused, since they're not seen as conducive to any kind of individual reforming. As an obvious and necessary consequence of this point of view, the death penalty gets rejected, since if there's one thing that doesn't help one to become reformed it's being dead. Now, it's important to understand that this whole notion depends, to be valid, on the possibility of the majority of criminals reforming, which is something the defendants of the first approach don't think possible, or at least think possible only for a small minority of cases.
The current US system is clearly modeled on the first approach, with a few touches of the second one here and there. As such, even though on a moral basis alone it could reject the death penalty, keeping it around isn't incoherent, even the cost being the same. But where the overall approach to be change to the second one then sure, employing it wouldn't make sense, from any perspective, even a purely practical one.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no they didn't. They are anti-FOSS.
Not quite. What Apple really is against is "open hardware", or, more precisely, "open OS", at least when it comes to the one (hardware and OS) they themselves sell. As for individual pieces of software, they don't care whether it's FOSS or not. On the other hand, if your FOSS license of choice happens to prevent others from uploading it to their app store, see VLC for iOS, killed, if I remember correctly, by the VLC folks themselves, what guilt do they objectively have? When an open source project selects a license that forbids end-users of closed hardware from running said project's software, that's precisely one of the "features" the project aimed for, meaning it's working as intended.
(It could be argued that the project actually intends to encourage hardware makers to not close the hardware. But that's the positive side of things, the negative being that, if the hardware maker doesn't opt to open it, end users will suffer no matter what. You can't have one without the other, the alternative being to have neither.)
I'd enjoy hearing the explanation behind how women's minds work.
This will provide some useful insights: Láadan.
Statistics show that...
Statistics also show that in 100% of the cases, homicides are linked to human beings. I'll tell you what: this is many times more dangerous than the deaths linked to the widespread use of dihydrogen monoxide. We must act to stop it, NOW!
analytical cookies (eg. count unique users)
Because God forbid website owners aggregate information for optimization purposes. After all, let's all just pretend IE is everything everyone uses, all our users male, there's no purpose in trying to figure out anything precisely, optimizing for our best wild guesses and/or for whatever industry marketers says is fine, and only evil people engage in this newfangled silliness called "math".
Jokes aside, I predict UK will see a surge in AWStats usage, plus a resurgence of very long URLs (including old-style web bugs with very long URLs).
In short: another idiotic and plainly useless law.
I still don't understand why my super-complex nth-generation Office software still asks me if I want to "Save or Discard Changes" when I quit, without showing me what has changed in the document.
And I don't understand why Excel asks me whether I want to "save changes" to a spreadsheet I opened to look at and closed without actually changing anything.
Hmm... this is a good idea for a Greasemonkey script. Something to auto-report all automatic app requests as spam, auto-block them, auto-hide them, auto-set FB to not show app requests from that person, and then, finally, auto-hide FB's "there's something hidden here" left-over DIV so you don't even know there was something there to begin with. And it probably already exists.
So - what's really going on here?
Well, think how Americans would react were Russia to start building a huge missile "defense" system near the US border. For example, in Cuba...
it's ridiculous to hold politicians to absurdly high standards and react with cynicism when they fail them.
How is "put quotes around copied text; add the author name and page within parenthesis after the text" an "absurdly high standard"?
I don't understand people who don't understand what plagiarism is. It's so simple! Typing while reading? Quotes. Typing entirely from your own mind, with all 3rd party books, articles, reports etc. closed? No quotes. Gray area? Unsure? In doubt? Quotes, and perhaps a footnote. And done!
I blame the fact that most Americans have no idea why their rights are important, or what life would be like without those rights. We are already starting to get our feet wet with this, but people need to be tossed in head first before they really understand the issues.
I remember a political text I read years ago in which the author was of the opinion that every democracy should experience a few years (or decades, as is wont to happen) of fascism to both fully appreciate the value of what's been lost as well as to learn what stupid mistakes to avoid next time around...
© April 1 2012 Mojang
Yep. I was believing it until this: "hard science fiction (think Star Trek sci-fi)". Very hard indeed.
For YouTube, just enable the HTML5 experiment. No Flash needed.
Several times? What are they?
When you make your National ID card you must give them (all ten fingers), as well as anytime you renew it, for any reason, be it because it was stolen, because you lost them, or because it's time to renew it, which is once every 10 years (although you usually only discover it's time to renew it when you try to open a bank account and someone tells you your ID is void). The same goes for your passport, which is valid for 5 years, although most people don't have one, so this one is optional.
Don't people refuse to give them, or or use fake fingerprint skins to defeat the system?
Nope. Brazil has no recent history of extensive persecution of minorities, so the huge majority of the population doesn't mind.
Brazil has always seemed to me like the next fascist superpower, going beyond China.
Ah, I don't think so. People here mostly don't care about anything political, at all. And the governing parties, all of them, are corrupt in a purely non-ideological way, interested solely in money above anything and everything else. This isn't the kind of scenario that leads to fascism. Besides, when we had a fascist party, way back, it was as odd in its "fascistness" as anything that happens around here. I remember reading once a text by its founder, I don't remember his name, criticizing then Nazi Germany and fascist Italy for persecuting Jews and foreigners. Go figure...
By the way, I just don't get the antagony some people have about the government cadastrating people. No, it doen't lead to retriction of freedom, and is not necessary for that.
This depends on culture. It doesn't really matter when there's no persecution of certain groups nor any prospect of there ever been one, but when something like this exists, or is a concrete possibility, it matters a lot. The typical example is Nazi Germany, whose persecution of Jews was perhaps hundreds of times more effective than it'd have been for the sole reason Germany had extensive, very precise information on who was a Jew and where, exactly, all of them lived.
"Meddling with the very fabric of reality"? Gimme a break. *eye-roll*
True enough. Something that'd merely *approach* meddling with the fabric of reality would be, let's say, some kind of bomb that once detonated changed the local space-time curvature, as in, were you to bring a ruler and/or a clock and you'd notice now empty space itself was measuring differently, provided "measuring" was still a meaningful concept. To actually meddle with reality, though, you'd need something way more powerful, let's say, a way to make math itself work differently there, as in, "over there 2+2 now is 5, and 3+3 equals -1, but we don't know more because entering it means instant never-having-existed".
This can be used in a much more mundane way - a website can check if you have Adblock installed, and it can refuse to display its content to you then unless you uninstall it.
True enough, as I remember finding one site, once, years ago, that did this. In fact, it's actually easy to do in JavaScript: search the page for the relevant elements and do something upon not finding them. But it seems the absolute majority of sites out there just don't think it's worth the effort. Adblocking users are such a minority that the cost of implementing anti-adblocking measures, and keeping them updated in the ensuing arms race, is more than the expected return on investment, as adblockers are very poor adclickers anyway. Not bothering is both easier and more profitable.
Any similarity with the argument that piracy is not worth fighting against isn't mere coincidence.
To keep other people from making something better using your building blocks and leaving you out of it.
The (alleged) purpose of copyright is to promote the progress of arts. The moment it starts keeping other people from making something better, i.e., starts PREVENTING the progress of arts, its whole purpose becomes null and void. So, again: copyright? What for?
Crowd-funding is how entertainment will work in the the not too distant future, as far as creators are concerned:
0) Start by making something good, although probably for free, thus starting to build a reputation;
1) Offer to do something, for money, proportional to your reputation;
2) Get funded by the crowd;
3) Deliver a good end result, and with it improve your reputation;
4) Loop back to 1 as much as you need or want;
5) Retire.
Copyright? What for?
You're probably right. I've read the bible.
Contrary to what protestants in general, and American ones in particular, want to believe, this isn't usually enough by any means. You see, any major literary author or work, such as Shakespeare, requires a ton of research to be properly understood, so much so you have entire academic departments dedicated to properly analyzing them. Sure, you can just take a "complete works of [author name]", read it once cover to cover, and think you understood it, but it's almost certain you didn't. Now, given major religious texts are way more complicated than "simple" literary works, the complexity expands geometrically. This is the reason why older branches of those religions usually recommend you don't directly read said texts without at least some previous preparation. It's better to first read some introductory ones to get an overall idea on the techniques used to approached the major work as well as the proper contexts, and only then dwell into it.
Please note this way to deal with such works is valid independently of whether you actually believe or not on its attached religion. Academic comparative religious studies are usually as much atheistic as everything else in academy nowadays, and yet they follow proper study patterns when dealing with such works. This is so because otherwise the results at which you'll arrive will be quite random to say the least, and overly colored by your own cultural background, always a poor way to go about analyzing anything located outside it.
By the way, please also note, for whatever it's worth, that I'm not a Christian, so this isn't preaching.
At this point I don't plan to buy any more e-books (unless they are DRM free) except in special circumstances where I use the book as a reference so much that portability (it weighs nothing extra and I can have it with me anytime I have my tablet) out weighs all the negatives of DRM.
You know that stripping the DRM out of any ebook you purchased is trivial, right? There are scripts out there to do that with minimum effort. In fact, these scripts are even available as 3rd party plugins to calibre, in which case the DRM stripping becomes transparent (you'll have to Google around though -- for obvious reasons they aren't officially supported). Add to this calibre's ability to freely convert DRM-free (and DRM-stripped) e-books from one format to basically any other format, and everything that was wrong with e-publishing has in practice been solved.
What I've been doing is creating my own ebooks from websites that have a lot of material that I need to read. I just can't read on a monitor if it's a large amount of text. This is what I do: either use a conversion website or Sigil.
Another good tool is calibre, which, among tons of other functions, such as being an e-library manager and providing the ability to automatically strip DRM out if you're so inclined (and manage to find the 3rd party plugins required), allows one to automatically download new blog entries and transfer them to an e-reader on a regular basis. As for individual long web pages, I really like Instapaper, configured to send the pages I queued to my Kindle once a week (it provides a daily option too).
American Libertarians, you mean. They've co-opted the term and twisted it to mean something other than its original meaning.
This is because American Liberals did the same with this word. Everywhere else "liberal" is a person opposed to both religious and State intervention, as well as hell-bent on defending free markets. But since that's not the meaning the word ended with in US English, the anti-authoritarian free-market advocates were without a single word to describe themselves, and thus went for the most similar sounding one they managed to find that wasn't being actively used by someone else. The other attempted terms are either two-worded ("classic liberalism", "paleo-liberalism" and "anarcho-capitalism") or completely at-a-glance unintelligible ("minarchism"), hence much less useful.
By the way: what Americans call "liberalism" is better know around the world as "social democracy".
We need to realize that cooking, cleaning, shopping, and budgetting aren't things that people just know
Which is the reason schools in Japan have classes on "home education" where one learns cooking etc., although usually only girls attend it. It's a very nice concept that other school systems should adopt, and for both sexes, evidently. Bonus points if it also includes notions on personal finances and budgeting.
If I forget to lock my door on my way out of my house one day and come home to find an "ethical" thief in my home waiting to educate me on the importance of locking my doors, you can bet that I'll be calling the police.
There's the right, there's the wrong, there's the lawful and there's the unlawful/illegal. Right and lawful aren't the same, as aren't wrong and unlawful. They should be, but they aren't. That said, there are people who tend to operate more along the right-wrong axis of the ethical plane, and those who tend to operate more along the lawful-unlawful one (and I thank D&D for the clear way in which they express this insight). From your described hypothetical reaction it's clear you're of the later persuasion (lawful-neutral perhaps?), as are, quite evidently, lawyers, judges, most CEOs etc. Hackers, however, operate mostly on the former, as would be the case with your ethical "chaotic-good" thief. And, as in the game, there's no resolution in sight for this real world clash of worldviews, the sad thing being that, whenever two "goods" battle trying to figure out which one is the "best", they both weaken, and the actual villains advance.
You do realize you are describing reform, right? Becoming less of a jerk and grasping the importance of being part of society are both ways for the problematic person to change for the better (from society's perspective).
Yes, but my point wasn't that in practical matter both perspectives diverged much. The practice in both many times overlap, although where they diverge, they do diverge a lot. It's more a question of focus as well as opportunity really: the first approach wants to protect society despite potentially damaging the individual, while the second wants to reform the individual despite potentially damaging society (in the sense that softer/smaller/shorter punishments many times allow a criminal to go back and commit more crimes, thus damaging society).
"Reforming the criminal" is not a new notion, the new notion is that increasingly severe punishment alone is not sufficient to lead to effective reform.
The new notion is that reforming should be the goal. Reforming was observed before, sure, but it was taken more as a lucky by-product in the law enforcement activity than something that could be systematically employed, as the goal of said activities wasn't (and usually isn't) this. There's also a difference in both approaches as to what is considered a small enough crime to warrant a not so severe punishment. The first approach considers the effect in society, period, so a lot of things warrant extremely harsher punishments than the second approach, who thinks first on the feasibility of reforming the criminal, would employ in a similar case. So it's important to distinguish eventual softenings of the former as a change towards the later. Being less severe because you have lots of surplus money and can thus afford being magnanimous isn't the same as being softer because that's more conducive to reforming the criminal.
As such, I see no reason how practicality could decide the question of the use of the death penalty, as it seems to me just as practical (or even a smidgeon less practical, I admit) than real life imprisonment.
I myself have no defined position on the death penalty, but I know more or less the different arguments, and it seems to me they all can be reduced to two basic and incompatible opinions regarding what the punitive branch of the justice branch is for.
The first, and oldest, is the notion that the punitive branch goal is simply to protect society, what it accomplishes by removing from it those who violate (that) society rules. In this case society, which is what MUST be defended, is understood as a set of agreements on how one person should behave with another so that everyone can go on with their lives without causing trouble for each other and helping each other so that the end result is a net gain for everyone. So, if someone is being problematic, you punish him lightly so that he notices he's being a jerk and start behaving; if he does something more serious, you ostracize him temporarily (this ostracism can be literal in small enough societies, as you literally make the person get out of the village/tribe/whatever and taste living on his own, without the benefit of community support, so that he can start grasping how very much important being in it is -- and if he dies while "out", well, that's his problem); if he does something much more serious, you either ostracize him permanently (which, depending on context, is about equal to killing him), or disable him so that he cannot do that kind of damage to society anymore (this can take the form of amputation/castration, which, in more civilized societies, takes the form of lobotomy, chemical castration, inserting sensors to track the person every move, telling everyone who he is via public sex offender list etc.); and if his danger to society is understood be so extreme that you absolutely cannot take the risk of him remaining around, the next logical step is the death penalty, as it's the definite form of removal. Notice then that, from this perspective, being in any way nice to the criminal isn't part of the requirements at all. In fact, as long as he's being punished, or is an illegal alien, he's thought of as someone from without society, hence not deserving of any of societies niceties, which only actual society members deserve.
The second, and newest, is the notion that the punitive branch goal is to reform the criminal. This is similar to the above in many practical matters, since in many cases you remove the person from society, but the difference is that he's still considered part of it, hence deserving of protections, rights etc. As for the punishments, they're thought of as a means to an end whose focus is first the individual, and only secondarily society proper. As such, harsh punishments are usually frown upon and go unused, since they're not seen as conducive to any kind of individual reforming. As an obvious and necessary consequence of this point of view, the death penalty gets rejected, since if there's one thing that doesn't help one to become reformed it's being dead. Now, it's important to understand that this whole notion depends, to be valid, on the possibility of the majority of criminals reforming, which is something the defendants of the first approach don't think possible, or at least think possible only for a small minority of cases.
The current US system is clearly modeled on the first approach, with a few touches of the second one here and there. As such, even though on a moral basis alone it could reject the death penalty, keeping it around isn't incoherent, even the cost being the same. But where the overall approach to be change to the second one then sure, employing it wouldn't make sense, from any perspective, even a purely practical one.