Pangloss

Er,okay.... Hey Ecoli, that's the first I've heard about major corporations funding the demonstrations. Do you have any further info on that? It sounds interesting.

I was pondering a post along similar lines, Jim. I'm deeply sympathetic to their position, but I really think they're shooting themselves in the foot by continuing demonstrations, not to mention allying themselves with far left wing labor groups and socialists who could care less about them than they fear far-right conservatives do. They're shoving words into the mouths of demonstrators who don't even know what those words mean -- literally. Senator Martinez, a Republican and an immigrant himself who has sided with Democrats on immigration reform, said yesterday that we do not need further polarization on this issue. It's time to come together, not move farther apart. But I've been feeling pulled to the right on this. I'm still willing to accept the compromise, but it's clear that it will not stop illegal immigration and may (MAY) even encourage more of it. I'm VERY unhappy about the pandering to the left on this issue -- the aspect of producing millions of new partisan voters just because they're partisan, not because they're voters. That's not what *I* signed on to immigration reform for. I turned on the car radio yesterday during lunch and flipped back and forth between Air America/Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh. And you know what? What I got was little different from what I'm seeing on the nightly news! One extreme position countered by the other. No compromise. No common ground. No agreement or consensus. Something is rotten about all this, and the partisan shenanigans need to stop. Most people agree that the border needs to be secured. Most people agree that humane, humanitarian treatment of illegals is necessary. Most people agree that immigration is an important life blood of this country, and is necessary. Why the heck can we not move forward with the stuff we agree on here?

I learned everything I know about middle class Englishmen from watching Monty Python. That's an accurate portrayal, right? (grin) I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on much of your argument. But I do think we have some common ground: 1) The west/US is at least partly to blame for the current political situation in the Middle East and w/ Iran. (We might also agree that they are also responsible for their own behavior.) 2) War is not a desirable course of action. Anyway I respect your opinion, and I hope you stick around -- I'm enjoying your posts, even when I disagree.

But if the clerics are the ones who are really in charge then that's actually a *bad* sign, because they're the ones who are making the *most* outrageous statements, far in excess of what the president has said. It was a cleric who said they were really working on nuclear weapons, and it was a cleric who recently talked about giving nuclear technology to countries like Sudan. Saying that the president is weak and a mere puppet of the clerics should send a shiver up the spine of every free mind in the western hemisphere.

Back in the early 1980s when I first got into online debate/discussion (The Well, CompuServe charter member, GEnie, BBSs, etc), I used to get asked about my name a lot (at least in the few places where I dared to use it, which I never do anymore). It happens to be the same as a relatively well-known science fiction author. That author is long deceased, and he was writing under a pseudonum anyway. (This was all long before the advent of the Web.) I still get a lot of email from students doing middle/high school book reports on his most famous work. Thankfully the Wikipedia has begun to absorb this kind of traffic. More recently, it turns out that I share names with a local politician another part of Florida. Given my interest in politics, that one gives me a good chuckle fairly often.

I've answered this question already, in great detail -- is there some reason you can't respond directly to the answers that I went through the time and effort to type into this forum before? Are you unable to do so? So you have read my other posts. Odd, it didn't sound like you had, based on the quote above. On the other hand, perhaps you really haven't, since if you had you would know that I have not *advocated* the death penalty in any of my posts. You know, I've taken the time to say what I mean very carefully. I'd appreciate it if you'd take the time to read what I actually wrote, and respond to what I actually wrote, rather than responding in a spinning and distortive manner. Well thanks for letting me know that your judgement can be swayed merely by the tone and behavior of the poster. (Or at least the way you've interpretted their post.) I'll remember to judge your responses according to the manner in which you apparently would prefer that they be perceived. Thanks, I guess?

I hear there's a disease in Mongolia that's not my fault. I'm not sure how that happened, but as a White Male American I'll get right on it, and find a way to take the blame and apologize for it somehow.

No. I know the article I linked above didn't have much info, but as you might imagine it's been all over the local news. As I understand it, the mother had a court injunction preventing contact based on a history of angry confrontations. It's unclear why he was with her, but a reasonable guess might be that she needed him to help her take the baby to the hospital. I imagine that's a decision she'd like to have back.

I think you do a disservice to the debate (not to mention insult your fellow members) to pawn it off as some sort of two-bit, television-derived argument. If you think that's where my logic comes from, you're seriously mistaken. I fully understood my position on this long before either one of those television shows was even created (and yes, I know how long Law & Order has been on the air). You've not even tipped the iceberg in refuting the argument I posted above, which had nothing to do with jury emotion at all. What *you've* done is very much like what television does, actually -- play on emotions, ignore logic and reason, and pretend like the other side of the debate has nothing of interest to say at all. That's not debate. It's simple appeal to emotion. And it's not what we do here, so you might want to give some more thought to your position before posting again.

I applaud your honesty. But I want to point out that the concept of justice as a means of revenge' date=' while satisfying, presents an important, if often overlooked, logical trap. If you ask the justice system to make a subjective, situational, even emotional determination of [i']relative[/i] harm like that, then you remove from the justice system the one thing that makes it work in the first place -- it's blind sense of fairness and equality. Put another way, we push justice to a level above petty, real-world concerns because it means that it cannot be swayed by external pressures. If you want justice to be blind to politics, or power, or money, then you also have to settle for the fact that it is blind to emotion as well. The founding fathers knew this, as did many in other leaders in systems of justice in western civilization at the time. That's why our system was created in the form that it's in, where retribution is set aside so that something more important can be tackled, free of the burden of emotional bias. It isn't a perfect system, and it could even be argued that this approach is inherently flawed (can it ever be truly fair and equal?). But it's the best system we have. Pulling it down a peg, just so we can go Hammurabi on the bad guys, would be more than just a simple mistake. It would be a major leap backward for western civilization. In the end, it's not about whether we're treating the perpetrator as if they are a victim. We don't give them assumption of innocence and all those avenues of defense for their benefit. We do it for ours.

This has always been my general feeling as well, that the DP is too much about retribution and not enough about justice. Unfortunately it's not quite that clear of a demarkation on a theoretical level. Your summary misses a key point: Justice isn't just about removing the perpetrator from a position of causing any more harm. After all, if that were the case then we would have to lock up, in perpetuity, every single offender for every single offense! The additional property of justice that we need is some form of punishment that conveys the message both to the offender and to other potential offenders that society does not tolerate crime. There are proponents of the DP that make reasonable non-retributive, or justice-oriented arguments. I'm not one of those people so I don't know if I can really play a decent Devil's Advocate here, but I believe the argument is made along the lines of the old axiom "make the punishment fit the crime". In other words, for cases that aren't just murder, but are perhaps torturous in nature (etc), you need something that's more balancing than mere incarceration for life. I think that argument has merit. But it just isn't how most people look at it -- for most people the death penalty is about retribution. And that's not what justice is about. And of course there is the issue of our flawed ability to determine of guilt. The fact that innocent people could be put to death by accident is kind of a no-brainer, isn't it? Why run the risk of making that ultimate mistake when we don't have to? I believe in law and order, not because I'm any kind of conformist or authoritarian but because I believe in the power of democracy and the consent of the governed. I also beleive in the responsibility of citizenship, and so if I were placed on a death penalty jury, I could do it. But you'd sure have to erase all doubt from my mind before I'd apply it.

I don't mind a separate thread on this because it's a slightly different subject, but let me wear my "mod hat" for a moment and just add a couple of references to other recent discussions on this same general subject (the death penalty) for the benefit of our readers and to try to keep the inter-topic repetition of arguments down to a minimum: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=20189 http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=20494

Thanks for posting that, it was really interesting. I had no idea it worked that way, but I guess it makes perfect sense.

This is one of those cases that's so abhorrent that it really makes you wonder. I've always been opposed to the death penalty, but if I were on this jury I'd probably ask to pull the lever on ol' sparky myself. A Florida father, incensed by an argument with his estranged wife, took actions so extreme that they just boggle the mind. The state is going to ask for the death penalty in this case. The couple was on its way home from the hospital where the baby had been treated for diarrhea. The couple argued, and the baby woke up screaming. The father picked up the baby out of its car seat and threw him head first out the window. The baby landed face-first in the dirt. But that wasn't enough. He got out of the car, picked the baby up by the leg, and slammed him down on the hood so hard that it dented the metal. Then he tossed him back into the car, shoved his wife out, and took off. He drove to a nearby canal where he threw the baby into the water. He drove back to the mother, still standing by the side of the road, and told her "Better find your baby before the aligators do." Police found "Charles, Jr.", who just a week before had uttered his first word, "Dad", floating face-down in the canal 20 minutes later. Some of these details are available in a story here: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/sfl-pbaby28apr28,0,970694.story?page=2&track=mostemailedlink&coll=sfla-dolphins-front

What peace process? The legitimately-elected government of "Palestine" is openly supporting suicide bombers, and Iran has pledged millions in foreign aid since (and clearly because) Hamas was put in power. The questions now become more tactical in nature than diplomatic.

That's an interesting point. As the tools get easier to use, "programming" becomes more of a routinely-trainable skill, and "programmers" become a more routine commodity. Specialization would seem to become more important. We already have a situation where "programmer" is not a sufficient appendage -- you need to know what kinds of programs the person has written. Maybe we need a new word, separate from "programmer", to distinguish the kinds that understand the theoretical underpinnings of programming from the simple client-server, managed code, increasingly wizard-based environments that people are routinely "programming" in today.

As a CS educator, I'm growing increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that we seem to be moving farther and farther away from traditional programming goals and aiming students solely at client-server, database-access work. Part of the problem, of course, is that that's what most programmers do these days. The vast majority of programming tasks in the business world (which is to say most programming) involves a client application and a database server. There are exceptions, of course, but it's gotten to the point where that's almost an underlying premise of every single project under development in most companies. People don't even talk about it anymore, it's just... assumed. Not that I'm complaining about business programming -- it's astounding how far that has advanced, just in the last few years. How many adds have you seen lately for Sharepoint portal administators? It's a two-bit hack job of a portal app, but it gets the job done, it's ubiquitous, and it's the sort of thing the MBA types get weak in the knees just thinking about. Business services are absolutely gasing the corporate world right now. But what are we losing in the process? The most powerful IDEs today are based on namespace extrapolation and abstraction -- System.category.function. This is great if you happen to be writing an application that will execute in an operating system that happens to live in that namespace. But what if you're not? You might as well be writing in Notepad. Where are the killer new tools for writing system software? Where is Visual Studio .GAME? Most traditional colleges and universities that have CS programs are suffering these days from lack of enrollment. Everyone's going into the applied side of computer programming. You guessed it -- working in managed code. One of the thing that's interesting about that to me is the fact that "Computer Science" should actually not even be about programming -- it should be about science. CS majors should be our foundation for the inventions that give us a future. Instead it's become the last resort for producing unmanaged code gurus. But where else are the unmanaged code gurus going to come from? They're not going to come from the burgeoning "CIS" programs -- those are all producing managed code experts. And they're certainly not going to come from the trade schools or the business schools. And yet unmanaged code is still critically important to society. We don't really want to have to install Windows on every elevator just so we can run the program we need to make it go to the right floors, do we? What do you all think?

These would really seem to be on a different subject from the one we were discussing, and doesn't refute what I was saying. I'm already aware of these points, but... thanks for contributing? If you want to talk about consumer confidence and popular opinion... welll... that might be an interesting direction to take the discussion, so I'm down with that. It's certainly something that must be driving Detroit nuts. The SUV saved the auto industry, and now they're stuck with vast inventories and a consumer interest that's changing faster than it ever has before. I think we may be approaching another period of pressure-derived innovation. Americans like big cars not just because they're more comfortable but also because they're safer. Amongst other things it will be interesting to see if innovation can produce safer (big) cars that are also fuel efficient.

From what I understand, we should also be concerned about sulfur emissions, which continue to be underappreciated by the power industry and government regulators.

Yes, in fact I see the drop in SUV sales as a silver lining in the cloud of high oil prices as well. Cutting our dependence on fossil fuels should be a national priority. Being a computer guy anyway, I can't help but think about it every time I work on a system to try and eliminate "single points of failure". Western Civilization has a great big honkin' immersurably dangerous SPoF, and it's not doing a darn thing about it.