danssig

Or you can use AirVideo. It converts while it streams or you can have it just do the conversion and dump it in iTunes so it will sync to the ipad automatically for offline usage.

Well, that's the thing: even in the US, as bad as it has become, saying vile racist comments on the internet wouldn't get you put in jail.

Is the guy a scumbag? Obviously. Should people go to jail for speaking their mind? That's probably where we diverge and think each other are crazy, but the key is: if you can be put in jail for, say, racism then a corrupt government need only make disagreement be framed as racist, for example. It's safer to just allow anyone to say what they want (with obvious exceptions like yelling "FIRE!") and point out why their argument is stupid.

Don't forget; the UK also put someone in jail for tweeting.

Seems like a proper time for civil disobedience.

I would be good with getting rid of prisons entirely. If someone is violent and dangerous then they're probably insane and should be treated, not "punished".

As far as your example, I find it bizarre that you find a person threatening to kill you with a weapon in your face is on the same level as someone who empties your bank account behind the scenes. The latter is more financially devastating but the first is more terrifying to be on the receiving end of and could result in you dying or being crippled.

Further, I didn't really have in mind some guy doing a hold up. I was thinking more about murders and people who will do violence to others if not contained.

And finally, it's not about "evil" and it's not about what someone "deserves". Throwing someone in prison doesn't fix anything. It doesn't make them stop committing crimes, in fact it usually means they'll commit more when they get out. It might make some people feel better about themselves to know that someone is suffering, but I would question the mental health of that point of view as well.

It depends on what we're talking about. If a person stole money then they should have to pay that back with reasonable interest. So that wouldn't be tied to how much money the person has, they're basically giving back what they took.

If it is some other crime that can't be handled by simply giving the money back you could just scale up the costs, for example. E.g. if you make $1m/yr, then the penalty is 90% of your earnings. If you make $10m/yr, it's 99%.

Just brainstorming. I don't know what the proper solution is, but looking people in a cage seems crazy to me.

There are many options. Charge them money (and ensure you can force them to pay it back, e.g. wage garnishing), public service was suggested, etc. Looking them away from their life seems incredibly excessive.

Or in Common Lisp you would be able to "signal" a condition and then handle the situation. Signal will just do nothing unless some higher level code has an explicit handler for it [1].

[1] I remember reading a MIME encoding library years ago. There was a point where the code would detect an error but if the error was at the end it would just drop that part and write in the last couple of bytes. In this situation, most clients won't care that this is happening but what about those that do? Since this code signalled error by returning NULL there was no way to signal "saw an error, but fixed it". In Common Lisp, signal could have been used for clients that would want to report on this.

Or drive prices down. You would be cutting out a lot of middle men going this route.

I find locking people away from their life for more than a day or two absolutely barbaric. I'm surprised a country often rated most democratic in the world locks people away for non-violent offenses.

Wtf? Why hasn't this post blended into the background already? US healthcare inexpensive? Pretty much everyone who's ever looked into this disagrees.

Worrying about about health insurance is silly? What a moronic attitude. Health care is a reverse lottery and there's practically no top end if you end up with "winning" genetics/car crash/whatever. "Not worrying" about healthcare insurance is irresponsible and wreckless. If you end up needing expensive emergency care the rest of us have to foot that bill because you were so arrogant as to think it couldn't happen to you.

Unbelievable.

8??? The company I'm at is still on 6!

Oh I agree with that. If Vista didn't kill them (or even hurt them, really) I can't imagine this will either.

I have a MBP and I can install what ever I want. What are you talking about?

That's not strictly true. People generally skip every other version of windows because somehow every other version sucks.