You know what I never understood? The concept of "making an example" out of someone in the justice system. How can we give one individual a sentence that is exceptionally harsher than the norm and not have that sentence be considered unusual as in cruel and unusual? The whole point is that their sentence is unusual for the circumstance. How is this in any way a just and equal, and legal for that matter, application of the law?
It really depends on what you're "making an example of".
The words "making an example" are just a way of describing deterrence, which is a core function of the criminal justice system.
Deterrence is intrinsically neither good nor bad. It depends on what you're deterring. If it's arson, deterrence makes a lot of sense: it's fun and easy to set fires, and very easy to underestimate or disregard the harm those fires will do to others. If it's political tagging, deterrence makes much less sense. The justice system needs to extract a penalty for damaging people's property, but politically-motivated tags are a low-intensity problem.
Beyond deterrence, criminal penalties must account for the inefficiency of policing and the rewards to crime. A 1:1 damage/penalty system is intrinsically ineffective; it makes crime a rational decision.
It's easy to agree here that 3 years of probation for tagging in a deliberate attempt to get arrested to make a political point is abusive.
I don't know that the justice system as a whole has to account to anyone for handing out cruel and unusual punishments. I imagine in this case, they knew at the time of sentencing that the defendant was practically live tweeting his experience, and that a light sentence would be more likely to encourage others to disobey in a similar manner. It's not a justification, but 'making an example' is probably intended to serve as a deterrent to copycat criminals.
Sure, if you get caught, you compensate / reimburse the victim. If you don't get caught... well, sometimes you get lucky. But that's no different than how we do things now. Not everybody gets caught. It sucks, but it's reality.
But the idea that we're going to "extra punish" a handful of people here and there to "make an example out of them" is totally incompatible with any reasonable notion of "justice" .
So you don't think criminals should have to reimburse their victims, or make some appropriate restitution? Just lock 'em in cells and make them suffer until they've paid their dues, or maybe put them on a chain gang? Gotcha.
I don't want anything to do with it. Locking people in cells, forced labor, etc. are for the (few) people who are simply so dangerous that they can't roam the world without representing an imminent threat to others.
How so? And couldn't we make crime less profitable than not-crime by making not-crime more profitable and more accessible, instead of ruining the lives of the unlucky few who get caught?
The majority of people are happy living within accepted social norms. But there's 5% at each end of the Bell curve. At one end of the Bell curve, those 5% push social norms forward and eliminate things like slavery and segregation. At the other end of the Bell curve, those 5% flout social norms to their own advantage, and only violent reprisal keeps them at bay.
It already is. It probably always will be. So we can ignore reality and live in some fantasy-land where everything is perfect and none suffer and everybody walks on gilded streets and has a pony... or we can accept reality for what it is. But if attempting to build this polly-anna'ish dream world involves violating the fundamental essence of what justice and equality under the law mean, then I - for one - want no part of it.
I can't help but remember Aaron Schwartz when someone mentions "making an example". What can I do to try to discourage this practice of "making an example"?
This guy purposely wasted the time of the legal system, i.e., he wasted or tax dollars to prove a point. I think it's obvious why a judge would not be overly happy about it. I'm not surprised he got more than the usual punishment.
Oh come on, you think the taxpayer dollars are the biggest issue on the judge's mind? So he throws 10x the taxpayer dollars at the problem by putting him on probation for 3 years?
Have you ever met real people? Ever seen someone make decisions because they're pissed off? The guy basically took a shit all over the (immoral) way the justice system works, that's why he was singled out and made an example of.
Not sure how you got the inside scoop into the judge's thought process, but yeah, I assume he was pissed for exactly the reasons I listed; his time wasted, police time wasted, money wasted. Who knows, maybe the judge is just a big jerk who is happy with the unfairness in the justice system, but you don't know that any more than I do and there are plenty of good judges and cops out there.
You also don't know how this guy interacted with the police and the judge. He may have been a jerk himself. No one knows, but I do know that the legal system is not run by robots, and if your intention is to piss people off who have the power to screw with your life then, well... prepare to be screwed.
This is in no way a commentary on the substance of the article, nor am I defending the judge's decision. There's plenty of unfairness in the legal system (I've been on the receiving end a couple of times in my youth) and it's not right.
The point was that putting someone on probation is expensive. If the judge was upset about tax money being wasted, and their response to that was to waste more tax money, then the judge
...Again, for the I don't know how manyith time... it's not about what should be, it's about what is. If you want to live your life in la-la-land then don't be shocked when things don't go how you thought they would. Did anyone actually read what I said without adding in their own assumptions about why I would post it?
Let me put it this way; I'm your boss, and you go out of your way to screw with me and make me look bad. Would you not expect retaliation? Would you expect the same treatment as every other employee? If you do then you're naive. Judges and cops aren't robots, they're human. You piss them off and, as most people would, they are going to cause you as much pain as possible.
Like it or not, these people have a lot of power, for better or worse. If you want to make a stand and expose those who may be abusing their power then great, but don't expect that they will sit idly by while you do it.
And also for the n-th time these are people who's sole professional purpose is to be be fair judges and protect us from abuse, and they are apparently worse at it than J random hacker off the street.
Thats the core of what makes it shocking.
Lets say we had a business division of people focused intensely and solely on the job of applying computer science principles to practical net positive business applications. Shockingly there might exist a regional dysfunctional group where no one knows how to plug in a mouse or fizzbuzz. You can't rationalize away the incompetence of that particular IT department by making comparisons to the proverbial grandma can't be expected to run Ubuntu and pro football players shouldn't be expected to hack Clojure because that misses the point of why those specific societal positions exist in the first place.
Maybe even more on topic for HN, say someone wrote a garbage collector that actually stuffed the heap more full of garbage than when it started, and then when bugs are filed, rather than fixing the bugs, we get spin and rationalization that 99% of non-garbage collection code also put trash in the heap so its not really a bug that the garbage collector generates more garbage than it removes, etc.
All criminals "waste the time" of the criminal justice system, if that's your word for what I would call "justifying its existence".
Only a racist or classist asshole would single out one client of the justice system and accuse them of "wasting its time" because they seem like a different sort of person from the one the system is targeted towards.
Yes, but it's not the same as someone committing a crime solely to be processed and get a look at the inside of a cell.
If I'm a "racist or classist asshole" then you're a naive moron. You seem to have read too far in between the lines; I never once said that I agreed with the decision, only that it doesn't surprise me one bit.
Well, I disagree that it's not the same (from the point of view of how the imaginary perfect justice system in my head would operate) but I agree with you that the judge may have thought it wasn't the same.
I too worded my comment carefully: if the first sentence of your earlier post was to empathise with the mindset of the judge, then it seems to me that it is the judge whom I am calling a racist or classist asshole. I await my summons for contempt of court.
Then we disagree, that's fine, but I wasn't empathizing with the judge. I was pointing out that this guy should have expected to get smacked around for pulling a stunt like this.
Again, not saying that it was right or wrong, but the outcome should have been obvious.
I think you misunderstood my point. I was not defending the decision. What I'm saying is, if you commit a crime with the sole intent of being taken in to write an article which portrays these people in a bad light (right or wrong), then expect for them to be harsh on you. If you're surprised that they would punish you harshly then you're just naive.
Isn't the entire purpose of the justice department to give out fair unbiased rulings?
The cops being pricks is understandable, if a waste of everyones time, the judge being a prick is not. It is his only job to consider only the crime and the motives, and while his motives did warrant a stiffer penalty, they probably did not warrant that harsh of one.
I'm not sure what world you live in, but it certainly isn't this one. Judges are human. You go into court and decide to be a jerk to the judge? Guess what; you're walking away with a bigger penalty then you would have if you were nice. The judge did not go outside his authority as far as I am aware. He has discretion to go either way, and there are very good reasons for it(which is one reason that I hate mandatory minimums, but that's neither here nor there).
I'd be careful about assuming bias here. If a judge thinks that you deserve a larger penalty as a deterrent then that's not bias, he's doing his job. If he hands you the maximum penalty because you're his noisy neighbor then that's bias. I can't tell you what his motivations were.
> If a judge thinks that you deserve a larger penalty as a deterrent then that's not bias, he's doing his job.
There is no un-biased method of determining that the OP is likely to tag a building. Every single factor pointed to this being a one time event.
The only factor that you can pin a maximum sentence on is being indignant towards the process. He believes the process needs to be improved, and put himself in there intentionally to observe.
Doing it intentionally points to a harsher sentence, but going beyond the initial arraignment already put him into harsher sentence. The prosecutor asked for several times the typical punishment as well.
Although it is always possible we are missing something, typically it is the case the most obvious truth is the correct one. The judge thought that purposefully tagging a building was an afront to the justice system and punishable to the full extent of his power.
The good thing about symmetric key encryption in the browser is easy enough to check. You just need to make sure that messages/images are encrypted before being sent to the server, and that the password is never sent to the server. Also ChatStep uses sjcl so the crypto isn't homemade like CryptoCat.
Sure, I can verify that things aren't being sent in plaintext, and I can verify that they're using sjcl, but I can't verify most of the other things I mentioned. How do I know they're using sjcl right and not introducing some vulnerability (yes, I know I can dig through their JavaScript, but that's a plain in the ass)? I'm not saying I think they've got any problems; I'm just saying, be careful.
These sorts of tools, while convenient, are dangerous without a proper understanding of what you're doing. User beware.
Really? Did you even read the post- "The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published
prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain..."
This is nice, but I'd love to see some more important features opened up instead- things like huddle on mobile web and working video playback in the Android app would be great.
Worked well in Chrome 10 on Windows 7 for the first few minutes then crashed. Adding files was a little bit slow but the audio playback and tagging worked well. Nicely done though, it's very cool!
