Peter Kasting
5,164 followers -
Christian, husband, engineer, musician, and many other hats
Christian, husband, engineer, musician, and many other hats
5,164 followers
Peter's interests
Peter's posts
Post has attachment
Public
Disturbing.
http://www.vice.com/read/judge-shelley-chapman-criminal-court-bronx-horror
Here was one comment below that, had I had a Facebook login to use (aside: news sites, please make it so Facebook isn't the only way to leave comments on your site), I would have replied to:
"He thinks criminal court is horrifying? I think CRIMINALS ARE HORRIFYING, I think the things they do are horrifying. If the judges and court officers have developed a sort of "gallows humor", just like I did when I worked in war zones, that's psychological self-protection. Check and see if the judges DECISIONS are wrong, illegal, unusual, immoral. I doubt it."
There is an important distinction that must be made. The men and women being arraigned are not criminals. They are accused of crimes. In our justice system, someone is innocent until they are proven to be guilty. That is not to be taken lightly: it is the attitude necessary to achieve a just result. If we assume guilt ahead of time, we will certainly find it, but not, I think, to society's benefit.
And so perhaps criminals -- those guilty of crimes -- have done horrible things, but at an arraignment, "gallows humor" regarding this, however familiar or self-protecting, serves injustice. So yes, almost certainly, the result is that some of the decisions are wrong and immoral.
I don't mean to say that this would be an easy job. I don't think I have the temperament to be a fair judge, and I doubt many people do. I doubt many judges do. It demands, perhaps, more than we should expect of a human to hear endless accusations of crime day in and day out and not become jaded.
But I can't see how we can prevent this, at least as much as it is preventable, except by trying our best to hold the people in our justice system to a high standard. And there, I think, the commenter's reply makes a grave error. By excusing a cavalier attitude, it invites cavalier results.
http://www.vice.com/read/judge-shelley-chapman-criminal-court-bronx-horror
Here was one comment below that, had I had a Facebook login to use (aside: news sites, please make it so Facebook isn't the only way to leave comments on your site), I would have replied to:
"He thinks criminal court is horrifying? I think CRIMINALS ARE HORRIFYING, I think the things they do are horrifying. If the judges and court officers have developed a sort of "gallows humor", just like I did when I worked in war zones, that's psychological self-protection. Check and see if the judges DECISIONS are wrong, illegal, unusual, immoral. I doubt it."
There is an important distinction that must be made. The men and women being arraigned are not criminals. They are accused of crimes. In our justice system, someone is innocent until they are proven to be guilty. That is not to be taken lightly: it is the attitude necessary to achieve a just result. If we assume guilt ahead of time, we will certainly find it, but not, I think, to society's benefit.
And so perhaps criminals -- those guilty of crimes -- have done horrible things, but at an arraignment, "gallows humor" regarding this, however familiar or self-protecting, serves injustice. So yes, almost certainly, the result is that some of the decisions are wrong and immoral.
I don't mean to say that this would be an easy job. I don't think I have the temperament to be a fair judge, and I doubt many people do. I doubt many judges do. It demands, perhaps, more than we should expect of a human to hear endless accusations of crime day in and day out and not become jaded.
But I can't see how we can prevent this, at least as much as it is preventable, except by trying our best to hold the people in our justice system to a high standard. And there, I think, the commenter's reply makes a grave error. By excusing a cavalier attitude, it invites cavalier results.
Public
Random Chrome news trivia.
I know our announcement about an extension to restore "backspace goes back" functionality to Chrome said the words "we heard you", but it's not actually true that (as Techspot wrote) we made a decision to totally gut the feature and then were "forced...to reevaluate". We wanted to release such an extension from the beginning, it just took a while to get shipped, for various reasons.
I mean, we do listen to user feedback, but this was more a case of having heard the feedback over the years before this that people use this feature, so we knew from the beginning that we wanted to maintain this capability for those users.
(As to why do this as an extension rather than an option, I have written before about this topic, but if necessary I can always write another such post in the future.)
I know our announcement about an extension to restore "backspace goes back" functionality to Chrome said the words "we heard you", but it's not actually true that (as Techspot wrote) we made a decision to totally gut the feature and then were "forced...to reevaluate". We wanted to release such an extension from the beginning, it just took a while to get shipped, for various reasons.
I mean, we do listen to user feedback, but this was more a case of having heard the feedback over the years before this that people use this feature, so we knew from the beginning that we wanted to maintain this capability for those users.
(As to why do this as an extension rather than an option, I have written before about this topic, but if necessary I can always write another such post in the future.)
Public
Random spammers making new accounts pretending to be Vietnamese women and sharing photos with me: please just stop.
Public
Why does everybody try to build their own video/streaming tech and then they all suck at it? If it isn't ESPN's abysmal streaming, it's the NBC Olympics' lag-filled, crashy player.
STOP BUILDING YOUR OWN TERRIBLE SOLUTIONS AND JUST USE YOUTUBE OR SOMETHING.
Argh. Watching the Olympics on streaming is just painful.
STOP BUILDING YOUR OWN TERRIBLE SOLUTIONS AND JUST USE YOUTUBE OR SOMETHING.
Argh. Watching the Olympics on streaming is just painful.
Post has attachment
Public
This is a bad rule for a lot of reasons.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/1/12342096/pokemon-go-new-york-sex-offender-online-gaming-ban
It's true that Pokemon Go may cause children to come nearer to where sex offenders live. But having the sex offenders not play the game isn't what would fix this. The article notes that negotiations are occurring that would result in no Pokemon/gyms/etc. appearing near sex offender residences. But if that's occurring, why should the offenders be banned from playing the game? Their playing isn't the factor that will or will not result in people coming near their houses.
More generally, what about when offenders go to work, or to the store, or any other random part of their lives? What if there are Pokemon near there? Are we going to ban Niantic from allowing Pokemon to appear near offender workplaces, near stores, movie theaters, clubs, and any other business or location that can have an offender inside it? Are offenders going to all wear permanent tracking devices and Niantic will have to create constant bubbles of nothingness around those positions at all times?
What if there aren't Pokemon near where the offenders are and kids happen to be nearby anyway? Should we create force fields to prevent the two from coming into close contact?
And why are all "internet-enabled games" (which, these days, means most games, arguably even the ones without a multiplayer component) banned? What harm are the others causing?
Sex offenses are rarely about sex so much as about power. The offender feels powerless in some way and asserts power by victimizing someone weaker. Or the offender has a dearth of normal social interactions and grooms some victim to substitute for them.
So imagine in this world that you've already publicized the offender by putting their name and address on a public list and announcing them to all their neighbors when they move in (which is called "postering" and is common or even mandatory in a lot of places). Probably this means few of their neighbors will want to relate to them, and they may be harassed.
Next you prevent the offender from living anywhere remotely near anywhere children commonly are, which, given the density of schools in most places, mostly banishes offenders to the outskirts; there's no way to live near/in most population centers (and thus jobs). So they're now physically isolated even more.
Next you prevent the offender from even relating remotely to friends or relatives by playing games online. Those TV commercials where friends play Call Of Duty or Madden or whatever together while chatting on their headsets? All that is permanently banned. Do it and you violated your parole.
What frame of mind will this place the offender in? Isn't it obvious this will exacerbate the very isolation, powerlessness, and anger that led to offending in the first place? Even if we don't care about the basic human needs of the offenders (which we should), isn't this clearly idiotic from a public-safety perspective? These sorts of rules turn past offenders into future offenders.
Humans are incredibly bad at estimating risk; they operate on salience rather than statistics; they make emotional rather than rational judgements; they are vindictive and ingroup-focused. These factors result in a set of policies for sex offenders that is incredibly counterproductive. This new policy just takes those factors and makes them even worse.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/8/1/12342096/pokemon-go-new-york-sex-offender-online-gaming-ban
It's true that Pokemon Go may cause children to come nearer to where sex offenders live. But having the sex offenders not play the game isn't what would fix this. The article notes that negotiations are occurring that would result in no Pokemon/gyms/etc. appearing near sex offender residences. But if that's occurring, why should the offenders be banned from playing the game? Their playing isn't the factor that will or will not result in people coming near their houses.
More generally, what about when offenders go to work, or to the store, or any other random part of their lives? What if there are Pokemon near there? Are we going to ban Niantic from allowing Pokemon to appear near offender workplaces, near stores, movie theaters, clubs, and any other business or location that can have an offender inside it? Are offenders going to all wear permanent tracking devices and Niantic will have to create constant bubbles of nothingness around those positions at all times?
What if there aren't Pokemon near where the offenders are and kids happen to be nearby anyway? Should we create force fields to prevent the two from coming into close contact?
And why are all "internet-enabled games" (which, these days, means most games, arguably even the ones without a multiplayer component) banned? What harm are the others causing?
Sex offenses are rarely about sex so much as about power. The offender feels powerless in some way and asserts power by victimizing someone weaker. Or the offender has a dearth of normal social interactions and grooms some victim to substitute for them.
So imagine in this world that you've already publicized the offender by putting their name and address on a public list and announcing them to all their neighbors when they move in (which is called "postering" and is common or even mandatory in a lot of places). Probably this means few of their neighbors will want to relate to them, and they may be harassed.
Next you prevent the offender from living anywhere remotely near anywhere children commonly are, which, given the density of schools in most places, mostly banishes offenders to the outskirts; there's no way to live near/in most population centers (and thus jobs). So they're now physically isolated even more.
Next you prevent the offender from even relating remotely to friends or relatives by playing games online. Those TV commercials where friends play Call Of Duty or Madden or whatever together while chatting on their headsets? All that is permanently banned. Do it and you violated your parole.
What frame of mind will this place the offender in? Isn't it obvious this will exacerbate the very isolation, powerlessness, and anger that led to offending in the first place? Even if we don't care about the basic human needs of the offenders (which we should), isn't this clearly idiotic from a public-safety perspective? These sorts of rules turn past offenders into future offenders.
Humans are incredibly bad at estimating risk; they operate on salience rather than statistics; they make emotional rather than rational judgements; they are vindictive and ingroup-focused. These factors result in a set of policies for sex offenders that is incredibly counterproductive. This new policy just takes those factors and makes them even worse.
Public
I think "Xy McXFace" might be an even less funny and less creative trend than recursive acronyms.
Post has attachment
Post has attachment
Public
+allen clapp showed me this tonight. How did I never see this video? Mega LOL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3d3v_oIqI
There are so many questions I want to ask. One is... how do these two songs relate to each other?!?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3d3v_oIqI
There are so many questions I want to ask. One is... how do these two songs relate to each other?!?!
Post has shared content
Post has attachment
Public
This has nice words about Chrome, but I'm not sure exactly what it's measuring in some cases, or how representative its score is.
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/29/a-famed-hacker-is-grading-thousands-of-programs-and-may-revolutionize-software-in-the-process/
"Looking at three browsers, for example — Chrome, Safari, and Firefox — Chrome came out on top, with Firefox on the bottom. Google’s Chrome developers not only used a modern build environment and enabled all the default security settings they could, Mudge says, they went “above and beyond in making things even more robust.” Firefox, by contrast, “had turned off [ASLR], one of the fundamental safety features in their compilation.”"
That's all true, as far as it goes. But does his "fortified source" score account for the level of sandboxing in the browser? The main reason why Chrome is more secure than Firefox is that we currently have a pretty robust sandbox covering everything, and their sandboxing is less strong and comprehensive. That means turning a bug into an exploit is a lot easier.
Sure, things like ASLR help, but in my understanding they're more speedbumps that make certain types of memory exploits harder to construct than full-fledged firewalls like the Chrome sandbox architecture is intended to be.
I guess I am automatically wary every time someone praises something Chrome does because I don't want us crowing about anything we don't fully deserve to crow about.
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/29/a-famed-hacker-is-grading-thousands-of-programs-and-may-revolutionize-software-in-the-process/
"Looking at three browsers, for example — Chrome, Safari, and Firefox — Chrome came out on top, with Firefox on the bottom. Google’s Chrome developers not only used a modern build environment and enabled all the default security settings they could, Mudge says, they went “above and beyond in making things even more robust.” Firefox, by contrast, “had turned off [ASLR], one of the fundamental safety features in their compilation.”"
That's all true, as far as it goes. But does his "fortified source" score account for the level of sandboxing in the browser? The main reason why Chrome is more secure than Firefox is that we currently have a pretty robust sandbox covering everything, and their sandboxing is less strong and comprehensive. That means turning a bug into an exploit is a lot easier.
Sure, things like ASLR help, but in my understanding they're more speedbumps that make certain types of memory exploits harder to construct than full-fledged firewalls like the Chrome sandbox architecture is intended to be.
I guess I am automatically wary every time someone praises something Chrome does because I don't want us crowing about anything we don't fully deserve to crow about.
Wait while more posts are being loaded