...or they take the prison sentence and be given a comfortable retirement by the mob when they are released (as their reward for serving a sentence in silence)...
I can't offer a source (sorry), but I was listening to this podcast on criminal justice a few years ago, and they talked about it being semi-common in Japan for the Yakuza to assassinate their own members in prison. It wasn't because they were afraid the guy would rat them out, it was because he was just a low level employee that they didn't feel like they owed very much to, and it was cheaper to pay for him to be killed then to be obligated to pay his retirement when he got out.
I wonder if that ever happens stateside.
When your country has a GDP of $14.5 trillion a year, and you've got $15 trillion in debt, You need to raise taxes and you need to reduce spending on things you can limp by without, and pay off that national debt
Blockland is a non-competitive multiplayer online sandbox game where players can build with interconnecting plastic bricks which are similar to, but legally distinct from, legos.
"I've asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way," Isaacson recalls. So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson. Asked by Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision, Isaacson replies, "I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking...we talked about this a lot," he tells Kroft. "He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."
Which means that the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field ultimately claimed the life of it's creator.
Of course, another way would be to bootstrap by writing yourself an assembler in machine code, then a compiler for the source language of that compiler in assembly (using your self-written assembler), and then use that to compile the compiler you got in source (and to get an optimized compiler, compile the compiler with that compiler again). But again, few people have the resources to do so.
I challenge that this is as hard as it sounds. The bootstrapping homebrew compiler doesn't have to be fast or efficient, and doesn't have to produce fast or efficient code, it only has to be *correct* the one time you use it. You'd then use it to compile gcc, which to my understanding is implemented using only C (not c++) features.
So time to bootstrap a correct C-compliant compiler? In my arrogance, I bet it could be done in 6 months by a few dudes in a garage. Which if you're in a field that needs bulletproof compiler trust, is a small investment.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
