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Comment This isn't a victory for Behring-Breivik. (Score 3, Insightful) 491

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

Comment 6 billion or "hundreds of billions"? (Score 1) 143

Last time I took a maths class, 6 was not "hundreds". If 6 billion isn't a typo, then the article is way out of whack, and the economics are actually heavily stacked in the hyperloop's favour, as 2 airports with terminals and a dozen 747s to shuttle between them would end up costing more than 6 billion.

Comment Re:it's nonsense (Score 2) 84

If the FBI 'joins the dots' by connecting Pirate Bay uploader 'sharkmp4' and porn producer Ingenuity13 to Prenda (which seems pretty likely), then Prenda's whole business model looks very different.

They claim to be acting on behalf of Ingenuity13 to defend Ingenuity13 against copyright infringement started by sharkmp4... which would be legal, if they were not taking a blunderbuss approach to sending out accusations to people who are innocent but would rather pay up than go to court.

If however, Prenda, Ingenuity13 and sharkmp4 are one entity, they actually set just up a honeypot on their own behalf, and all the downloads were actually legal (because the copyright holder chose to share the files), all the accusations were false (and actionable), every penny of revenue they made was fraud, and they have been lying to more courts than most other corrupt or racketeering organisations even get to see the inside of. This is so illegal on so many levels that they'll pretty much end up not being sentenced by a court to life imprisonment, but simply dying of old age standing in the dock while the list of charges is still being read out.

Comment Re:Yet another proprietary API... (Score 1) 415

This isn't about getting 'the latest games ported to Mac', this is about getting iOS games ported to Mac.

The iPhone/iPad platform has a hell of a lot of exclusive games, and if Apple can make the process of also offering those games to Mac owners sufficiently easy for developers, they might just end up with more games being available on Mac than there are on Windows.

Comment Re:Not sure there's a case (Score 1) 257

The letter to PA was sent on behalf of "Phi Sigma Sigma, Inc.", and there has to be some mechanism in place to pay for all those blue and gold* robes so they probably do count as a business.

* Just a wild guess based on those being their official colours according to Wikipedia, the colours of their logo, and the colours of practically everything on their website... wouldn't it be funny if those really were the colours they claim are "secret"!

Comment Self-fulfilling prophecies (Score 4, Interesting) 186

The Coati (a small member of the raccoon family native to Brazil) is also known as the Brazillian aardvark. The reason that it's known as the Brazillian aadvark is that someone made the phrase up and added it to Wikipedia - but the coinage gained traction, because journalists copied it, and this led to a citation for that name being added to the article. Now wikipedia is in a quandary... there are, thanks to lazy journalists, people who know the coati as the Brazillian aardvark, because they read that in a newspaper... so is the hoax now true?

Does it become true if the dord of references to that name reaches a certain level?
Does it become false even though people do use the term, just because the etymology of the word was a hoax?

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