>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

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.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

Yes, and the innocent boy wipes out an entire sentient species. Meanwhile his psychotic, megalomaniac brother brings about world peace but only as a means to seizing supreme world power for himself.

It's not about survival or teen nerd wish fulfillment, it's about how our much our intentions matter as compared to our actions.

There's a similar though smaller revolt going on over the changes to Yahoo's Fantasy Football. The nasty thing about the Fantasy Football changes is that they didn't roll them out until two weeks before the start of the season, after lots of people had already paid as much as $250 to join pro leagues.

Yahoo went so far as to post an announcement to every league that they won't be going back to the original format (but they really appreciate your comments!).

When I see vertical-takeoff-vertical-landing my first thought is Armadillo Aerospace and their years of work on those rockets. Now that Armadillo is largely mothballed, have some of their guys turned up at SpaceX?

Why? For e-commerce. Especially for products that are made to order, anything that cuts down on return rates ("this isn't what I thought I saw on the website") is worth putting some money into. I'm working on exactly this sort of project right now and we finally made the decision to cut 3D because support is so patchy.

End user support isn't the whole problem though. You also need 3D models with enough detail to look smooth but small enough to deliver over the web. If you can even get 3D models for a product they're usually the designer's CAD files which are huge and not easily converted to a format used by a gaming-type 3D engine.

But how is a $548.99 subsidy not illegal dumping?

The impact of this is actually pretty wide. Crypt_blowfish has been gaining popularity as a hashing algorithm in PHP thanks to Openwall's PHPass framework. Four years ago most PHP projects that I know were still using MD5 or SHA1 to hash passwords. Today those MD5 and SHA1 hashes can be brute-force cracked by free software running on a $200 GPU in a matter of days if not hours. So even a buggy version of Blowfish is still better by far.

So yeah, it's a wide-ranging bug but not a world breaking one. For starters it only affects passwords that use 8-bit characters, so passwords typed by anyone using a US-English keyboard still produce the same hashes as the correct Blowfish implementation.

For passwords of length n*4-1 (3, 7, 11, 15, ...), 8-bit characters in certain positions will result in some characters being ignored by the hash function. This makes it possible (though still not easy) to produce a collision, i.e. multiple different passwords that result in the same hash.

It's bad, but I want to stress that using even a buggy crypt_blowfish for password hashing is still a quantum leap over the single-hashed MD5 or SHA1 that you were seeing literally everywhere in the PHP world just a few years ago.

Wide. Many major PHP projects have been moving toward Openwall's PHPass algorithm that uses Blowfish as its preferred hashing algorithm. Note that even with this bug it's still better than the unsalted MD5 or SHA1 hashes that most projects were using previously. Today any of those old hashes can be brute-force cracked by a $200 GPU in about a day.

Let me fix that for you:

The Acid tests are demos, not unit tests of HTML compliance. I would rather see real progress in areas where FF is truly weak (like, say, the crappy SVG renderer) than worry about those last three pips on Acid3.

Except that his story isn't that hard to believe. I can remember busting out 20-page papers overnight when I was in college and I'm not a particularly fast writer. It's easy to imagine that someone with enough practice and motivation could churn out papers like this for a living.

Today I code web applications and I recognize the process he describes. He has essentially built a research paper "framework" that lets him quickly build products that fit a baseline set of requirements. In fact it sounds like he rarely even has to come up with a true finished product, essentially building one proof-of-concept after another. It's amazing how fast you can work when you honestly don't care about the details.

How many code geeks will spends hours and days and weeks over meaningless bullshit projects just because they can? This guy does the same thing with words and he found a way to get paid for it.

Go back and read TFA. I'm saying this not to be an asshole but because it's genuinely fascinating.

The author states that:

* He went to college to be a writer and found out that there's more than one way to get paid for what you write.

* He uses mainly Wikipedia (for background), Amazon for the free pages, and Google Academics for the abstracts. Everything else he spins from educated guesswork and outright bullshit with lots and lots of filler.

* He doesn't edit his work at all, this helps him work faster and heads off requests for him to "dumb it down".

* His clients often thank him for making typos (presumably because it looks more authentic that way).

He's not producing high quality work for top honors, he's producing "good enough" work for the sake of graduating at all. It may pay to get A's but C's get degrees, etc.

I've said for years that not everybody needs a college degree. I would guess (I would hope) that this guy is helping along the raft of mediocre graduates who won't ever really use their degree except as resume fodder. Unfortunately this just devalues college degrees even more so that employers keep on requiring degrees for jobs that don't really need special training.

He's right about one thing, blame the colleges that are more interested in collecting tuition fees than in producing actual, competent scholars.