>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.

Have you ever put a slingshot in a blender or, conversely, created a blender that could be fired by slingshot?

The news of the earlier hack got me thinking about the unique risk/reward of ubiquitous communication and the challenge of computer security to keep pace. Certainly some say the pace of technological innovation is no longer in step with yesterday's, but that almost begs the question. It's truly ironic that modern computing becomes physically smaller as its footprint on our lives looms ever larger with each new year, yet no one disputes that, lately, electronic progress rests solely within the social stratum these days.

We should ask ourselves, however, the rather basic question of whether this seismic shift in the nature of the changes in technology brings with it an impedimentary effect on our lives, or indeed to wonder to the degree technology has ever been pedimentary when it comes right down to it. Yes, it's certainly got its foot in the door, but as with feet and doors it's not always possible to know at the moment of impact whether said foot represents opportunity, doom, or a casualty of a society overeager to shut the door to change.

Certainly the last thing anyone wants is a race to the bottom. Ah, but that's not entirely accurate when one considers the vested interest shoemakers have in most modern day footraces. It suggests that, moving forward, the most important thing to do when evaluating new technology in 2013 may very well be to first identify the shoemakers for that technology. Ask yourself: if I'm already wearing five pairs of socks, do I even need shoes at this point? Odds are, you don't.

Or, apparently, Raspberry Pi. I really have to get around to buying a couple of those.

I don't think it's something that's prepackaged and easy to install, unfortunately. The principle behind it is here, as implemented on OpenBSD.

For hardware, I guess just a small PC with a wireless network adapter and a wired network adapter. Major thing is to make sure everything is compatible with OpenBSD (or Linux as another option, if it looks like the above process can be tweaked to it). Wireless adapters are a pain for compatibility.

It seems to me as I write this that it'd be really neat if the EFF sold ITX-profile routers preconfigured to create open hotspots that route over TOR.

Typically, you only get one of these around a newly formed star, a T Tauri star, or Herbig Ae/Be star. This discovery really broadens the scope for the types of stars that could yield solar systems like our own, and maybe in turn, the likelihood for finding some sort of extraterrestrial life.

Keep in mind that (with a decent router) you can open your Wi-Fi but route all guest connections through TOR transparently. That might be a fair compromise, along with rate-limiting, capping per-session usage, and setting a hard limit for the month if necessary to prevent yourself from going over your own cap on service.

Open Wi-Fi everywhere actually makes me more nervous for the clients than for the servers. People already don't understand security with Wi-Fi, and need to know that any server they're using can observe their traffic if it isn't encrypted. I guess that's already a concern without open Wi-Fi everywhere, though.

Because there are two worlds colliding here in the mind of the average person.

• The school of thought that the victim is always at least partly responsible for being conned. There's a sense of superiority a lot of people get when they hear about scams where, because they themselves would never fall prey to a scammer, anyone who does is deficient or incautious.

• Anyone charged with a crime involving a computer for more then Solitaire, porn, and recipe hunting must be guilty.

It's been over eight years since the last TrollBack? I don't know if I ever said thanks for those, by the way, so thanks for those; really enjoyed them.

If science required knowledge of the outcomes before it was performed, ask yourselves: how many of the technologies around us would we enjoy today?

Taking the space program as an example, putting a man on the moon was symbolic, but the payback for the research and development went far beyond that. Even if we didn't reach the moon, we got memory foam, orange drink, and satellites out of the deal.

But too many people are unwilling to pay for R&D if they don't have a 100% guaranteed outcome. Well, science doesn't work like that. The best we can do is speculate about the gains from better and better software-based brain models. Simulated protein folding probably seemed a bit goofy to somebody when it was first proposed. We don't know if we don't try.

Fwoooooooooooosh. Fwoooooooooooooooooooooooooosh. KWEEEOW. Fwooooooooooooooosh.

Nah, just edit once and have the other 4999 machines fetch through Gnutella with a batch file. It's not like this isn't a solved problem.

That sounds pretty good. I figured there had to be something more to it if 1500+ people were showing up. 18 years in and my imagination with regard to Linux still only goes so far as to web browse, write code, and beg WINE to run games properly. Though I certainly wouldn't turn away automated beer if it came in the next Ubuntu.