Which would likely be the owners of 90% of the computers in botnets. Gullible of plain ol' stupid. So, I guess that's a match made in heaven.

One might even argue that subjecting your fellow Slashdotters to horrible puns is cruel, but that would lead to even sillier (and pointless) ideas.

The whole thing where innocents get the death penalty because of mistakes, is why you keep them in jail until you're absolutely sure they -did- do it. And in most cases, you can't be absolutely sure they did it, so... you keep them there for life, instead of killing them. If they're escaping from jail too often, you've got another problem anyway. And the populace won't notice the difference between a death and a life imprisonment, other than having to pay slightly less tax because apparently life imprisonment is cheaper. And you have the benefit of not killing the innocent.

I'd say there's quite a few reasons to reserve executions for very few cases, or ban it outright. That said, I'm biased, I'm European. We're all progressive and shit.

The economy seems to always adjust to whether people can afford stuff though. Otherwise nobody would sell anything. If people can afford another $30000 in emergencies because they have some organs to sell, the cost of the stuff an average person buys in their life would just go up by a total of $30000. In that way, being able to sell organs while alive would become just another insurance scheme: spend a bit extra over time, so you can afford something big when you really need it.

Personally, the thought of having to actually use that insurance freaks me out. We'd be better off just getting a mandatory regular insurance of said $30k or whatever those organs are worth.

Think of debts due to hospital bills of a loved one, or having to choose between having two kidneys and letting your kid go to college. If many people started selling "redundant" organs, even for the best of reasons, then standards could shift so that others might do it for not-so-great reasons.. and we get a drop in the average health of poor people, for the advantage of those that are better off.

Hell, imagine having cancer and knowing it hasn't spread to some of your valuable, sellable organs yet... and you can't afford hospital bills the normal way. Most people would do it.

I know I'm invoking the slippery slope argument here, but I think it might be justified.

The butchering argument is one I hadn't thought of yet... And I'd say it's pretty much on equal footing with the "forced to sell kidney to pay debts" scenario. Good one.

An analogy I found earlier today was that those countries are a bit like babies. Making noise, occasionally hurting others or themselves by accident.. But if a baby drools/pees/vomits all over your sweater, you do not obliterate it. You teach it, or just trust that it's causing almost no damage. The well-established, loosely-allied countries in the world are the adults in this simile, who should be teaching the less well-off countries.

If we just showed the residents of those places how things could be, and gave them an anonymous, secure channel to voice their opinions through, that would give us plenty of information to know what to do next. Instead, the US gathered up some cronies (sadly, the country I live in was one of them) and pretty much just crushed any problem countries.

Thanks for the link. I care not for Apple, but seeing that Cycles will get proper OpenCL support was almost enough to make me squee. Almost. Good to know, anyway :)

Probably, though I wouldn't know. I hadn't looked into mining until Bitcoins got so difficult to mine that graphics cards were completely irrelevant already. It's all ASICs now, and if you try to buy one you won't get it until it's become worthless. Expect to be scammed. That's mostly why Scrypt was made, afaik: to put power back in the users' hands, by making it difficult to mine by graphics card (failed) and by ASIC (hasn't failed yet; might later)

Apparently, Radeons have an instruction that's really important for Scrypt mining, which nVidia cards lack. That's why Radeons of the same price generally reach perhaps 10 times as many hashes per second.

I was going to post a similar comment to harrkev's, except I had to log in first to be able to actually post it. So I'll just add to that.

The printer used by Defense Distributed, as far as I know, is an FDM printer, much like the RepRaps. This would mean that I could easily print a plastic gun that's just as good as the ones made by DD. Making such a printer is easy to the point that anyone can make one from scratch with some technical knowledge and programming skills, now that we've seen them and know how they work. There is absolutely no way anyone could prevent a dedicated individual from 3D printing one of these guns.

I'm speaking from experience here, I've got a homemade Mendel90 and I've looked into the related software and firmware.

Can you imagine the fucked-up settings after a nice night with the boyfriend/girlfriend? Twenty apps open, desktop rearranged into total chaos, and you're about to send a mail containing "afaguhiho;agehgisuaffgasf butts" to the CEO of Microsoft.

To add to Errol's reply.. Basically, our minister of security and justice, Ivo Opstelten, loves to act like a rabid fanboy of the book 1984, and of the things the UK and USA are already doing. We're just lagging behind a year or two on the field of "massive disregard for citizens' rights".

Not an ideal choice, in other words.

Source: dutch citizen. Annoyed dutch citizen.

You think he was handing her a few dollars' worth of pennies? Ahem, maybe not "handing"...

I struggle to find out how SuricouRaven was being homophobic. Maybe pedophobic, if that's a word?