We're not talking about "quite a few". We're talking about 80,000 at levels per capita that no other country on earth does. We don't conduct science and research to make ourselves feel fuzzy. We do it to point out that a huge amount of those people are not in for life, and will be released at some point, so why would we be complicit in inflicting mental instability on them given that it would be in our self interest to ensure they're not crazy when then are released? The whole point of raising the alarm on this is that it's being used on people who do not pose imminent physical threats and dangers to others. It's right there in the summary, and the article - nobody is suggesting that solitary confinement isn't required, but it's weapons grade stupid (if a profitable business model for jails) to turn humans into worse humans. We figured out a long time ago that it's more more beneficial for US to rehabilitate those who we can, so if you're okay with using punishments and detainment that cause people do become more of a danger to society when they're let out than when they're let in, you're not even making a case for self interest.

It refers to the C Run Time, aka. the C standard library. Back in the day, only C programmers were able to operate radar. Nowadays, they can monitor radar with jQuery and node.js.

Did it ever occur to you that this might be more complicated than it seems from the outside, and that the politics going on here might not actually reflect the bulk of the population?

Would you like to tell us what country you're in, so that we can share with you how we feel about your country's choices?

The modern homosexual rights movement started in the United States, and has derived the vast bulk of its force from the United States. The United States has the first gay rights group, the first gay bookstore, the first gay bar, the first gay political group, the first gay autobiography in modern times, the first magazine openly for gays and about gay culture; we invented and performed the first sex reassignment (Sweden was the first to make that legal, but that's because it was never illegal here; we performed the first one seven years before anyone else made it legal;) we were the first to successfully fight discharge over orientation, though far from the first to allow gays in the military directly; we were the first modern Western country to have a gay leader at the senator level, though we have not yet hit the presidential level and Iceland has; if you remove France, who got it in the late 1700s, we were the first Western country to eliminate sodomy laws; we had the first gay kiss on a major magazine cover (probably first at all, but who can exhaustively search minor magazines?,) we started the transsexual rights movement, the first officially sanctioned university group for gay advocacy, we invented pride parades and hold them everywhere; we created gay as a protected class for discrimination, also trans, and we'll probably be the first to poly; we had the first gay ordained minister; we invented the rainbow flag (sorry, I wish it was less ugly) and thereby probably the first major pride symbol (but I can't exclude so maybe there's something earlier?,) we started the Gay Games, we missed the first statuory discrimination ban by months, we had the first city and first territory (state, thank you) to extend marriage benefits to gay partners, we came to terms with AIDS way ahead of the pack, we did gay adoption first, etc.

Are you sure Americans are anti-gay, and not just a country of a third of a billion people who have a handful of bad apples, a media system faking controversy to generate viewership, a slashdot reader who's forgotten what percentage of the internet is trolling, and a parochial political system pandering to margins to get voted in?

The phrase "utter fucking cunts" suggests the UK, and to look at Wikipedia's gay rights map, it looks like the US and the UK are world leaders, and that the US is ahead of the UK.

Looks like England is ahead of the US, but hey, California's ahead of England, and California is both larger than and nearly as populous as Britain, so I think that's the actual natural comparison. You guys don't have national gay marriage observation yet. We *do*. (We don't have national performance yet, but that's no big deal; just take a $200 trip to California. It's still binding in every hateful corner of the South. The UK has no such privilege.) North America is the only continent where this is wall to wall legally supported; Eastern Europe misses it by four countries (no illegal but four no recognition,) and South America by six (five no recognition, one illegal.)

Africa has only one country where gay marriage is legal, and Asia has only one (and shockingly it's not Japan) plus six more where it's not recognized.

Uganda just recently worsened their practice to making homosexuality a capital offense. Cameroon, Iran, Nigeria, and Ethiopia all carry the death penalty (these are all nations in the Britain population range.)

The United States is vascillating over whether it's legal for a private business to choose to ask someone to leave over their preference. And we're so shocked by this that there's a national uproar.

We've had several states where this has been legal for decades, and our states are often the size of what you think of as small countries.

So slice it and dice it however you want, but I think the US is actually doing quite well with regards to homosexuality law, thanks.

Please don't blame me and my countryfolk for the things that happen on TV.

No.

Kicking puppies is awesome.

Nothing needs to be hacked to get that same estimate of revenue.

Just download their zone file and multiply by their annual. The zone file even tells you when they were registered and when they're registered until, allowing you to take account of public discounts for registration length.

It's still an upper bound; you don't know what other offers or freebies are in there. But still. It's a better upper bound than the hack ostensibly provides.

Did the OTA process itself cause the instability, or would your device been just as unstable had you updated it over a cable? My comments regarding OTA updates are meant to apply to the OTA aspect only, not whether the update itself is good. That is, for a given update X, do you deliver that update via a programming cable plugged into the ECU at the dealership, or do you deliver that exact same update OTA. That was the point in debate.

Or is your (unstated) argument that by lowering the barrier for making updates (ie. OTA is easier and cheaper than calling everyone into the shop), that would tempt auto manufacturers to take shortcuts in their QA process in the name of getting updates out there more quickly?

Johnny Carson? Every one of his jokes was original? He mined Vaudeville humor and brought it to TV. He didn't even start the Tonight Show.

Elvis Presley? All of his hits were written by others. Let's face it: He made his money and fame bringing black music to white people.

James Brown? Definitely an original, whose life unfortunately went off the rails at some point.

Ok, that's enough rant. Every one of those folks earned their place on a stamp. I just wanted to point out your double standard. It's easy to dismiss one person or another with cherry picked criteria.

If you walked up to a random 20 or 30 something on the street today and asked them if they knew who Carson, Bergman, Presley, Brown or Jobs was, I imagine Steve would beat out most of them.

I'm no Steve Jobs fanboy. (I've never owned an iPhone or iPod, and I'm posting this from a Linux box.) But even I can recognize the reality of the situation.

No, he doesn't...

I know you're just trying to be snarky.

Actually, proper OTA updates have a number of safeguards built into them to ensure the process has clean "before" and "after" states for each step of the update process, with no crash-inducing intermediate state. I can think of at least one vendor that has a product in this space. (Note: The link is not meant as an endorsement; it's merely an example.)

The only real thing I imagine you need to worry about is if the car has had damage or after-market "upgrades" that might interfere with the validity of the update, leading to safety issues with the combination. A trip to the dealer would at least give the dealer a chance to notice such things. I find it hard to imagine that in practice, though, that it would uncover many negative interactions at the dealer.

The way I like to summarize it when talking to non-technical types is this: The odds of any one ticket winning the lottery jackpot are astronomically small. Regardless, people win the jackpot quite regularly.

Low probability per trial × many trials = reasonable probability of occurrence overall.

Rounding small probabilities down doesn't fully explain all the ways folks get tripped up thinking about probabilities. For example, the Birthday Paradox doesn't fit that model directly, because it's counter-intuitive what constitutes a "trial". As the number of people involved grows linearly, the number of potential pairings grows quadradically, and most folks don't really take that into account.

Extending that to the lottery example: It's far, far more likely that two people bought the same numbers than it is that anyone matched the jackpot numbers. (And that's before taking into account the fact that folks that pick their own numbers rarely pick very random numbers.) But nobody's interested in that coincidence until the folks with the same number also match the jackpot number.

The notifications seem to be going out in waves, slowly. I'm not sure why. Across three folks I know (including myself) with Kickstarter accounts, the emails themselves all seem to have gone out within minutes of each other, but one of them arrived just minutes ago.

I'm guessing with the volume of emails, it got throttled along the way. You can see this in the Received: headers:

Received: from o2.e2.kickstarter.com (o2.e2.kickstarter.com. [74.63.202.49])
by xx.example.com with SMTP id xxxxxxxxxx
for < username@example.com >;
Sat, 15 Feb 2014 21:49:50 -0800 (PST)
...
Received: by filter-219.sjc1.sendgrid.net with SMTP id xxxxxxxxxx
Sat, 15 Feb 2014 21:18:46 +0000 (UTC)
Received: from MTEzNDg (unknown [10.42.83.122])
by localhost.localdomain (SG) with HTTP id xxxxxxxxxx
for <no-reply@kickstarter.com>; Sat, 15 Feb 2014 21:18:46 +0000 (GMT)

Notice that the earlier time stamps (corresponding to when the emails were generated) are around 21:18 GMT, but the arrival timestamps are around 21:49 PST, about 8 and a half hours later. And that's about how far apart our emails arrived. I imagine more are in the queue.

(And yay crapflooders for making it impossible to format things usefully in Slashdot comments.)

As far as passwords go, I'm not worried about anyone actually hacking my Kickstarter password. It's a password unique to Kickstarter, and it was generated at random.org as a 13 character mixed-case alphanumeric password. Good luck reverse-hashing that. Even if you do, it won't get you much.

I think you just tried to write a scene for an episode of CSI.

My (Canadian debit) card has been scanned twice, and both times the bank called me up, notified me of the fraudulent charges on my account, and the money was back in my account in under two weeks.

"the consumers get to be forced to memorize a new PIN!"

Sometimes it's funny to hear Americans complain about how difficult life is. Change is so scary!