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Comment Re:glad to know judge got 28 federal years, until (Score 5, Insightful) 215

This attitude is part of everything that's wrong with the prison system. The idea that prisoners should be relied upon and expected to met out additional extrajudicial punishment to other prisoners. The idea that prison rape is "ok" because it's happening to other prisoners.

Comment Re:Lasers are easy to stop (Score 1) 517

Also speed means the laser doesn't need to be highly destructive. There's absolutely no problem with simply locking a suitably powerful laser on a target and firing it continuously until the target undergoes a failure, because so long as your tracking is working you pretty much will never miss - there's 0 effective flight time on terrestrial scales.

Comment Re:Double Irish (Score 1) 825

Your argument is "the Sovereign should have all the power he wants, and every whim indulged, because the only other choice is anarchy, and life there is nasty brutish and short." Hobbes' Leviathan. The opposing political philosophy was voiced be Locke. Have you heard of him? Much of the US Declaration of Independence was copied from Locke's works.

What do you think it says that this nation was founded on the principle that your simple-minded view was so wrong that it's worth going to war over?

Your nation is a democracy. Represented by the people. If its not that, then it doesn't matter what you think. But you seem to think it is that. In which case, taxes go to the people, and for the provision of their needs.

Comment Re: OMG (Score 1) 282

Actually plutonium is mostly just a biological toxin. Its a heavy metal that gets drawn into your cells and hits you about the same as say, a dose of cadmium breathed into the lungs would.

Radiation is a funny thing: alpha emitters are harmless outside the body, but incredibly toxic if absorbed. Gamma emitters are no trouble at all - they're no more dangerous (barring chemical toxicity) outside then inside since the radiation passes through all practical wearable shielding.

Comment Re:In other news... (Score 1) 307

Alternatively, you're part of a relatively limited slice of a generation for whom "not sharing" is an odd, sociological outlier compared to those which came before and after. The 40s were war years, and everyone had the shared experience of having to contribute in some way - across most of Europe the stories are of shared communities and experiences. It's only in the time since then has the notion that everybody can be absolutely private in their affairs gained the traction it did, especially in the US.

This was then crushed again starting around the 80s when censorship rules began to be overturned, and you see the beginnings of it in a generation of filmmakers who wanted to see what they could put on screen, and the slow rise of the internet and the generation which would eventually come to be part of the Google/Facebook generation.

If you think everyone else is broken, it's more likely just you are.

Comment Re:Lame Lame Lame! (Score 1) 198

I'm not sure I entirely agree, but I do agree that explaining "why" in decent terms has always been my biggest problem with understanding mathematics. I can just about get through calculus if I rote-memorize for long enough to start seeing the pattern, but the entire process utterly failed me when it came to complex analysis (5 textbooks and one failed semester later and I'd say I'm still at zero - the only subject where after a few hours I could still have absolutely gotten nowhere).

Comment Re:The web can be a great tool... (Score 1) 198

I'd argue the rise of the tablet is also a problem here though: computing of 20 years ago meant you weren't too many steps away from seeing how the system runs, how it operates, how you can create new programs on it. This isn't even possible on Apple-branded tablet products, and trends too "way too complex" on Android systems (although things like AIDE do mean you can theoretically develop new apps - but I doubt I'd have gotten anywhere with Java and all the boilerplate compared to a command line terminal when I was starting out).

Comment Re:This pays credence to my rant about tech (Score 1) 198

The basic problem is districts ship technology but not applications and basic training, nor investment in adapting their syllabus's to match and take advantage of their new capabilities (I would guess because that makes it go from "a lot but reasonable to" to "no upper bound because you need to plan to have developers on full time").

Comment Re:OpenSSL and the Internet (Score 2) 97

This is stupid.

If there's one lesson in the history of computing, it's that every type of possible side-channel leaks information like crazy if not properly controlled. So in what world does it make sense to mix up your application or transport protocol with your security protocol? The examples you give have nothing to do with the underlying transport protocols, or overlaying application protocols that have been in use.

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