In Search Of... consolation...

Worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, as bright as a quarter moon for a while, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry.

There would be considerably more worrying were it not for Slashdot filters.

Based on a study that shows the average Briton doesn't take nearly enough placebo.

I would say "sold" but with BTC in the $250 range that works out to roughly $0.000025 so it isn't worth the hassle of setting up an account, and it's too small to withdraw. Besides, agents of His Majesty Felipe VI are the ones who really need to do the collecting.

I hereby declare the number 90185349087539845793845389573985739485739487593857893 in the name of the King of Spain. What will you give me for that?

Do continue.

Ditto. Any significant C I've written had "cleanup:" at the end of many functions, and "goto cleanup" wherever you had to bail out of the middle of such functions. Once I got over the "never use goto" mentality that was drilled into my head, I realized it was the most maintainable way of dealing with things that had to be released such as file handles, graphics contexts, memory, etc. Anybody who analyzed my code should have quickly picked up on the fact that this was an idiom for something like destructors in a language that doesn't have them.

Isn't the point of prison to separate criminals from the general population?

This; but with some very important caveats. First, the separation must be as humane as practical. Why? Well there's the obvious "don't be a sicko and mistreat anybody, even a prisoner because it's immoral" argument. There's also the "hey, they might be innocent" argument. Everybody, even the most hardened "tough on crime" person should understand this. Every single one of us is potentially a victim of mistaken imprisonment. What, not me? Yes. You. If you disagree, please refer back to the definition of "mistaken imprisonment". Thus, we all have a personal stake in safe, humane treatment of prisoners.

Second, we should carry out this humane separation only when necessary, and in a way that isn't too costly.

The policy as described in the article summary seems neither humane, nor necessary. In the long run it will be costly too. Extended solitary can lead to severe mental conditions. Severe mental conditions are costly to society, either because of new crimes when released, or the need to turn the prisoner over to an expensive psychiatric facility for the rest of their lives.

If they're concerned about people running gangs from prison, they could monitor their networks. Collect all the information and trade it with your friends... then collect their friends and put them in the same cell. Of course there'd be less of this if we weren't waging a war on drugs; but that's a separate rant.

Perhaps the difference is that much of the ship on Titan would be operating at temperatures close to the phase transition, whereas on Earth only a tiny part of the ship is operating at such temperatures.

Now I really want to know how many C-64s, Apple ][s, Osbourne's, or other contemporary machines available to students we would have needed to have a 95% chance of mining a coin before the semester was out. That's assuming that crypto currency existed in 1987, which it didn't. I suspect we would have overloaded the breaker panel and not have had much of a chance. These machines struggled to render one crappy low-res image of the Mandlebrot set.

A more plausible technique back then would have been to steal cycles from an academic computer. I don't know what they had in the 80s, but when I returned to school after dropping out there was an RS6000 and a Sun cluster to which we had access, and possibly more that we could have found and compromised. Not sure how much computing power could have come from pooled student accounts. It might have been more plausible; but the ability to run unattended jobs was often restricted. Computing privileges at a university generally aren't worth risking for such nonsense...

Electricity was not metered in our dorms. A lot of us joked about electroplating. AFAIK, nobody did it. This was in the 80s when most weed was ditch from Jamaica or Mexico. People weren't hip to hydro there. If you offered college students free electricity now, grow-ops would definitely be their first thought.

Of course this is Greece we're talking about here, so they'll just end up with rolling black-outs if they aren't doing it already. It's hard to run a grow-op, server farm, or anything when the juice is only on for a few hours a day.

Too much of a fire hazard. I don't see any local fire marshal wanting to sign off on such a thing. I'd go with a gas detector that sounds an alarm and releases CO2 into the chamber. It would rapidly displace whatever they managed to pump in. The cold steam hissing out of the box would also give them one heck of a startle.

Internet of Things has actually managed to surpass my hatred of "The Cloud"

You need to put the two together... for synergy.

You don't follow my logic because it isn't what I said. It's not my logic. It's just something you inferred. "When the economy is bad, communism starts to look better", is not the same as "The economy is bad. Communism will be better. Join the Party with me".

Not only is that obvious on its face, you can see it in the statistics: the more "statist" and regulatory governments have been, the less well economies have done and the more income inequality we've seen.

That's an awful lot of un-quantified stuff. You can have fun measuring these things in oh-so many ways. I propose to measure oppression in Stalins per acre, and economic outcome in chickens per pot. Fair enough? Let's get some real analysis started now...