the AI which hacked hawking's system and is using him as a puppet has developed a sense of humor.

we're doomed, and it will be hilarious.

AWKWARD!

All I'm seeing is "some guy posted a blog entry about a three-year-old paper". Surely it must have been on Slashdot before, though I can't actually find it with Google.

That is totally not the answer I was expecting. That's awesome. Thanks.

Chicago? Why?

When I was in Ireland, I never bought another drink once people discovered I'd been to Boston. Which I though was odd, but it made a kind of sense given the large Irish population. It was like a kind of Irish promised land.

What's the Aussie connection to the Windy City?

I find it kind of remarkable that it's so low in the US. I wonder why that is. I can't imagine that conditions are any better. Or are UK prisons that much worse?

Could we be taking stronger steps to prevent it? (Surely not.) Could it be something about our pro-imprisonment culture that makes for a different mind-set among prisoners? Perhaps the record keeping is different?

I'm not any kind of expert, so this is the rankest speculation. The factor-of-five difference is very striking.

Only because the standard of proof is so high. We have a lot of protections in place for those who stand accused of a capital crime, precisely because it's so final.

And that's good, but that says less about capital punishment than it says about the difficulty of proof. How many people are put in prison for decades, sometimes to die there, because their cases don't attract as much attention and aren't subject to the same level of scrutiny? Prison is still punishment, made worse in many places (including the US) by subjecting the prisoners to each other. Last year 82 prisoners in UK prisons killed themselves, more than twice the 35 people who were executed in the US (with a vastly larger prison population). (I'm sorry; I couldn't find data on US prison suicides but I suspect it's at least comparably high.)

I wish we could provide all of the accused with the level of scrutiny that they deserve. It would save a great many lives from being ruined, a fate I find at least as horrifying as execution.

True, though it could well impact the estimates of methane emissions worldwide. If there's some unexpected source of methane, there may be more. Or it may indicate that if some sources are producing more then others are producing less, or that that methane atmospheric lifetime is different than we thought.

So it's scientific curiosity, but it may well end up having an impact on our understanding of climate change due to greenhouse gases, beyond the immediate production at this site.

It's always an election year now.

Nice, thanks for the info. Nvidia would be nice, as I want to run blender. Is there a good comparison site for various laptops with high-end graphics and CPUs you know of? I've been poking around online for a while, but determining what the best supported higher-end laptops are for Linux is far from easy.

If Apple's recent stream of security failures has not convinced you to switch to Linux or BSD, you are basically hopeless.

Oh, I've been running Linux for years and years. I was going to dual-boot an apple laptop with osx+linux, but now I have no interest in having osx any more than I do windows. I'll take a look at the new dell.

My Grandmother (she is 85) has an Intel based Core Duo Macbook and Apple has stopped providing security updates [...] When we bought the machine (new) I thought the macbook would be more usable for her than a Linux laptop. While it has been a good machine, being orphaned on security updates is bad form by Apple.

It's not too late:

http://www.odi.ch/prog/macbook...
http://www.codingepiphany.com/...

We are talking apple users here, not Linux users. All three Apple users who know these steps have probably already done so. The other several hundred million are fucked, and Apple has now publicly taken a stance that they plan to hang those millions out to dry.

Ironically, I was going to buy an apple laptop for sheer convenience (and to run more recent versions of scrivener), but now I most certainly won't. Time to research good Linux laptop alternatives instead (ideally with high-end graphics capabilities that support blender's cycles module ... wonder how well Optimus is supported these days). Oh well, it will probably be cheaper anyway. Maybe I can treat myself a 4k monitor with the money saved.

That's partly Amazon's fault. They nag you to provide reviews. And not just star ratings, but reviews; IIRC you can't submit the star rating without at least a few words. So at least some people end up writing crappy reviews just to turn the nag off, and hoping that they're helpful, even though ones like this obviously aren't.

Suck it up. None.

Go home, you're drunk. It's not important that it's written in Java. It just is.

"Hi everyone, we wrote this library in a language, but we won't tell you what language we wrote it in, because it's not important."

That's a weapons-grade stupid way to think about it. Man, I couldn't give a shit about Java. Don't use it, don't program in it. Exactly what point do you think you're making here?