some people are simply too dangerous to others to leave to their own

Even assuming that's the case, a state that is allowed to execute its citizens is even more dangerous.

why is it our responsibility to support them for the remainder of their natural lives?

Executing a person is more than simply deciding not to support them. It's genuinely disturbing that you seem to think that a person's execution is a decision about whether to support them or not.

Death penalty is not a secret, people know if you do this, chances are you are going to die for it.

No, in many cases they don't. Such as the getaway driver for a robbery where something goes wrong and the other person kills somebody. Or the mentally retarded. Or the clinically insane. Or minors. All of these kinds of people have been executed by the USA and a lot of them can genuinely claim to have not understood the ramifications of what they were doing.

PS: You DO have backups.... right?

As SSD cells wear, the problem is that they hold charge for less time. Starting new, the time that the charge will be held would be years, but as the SSD wears, the endurance of the held charge declines.

Consequently, continuous write tests will continue to report "all good" with a drive that is useless in practice, because while the continuous write will re-write a particular cell once every few hours, it might only hold a charge for a few days - meaning if you turned it off for even a day or so, you'd suffer serious data loss.

SSDs are amazing but you definitely can't carry conventional wisdom from HDDs over.

Yeah I'd like some more meat to the story as well. Amazon Glacier achieves its pricing by using low-RPM consumer drives plugged into some sort of high-density backplanes; supposedly they are so densely packed that you can only spin up a few drives at once due to power and heat issues. Hence the delay.

I assume Google is doing something similar, maybe with somewhat better power or cooling since they're offering faster retrieval times which implies that perhaps they can spin up a higher percentage of drives at a time.

I've heard some horror stories from people who've had their Google accounts auto-banned due to overzealous spam filters for the Play Store, Adwords and things like that, and been unable to get to speak to a human at Google about it. What happens if you protect your phone so that you need to sign into your Google account, then you lose your Google account?

When you find out about the gerbil, you should also check the gerbil's gut bacteria...

Some 10 years ago, in response to rising blood sugar levels, I lost almost 60 pounds. Although I have an annual 10 pound cycle, (gain in the winter, lose in the summer)

In all that time, there has not been a single day that wasn't filled with angst about eating too much. Satiety is rare, and must be paid for with future deprivation. Most of my family has no idea, only my wife is really aware of the constant struggle I fight.

I would happily transplant fecal material if it would help with this.

It's not computer-related, but this book reminds me of the Phantom Tollbooth.

It never is, and never will be if all goes well. Wouldn't you rather be honest about what you (don't) know than work on stupid old data, like "cloved hooves are bad to eat"??

We continuously learn more, and the "flip flops" are the result of continuously better understandings. Your life expectancy has increased as a result, and this continues to improve each and every year.

There is a tremendous amount of ignorance and stupidity the world over. People get ideas from random sources, make their choices, and are very prone to making the mistake of believing everything they think. So we have people who *still* swear by Laetrile as a cure for cancer, or Scientology as a cure for arthritis caused by grumpy souls stuck in their elbows.

However, science offers a way out of the maze: the idea that ideas are only as valuable as they can be *validated* by peer review and experimentation. Validating ideas is painful, costly, and time consuming, so it takes *time* to find all the stupids and work them out, one by one. Combine that with the often significant economic interests in the ideas being cross-checked, and you can see it often takes even more time and expense to get the word out.

The change of tune that you point out is perhaps the single biggest strength of science, not some evidence of *ahem* irrational design.

Simply put, VR headsets (displays mounted in such a way as to be placed in front of a person's eyes) have been visualized and built for decades.

Sure, but that's not what's being patented here. What's being patented here is a frame that you can slot an existing mobile device into to be used as a headset, where the headset detects the insertion and notifies the phone to switch to VR mode. That's not something that has been built for decades.

Lawnmower Man anyone?

Lawnmower Man didn't include a device like this. This is not a patent on any and all VR displays, it's a patent on a specific type of frame for mobile devices.

Yep. At that time Microsoft were still running Hotmail on FreeBSD because they were struggling to migrate it to Windows.

Or a can of beans?

I mean, it's a header to tell you what's inside the packet. How is a label on a can not telling you what's inside the can?

There's lots that you are missing.

The issue isn't the input data, it's the processing method. The processing method mentioned here as "revolutionary" is just about exactly the method that Raymond Kurzweil posited: a hierarchy of "nodules" that pattern match on a cascading network of pattern matches....

We're living with a modern-day Turing. Do we give him ample credit?

If anything, the digital revolution obviates the need for tedious, drudgerous work. In the 1960s that was George Jetson speak! Poor George had to work an entire hour per day! But now that we've adopted far-right, archaic ideology and let the super-wealthy get all the spoils of the digital revolution, suddenly "eliminating drudgery" means "eliminating jobs".

The digital revoluion is set to disemploy up to 50% of Americans over the next 2 decades. It's going to get lots worse before it gets better. That is, unless you are a software engineer.