Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Any laptop (Score 1) 385

Any laptop will do, since most of your computing will be done remotely. You just need to be able to run SSH or NoMachine. The only thing that matters is that your laptop has enough resolution to show the remote screen. If she doesn't have Linux experience, then a Linux laptop could help with that, since all the computer clusters run Linux.

I'm a plasma physicist, and I say any laptop will work.

Comment Re:They just want to grow crops of wage slaves (Score 1) 119

And I suppose you belong to the superior race-*ahem* culture that is capable of innovating, and you can't understand why anyone would waste their time with poor Africans who won't ever amount to anything. That's what you believe, isn't it? See, if you really thought it was about culture, it would make sense to provide education where it was needed most, since education is perhaps the best way to overcome deficiencies in the culture.

Zuckerberg and Gates could invest more in America, but they don't owe it to Americans simply because they made more money off of Americans. (Or if they do, you should be arguing for higher taxation, not complaining about where they focus their personal cash.) As far as efficiency of altruistic efforts, it's pretty clear that a dollar will go a lot father in impoverished countries than USA, even when accounting for corruption.

United States

How To Execute People In the 21st Century 1081

HughPickens.com writes Matt Ford writes in The Atlantic that thanks to a European Union embargo on the export of key drugs, and the refusal of major pharmaceutical companies to sell them the nation's predominant method of execution is increasingly hard to perform. With lethal injection's future uncertain, some states are turning to previously discarded methods. The Utah legislature just approved a bill to reintroduce firing squads for executions, Alabama's House of Representatives voted to authorize the electric chair if new drugs couldn't be found, and after last years botched injection, Oklahoma legislators are mulling the gas chamber.

The driving force behind the creation and abandonment of execution methods is the constant search for a humane means of taking a human life. Arizona, for example, abandoned hangings after a noose accidentally decapitated a condemned woman in 1930. Execution is also prone to problems as witnesses routinely report that, when the switch is thrown, the condemned prisoner "cringes," "leaps," and "fights the straps with amazing strength." The hands turn red, then white, and the cords of the neck stand out like steel bands. The prisoner's limbs, fingers, toes, and face are severely contorted. The force of the electrical current is so powerful that the prisoner's eyeballs sometimes pop out and "rest on [his] cheeks." The physical effects of the deadly hydrogen cyanide in the gas chamber are coma, seizures and cardiac arrest but the time lag has previously proved a problem. According to Ford one reason lethal injection enjoyed such tremendous popularity was that it strongly resembled a medical procedure, thereby projecting our preconceived notions about modern medicine—its competence, its efficacy, and its reliability—onto the capital-punishment system. "As states revert to earlier methods of execution—techniques once abandoned as backward and flawed—they run the risk that the death penalty itself will be seen in the same terms."

Slashdot Top Deals

A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. -- Thomas Jefferson

Working...