Which is not at all what the article is saying. It's saying that solitary confinement is being used on many more people than those "some folks." You're not making an argument any more than me saying, "Well, some folks should be killed, so why would we care how many folks are being killed?"

We're not talking about "quite a few". We're talking about 80,000 at levels per capita that no other country on earth does. We don't conduct science and research to make ourselves feel fuzzy. We do it to point out that a huge amount of those people are not in for life, and will be released at some point, so why would we be complicit in inflicting mental instability on them given that it would be in our self interest to ensure they're not crazy when then are released? The whole point of raising the alarm on this is that it's being used on people who do not pose imminent physical threats and dangers to others. It's right there in the summary, and the article - nobody is suggesting that solitary confinement isn't required, but it's weapons grade stupid (if a profitable business model for jails) to turn humans into worse humans. We figured out a long time ago that it's more more beneficial for US to rehabilitate those who we can, so if you're okay with using punishments and detainment that cause people do become more of a danger to society when they're let out than when they're let in, you're not even making a case for self interest.

I think you just tried to write a scene for an episode of CSI.

My (Canadian debit) card has been scanned twice, and both times the bank called me up, notified me of the fraudulent charges on my account, and the money was back in my account in under two weeks.

"the consumers get to be forced to memorize a new PIN!"

Sometimes it's funny to hear Americans complain about how difficult life is. Change is so scary!

Because lots of people run 3D games on servers.

Certainly we do use GPUs for some floating-point intensive tasks on servers, but this is nowhere near fast enough to be useful.

We're not that far off thin client gaming. So suggesting that lots of companies won't be running 3D games server-side in the near future is disingenuous.

Yes, indeed, if a well written letter can create a response of ..

But it can't and doesn't. So there's that.

Lastly, can I be the first to point out that Popular science has very little to do with science and hasn't in well over 50 years? They are to Science what the Enquirer is to hard news sites. ... which makes people that care about Popular Science's move sound even more out of touch. People making a big deal out of this mystify me.

You are "dumb". You have nothing to say about the line of work I'm in. I am also "dumb". I have nothing to add about the line of work you're in. I don't see you as being in an ivory tower, I'm just the one who knows that I've nothing of value to add to your industry/science/line of work. Unless we work in the same fields, or related fields, in which case, I have plenty of other means of being exposed to your work, and addressing and debating any problems I may have with it. Scientists are not in ivory towers, and they don't think they're in one. All that said, there's a reason why they have offices and aren't doing work on whiteboards on the corner of the street.

If you really think a town hall meeting is a productive forum to work on highly specialized fields of domain knowledge, I'm not really sure what to say to that.

Since the vast majority of scientific advances don't necessarily originate from one place, person, or time but often many at once, I find the idea that we're relying on lightening to strike in a comment board in order to achieve some important scientific advance rather naive and laughable.

Why would you infer that it's storing the entire page? It's easy enough for the browser to remember what fields had what data in them, load the page, and restore any form data.

Knowing GL/DirectX is pretty meaningless in games unless you're looking to be hired as a graphics programmer. Even more interesting these days is that as more of the gaming experience moves online, we're seeing fairly traditional skillsets such as DBA or server side programming become much more in demand. It all depends on what you want to do *on* a game development team. Knowing graphics programming doesn't guarantee you a job anymore than being demonstrably skilled in any other facet of game programming. In fact, going in and thinking that just because you can write a hobby game front to back yourself is far less interesting to employers than being able to demonstrate an interest in a specific area.

I work for one of the top 5 developers on console games, as a programmer. Are there crunch times? Yes. Do you get comp time? Yes. I'm going to be taking 35 days vacation this fall. The work itself is vastly more interesting and personally rewarding (to me) than working on business intelligence software, which is probably where I'd be otherwise.

You get what you put into it, and you also get what you put up with. I don't recommend that anybody sacrifice their quality of life simply to be in games, and certainly some studios are worse than others, but in making games for 9 years, if you can put up with a some crunch every year or two, it can be a really fun job. Just put up resistance if you're being treated unfairly (80 hour work weeks? Never.) .. once you get some experience, you can move around. The entire industry is a game of musical chairs, so you should be able to find something at your 'pressure' level. Some people will put up with those insane for the privilege of working on a GTA title, but there is plenty of middle ground.

And as somebody else pointed out above, just because you like playing games (or even making them for yourself) doesn't necessarily mean you'll like making them in the AAA game space. I just wrapped up a title where the credits take about 40 minutes to watch, so there are lots of considerations in terms of how much time you're willing to put in, how much individual credit you're looking for, etc.

I realize you're cherry picking the NASA buy, but I'm pretty sure Google is acting on self interests alone. Even if you choose to believe that NASA picked up the phone one day, and a bunch of politicians on the other line said, "Hey NASA, buy this thing from Canada, cause that would be awesome!" I bet that kind of simplistic worldview makes their scientists and mathematicians feel awesome.

I guess D-Wave's Google Ads campaign (Buy a 10 million dollar computer! Click here!) wasn't getting good sell through rates, huh?