not only should we not try to prevent it, but it should even be easier.

It's already easy enough. You just can't make it easier. What you can do is to make it less painful. Is the fear of pain a deterrent? Perhaps, to some. But the car exhaust (CO) will kill you painlessly; some sleeping pills (barbiturates) will do the same. Heroin will do you in as sure as a bullet; and not only you won't suffer a pain, you will be rewarded with the final performance. It's far easier for most suiciders to just park their car in the garage, close the door, and let the CO kill them, than to look for a gun and then shoot themselves. It is very painful, by the way, and very messy - shooting yourself is not a good way to leave this world.

The society will not notice the outcome of their decision anyway; there are 6+ billion people on the planet already, it's not like we are endangered species or something. If someone wants to make room, it's their right. Not that I encourage them, of course. They are just free.

I know a guy who committed suicide and a girl who attempted suicide and no one is happy that he succeeded or that she failed

Romeo and Juliet, something like that? Those were successful all the way through. Does the society want them dead? Not really. But, darwinistically speaking, the society benefits from mentally stable people, not from head cases. Those *should* evolve out, in the grand scheme of things. Like taxes, if you support a certain behavior you get more of it. There are people who try to commit suicide repeatedly (and fail N-1 times out of that.) Then firemen are summoned, the police, and the doctors... what for? In the USA the Constitution guarantees your right for pursuit of happiness, but it does not define what form it may take. If you cannot live without your man|girl, don't. Will I be sad? Probably. But I cannot tell you to suffer for years, if not for the rest of your life, just because it is in my personal interests, either political or religious, to keep you alive. That would be awfully selfish of me. On that subject:

can't you at least acknowledge that more people killing themselves is a bad thing?

Bad thing... bad thing... bad to who? What metric are you using, and whose viewpoint? Per the blind and deaf quadriplegic, his life is over already. Per his brother, he must be kept alive until brother's own child can inherit his house. Per his wife, he should die immediately, so that she inherits. Per his aunt, Jesus the God personally told her that suicide is a sin, so the poor injured man must be kept alive for as long as possible - even though he suffers physically and mentally. Who is correct here, in this sea of incompatible interests? (This is a dramatization of a real world scenario that played out in Florida.)

So when you say "bad thing" you need to qualify this statement. The nature doesn't have bad things. Things can be declared good or bad only by an observer who has an opinion.

Actually I'm guessing the ones who don't get caught or killed stop on their own once they pass their mid-twenties.

I'm not sure where you live, but in most countries criminals cannot stop. There are the usual socioeconomic reasons for that. There is not enough jobs even for citizens who never jaywalked. What chance, in your opinion, a man with a burglary or a theft under his belt has? How many store managers will be happy to give him the keys to the money box? The only jobs that are left for them are menial jobs, like digging of ditches. Maybe one can become a licensed professional, like an electrician or a plumber, but that's not easy - there is a requirement for apprenticeship, and with that see above.

Can a criminal reform? Yes. Most of those success stories are from white collar crime, where for example an accountant made a "mistake" toward his own bank account. Just once in his whole life. He won't do that again. Kevin Mitnick is a good example. Some violent criminals embrace religion in prison and also become ex-criminals. The vast majority, however, is stuck in the vicious circle forever. They don't know how to live differently, and the society rejects them even if they try to end their wrong ways; they become career criminals.

With regard to "hardened killers", there is no shortage of those. Gang initiation rituals sometimes include killing of someone. There are obvious reasons for a gang leader to require that. Many homeowners are injured and killed during home invasion. Nobody would be concerned about an imaginary problem; the people are concerned because the problem is very real. It is exacerbated by the fact that most homes in the USA are open to anyone; you are separated from the street with just one flimsy glass door. Burglars throw a stone through that door (in the back of the house, usually,) and if nobody comes out to investigate then they come in and gather valuables. If you are unfortunate enough to catch them in the act, they may kill you. Many burglars are desperate druggies in search of money to buy another dose; they won't even consider your life sacred; they will kill you for $10 (that has also happened.)

I cannot say much about the distribution of violence among criminals. But my own understanding is that meek criminals do not exist. They simply cannot survive among their own kind. If they are lucky enough to get arrested early, they are most likely to mend their ways. The survivors, on the other hand, are someone to fear - they are graduates of a school that does not forgive a weakness.

Gene Roddenberry was never very good at going more than 40 years into the future with any of his technology detail predictions.

It doesn't really matter how far into the future the author of the script is looking. The only thing that matters is how the viewers are going to accept that.

Try to make a movie today about a programmer's day at the office, and then show it to the audience of 1900's. Will that work with them? But a good old western will work because the audience understands what's going on. You can look 1,000 years into the future, where humans become invisible energy beings. How do you film those?

Is it feasible that the Starfleet insignia doubles as a communicator, but is not able to transmit video - or even still images? That you cannot triangulate on that signal? That it cannot automatically report medical trouble? These functions are already common among special operations troops, even though we haven't mastered the art of subspace communication yet, as far as I know. But these, and many other omissions and deficiencies give the script writers the tools to construct situations where the protagonists have to actually invent a solution, instead of casually teleporting away from danger. The same story happened to K-9 and the sonic screwdriver of Doctor Who - they became a universal solution to all the problems. That's why the Doctor gave them away. (No sane person would do that, of course, considering how often these devices saved his $behind.)

Should the you who's having a really crappy day have the power to kill the you who will have a lifetime of other days?

Unconditionally YES. No man can be called free if he doesn't have this ultimate freedom - and the responsibility that comes with it.

People have moments of weakness, if possible I'd like to make it less tempting for those moments to end with their own death.

I believe in free will and self-determination. It is wise to keep dangerous temptations away from children - they don't know any better. But once a person becomes an adult, this restriction is lifted and he is free to do whatever he wants - as long as it doesn't clash with the same right of someone else. If he was wrong... too bad, he should have asked for an advice, or perhaps he should have thought about it a bit more. If someone, after all, suicides - respect his decision; he had his reasons; one day you may have yours. None of us live forever, as far as I know, and not everyone is excited about spending his last ten years of life in a bed, paralyzed, unable to even eat on his own, and over those ten years burning through the entire education fund that was being saved up for your grandchildren. When your time is up, it's up - deal with it. Many suicides are just an easy escape from a painful and terminal illness.

If every criminal is armed, and constantly committing home invasions, then sure, I might be in favour of a lot more guns, but I don't think that's the world.

Do you think criminals commit home invasions just on some special days, like Santa Claus? They go out and burglarize residences until they are caught or killed. There are very few criminals who were successful for a while but then, before they were arrested, suddenly saw the light and became honest workers. Most soldier on until stopped. Criminals are not very smart. Smart people don't need to rob houses; we get paid big bucks for sitting in our chairs and pressing keys on the keyboard.

By the way, all criminals are always armed, as far as the victim is concerned. Not everyone carries a gun, but a crowbar will be plenty sufficient for an old man (that happened too, and more than once. Burglars don't like witnesses; dead men tell no tales.) I read that knife crime in UK is off the charts, and I can understand why - knives are cheap, silent, deadly, easy to make, and easy to dispose of. Gun crime is also rising as a side effect of that - criminals need guns to defend themselves against criminals with knives. It's not a mutual appreciation society, you know.

With strong gun control, even if a few tragic scenarios happen where someone could have really used a gun, I think a lot more tragic scenarios will have been avoided.

We are firmly in the land of hypotheticals at this point. I'd better stop now :-)

There are already dumbots in that range. Any new robot should come with at least an Allwinner ARM CPU ($7) and a camera as standard. That's enough for some vision processing and at least 2D SLAM. The hardware to put some real smarts in a little bot is now cheap and there's enough open source software available to get started on making it smart.

Given the gun violence rate in this country...maybe their correct?

First off, your guns are made of metal. Making a usable firearm isn't something the average person can do. you need tools, machining equipment etc. now can you make something that fires a round or two cheaply and badly? Sure. But those things are more likely blow up when you practice with them than do any serious damage to the public.

This is simply push a button get a gun technology. You can't see the difference between those things? Perhaps you shouldn't be handling guns then...

Is there hype over 3D printing? Sure, but the potential of this technology (that I'm in favor of) is going to disrupt so many things you take for granted it's not funny. When they develop food safe plastics to use? Good bye sales of low end dinner sets. Plastic silverware industry? Completely upended. Dead? Maybe not but when a good chunk of the population can print their own at home, the 'market' is vastly changed.

Push a button, get a widget is a huge change. But when that widget is capable of being hidden from metal detectors...and can shoot people? Big big difference.

The trouble with being a plumber is that most of the work is in building and remodeling. With housing construction way down, most of the people in the building trades are hurting. It's great during a building boom, though.

A related trade is HVAC - heating, ventilating, and air conditioning. There's more electronics and control involved than in plumbing.

Really, any manufacturer who implements that should be liable for the time wasted for people trying to get real work done with their 3D printer.

I wonder how this could ever be implemented in FOSS.

The same way anything is implemented in FOSS. It'll be written into the source. Lots of people will modify the code to disable the backdoors. People will post versions of the software with the backdoors missing, many of which actually still have them or have different backdoors installed. Governments may lead an automated search for software without the backdoors, or may simply ignore it uniless they have a reason to target the individual using it.

In other words, what a fucking mess.

For example the powers that be at work decided that the important thing was 3 of the 4 groups (upper, lower, numbers, and punctuation are the groups), and length, with 14+ being what makes it happy. So you input a short phrase like "I like puppies" it'll call it strong and take it. However if you input "@la2wo!d?o-z4" it'll call it weak because it is too short. Input something like "niecrlazleswiariucriuml7priu8roab7iuyluc0oawr1u5pl" and it'll reject it because there are only 2 of the 4 groups).

There's no further analysis, it is just a length and groups thing, with rather poorly defined groups.

Also in terms of strength, while there's no perfect one, measuring bits of entropy, which you can do, is pretty good. However few sites use anything that advanced.

I'd say I'm a pretty security aware individual, what with working in IT and all that. I do defense in depth on computer and physical security, I'm proactive about things, etc. Seems to have worked, I've never had a system owned.

So I never reuse passwords, right?

Wrong, I do all the time. Almost every forum online I have the same password for, and it is a weak one. Why? Because I don't care. Oh no, someone might hack my forum account and... I dunno, post something as me! Whatever would I do? I'm not going to bother to generate a great, unique, password for every site.

However my bank account? Random password (I don't seem to have trouble remembering them), long, and it requires two factor authentication. That protects my finances, and those matter. So security on that is pretty high.

The idea that everyone is going to have a high security password for every site and not reuse it is silly. There are plenty of things where if your account got compromised, you just don't care so much.

Also it can make sense to group systems. All my systems at home use a single password. There is no reason for them not to. They are all in the same security context, basically. It is no different than at work where my single account gets me access to any domain system.

It's amazing how much miscellaneous rock is floating around this solar system. Four sizable chunks of rock (tens of meters) have gone by the earth in the last week, one within lunar orbit. None were known objects.

There's a mile-sized one going by on March 31st, but closest approach is over 3 million miles.

The second experiment added some Linux laptops that ping-flooded to generate lots of network activity. The second experiment showed a clear increase in plant "damage" /lack of development.

Were the laptops located so that their fans wouldn't be blowing hot air past the seeds, heating them and sucking the moisture out of them?

The director. Not sure why he likes it so much but it is added in, mechanically, by him shining lights at the cameras. They really need to hire someone to poke him with a sharp stick when he tries to do that. I'm not sure why he likes it so much, but he does. In behind the scenes stuff he talks about how much he likes the look of it.

But that's why it is there, one of the very primary creative forces in the movie really likes it.

It's an interesting part of human psychology I never studied, and I don't know how much research has been done on it. However you see it with relative frequency. Someone will decide something is offensive to a given group without themselves being part of that group.

The two issues people seem to be being offended on behalf of women for are the fact that Uhura wasn't a very "strong woman" character, in particular with her somewhat self centered reaction to Spock's attitude toward death, and to the fact that Kirk leers at Alice Eve's character and we see her in her undergarments.

I don't really get it myself. Ya the Uhura thing was maybe a little silly and "girly" but it was done first to set up Spock's reaction with regards to emotions and second because they wanted a lover's quarrel for comic relief (which the audience I saw it with found quite funny at least).

It is just something you'll encounter from time to time: Someone will find something offensive for you on your behalf, even when they are not in that group. I think perhaps some of the male reviews are worrying too much about if the portrayal of women was "correct" for whatever definition of "correct" they have whereas the women watching the movie are just concerned about if they are enjoying the time they spend watching it.