>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

If only we had a website the covered this sort of stuff ... oh right, we do! New VPN IP addresses probably take a while for them to identify the traffic on and block. But there are plenty of services like HMA that constantly roll out new ip addresses. So as long as you're a mouse willing to play whackamole with your cat overlords ... Annoying, yes, but that's the definition of the internet in China.

In response to the second part, that is always true regardless of the answer to the first part. Not only are members of the government are treated differently but also their families. The "party" class enjoys many many perks. Unmonitored VPN connections would be laughable compared to their insider trading, disregard for the law and instant attack dogs they routinely utilize.

While you're accepting suggestions, why isn't my aforementioned article linked in the "You may like to read:" section of this page? Those stories seem to have nothing to do with China's firewall yet a simple google search shows a whole slew of those stories on Slashdot. I think you could get timothy's family to help you track that stuff if you would return his body to them. They only want closure, it doesn't matter if it has to be a closed casket funeral!

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

I don't think Google will actually kill G+ off any time soon - that would be too embarrassing a retreat - but they've finally stopped shoving it down people's throats as hard as they were before. (Amusingly, I re-connected recently with an old friend from university who is now fairly senior in Google. Where did we connect? Facebook. Says it all, really...) The only place I've seen bits of "Circle" lately is on Twitter, plus a few I've added on Facebook. I took a look on Brewmasters when someone tried to nudge us that way, but didn't take to it; Multiply seemed fine until they pulled the plug, and we seem to have been largely homeless since.

I like Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari - all decent browsers in general. I share your misgivings about Opera's new owners, though, and I'm very glad Fastmail (my own email provider) is now independent again; having my email under Chinese control would be quite disturbing.

> If nuclear was far superior, we'd be installing more of it.

Right. The world is completely rational and efficient.

Amusingly, I find myself teaching courses in both Java and Android development this semester. (I haven't updated my /. journal for ages now, probably should; short version: now half-way through a PhD in computer hardware security/forensics, in a small and short-staffed university department where I find myself filling increasing numbers of teaching gaps.)

The mobile app dev is an evening class I teach for the "access course" - people who have been out of education a while but want to come and study for a degree. It's another dimension of "module bingo" crossed off - I've now taught levels 6 through 10 inclusive (7 being university 1st year, 10 is final year), for three of the four Schools (Science Engineering and Technology, Arts Media and Computer Games, Dundee Business School - but not yet Social and Health Sciences). Being completely new to programming, I've got them coding away in MIT's App Inventor for now - clip-together lines of code on screen. Surprisingly good as a starting point I think - and means they don't need to meet any Java yet, too! (It looks like next year's modules drop Java and use C++ instead.)

Good luck in your fights with it, anyway - I'm quite glad to avoid writing Android code directly so far. I'm hoping to cut my teaching load for the fall semester and focus on research, with some new full time teaching staff starting soon, though I've heard ominous developments on that front lately...

Yes, but oftentimes they protect some people's rights by infringing on other people's rights. It's only as simple as you make it sound when there's no conflicting interests. Which there are lots and lots of in any decent sized and reasonably diverse group.

Or, you know, interpret the second amendment as written and require gun owners to be part of a well regulated militia. Which would be far more restrictive than any of the restrictions currently proposed by even the more liberal folks. But just go ahead and keep believing it says something it clearly doesn't say. It's your God given right to be delusional as well.

The problem is that not everyone is on an unlimited broadband. I don't expect Microsoft to cater primarily to the millions upon millions of people who still have slow and/or metered connections, but it would be nice if they didn't go out of their way to make our life hell.

You can't just take an amazing piece of expensive kit like that and essentially throw it away! Oh wait - that's what we've been doing with the first stage of every launch forever until just now. Carry on then.

More seriously, congratulations, SpaceX, for taking such a big step forward for humankind.

No, it wasn't just simpler. The heliocentric model explained the orbits more precisely. Check out Kepler.

If we were to go by the idea that elegant explanations with no predictive power were science, then I propose a "theory" which by gravity is conveyed by magic invisible elastic bands that are attached to everything in the universe. And I'll write equations and come up with rules that will make the behavior identical to what we see observed. If you find a problem, I'll just update my equations accordingly. We could do that back-and-forth forever and I can hold on to my "theory" forever.

No, to find out if my theory has any merit, we need to show some way in which looking at the world through my theory provides a better understanding, a more precise model, and not just an appealing idea. Elegant ideas can provide useful inspiration for scientific exploration, but if they don't make any testable predictions they are just dreams, no more true or false than fairies. The foundation of science, as opposed to every other system of knowledge is it's brutal testing of ideas against reality.

String theory, as far as I've read, provides no insight into the behavior of anything, and thus we simply can't tell if it's real or not. It might as well be fairies.

Hmm. Why don't they crowdsource autonomous cars then? Just have millions of people in third-world countries paid pennies an hour deciding whether your car should speed up or slow down. If it's the best way to solve captchas, what could possibly go wrong?

Those must be some amazingly limited contexts because my success rate even getting her to play songs on my phone is bad enough that my blood pressure rises every time I even think of giving it a try. No, I don't have an accent or a speech impediment. It's just not ready for primetime yet, and certainly doesn't make up for the lack of normal UI.

Indeed. For example, I can speak aloud in public like an idiot "Play Abbey Road by The Beatles" and then Siri will play Eternal Flame by The Bangles. Then I can tell her to stop and say it again more loudly and clearly, sounding even more like an idiot, only go get Winding Road by Sheryl Crow. If by chance she recognizes it on my third, full-retard repetition, it'll be the one in five times that the song doesn't actually start playing even though she got it right, a lovely new feature since iOS 9.

It's magical, I tell you.

Please bring sensible UI the fuck back.