...because all the materials to be sent out into space will be shipped via Amazon Prime. So you know, just $99 a year.

>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.

That slippery slope will no doubt be lubed with Astroglide.

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

4TB drives sell for $165 right now on Newegg. So five of those would cost $825. Your friend could stick them all into a large PC with multiple bays and create an enormous RAID-0 array of 20TB. Then he could use FreeFileSync to copy those files. Or he could set up another NAS with those 5 4TB drives and just do a copy/sync. It'd take days for the initial load, but it would be backed up. The problem with having that much data on CrashPlan (also my cloud backup of choice) is that it would take so long to restore it -- too long, I'd think. You'd blow all sorts of bandwidth limit to do so. And you can't use their restore-to-door plan for backups greater than 3.5TB. Until we have Google Fiber running everywhere, bandwidth just doesn't make it feasible to push all that data to the cloud.

Check out Marshall Brain's Robotic Freedom. He addresses a lot of the discussions we've been having here. A good snippet:

I've not been happy with the widescreen movement myself. How often do you watch movies at your computer? How often do you read web pages that take advantage of anything over 1000 wide? But it gets harder and harder to find standard aspect ratio (4:3) monitors these days. The solution is 1920 x 1080. Acer makes a 22" 1920 x 1080 in the $150 range, and the 24" is around $200. I've been pleased with both. At work I'm lucky enough to have 2 x 22" 1920 x 1080 monitors.

This is good advice, and gives me an opportunity to speak to the community at large: some of us who go to cons and are in a position to shake tons of hands politely decline. It's not because we're being dicks, it's because we know it's a good way to substantially decrease our chances of catching and spreading any germs.

I played the PAX Pandemic game, where the Enforcers handed out stickers to attendees that read [Carrier] [Infected] or [Immune] (There was also a [Patient Zero].

I got the [Immune] sticker, and by the time I got home on Monday, it was clear that I had the flu. I've had a fever between 100 and 104 all week that finally broke last night, but I'm going to the doctor today because I think whatever I had settled into my lungs. I'll tell him about the H1N1 outbreak and get tested if he wants to run the test, but at this point I think it's safe to assume that I was [Immune] to the Pig Plague, but definitely [Infected] with the damn PAX pox.

Even though it's been a week of misery, it was entirely worth it, and I don't regret going to PAX for a single second.