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Comment This isn't a victory for Behring-Breivik. (Score 3, Insightful) 491

by CleverNickName (#51949589) Attached to: Anders Behring Breivik, Norway Murderer, Wins Human Rights Case

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.

Comment Re:For those of us looking to buy a 3D printer (Score 2) 213

by H0NGK0NGPH00EY (#41519445) Attached to: The Explosive Growth of 3D Printing

Did you happen to see the Formlabs Form 1 printer? They were at Maker Faire too. They're running a Kickstarter right now, and from the photos and video on there the parts that machine produces look far better than most anything else I've seen. I watched the video of the Tinkerines Ditto on IndieGoGo and the parts didn't look anywhere near as finely-detailed.

I'm quite interested in learning more about the Form 1 and it would be great if someone had a first-hand experience from maker Faire (I'm in Seattle and couldn't attend).

Comment Logitech Alert (Score 1) 508

Logitech has a system that I purchased for my home: Logitech Alert.

You didn't specify exactly what you meant by "cheap," but you can get a full six-camera system (the max # of cameras it will support) for around $1,000.

720p cameras, motion detection, video stored on SD cards in each camera and copied to your PC, remote access, email alerts... It's got pretty much everything.

The best part is how ridiculously easy it is to set up. The system uses your home's electrical wiring to communicate between the cameras and the base system, so you literally just plug everything in and you're up and running. I was shocked at how easy it was to set up.

Here's some sample video from the camera on my front porch (which, by the way, I exported from their software to YouTube in just one or two clicks).
User Journal

Journal Journal: in which i am a noob all over again 17

Journal by CleverNickName

I haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry. ...yeah, it turns out that it's at the bottom of the page.

So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.
Android

Google Docs' OCR Quality Tested 99

Posted by timothy from the weighed-in-the-balance-and-found-wanting dept.
orenh writes "Google has released a Google Docs application for Android, which includes the ability to create documents by OCR-ing photos. I tested the application's OCR quality and found that it's mediocre under the best conditions and poor under real-world conditions. However, I believe that this poor performance is caused in part by an intentional decision by Google."
Science

Is Science Just a Matter of Faith? 1486

Posted by CmdrTaco from the you-can't-test-faith dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "Pastabagel writes that the actual scientific answers to the questions of the origins of the universe, the evolution of man, and the fundamental nature of the cosmos involve things like wave equations and quantum electrodynamics and molecular biology that very few non-scientists can ever hope to understand and that if we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we accept the incredibly complex scientific phenomena in physics, astronomy, and biology through the process of belief, not through reason. When Richard Fenyman wrote, 'I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics,' he was including himself which is disconcerting given how many books he wrote on that very subject. The fact is that it takes years of dedicated study before scientific truth in its truest, mathematical and symbolic forms can be understood. The rest of us rely on experts to explain it, someone who has seen and understood the truth and can dumb it down for us in a language we can understand. And therein lies the big problem for science and scientists. For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us. Trust and belief. Faith. Not understanding. How can we understand science, if we can't understand the language of science? 'We don't learn science by doing science, we learn science by reading and memorizing. The same way we learn history. Do you really know what an atom is, or that a Higgs boson is a rather important thing, or did you simply accept they were what someone told you they were?'"
Sony

Sony Lawyers Expand Dragnet, Targeting Anybody Posting PS3 Hack 437

Posted by Soulskill from the scorched-earth dept.
markass530 writes with this excerpt from Wired: "Sony is threatening to sue anybody posting or 'distributing' the first full-fledged jailbreak code for the 4-year-old PlayStation 3 gaming console. What's more, the company is demanding that a federal judge order Google to surrender the IP addresses and other identifying information (PDF) of those who have viewed or commented about the jailbreak video on a private YouTube page. The game maker is also demanding that Twitter provide the identities of a host of hackers who first unveiled a limited version of the hack in December."
It's funny. Laugh.

ESRB Exposes Emails of Gamers Who Filed Privacy Complaints 75

Posted by Soulskill from the well-played dept.
simrook writes, "Many people filed privacy complaints with the ESRB over Blizzard's recent (and afterward recanted) move to require the display of users' real life names on Blizzard's official forums. 961 of those complainants had their email addresses exposed in the ESRB's response." The response itself didn't go into the organization's thoughts on Blizzard's plan, but they explained to the Opposable Thumbs blog that anonymity isn't a huge concern to them, as long as users are given the opportunity to opt out. "The role of the ESRB Privacy Online program is to make sure that member websites—those that display our seal on their pages — are compliant with an increasingly complex series of privacy protection laws and are offering a secure space for users to interact and do business online. ... But online privacy protection doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as anonymity. It's about making sure that websites collecting personal information from users are doing so not only in accordance with federal regulations but also with best practices for protecting individuals' personal information online."
Education

Quantum Physics For Everybody 145

Posted by kdawson from the this-time-without-the-math dept.
fiziko writes in with a self-described "blatant self-promotion" of a worthwhile service for those wishing to go beyond Khan Academy physics: namely Bureau 42's Summer School. "As those who subscribe to the 'Sci-Fi News' slashbox may know, Bureau 42 has launched its first Summer School. This year we're doing a nine-part series (every Monday in July and August) taking readers from high school physics to graduate level physics, with no particular mathematical background required. Follow the link for part 1."
Government

Court Takes Away Some of the Public Domain 431

Posted by kdawson from the congress-shall-make-no-law dept.
An anonymous reader writes "In yet another bad ruling concerning copyright, a federal appeals court has overturned a lower court ruling, and said that it's okay for Congress retroactively to remove works from the public domain, even if publishers are already making use of those public-domain works. The lower court had said this was a First Amendment violation, but the appeals court said that if Congress felt taking away from the public domain was in its best interests, then there was no First Amendment violation at all. The ruling effectively says that Congress can violate the First Amendment, so long as it feels it has heard from enough people (in this case, RIAA and MPAA execs) to convince it that it needs to do what it has done." TechDirt notes that the case will almost certainly be appealed.
Space

Rumor of Betelgeuse's Death Greatly Exaggerated 356

Posted by kdawson from the holding-out-for-twenty-twelve dept.
The Bad Astronomer writes "A rumor is spreading on the Net like wildfire that the red supergiant star Betelgeuse is about to explode in a supernova. This rumor is almost certainly not true. First, it's posted on a doomsday forum. Second, it's three times removed from the source, and is anonymous at each step. Third, the evidence is shaky at best. Plus, even if true, the supernova is too far away to hurt us. But other than that ..."
Books

Publishers Campaign For Universal E-Book Format 348

Posted by Soulskill from the they-also-want-a-pony dept.
As the battle rages for control of the e-book market, publishers are starting to unite behind a common desire: a universal e-book format. David Shanks, chief executive at Penguin Group USA, said, "Our fondest wish is that all the devices become agnostic so that there isn’t proprietary formats and you can read wherever you want to read. First we have to get a standard that everybody embraces." The company's president, Susan Petersen Kennedy, explained that book publishers did not want to "make the same mistakes as the music industry, which had an epic struggle over electronic distribution and piracy and lost huge market share."

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Would you people stop playing these stupid games?!?!?!!!!

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