>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.

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

No, per the article, shipments have been postponed again, this time to January 15th. However, Dave will get the $10 off that they were offering to new buyers.

Actually, while that's true about Korean birthdays, in this case people actually aren't sure. Older reports said he was born in 1941, but his official biography says 1942. The general assumption is that he was born in 1941, and 1942 was made up for propaganda. His father, Kim Il-sung would have been 30 in 1942, meaning that, by altering the date, they can celebrate 10 year anniversaries together (so next year they can have a big celebration for Kim Il-sung's 100th birthday and Kim Jong-il's 70th). Since part of how Kim Jong-il held onto power was by trying to absorb some of his father's reflected glory, that made sense as a propaganda move. So he's probably 70, but might be 69 if his "official" birthday is actually accurate.

Also, with regard to age complexity, don't forget that most Koreans literally don't know how to say "forty years old" or older because the numbering system used for ages is only for sequential counting (there's a different numbering system for things which are not always sequential). When necessary, they'll use the other (Chinese-derived) numbering system for ages above 39, but generally will simply avoid talking about it.

Actually, while I'm not a lawyer, I am a law student (though this is not legal advice, retain your own counsel, etc.), and it's actually even less than that. Under most circumstances, contract violations provide for damages ONLY. I believe the 3x damages bit you're remembering is for RICO violations, which I doubt would apply here (however, I haven't studied RICO, so I honestly don't know). Had the guy been unable to find anyone else willing to run the same deal, he'd have an argument for expectation damages (damages for not receiving the benefit he expected from the ad), but since he ended up getting the same deal from someone else, there were no real damages.

This sounds shocking to a lot of people, I know, but the courts generally view contract violation as a value-neutral situation. Courts refuse to "punish" breachers, their only interest is in making the other party whole (and even then, only if the party has done everything they can to mitigate their own harm). Again, in this case he was able to go to someone else and get the same deal, so the only conceivable harm is the trivial amount of time and effort to approach a competitor and ask them for the same deal. The courts are not your daddy, here, where you run to them crying "but he promised!" You're expected to be an adult, do your best to solve the problem yourself, and turn to the courts only to resolve any real material harm you suffer from the contract breach.

Let's make sure we note what some of those "other countries" are. So not just Australia and Japan, but all of Europe (including Russia), most of East Asia (notably China, which has 1/3rd of the world's population), the United States (highest birth rate of the industrialized world, but still essentially only 2.1 children per woman, about replacement), and most of the largest nations in Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico). What does that leave? India, Africa, the Middle East, and most of Southeast Asia. That's it. Those are the only regions currently projected to add to the world's population, and their birth rates are falling too. The total worldwide fertility rate is currently only 2.5 children for women, down from 2.8 ten years ago. Global replacement rate is 2.33 (higher than for an industrialized country because it includes poor countries with higher mortality rates), so we should reach steady state in 10 years. Population growth is over, folks, there's nothing to see here.

Some of the data itself is from the public record, but compiling all of it yourself would be prohibitively expensive. It would take many trips to various libraries, churches, courthouses, etc. in lots of far-flung places in different cities, states, and countries. And that's all before you start indexing, searching, copying, or scanning any records.

Then consider they're hosting all those billions of records, have developed decent software for both building family trees and documenting them with their database of sources, and continually improve their software and increase their database holdings. The only reason they can charge so little is the economy of scale based on their huge userbase.

For me it's mostly just a hobby. I love history to begin with, and my family history is specifically interesting to me personally. Finding out where my ancestors lived, what their lives would have been like, and why they immigrated to America is fascinating to me.

I've read that genealogy is the second most common hobby in America, after gardening. Of course, that depends on how a hobby is defined. I consider reading my favorite hobby. However, for some people, i.e. Mormons, genealogy has religious significance. That's why Salt Lake City, Utah is the biggest destination for many people doing genealogical research.

I've also read that, which really interests me. Don't you find it fascinating that your (or at least some modern Turks) ancestors possibly spoke Hittite or another Indo-European or even Semitic language? I recently paid for a genealogical DNA test, which will tell me more specifically where my ancestors came from. My paternal ancestors immigrated to America from Germany in the 1880s (then Prussia), but there are several clues which point to them actually being ethnically Lithuanian. The area where they lived has been part of Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Germany in just the last few hundred years.

Actually, every person on the planet is descended from immigrants if you go back far enough.

Census records are released 72 years later, to be exact. Also, although the US Census isn't available until then, many state listings of much more recent births, marriages, divorces, and deaths are available.

Too much data is far more preferable than too little. Back in the old days, before many sources were available online, most searching had to be done by hand, paging through entire paper records until you found a possible match. The earliest online sources were often just indexes to paper records. It made it much easier to find the records, but then you still had to travel to a library, courthouse, church, etc. that might be in another state or even country.

The reason the algorithm is so promiscuous is that it's probably using Soundex to match names. That's a good thing though, as I've found some of my ancestors names spelled in lots of different ways.

Definitely agree, the anonymous reader didn't try very hard. And records for living people are necessarily scarce because of privacy issues.

Actually, just creating and editing your family tree on Ancestry is completely free. And there's no limit to the number of people, AFAIK. The paid service is just for accessing their database of sources and connecting with other users who might have overlapping family trees.

I pay for ancestry.com because they have a huge database of sources online, and probably the largest number of users out of any other family tree websites. It's much more convenient for me to search and view their literally billions of records from the comfort of my own home than going to my local library or LDS center. If I did that, I'd have to copy their records and scan them myself. Ancestry's already done the legwork for me. Also, since they have so many users, I've connected to several other people doing research along the same family lines, which saved my quite a bit of time.