What's with the continual use of HP and not HPE, use of the HP logo (not the HPE logo), and even making a joke about the name difference (followed by repeat use of HP). They are very different beasts in very different businesses. Part of that is reflected in the employee count: at the split 3 years ago, HPE had around 240k employees, while HP had around 49k.

Agreed. I also have "computer glasses" that are all about the focus. They have close up prescription on the bottom, far at the top, and most of the middle is about arms length (monitor distance) focus. They are fantastic. Before that, I was tipping my head up with my progressives to get the focus, and found I did most of my work on the bottom half of the monitor as it was hard to focus on the top without a lot of head tipping.

>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.

I used to hide little waldo images in old maps for Day of Defeat. It was a lot of fun to do. Kinda had to stop once it went all commercial and such.

There are a lot of things you can do with some printers that enable web servers without any authentication at all. Print things, ask to do a scan (people forget things on scanners), view and modify contact lists for FAX and scan to email tools, etc. Definitely potential for "denial of ink and paper" attacks on a printer.

IMO manufacturers should only allow local network access to these devices unless you explicitly set or modify the default login.

I'm no fan of Java-based curricula, for the same reason I'd be no fan of Fortran-based curricula. Computing isn't about one language. Each language and system shows you one hyperplane of a vast multidimensional space. The best programmers know lots of languages, and choose wisely among them — or even create new ones when appropriate.

In the production world, there are times where some C++ or Java code is appropriate ... and there are times when what you want is a couple of lines of shellscript and some pipes ... and there are times when the most sensible algorithm for something can't be neatly expressed in a language like C++ or Java, and really requires something like Common Lisp or Haskell. If you need to exploit multiple processors without getting bogged down in locking bullshit and race conditions, you're much better off using Go than Java.

(Just last night, at a meetup, I was talking with two bright young physicists who reported that their universities don't do a good enough job of teaching Fortran, which is the language they actually need to do their job. Scientific computing still relies heavily on Fortran, Matlab, and other languages well removed from what's trendy in the CS department — no matter if that CS department is in the Java, Haskell, or Python camp. But if you want to learn to write good Fortran, you basically need a mentor in the physics department with time to teach you.)

And there are times when the right thing to do is to create a new language, whether a domain-specific language or a new approach on general-purpose computing. There's a good reason Rob Pike came up with Sawzall, a logs-analysis DSL that compiles to arbitrarily parallel mapreduces; and then Go, a C-like systems language with a rocket engine of concurrency built in.

(And there's a good reason a lot of people adopting Go have been coming not from the C++/Java camps that the Go developers expected, but from Python and Ruby: because Go gives you the raw speed of a concurrent and native-compiled language, plus libraries designed by actual engineers, without a lot of the verbose bullshit of C++ or Java. Would I recommend Go as a first language? I'm not so sure about that ....)

What would an optimal computing curriculum look like? I have no freakin' clue. It would have to cover particular basics — variable binding, iteration, recursion, sequencing, data structures, libraries and APIs, concurrency — no matter what the language. But it can't leave its students thinking that one language is Intuitive and the other ones are Just Gratuitously Weird ... and that's too much of what I see from young programmers in industry today.

SCIENTIST 1
I'm afraid we'll be deviating a bit from standard analysis procedures today, Gordon.

SCIENTIST 2
Yes, but with good reason. This is a rare opportunity for us. This is the purest sample we've seen yet.

SCIENTIST 1
And potentially the most unstable!

SCIENTIST 2
Oh, if you follow standard insertion procedures, everything will be fine.

SCIENTIST 1
I don't know how you can say that. Although I will admit that the possibility of a resonance cascade scenario is extremely unlikely, I remain uncomfortable with the---

SCIENTIST 2
Gordon doesn't need to hear this. He's a highly trained professional. We have assured the Administrator that nothing will go wrong.

SCIENTIST 1
Ah yes, you're right. Gordon, we have complete confidence in you.

SCIENTIST 2
Well, go ahead. Let's let him in now.

Exactly. HP does this with contractors (2 years work, 100 days you can't work).