Shoulda saved the results of the sniffing to Richard Stallman's account for old times sake.

Justices decide if the Constitution prohibits a law, not if the law is a good idea.

IANACL (I Am Not A Constitutional Lawyer), but I don't understand how this law would necessarily be unconstitutional -- these people are being given access to due process, and are essentially being held on the same legal basis that the government uses to commit the dangerously mentally ill (which, really, is what these folks are).

This isn't to debate the merits of the law itself, of course, but blaming the Democratic-leaning justices for ruling on the law's constitutionality (esp, in a 7-2 decision) is pretty weak.

Another obvious issue with this ruling is that "Sexually Dangerous" just sounds like a Prince song.

Reading about this today, I found that the scope of this particular decision is less scary than I initially assumed -- it's limited to prisoners who meet a standard as being "sexually dangerous", so they're not just being held without due process. Apparently this applies to about 100 prisoners nationwide.

The trouble here is that we, as a society, have real trouble in applying common sense in our legal system. You start with an obvious good thing (keeping violent sex offenders behind bars) and it grows into something completely different -- consider the way the term "sex offender" has been distorted. Once you start allowing this sort of action, where's the protection that keeps it from growing into something else?

Are we going to start seeing 18 year-olds locked up forever because they had sex with a girl a few months younger than them? It sounds silly, but we already routinely label this a "sex offense". Will taking a drunken piss in an alley set you up for decades in prison? Again, common sense says that's ridiculous but again, it can already get you labeled as a sex offender.

Until we figure out a way to legislate in a way that applies some degree of common sense, this sort of thing just can't be allowed.

Yes, why should anyone be concerned that their ability to afford food and heat in their declining years is dependent on the long-term stability of a system that can be radically damaged by a single mistyped letter?

I guess we're all just lucky this guy hit "b" and not "z".

I suspect that I speak for everyone with their retirement money and/or savings invested in the markets when I say: HO-LY SHIT.

Frankly, I was more comfortable with the concept that the DOW could drop 1000 points in one afternoon due to some obscure overseas debt concerns than I am the idea that the DOW can drop 1000 points in one afternoon because of a fucking typo. I realize that markets and the economy in general are collective illusions to begin with and all that, but do we really need to be reminded quite so forcefully?

Might be time to invest my money in something a little more solid, like canned food and ammunition.

So the article speculates that this is a testbed for on-orbit threat detection systems, which given the number of countries getting into the space gig seems like a reasonable thing to be working on.

So here's why bit I don't get: Why build it into a space plane rather than a regular satellite? Seems to me that you're adding an order of magnitude to the complexity of the mission -- do they really need the sensors back that badly, or is this maybe for something else?

Except Taco misquoted Ghostbusters. I wasn't going to point it out.

"That's a big twinkie..."

I remember playing MW4 and thinking, "you'd have to pay me to keep playing this game".

Now I have proof that I was right.

The trouble with multiplayer RTS games is that, after a while, they appeal largely to the type of folks who want to learn the recipe for success on a given map and then practice until they're able to apply it faster than the other loser they're playing against.

What I'd like to see in the next wave of RTS games, then, is a method by which they screw with the various units just enough from game to game that simply being able to do the same thing over and over again as quickly as possible does not equal success in multiplayer -- somehow introduce a measure of creativity and quick-thinking rather than just "zergling rush the bitches until Blizzard patches us"-style tactics.

I was going to try and write a funny post here about taking revenge against your coworkers, but the Onion did such a better job:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/disgruntled-ninja-silently-kills-12-coworkers,1575/

It's not just his 'Holier than Thou' attitude that'd worry me as a potential employer, it's that he pretty clearly was also a terrible admin.

Who the heck sets up a mission-critical system (in this case, quite literally given the city services it fed) and then proceeds to set themselves up as a single point of failure? That's not just being slightly paranoid, that's being either grossly incompetent (not thinking of the downside) or wildly unethical (using it to ensure lifetime employment).

I find it interesting that folks seem to assume the fact that the managers, city government and police acted poorly in this case somehow balances out the fact that Childs was guilty of the crime.

There were plenty of opportunities on both sides to handle this entire affair in a better way, and both sides managed to screw up each and every opportunity. That said, when your manager asks you for access to a system, you give it to them -- you can write for the record that you're doing so under protest and list the reasons, but you do it.

Legality aside (since that's a settled issue), let's not pretend Childs was somehow a slightly-paranoid innocent in all this. Childs acted unethically and incompetently as an administrator -- he was trusted with access to these very important systems, and he abused it. He not only failed to create a plausible disaster recovery plan, but he set things up so that he had to be the cornerstone of any effort to recover or even maintain the system.