The responsibility lies with the nutbag who shot up the school and then committed suicide. It might be nice to try to find some reason or trigger for it, but really it was the actions of one individual performing a heinous act. He took advantage of the situation and executed his twisted plan, or reacted completely insanely, or something in between. While in a situation where he may not have had such easy access to such weapons (for whatever reason) it may not have happened the way it did, but there's no way of knowing for sure that he wouldn't have done something similar another way.

Whatever you think of her gun selection, in firepower or quantity, it seems she gained them legally and behaved with them responsibly. It can surely be argued that no matter how stringent any gun control law, short of completely banning gun ownership, she could have followed all of those more strict laws and still had weapons that her son would then acquire illegally and use incorrectly.

There's no evidence she didn't properly secure her firearms and that he simply defeated said security. Locking something in a gun safe isn't something that would stop a motivated and capable 20-year old. He could surely have known where she kept any locker or trigger-lock keys, and reached them. Short of that any number of tools could have been used to overcome many home gun lockers, especially those meant to keep children safe and not truly secure the weapons.

Some blurb I saw somewhere said that Connecticut only requires locking up firearms when there are minors living in the home, and since he was 20 he was not a minor. Yes, a responsible gun owner should have locked up the weapons regardless, but again, a 20-year old familiar enough with the weapons to do what he did would have surely been able to open said locks.

Additionally, while the actions show in hindsight that he was plenty unstable (tore up first-graders...'nuff said), there's not been convincing evidence presented (that I've seen or read) that indicates he was unstable to the point that one might think he would do what he did. Too many interviews point out "what a quiet person" or "nice fella" or whatever. I'm sure his mother thought she understood whatever was going through his head, as most parents will believe with their kids, even when they're wrong. We'd all like to believe that we'd be able to see the breakdown coming, and even if there was any indication he was about to snap, perhaps she didn't envision he'd snap like this, or on that day.

These are the basic facts. She had legally obtained weapons. He obtained them from her (and killed her with them). He is responsible for the actions that took the lives of those children and their protectors.

Wait a second...in light of Google's recent patent award of guilt by association, does this mean that as /.ers we're all guilty of conspiracy to incite a revolution (I mean, I'm no lawyer, but that sounds like it could be a crime).

Oh, wait, that shouldn't be a crime...at least not according to Thomas Jefferson.

Agreed. No one should be able to tell me whether or not I have to wear a helmet.

Besides, helmets aren't really holding back wide-spread bicycle use.

Helmets are not mandated where I live, for bicycles or motorcycles (when the rider has a motorcycle-endorsed license). It is up to the individual whether to wear a helmet, as it should be. At least for adults; I'm not sure if children are required to wear helmets on bicycles, but really most pre-teen kids will do whatever you tell them in order to ride a bike anyway...and most well-behaved teen kids will suffer the indignity of wearing a helmet if it affords them the freedom to move about without parental involvement.

The obstacles to bike-riding instead of car-driving (or bus-taking) is that there needs to be convenient and secure storage at both ends, something needs to be done to allow clean-up at both ends, and consideration needs to be made for wardrobe at both ends. Bikes are too easy to steal, and penalties for stealing a bike are pretty weak, especially when compared to the penalties for stealing a car. No matter how fit one is, there's a bit of clean-up needed after a ride of any length or speed. Few people can get away with wearing the same clothes while biking and working, even if the clean-up is not needed or gets neglected.

Even if you get over those obstacles, the biggest obstacle, at least in most American urban areas, is that people don't live close enough to where they work. A (probably...I didn't research, so let's go with the conversational 80%...) large percentage of workers live a longer distance than a comfortable bike ride offers. Both in terms of effort and time. As one example, I currently work a mere eight miles from my home; it's a 10-minute commute by motor vehicle (I typically motorcycle) in great traffic, more typically a 15-minute commute in moderate traffic, if I take the freeways.

Curiously, even in a motor vehicle, where I can maintain speeds of 30MPH easily, on the quickest road route not using the freeway, it's a 30-minute commute in good traffic. There are just that many traffic signals and other vehicles to cause delays. The route is probably only ten miles, versus the eight on the freeway, but the roads aren't flowing as smoothly. I'm sure most cyclists aren't capable of maintaining 30MPH speeds, even if traffic isn't a consideration, and probably not for that distance. Even maintaining a pace of half that on a bicycle means an hour on the road.

While I could probably use the 60 minutes of exercise a such a pedal commute would give me, and even though there are nifty bike lockers available at this location to secure bikes, I can't consistently work with those time lines, especially including any traffic-related delays that may occur on the slower roads, nor can I shower and change when I reach the office, nor would I be able to keep that speed carrying my laptop, other accessories and a change of clothes each day.

How does that meme go? Something like this, I think:

I don't always test my code, but when I do, I test in production.

X-Plane offers a USB dongle that you can have in your PC instead of the DVD to validate the license. I think that might be what they're talking about.

Not that I agree with them or think that the patent is even valid.

I already pay extra to have higher speeds and no bandwidth caps on my Comcast Business-class service.

If the tax went toward making a ubiquitous, carrier-independent service available everywhere, even with a lower bandwidth (being free doesn't mean it has to be the best), I'd be all for having everyone who pays for more cover the costs for those who can't (or won't) pay.

Agreed. Here's the obligatory TED link, with an interesting view on how the lack of patents, and an obvious and accepted pattern (pun intended) of copying has made the industry huge.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/johanna_blakley_lessons_from_fashion_s_free_culture.html

Of course it's because of the slew of people wouldn't bother paying for apps they could build and install themselves. Or those who would take it for their own, fork it, make it better, make it worse...

Heh...fair enough...I did, however, heed the "don't go there" warning. OK, in reality, I had no intention of going there; no interest, really. Just pointing out that provided source (and they're out there) doesn't always equal actual source).

It may also be the case that the posted source has nothing to do with the actions of the site. I mean, maybe they're being really friendly and helpful, but maybe the evildoers are just smart enough to instill a false sense of security by giving you some otherwise valid source, that isn't doing what they're trying to accomplish at all.

The bit about watching what the site does with Firebug or other browser tools or network monitors, will really reveal their nefarious nature...

True enough, and this can actually weaken security as your browser then checks for the existence of .com and .net and .org and .everyOtherTLDuntilItFindsYours, one (or more) of which will have been acquired by phishermen. Using a different TLD might seem like a great way to aggregate things, but my bank doesn't use .mobi to deliver mobile content to my phone, instead choosing to use m.bankname.com (not my real bank...heh...). Maybe it'll be intuitive after a while, but at least for the purposes of browsing for "bankname" alone in the address bar, it's a bad deal.

At least some of us do this on purpose, not because we're confused by the purpose of the big box, but because we're looking for search results about the perhaps heretofore unrecognized domain that might warn us about dubious uses.

Surely you meant this to refer to politics and not to making sure we're saying nice things, right?

Looks like they're all videos. I was hoping there'd be a nice blast from the past in audio form only...it'd be just my style to change my phone's ringtone to the old modem negotiation, especially for the annoying callers...

There's a second purpose of reCAPTCHA. There are always two "words." Both are from scanned documentation of some kind. One word is known, and is used as a check to see if you're trying. The other word is unknown, usually a little wonky, and you're being used to help OCR the text for them. The pair of words is checked, and as long as you got the known word right, and gave a try to the second word, you're in good; usually, that is--if they have enough input on the wonkier one, then you're being used to group-source validate the OCR on that one.

Nice recovery.

There is more often than not a gap between the design and the actual implementation, though, that sets the "hackers" from the "engineers," to use the OP's idea of it.

I try to practice quality standards and easy to follow patterns or algorithms. KISS is the fall-back; if it's too hard to write the software, then the design isn't appropriate. Likewise, if the software is too hard to read or manage, then you didn't follow the design.