>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.

This is good advice, and gives me an opportunity to speak to the community at large: some of us who go to cons and are in a position to shake tons of hands politely decline. It's not because we're being dicks, it's because we know it's a good way to substantially decrease our chances of catching and spreading any germs.

I played the PAX Pandemic game, where the Enforcers handed out stickers to attendees that read [Carrier] [Infected] or [Immune] (There was also a [Patient Zero].

I got the [Immune] sticker, and by the time I got home on Monday, it was clear that I had the flu. I've had a fever between 100 and 104 all week that finally broke last night, but I'm going to the doctor today because I think whatever I had settled into my lungs. I'll tell him about the H1N1 outbreak and get tested if he wants to run the test, but at this point I think it's safe to assume that I was [Immune] to the Pig Plague, but definitely [Infected] with the damn PAX pox.

Even though it's been a week of misery, it was entirely worth it, and I don't regret going to PAX for a single second.

This is why my motto (and fundamental rule for life) is Don't be a dick: it's simple to understand, and reasonable people can agree on what it means.

• If your goal is to create a "production system" of some sort, then you should pick pretty carefully from one of the following lists:
  • A scripting language, with Bash, being really ubiquitously available, being a good first choice, and fallback options being Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby
  • A "compiles-to-native" language, either C or C++
  • If you favor dynamic frameworks, then Java.

    (Or perhaps Mono...)

• If you are trying to learn, are in a position to consider the results "throwaway code," and are interested in learning programming concepts, then you should look quite a bit more widely:
  • For heavy concurrency, consider Erlang

    And it would be well worth taking a side-trip to do something non-trivial in Prolog to see how backtracking works.

  • If you want something that compiles down to pretty fast object code that might be a bit stricter than C or C++, then it would be well worth taking a peek at Modula-3, Ada, or Eiffel.
  • It would be well worth taking a look at Common Lisp and/or Scheme, as they offer considerably different object models from what is "traditional" in C++/Java, and, as long as you don't merely play the academic game of "just doing list processing" or "just doing recursion", you can learn some very different approaches to programming.
  • Icon was the string processing language from the makers of SNOBOL that looks quite a lot like C (which SNOBOL doesn't!), and which introduced, to computer languages, having generators (which Ruby & Python have since adopted, and which you can also find in the Common Lisp SERIES package), as well as coroutines, which are a more event-driven-ish way of handling concurrency (probably nicer than threads).
  • Haskell or OCAML provide more "conventional" (e.g. - somewhat more Algol/C-shaped) views on functional programming than do Lisp or Prolog, and have interesting bits to them.

There are a lot of interesting computer languages out there!

Sony BMG spokesperson: We're pleased to announce we are the final major music corporation to release electronic tracks without that pesky DRM! All you have to do is leave your house, go to a selected retail outlet, buy a special card there, go back to your house, scratch off the back of the card to find a code, go to our special MusicPass Web site, enter said code, and download one the 37 titles we have available, from Celine Dion to the Backstreet Boys!

Kid #1: Or, in the time it takes me to jump through all those hoops, I could just download all 37 of those albums off of Pirate Bay.

Kid #2: Or, I could just scratch off the back at the store, record the pin number, go home and download the album through a Tor connection, so you can't trace my IP number.

Kid #1: Also, what's with this first slate of artists? Celine Dion? Backstreet Boys? Kenny Chesney? Barry Manilow? Are you high?