What about we switch this kind of prison sentences with forced community service? That would still punish the offender but offers society a way to gain benefit from it instead of having to pay out of the citizen's pockets (taxes) for their life in prison... Just sayin'...

You can do what you want, but you have to understand the consequences of your actions. It is my absolute right to not support you if you stand for an opinion contrary to mine.

With great power comes great responsibility

Freedom of speech does not mean free from consequences. Freedom of speech does not mean unconditional support. It means that you have the right to say what you want, and that you should not be persecuted for it.
Now, as consumers of a product, it is our right to not use/buy the product to not financially support acts that go against our beliefs and moral stances (just like we choose to buy organic, or buy american, or buy fair trade, etc.)

If you think pursuing a dream and trying to fill your life with something fulfilling is irresponsible, I pity you. I would rather die trying to do what I love in life that be "responsible" and miserable.

CoffeeScript is nothing but syntactic sugar. I don't get why people are so excited about it, it is exactly javascript, with a different look. It is not a language of its own, and on top of that, doesn't run natively in its form and makes debugging a pain...

It was you!!! I want my $100 back!

Interestingly enough, when you listen to such a piece, you hear a pattern of alternating low octaves notes and high octaves notes. Even though there is no mathematical repetition, I couldn't help anticipating the next big octave jump in a direction or the other, and the music had some kind of pattern to me. How weird that we can find meaning and feel sentiment in the most mathematically pattern-less piece of music?

These are all languages which can be easily approached. They all can be run from the command line and have a fairly simple syntax for beginners. They allow to start with a simple one liner 'hello world', and can go all the way to OO concepts, database connections, web dev, interaction with other languages/concepts, etc...
Also, they provide the instant gratification needed for the beginner as it's easy to find simple projects that would satisfy the needs of a newcomer (creating a simple web form, a script to list all their mp3s, an equation solver, a graph plotter, etc... )

Personally, I started with BASIC (before I had a computer, writing programs on paper...) and if I had to do it all again, I'd probably go with PHP

Amiga OS had it done years ago : MUI

I wonder if they also use any kind of geolocation / IP Lookup to change these rates as well... It seems to me that targeting localities would make more sense than assumptions based on user-agents

A security researcher involved with a website that leaks confidential documents on his way to a hacking conference was questioned for 3 hours at a border... So what? Isn't that expected for this type of work? Don't get me wrong, I'm not in favor of heavy government snooping but he kind of had it coming... If I was him, I would surely expect this to happen once in a while. Nothing to see here, move along...

Actually Hong Kong (such as other parts of China like Macau) is a SAR - Special Autonomous Region. It maintains a high degree of freedom compared to the main land and will do for another 35 years or so