>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.

The reason they're shooting it is to *try* to make it go off.

Typically this would be put in a bomb pit somewhere nearby. From reading the comments this is fairly common practice there. This one nailed it pretty well:

"I know many Jewish Israeli people who had their bag shot just because they left it unwatched for a couple of minutes. Yes, this is the unfortunate reality that Israelis live in, where Palestinian terrorist would do anything (such as put bombs cowardly hidden in laptops) to intentionally hurt innocent civilians. These are precaution measures intended to prevent loss of innocent lives (yes, sometimes at the cost of a cherished laptop because of a possibly careless border officer)."

Yay! I'm still young!

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.

Bah. This is easily remedied by going at night.

This has been done before, IIRC Samsung released one of the first TV quality raster scanning system for laser shows.

Basically a standard laser show setup uses multiple lasers (to get your RGB) combined into a single beam then passed through a device, such as a PCAOM, which acts as rather like a programmable colour filter. (this isn't the only way it can be done with solid state lasers).

Two sets of mirrors can be steered in the X and Y axis to draw your shapes, beam effects, etc.

In the case of a TV or other raster displays the beam is steered much like you would an electron beam on a regular TV. It scans a horizontal line, moves down scans across, repeat. You can switch the direction of the scan (left to right, then right to left) on alternating lines to speed up the scan rate.

Wikipedia has some info on Laser TV's in general: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_TV and LaserFX has some info on PCAOM's if you're interested in the older tech: http://www.laserfx.com/Backstage.LaserFX.com/Archives/Archives6.html

Early systems actually used multiple projectors overlapping or drawing the first 3rd, 2nd third, etc of the image to make up for slower scan rates.

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.