>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.

i will say that my love affair with fantasy started in my freshman English class. We read Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, which i recommend. It's short and really interesting. Or if you're looking for a longer Le Guin, The Left-Hand of Darkness has been done a lot in classes. There's tons there that can apply to today.

Also, Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is awesome. i wrote a paper in college for a US Canon lit class where i justified the use of scifi in the canon and went from My Antonia to Martian Chronicles with nothing inbetween, since both books are somewhat about the cultivation of a new land/world, etc.

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.

i'm coming to this party late i admit, but i'm an anthropology grad student and can make a few comments.

For one, no this guy was not an anthropologist of any flavor. The article states he's a "media professor." i have my own biases about media/comm studies people... but i digress on that.

An anthropologist would never go about doing research in this fashion; and i have to admit one of the reasons this article bothers me is due to my own discipline's outlines and ethics. We do participant observation and we have to tell our participants that we are studying them, and give those people the right to opt out of being in our study group and then we are ethically bound to respect that opt out. We're not allowed to experiment in this fashion; pulling strings to play "what happens?" We only observe, and participate as much as possible.

As to the content of the article, i haven't played CoH, but i study online communities so i can give a brief comment based on my own observations and readings.

My small opinion of what's going on here is this (note: i haven't read his paper yet, just the article). Yes, the developers have their rules. But as another commenter has pointed out, the community has made its own subset of community expectations which happens in any community; there are The Big Rules, and then the Community Rules that lay under those.

Also in virtual worlds there are many, many, many instances of communities using the worlds in ways that the developers never intended. Linden Lab did not intend for Second Life to become a huge social hub, they really meant for it to be a hub for creation and creativity (according to Thomas Malaby, in his book _Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life_). As the community finds new ways to use the world and the tools the developers have given them, then the developer has to decide which of these new ways to encourage, which ones to let languish, if any! They have to decide whether to push their own agenda to the detriment of the community uses, or encourage the community uses and still bolster their own ideas, etc. etc.

There's an interesting dynamic (which my research will be looking at) between developer and community. Who holds more power, how much each stakeholder decides to give in to another, etc.

At any rate, he was playing within the developer rules, but the community he was in had its own set of rules subset to that. So was he really following the rules? Who makes the rules in these virtual world spaces? to me those are the more interesting questions, not what Prof. Myers "discovered." What he "discovered" was nothing new and really, online worlds are reflections of the offline world. People are this rude in the Big Blue Room, a bit more muted as the anonymity of the 'Net allows us to be more bold, but you still see this type of action out here in the "real" world.

Just my 2 cents in whatever currency (virtual or otherwise) you want to put it in.

i would assume that since ZDM, who we all paid our subscription fees to, no longer owns EGM that our old subscriptions will NOT be honored.

Here's the deal. ZDM, six months after shuttering the magazine, still has not decided what to do for those of us who still hold subscriptions. i'm willing to bet they're not going to do ANYTHING, and instead are just hoping we'll all forget we paid them money so they can keep it. Eff that.

Call EGM customer service: 800-779-1174. Ask for a refund, they'll give you one. Don't yell at them; ZDM farms out their customer service so you'll only be yelling at some nice lady in Florida who really is just as frustrated as you are at the whole situation.

DO NOT go through the email form on ZDM's site, because it's all braindead idiots who don't read for anything except keywords. Long story short: i gave up and requested a refund via the email form. i informed them i wasn't sure what card was on my account but was pretty sure it had been canceled and therefore needed to a) find out what card was on the account and b) possibly give them new information. i was informed that my subscription was canceled and money refunded. Since i have seen nothing show up anywhere, that refund went to a canceled card originally held by WaMu. Yeah i won't be seeing that money ever again.

So don't email. Call. You'll get someone with at least half a clue instead of none at all.

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.

That ending line would have been funny if Judaism believed in reincarnation...

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?