>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.

nt

I hear there are only crap informercial for closetted ghery asstards on that silly excuse for a web site. Even Taco had some more to offer instead of that junk.

The big problem with BitCoin is the massive amounts of electricity people are using to mine it. Not very ecologically friendly. I understand that they didn't want to make it too easy to "find" BitCoins as that could be inflationary. Still, perhaps they could have come up with a different scheme for "finding" coins? Maybe something that would solve actual problems like protein folding or something - at least then the electricity being used would be used to solve actual problems in the real world.

> moreover bitcoin is in a deflationary bubble right now anyway even though only a fraction of possible coins have been mined.

Indeed. Because the number of users of BitCoin is growing faster than the growth in BitCoin supply. And growth in BitCoin supply is very slow (and getting slower) at this point. This seems to be the big problem with the scheme: Like gold there is a finite supply that grows very slowly and this inevitably leads to deflation (falling prices denominated in BitCoin) which means holder of BitCoin will not be incentivized to spend BitCoin. Fortunately, BitCoin is a parallel currency and not our only currency.

A better scheme would have been to grow the supply of BitCoin at the same rate as the growth of people in the BitCoin "economy". That would lead to a stable currency instead of a speculative one.

The fact that Google achieves a 66.66% success rate in acquisitions is amazing. Most M&A's have a success rate of 17%.

According to a quote from the Wharton School of Business:

"Various studies have shown that mergers have failure rates of more than 50 percent. One recent study found that 83 percent of all mergers fail to create value and half actually destroy value. This is an abysmal record. What is particularly amazing is that in polling the boards of the companies involved in those same mergers, over 80 percent of the board members thought their acquisitions had created value.

— Robert W. Holthausen, The Nomura Securities Company Professor, Professor of Accounting and Finance and Management

http://executiveeducation.wharton.upenn.edu/open-enrollment/finance-programs/mergers-acquisitions-program.cfm

I'm not certain that there would be a significant performance increase from such a low-end processor. The VIA C7-D 1.8 only scores 333 on Passmark, which puts it in the range of an early-model Pentium 4 or Athlon XP from circa 2002.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=VIA+C7-D+1800MHz

It's also a 32-bit processor, so you're going to be capped at 3GB of RAM.

As an alternative, you can easily find used 4-5 year old Core2 Duo systems for $100-$200. They're 64-bit and will score 1300 or higher on Passmark.

http://www.amazon.com/Dell-755-Performance-Intregrated-Professional/dp/B004HPMH9Q/ref=sr_1_4?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1330885080&sr=1-4

I always attributed those to people playing around on VMs or their user agent strings.

But given the "640K RAM should be enough for anyone" mentalities I've seen around here, I'm not certain about that anymore.

Who said I was male?

The fact that you assumed that, and are still unflinchingly clinging to a 300mhz system from 1997 that is grinding your swap to death, indicates that you might need to get out more.

Very well then, we'll argue about more pocket change.

Discounting shipping, I've seen piles of 4GB drives selling at $4 at Walgreens on clearance, which with tax would be $5.

Either way, USB drives are dirt cheap and have been for years. I'm also a bit wary of the notion that malware will infest a USB drive formatted on ext3 because you were careless enough to use your $5 drive to transfer photos to a pharmacy, instead of reserving another stick for that purpose.

Windows Vista was a hog, but Windows 7 will run on any system that Ubuntu does, and runs well on the same systems, although you may have to disable Aero. The Windows 8 developer preview is actually faster and uses less memory that Windows 7, but it does require a "DirectX 9" graphics card (most anything 2002+), as the graphics are 100% 3D-accelerated.

Win7 also remarkably stable from what I've seen for the past 2 years or so. It's not subject to the junk XP was, like having to run ipconfig /flushdns (or rebooting) to fix network issues. It also uses ASLR and DEP by default for base security purposes.

Because of that, there's no reason to use XP in the Windows world ofr anything except for 1990s-era software that requires IE6 or does things like write to its own C:\Progra~1\ directory. Not to mention XP considers SATA to be exotic hardware, drivers haven't been written for it for years, its PnP driver capabilities are way outdated, etc.

But whatever you're using, it's your choice, and do enjoy. Just thought I'd inform you on this from the other side of things. :)