>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.

ps h -e (or ps hax) will exclude the header line so you get a more accurate count.

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.

They don't, of course.

Doctorow's EULA can't go out the door as it is for one simple reason: It doesn't have a statement about liability. The cleanest EULA I can think of would say:

1. This is copyrighted material,
2. It is subject to copyright laws,
3. The copyright went into effect on ______,
4. We hold the copyright.
5. Use it (or don't) at your own risk, because nothing that happens (or fails to happen) is our fault in any way.

Much better, though personally I think it should include a statement like

Probably the part where the defendant had already shown the kiddie porn to the border patrol. He had already testified against himself. Remember that bit in the Miranda warning about "anything you say can be held against you?"

Border patrol: Do you have any kiddie porn?
Defendant: Yep. Here it is on this scrambled partition I will now provide you access to.
Border patrol: You're under arrest for the kiddie porn.
Laptop: It is now safe to turn off your computer.
Later
Laptop: What porn?
Defendant: Yeah, what porn?
Border patrol: The porn you willingly showed us yesterday.
Defendant: I won't show you what's on that scrambled partition.
Judge: By showing it to us before you demonstrated that you were willing to let us see it. Saying yes once means yes forever. Kinda like rape.

It was a very narrow ruling.

Well, it thought about it for a little while, then it said to itself, "You know what? I'm a text editor. Let Firefox do its job and I'll do mine."

And the both lived happily ever after.

There's an amazing book called The Soul of a New Machine, which follows the team developing of the Eclipse MV/8000 computer at Data General in the late 1970s. One of the designers quit after spending weeks on end chasing down a hardware problem where signals were falling out of sync by mere nanoseconds. His resignation letter was a note he left on his monitor: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."

I'm a software guy and the book gave me a bit of perspective on what hardware people do.

IP is the epitome of imaginary.