I'm somewhere in the middle on this.

>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.

Yes, AC, that's _exactly_ what you would do. This is in beta, where you choose a prime sub-section of your market to run tests with. That is literally part of the definition of beta testing.

With Windows running only 27% of the Internet's web servers*, calling it "severely limit[ing]" is more than a little hyperbolic.

* source: http://news.netcraft.com/archi...

Read your post and this really encapsulated it all:
"THIS IS NOT HOW YOU UNIX"
Well said.

Causal Reductionism
Affirming The Consequent
Argument From Complexity
Argument By Prestigious Jargon
Argument From Outdated Information
Argument From Personal Astonishment

Take your pick... as we fall prey to Argument From Authority because it's Penrose, a man who knows mathematical physics but not necessarily neuroscience, making the argument.

For me, neither a physicist nor a neuroscientist, complex adaptive systems theories seem more than adequate to explain us without having to invoke spooky physics. Each little addition to our overall intelligence creates a more and more complex system that develops and adapts and, as in our case, might eventually begin to notice itself and have its thoughts (which we just call 'cognition' in animals) then turn to considering itself. Ergo... consciousness. Penrose seems to need a still more 'mystical' answer (and not just on this subject...) and, without quite going so far as to invoke a deity, chooses the most mysterious and currently least-understood science to hang his god hat on.

You've also been exposed to the sun for decades, but [presumably] don't have skin cancer.
http://skepticwiki.org/index.php/Argument_from_Incredulity

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.