>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 haven't posted a journal here in almost three years, because I couldn't find the button to start a new entry.
So... hi, Slashdot. I used to be really active here, but now I mostly lurk and read. I've missed you.
In addition to the efforts going on in Ottumwa, there is the already-existing American Classic Arcade Museum, located inside Funspot in New Hampshire. This arcade was prominently featured in the cult-favorite documentary The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. I don't think their mission is to collect every single game ever (that would be a lot of them) but they sure have a huge collection of both popular and obscure games.
The museum is really just one floor of the arcade (there are three) featuring many, many classic arcade games in excellent working order. I imagine the maintenance is a perpetual nightmare, but they do what they can. There is no admission fee, just ordinary tokens to play the games. Most still cost one token (each token costs a quarter, or less if you buy in bulk), and let me tell you $20 goes a long, long way there. For maximum childhood regression, they keep the lights down and play awesome 80s tunes over the sound system. I was there a couple months ago and got to play some games that I had not laid hands on for a long time: Elevator Action (last played at Fuddrucker's), Missile Command (pediatric dentist's office), Sinistar (Lamppost Pizza), Dragon's Lair (Chuck-E-Cheese), Star Wars (basement of the local Sears), Tapper (local bowling alley), Crystal Castles (by the front door of the local Alpha Beta supermarket) and so on. A few machines I had never seen before in person (a stand-up Pong machine, Satan's Hollow). They even have a friggin' Computer Space, but alas it was broken when I visited. The fact that you're even allowed to touch it is amazing.
I also got to play the infamous Donkey Kong machine, where I was proud to hold the high score (a piddly 18,000) for probably five minutes, and the same Pac Man machine where Billy Mitchell played the world's first perfect game of Pac Man (I think I cleared about 3 boards).
It's a real experience - if you're in the area I highly recommend stopping in.
I've lurked at
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.
There are also two Hadoop subprojects that either support SQL or will shortly. They both translate SQL queries into map/reduce programs. They are:
There isn't a C++ port of Hadoop's map/reduce, but there is a C++ interface to the Java code. It is used by Yahoo's WebMap, which is the largest Hadoop application. It lets you write your mapper and reducer code as C++ classes.
The Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) also has C bindings to let C programs access the system. If you want another alternative, the Kosmos File System (KFS) is also a distributed file system and was written in C++. Hadoop includes bindings for HDFS and KFS, so that the application code can transparently use either at run time depending on the path (hdfs://server/path instead of kfs://server/path).
In sorting a terabyte, Hadoop beat Google's time (62 versus 68 seconds). For the petabyte sort, Google was faster (6 hours versus 16 hours). The hardware is of course different. (from Yahoo's blog and Google's blog)
Terabyte:
Machines: Yahoo 1,407 Google 1,000
Disks: Yahoo 5,628 Google 12,000
Petabyte:
Machines: Yahoo 3658 Google 4000
Disks: 14,632 Google: 48,000
Yahoo published their network specifications, but Google did not. Clearly the network speed is very relevant.
The two take away points are: Hadoop is getting faster and it is closing in on Google's performance and scalability.
You don't have to know how the computer works, just how to work the computer.
