>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.

If you could "fix" high functioning autistic so that they could be completely normal what kind of effect might that have on scientific fields which attract such people?

I'm not sure that's an apples-to-apples comparison. Toying with the way the brain functions is quite different from repairing a physical abnormality.

I would liken curing color blindness to curing a physical ailment, not a mental one. Would you have any moral qualms about using medical science to repair the legs of a man bound to a wheelchair?

I hate Vista's Explorer with a passion.

Windows 7's explorer is even worse. I use Vista at work and Windows 7 at home. A lot of other posters are saying this, and they're right: Windows 7 is basically just a glorified service pack for Vista with a less hideous color scheme.

Sadly, for every nice new feature in Win7, there's three other changes that baffle and anger me. For example, Win7 explorer no longer displays the amount of free space available on your drive. That decision just makes no sense to me. Another thing I find annoying is that when you drill-down into folders in the right-hand pane, the left-hand folder tree no longer stays in sync.

Sure, Vista explorer will randomly decide that some code folder actually has music and display columns for "artist" and "rating", but at least I can tell how much free space I have on the drive at a glance.

these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike.

It disturbs me that there exists a radio signal, however well encrypted, that can launch Russia's nuclear arsenal remotely.

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.