Justice Antonin Scalia said something interesting in an interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday.

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Apparently Scalia believes that when the US government tortures prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, it's not a violation of the Eighth Amendment, not because torture isn't cruel and unusual, but because it's not punishment. They're not being tortured as punishment for their crimes, they're being tortured to extract information, that's a completely different situation.

It's an argument I've never heard before, but Scalia's got a point. The Eighth Amendment is clearly talking about punishment for crimes as sentenced by a court, but the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have never been convicted (or indeed charged, in most cases - so the Sixth Amendment is still out the window). So while torturing prisoners still obviously violates the Geneva Convention Against Torture, it doesn't appear to violate the Bill of Rights.

Interesting.

Alright, I've had enough people express an interest in this that I'm finally putting it together. We're watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer every Monday night at my house, beginning April 7^th, from 8:00 to 9:30. Guests are encouraged to bring munchies or beverages to share, and a comfortable folding chair if we have a lot of people.

Why Buffy? Well, when it was on TV in the '90s, I had no interest in watching it because it sounded stupid (a blonde cheerleader hunting vampires by night, attending high school by day) and most of my peers who watched it seemed to be mostly drooling over Sarah Michelle Gellar, whom I wasn't interested in. But over the years since then, people kept telling me I should watch it, and it's really good, and I should watch it, and it's a great show, and it's really funny, and I should watch it, and it's really good. Eventually I gave in, and watched Season One. It was just as corny as I had feared, but it was also funny, and didn't take itself too seriously, which helped a lot. And then it got better.

If you can see past the stupidity, it really is a pretty good show. It's very funny, and I appreciate the artistic qualities - Joss Whedon, the show's creator (who later created Firefly), frequently experiments with new ideas that aren't normally done in a television show - for example, there's an episode with no dialog, an episode with no music, an episode where a minor character only previously seen a few times is inexplicably the star of the show, a main character who gets eaten by a monster in the middle of a season (and removed from the opening title credits in the following episode), an episode set in ancient Sweden with all the dialog subtitled, an episode done entirely in the style of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, and a main character suddenly inserted that all the other characters seem to think has always been there, with no explanation until about six episodes later when Buffy finally realizes something's wrong. It's stupid, but it's unpredictable and fun.

Anyway, if you're in the Portland area and want to join us, RSVP.

In a startling turn of events, Microsoft has reversed an earlier stupid brain-dead decision, and is actually doing the right thing.

Internet Explorer 8 will have much better support for modern web standards than IE7 (which in turn has slightly better support than IE6). Apparently the internal builds already pass ACID2 (IE7 and Firefox 2 do not; Firefox 3 and the current versions of Safari and Opera do). However, the original plan was to only enable this improved standards support if the web developer specifically requested it by adding a special META tag; by default, IE8 was to operate in an IE7 compatibility mode. The goal was to avoid the problem of non-standards-compliant sites breaking when users upgrade their browser, which is what happened when people upgraded from IE6 to IE7, but it would have caused serious problems in the future.

Basically, it was a really bad idea, but Microsoft has changed their minds. They're doing the right thing, because it's the right thing to do. The last time I remember Microsoft going out of its way to do the right thing with IE was when they met with the Mozilla team in November 2005 to discuss using the same icon for RSS feeds in IE7 and Firefox.

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