[jrwoodruff]

Can be. But in the scenario described at the beginning of this article, what is the point of punishment here. Does this person need reformed? Can society dole out any more retribution/revenge/punishment than he's already experiencing?

Willful neglect is awful, a crime, and should be punished. In some cases it's probably necessary for a court to determine if the neglect was willful or not.

But I simply can't imagine the lifelong self-inflicted torment a parent would experience in a situation like the one described. Prison or death would be a respite I think.

[browningstreet]

Humans are like the glitchiest consumer products. Bugs galore.

[maxwell]

What object or entity has a higher feature-to-defect ratio than a human being?

[browningstreet]

We could think of it like that, but it seems like we're constantly surprised when humans can't run without crashing.

Crashing is often non-recoverable, and not really built into the runbook. Some support teams do triage pretty well, but most... not so much. The tickets build up, and often just get flushed.

Our monitoring infrastructure is built on the assumption of uptime. We ignore the technical debt.

[maxwell]

If uptime is the goal, individual humans are impressive compared to almost all human technology.

The Centennial Light has now been running mostly continuously since 1901, while the oldest living human was born in 1904. The bulb hasn't burned out, but has been shut off briefly a few times, which seems comparable to one's heart stopping but being resuscitated.

I'm not aware of any single "technology," in the broadest sense, operating for a longer continuous period of time.