So, boiling him in oil was out of the question?

A Federal judge sentenced Minnesota teen Jeffrey Lee Parson to 18 months for modifying the Blaster worm and releasing it to, in Parson's own confession, "launch a distributed denial-of-service attack against a Microsoft Windows update Web site as well as personal computers". U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said in her ruling that Parson's neglectful parents were to blame for the psychological troubles that led to his actions in the summer of 2003. Parson made a statement and apologized to the court and to Microsoft, saying, "I know I've made a huge mistake and I hurt a lot of people and I feel terrible." He will still have to pay restitution to Microsoft and to people whose computers were affected in an amount to be determined at a hearing set for Feb. 10. Okay, sure, that'll be a bite for a 19 year old kid, but I personally think that maybe a better idea than subjecting him to prison time would be making him work for Microsoft for 18 months. Have him use his l33t ha><0r 5ki11z (that's "elite hacking skills" for the leetspeak challenged) to rid Microsoft's buggy bloated Windows code of problems. Maybe such work would be beyond his ability, I don't know - but I think it's more useful to the thousands of affected Windows users to have an operating system that is protected against such problems than having the kid pay a fine and go to jail.