Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Errata, Futurity, Portality
Better than world-wide anarchy and privation. kejoki writes: "I came into work today and nobody had voicemail. We use an ancient AT&T system 25 (Merlin) with the Audix automated attendant/voice mail system ... not my bailiwick but the boss was going nuts trying to figure it out.
He finally called his System 25 guy and found out that quite a few people were having the same problem. Inspiration hit, and he set the system date back before 31 Dec 1999 ... whammo! The voice mail returneth.
AT&T->Lucent->Avaya, of course, no longer supports the system...as a matter of fact the boss seems to recall getting a letter from AT&T saying that they'd be taking care of the Y2K problems which might be in their equipment; but another soon after saying that support for the System 25 would be dropped as of 31 Dec 1999 ... hmmm.
Oddly enough, he's had a problem with the system giving a database I/O error for a while, but since he reset the date that has also vanished.
All very interesting. At any rate, if you have a System 25 and you can't get your voice mail, set back the date!"And in related news, Che Fox writes :"The OpenLDAP project is one of the first to be hit by a major bug due to the S1G (one billion seconds) Unix time rollover. The slurpd replication daemon, which pushes changes from the master LDAP server to the slaves, no longer works now that time has rolled over to 1 billion seconds. This means that all LDAP-using networks in the world that use OpenLDAP and slave servers to replicate the data (very common) are now broken. There is a fix available against both the 1.2 and 2.x OpenLDAP releases in the OpenLDAP CVS repository."
You may assume your former activities for the moment. Agent Green writes: "I was checking out my firewall logs this morning and noticed an unusual amount of port 80 traffic and come to find out...it seems that AT&T Broadband has lifted their port 80 restrictions on its residential network. Let's see how long this lasts ..."
Probably until the next worm that takes over everyone's port 80, whatever OS it runs under.
So what did one giant say to the other? jshep writes: "Inventor Ray Kurzweil recently responded to physicist Stephen Hawking's concerns regarding the progression of AI (previous Slashdot story can be viewed here). Kurzweil takes aim at Hawking's suggestion that we use genetic engineering to augment the power of the human brain."
The man behind the curtain is ... uh, vital to national security! camusflage writes: "Reuters has a story (courtesy of Yahoo) that says the judge in the Nicodemo Scarfo believes the "national security" gambit about as much as the /. community does regarding the use of keyloggers. The most choice quote is "I don't know what it means. It's gobbledygook. More gobbledygook," referring to the argument put forth that the keylogger is a sensitive piece of national security. An assistant U.S. Attorney indicated he would provide "classified and unclassified summaries of the system's operation and more affidavits detailing the national security aspects at stake," next Friday."
The "national security" idea is just our tax dollars at waste being used to pay shit for brain FBI agents and the like to do nothing but sit around and occasionally shoot innocent people. Now they're tying up a court case and slowing down our court system trying to make some vague claims about keyloggers having a national security aspect. Yeah, okay. Fuck you FBI. Fuck you NSA. Stop killing innocent people and wasting our taxpayer money.
I don't know why, but "Slurped replication demon" just sounds funny as all hell. Try to visualize slurping a replicating demon.
Best Slashdot Co
@Home is still blocking 80. Dang it. No biggie though. I redirected the main page elsewhere and then have that page come back in on a different port.
Yep, I never spell check.
More incorrect spellings can be found he
In other words: Expect Slashdot to go down for 6-8 hours tomorrow without explanation.
Cunning linguists
cvsup, a utility used to synchronize CVS repository's, was hit by the S1G event. Version 16.1d is available to fix the bug.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
"AI" is an unusual deception. Normally things that are artificial are presented as genuine. Artificial Intelligence proponents adopt the opposite approach. They sell something that is genuine and call it artificial.
The computer programs called AI represent the real intelligence of the programmers who wrote them.
Bush's education improvements were
Thank god AT&T has unblocked 80. I had a very stable mail/apache/ftp server that my friend ran and let me leech bandwidth off of that was unfortunately hosted by them. I've been so busy with school I haven't had a chance to find another host, so now I guess I won't have to. Hurray!
There is not one genetic engineering.
There are many kinds of GE.
One kind splices genes from other species into a species. This has problems with inaccurate gene-snips and potential allergies to foreign genetic matter.
Another kind of GE is simply eugenics, which many farmers have used for centuries; selecting the best representatives of a species to breed together, or hybridization. Eugenics presents political problems in humans.
Another kind of GE is the turning on of inoperative genes through hormonal treatments or other chemicals. Cancer genes (oncogenes) are turned on through sun damage and other carcinogenic interactions, for instance. This type of GE may be dangerous but it is noninvasive and can be done through conventional current gene therapy methods. I support this kind of work.
Now onto the spurious ethical questions.
There is no a-priori model of the human. Humans have been evolving for thousands of years, and our lifestyles and diets have a big part to play in that. The conscious manipulation of this process has the opportunity, actually, to be more ethical than the unconscious genetic engineering we have done.
The americans imported people from Africa in the slave trade and created "hybrid races" of humans, for instance. This has led to changes in frequency of various positive and negative genetic traits in the US population. Although slavery itself is reprehensible, I don't think anybody would consider treatments for sickle-cell anemia (which occurs primarily in Africans and African-Americans) immoral genetic engineering, for instance.
Conscious manipulation of human intelligence is a scientific technology question and is morally neutral. Methods and political superstructures surrounding the issue are not.
Goat sex free since 2001
Darth VIA Strikes Back, Countersues Intel
--
E2 IN2 IE?
1) I think it is fantastic that the judge in the Scarfo case isn't dazzled by the FBI's "National Security" defense. This case has absolutely nothing to do with national security, the FBI is trying to establish precedent above the law. This time it is the keylogging technique, next time it is Carnivore v.2.0 that they try to hide behind the "national security" shield.
2) Being a subscriber, I am extremely happy that AT&T has lifted the ban in HTTP servers (I know I may assume too much given the anecdotal source). Most of the servers that run on the @home network are small, low traffic servers that don't cause much of a problem(unless they are infected). They must be worried about losing even the small percentage of customers that run web servers. Economic hard times are hitting everywhere...
Enigma
I could see how divulging how the keylogger works could be a national security issue... once it's been released how it works, people could start looking for the tell-tales, and then once word gets out about how many people are actually being logged, all hell breaks loose... both in and outside the US.
$0.02 (CDN)
My cable IP, bought by Netscape AOL Warner CNN AT&T Time (NAWCAT) is still being port 80 filtered, at least as of this moment. While I hope that changes, it's too late for them. I already scheduled my Earthlink DSL installation. And just in case anyone from AT&T sees this: I got all of my friends who had cable accounts to switch with me. I hate you people But I am full of love. :)
He either comes off as a real interesting guy with encyclopedic knowledge,or a pathological liar with an ax to grind
The Jive Forum BBS software was hit by the bug as well, for the same reason as everybody else: the sort order changes when the values are stored in a character field.
Here's a comment from one of the developers regarding the design decision:
Hey all,
Thought I would respond since I'm a Jive developer. There were quite a few reasons for the date to be stored as it is:
1) Java uses the millesecond values since 1970 as its native date format. However, unlike Unix, this value is stored as a 64 bit long instead of a 32 bit integer. Effectively, this means there will never be date overflow. In any case, using the millesecond value is very easy and fast in Java.
2) Database support for dates is horrible. Most db's have a DATETIME or TIMESTAMP column type. However, all databases seem to implement them differently. Further, support for 64 bit numbers is also poorly supported across many databases. Therefore, we were forced to go with our own encoding (millesecond values), and to use character columns instead of numeric ones. This lets Jive work with over 10 different databases instead of 1 or 2.
3) Yep, we never thought about the date rollover bug until about a month and a half ago. Adding a few padding 0's was a simple fix and was released on Aug 8th as Jive 2.0.
-Matt
...is going to pay my thought on this subject much attention, but here goes:
It is time for us to stop. Just to stop and take a moment to reflect on the knowledge we have and what is possible with it in hand. We make bigger, better, faster computers, and put them into operation immediately, for use in labs, and hospitals, and all the places where we need accuracy, and checking, and double-checking. We start cloning and genetically engineering humans without regard to the psychological consequences -- what will it be like to grow up knowing you wouldn't have just "happened" the way normal kids have. When we finally reach deep down enough inside the atom and find the particle we're currently looking for, that's not good enough. We have to build a bigger accelerator, abandoning the last one.
We need to start taking some responsibility -- the genetic code is a programming language in which we're not yet versed enough. Mistakes made there won't send up a compiler warning, they will ruin someone's life. Who's making sure we know what we're doing -- not what, WHY -- when we (as a global society) develop something like artificial intelligence? Sure, popular media -- so-called sci-fi movies and books -- pretend to address the issue, and some writers actually focus, but good luck getting those involved to turn an eye outward long enough to convince them of the moral issues involved.
The surest way to be sure of what we are doing is to stop relying on an economical system that simply doesn't work. Capitalism sucks, and we all know it. Technological tools are wasted on popular culture and ignorant masses. So many resources are wasted, so much time is wasted, so many lives are wasted. And before anyone posts beneath me calling me a Communist or whatever, no, I'm not. I just have no faith in ANY system that doesn't work, that is run by greed, and I'm open to suggestion. I'm a human being first and foremost, and I don't see how the world as we know it is run by and for human beings.
Every time I think of it, I flash back to Gödel, Escher, Bach: no system can ever be complete which relies on itself to define itself. It's a good book, and thank you to those who recommended it a couple months ago. I got it out that day, and I've read the first part so far, and I got it out again to finish it as soon as I returned to school.
Then again, I could be a complete idiot. Maybe I don't understand science and industry as well as I think I do from my limited viewpoint. Please post rational thoughts below.
Of course, maybe I should just stick to writing poetry...
--Joshua
Emacs: for people who just never know when to
I don't buy it for a second! It seems completely disingenuous of the Wigler to suggest that this is a legal grey area. I am almost positive that this evidence will be suppressed (rightfully). I don't think many people if it were explained to them would see this as anything besides a wire tap. Disagree?
Isn't it good when the patch announcement comes in the same paragraph of the bug announcement?
:)
They must be charging millions for this kind of responsive support...
I think genentic engineers shlould be working on a genome patch that disables the "wisdom teeth" gene.
Congrats to FBI agents who dedicated tremendous efforts to hide a keylogger into my keyboard, since everything I type is publicly readable on Slashdot.
Everyone who keeps complaining about the port 80 blocking needs to put the situation in perspective. (Yes I am one of them.) http is one of those "nice" Internet services that will easily run on any port, without changes to the client software. Try to do that with Windows SMB networking - you can't (easily) because the port range is hard-coded into the OS and can't be changed without much hacking. At least we have the option of simply changing our URLs to end with ":81" to solve the problem. And if you happen to be serving a domain off your cable modem and the :81 makes your URL look ugly... well, cable modems just weren't designed for serving domains anyway, so look for another provider.
If @home *really* wanted to be jerks, they could block incoming connections to your PC (except as required by ftp/irc clients). We agreed not to run servers so that's well within their rights. But they're not doing that and it's trivial to work around the port 80 block, so let's just be happy for what we have (and enjoy the newfound lack of Code Red sponsored congestion).
-sting3r
See what billg has up his sleeve
Recently, I've witnessed an increase in posts claiming that microsoft has stolen linux code for use in their Windows 2000 operating system. These posts never give concrete examples, but instead rely on strawman arguments and wild claims.
Well folks, I've got access to the Windows 2000 code (I'm a CS graduate student at Rutgers University, which has access to it for educational purposes), and I've discovered the truth, which I'll get to in a moment.
First, a brief history.
Windows 2000 and NT are based on VMS design principles. VMS (Virtual Memory System) was DEC's operating system for for their VAX (Virtual Address eXtender) and later Alpha computers. It was a contemporary to Unix, but unlike AT&T, they didn't allow it to be ported to other architectures, which explains why it never gained Unix's popularity, despite being more secure and more powerful.
In the early 80s (while future "Open Source" icon Linux Torvalds was still wearing underoos), Microsoft did experiment with their own Unix operating system, and even planned on phasing out MS-DOS in favor of it, but scrapped that plan due to problems with Unix's ease of use, inefficient use of system resources, and archaic design. They sold MS-Unix to SCO, and signed a non-compete agreement.
This explains why Microsoft chose to use VMS as a basis for their next generation operating system.
Returning back to the Windows 2000 source code: I've examined it thoroughly, and cross compared it in design, style, and composition.
Microsoft stealing Linux source code for windows 2000 is as likely as Spam being the next theme ingredient on Iron Chef.
wow, youd don't know very much about the law do you? I guess that is why you post anonymously.
Has everyone interested in the Hawking story seen the recent Reg articles?
If not, check them out:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/21414.html
Stephen Hawking predicts cyborg ascendancy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/21488.html
Cyborg metaphysics
~wmaheriv
"Shema Yisroel- Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echad!"
The underboss of this holocaust, truly yours Frank White!
Custer's Revenge: The greatest video
Then what the heck are we going to do in 292,278,994 ?!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
It never existed for me. ever cince the "ban" I tried daily to see if It was put into effect yet. Hmmmm I never lost accessability(sp) to my machine.
....Wouldnt that have been a hoot!
I also know of a few others that also never lost Port 80 access to their AT&T@home home ran servers.
Although all of us run apache on linux, so it might have been a ban for only Microsoft products
my suspicion is that it was only in selected areas.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, you know, they ARE probably filing for bankruptcy tomorrow. :)
so far no problems with the connection whatsoever. no outages, no unacceptable slowdowns, nothing.
Anyone who's scared
of AI, don't worry so -
we can't do shit yet.
what scares me about
AI research is how much
hype and FUD appears.
-- This post is about truth, beauty, freedom, and above all things, Karma
Although I'm concerned about some of the reckless GE experimentation conducted. I've always had this feeling at some point in human progress we might require the ability to GE ourselves in order to survive as a race. That might be considered a contradiction in itself.
Still because of this I'm not willing to reject GE out of hand, it seems better to be informed if and when this event might occur.
Of course existance of the moral ability and maturity within the modern culture to be able to deal with GE technology is debatable at present.
I've experienced insane downtime, and to even get a refund for the downtime (which has lasted *days*, on 2 occasions, or just 12 hours+ on uncounted others), you have to call in for customer service. Which is uphelpful And rude. And not ever what you were hoping for after the 20-50 minutes hold times.
Now, I will say here, these are pretty much the same old gripes you hear about any ISP, downtime and customer service (is there really anything *else* to complain about?...), but this is stuff that I consider signifcantly unacceptable, we'll say enough to make me check for DSL availibility every 7 days. Most certainly not worth the $55 a month I was laying down for it. I feel it is necessary to say at least one good thing, I guess, so here it is - they never once changed my IP address. That was very nice.
But, the damnedable port 80 nonsense was the last straw. ADSL is availible in only 4 days, and even if it wasn't, I'd have bitten the bullet and eaten the cost of a line string for the SDSL connectivity. I was at the end of my rope with them anyway. I'm not only ditching their internet service, I'm getting rid of them as a TV cable providor as well. I'm going to go install Linux on one of those Dish Network boxes, they've got a great deal going.
He either comes off as a real interesting guy with encyclopedic knowledge,or a pathological liar with an ax to grind
I study the programming of the human brain. I have an opinion that is quite different than yours.
Most people in the U.S., and most people in the other cultures I've studied, believe that they are less intelligent and less mentally capable than they potentially are. Since they have a limited idea of their own brains, they make a mistake when they try to guess how easy it would be for a computer to duplicate human mental ability.
Bush's education improvements were
ATT would either
1) Close port 80
2) Shutdown modems which are connected to infected machines
3) Ban people who are running web servers against the TOS.
It's a quiet day today and I only got 72 hits this evening, but yesterday I got 2000+ hits.
I'm contemplating setting up a program which will trash the machine at the other end if it connects to me via CR.
With all due respect, Professor,
Even if the ethics were crystal clear, if every person on earth agreed 100% that engineering people was right and necessary, and was ready to pay to make it happen, genetic engineering could never keep pace with Moore's law. You can't fight exponential growth; computers are going to be smarter than us whether we engineer or not, so we may as well get used to the idea.
In some ways, they already are. Chess, to quote Murray Head, was long considered the "ultimate test of cerebral fitness." But machines now can beat even the world's best humans at the game.
In the last two centuries machines have become physically stronger than us, faster than us, more capable, and better in every concrete measure. Disaster was predicted at every stage, but never came to pass. For every definition of superiority we choose, a machine is built that beats us at it. This cannot be stopped, as history shows. But history also shows that the world will not end because of it.
Certainly, it would have the ability to do so if that's what it wanted to do, but why? I'm not saying "because pacifism is inherantly a smarter philosophy that is the path that AI would choose," how the hell should I know what way of life would be deemed best by AI? If I didn't need the nutrients and energy sources that Earth provides and I were a supremely intelligent being (for lack of a better word) I'd leave. "Fuck humans, they're annoying and I'm outa here," is the response I expect from any AI we produce.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
and add http://microsoft-watch.n3.net to your sig?
Roses are Red
Violets are Blue
Microsoft is stealing source code
Who gives a shit, so are you
I write Perl 'til I'm tired
I drink coffee 'til I'm wired
I don't give a shit if I get fired
My linux skilz will get me hired
I'm a guy that has a dog
And my dog knows his shit
MS Windows is a dog
Damn, my dog knows his shit
My poetry is shit
But I don't give a crap
One thing is for sure
No Microsoftee knows how to write a trap
My writing is for the birds
This poem is full of turds
Man, I sure am tired
I think I'll just go #&%@#^%$
pi=sigma{n:0-infinity}[(1/16)^n][(4/(8n+1))-(2/(8n +4))-(1/ (8n+5))-(1/(8n+6))]
1. Run a firewall between you and the internet (this is a no brainer for a web server)
2. REJECT in ipchains (not DENY)all trafic from 'authorisedscan.home.com'
3. TADA
NT is supposed to stand for "New Technology". But....
HAL is to IBM as
VMS is to WNT (WinNT)
Wow, did you think that one up all by yourself? How long did it take?
Man, I'm gonna save that one. Hey, do you mind if I save that one and use it some time?
Boy, I sure wish I could think up cool stuff to say like that.........
I was never even blocked in the first place!
:81 or :8080 to that address I give people would have been no big deal.
Not that it matters much. The only stuff I serve from home is personal experimentation type projects, and I just give people the URL including the numeric IP address anyway. So appending a
Seesm to me there are two solutions to the keylogging issue.
One is for the OS/FS community to come up with a keylogging virus of its own. Then no one can know when their keystrokes are being logged.
The other solution is for the OS/FS community to come up with a program which detects all off-site communication. Then no one can be keylogged without the ability to detect, given some marginal intelligence, that someone is observing what they do.
Mafioso and similar gang leaders are not good for the comunity. Governments with the ability to observe everything their citizens do is infinitely worse.
Database support for dates is horrible. Most db's have a DATETIME or TIMESTAMP column type. However, all databases seem to implement them differently.
This is also my big problem. You want an application that is easily db portable? Don't use date fields. Use ints and store unix time. Need more precision? Use bigint (or whatever) and store 64 bit datestamp. Date support _is_ horrible. At least Oracle allows you to output a unix datestamp after putting the dates through a mangler. You should _not_ have to do this. Every db uses different date formats, different date manipulation and formatting functions, dates are even handled differently (Oracle doesn't for example _output_ or _input_ a date, you _always_ have to format!), and forget about comparing or trying to range dates. MySQL appears to only accept dates in one specific format, and their date function set is extremely poor. It's just one big mess best avoided by not using date types at all.
Now, as to why use chars instead of int or bigint (_all_ dbs I've run into have some sort of bigint type that will handle 64 bit numbers)? Beats me. That's almost harder than date types.
"Hot lesbian witches! It's fucking genius!"
Sung to the tune of the Village People song "Macho Man". Italicized parentetical statements should be spoken in between sung parts of the chorus. "Goatse" should be pronounced "goatsay" or "goatseh". Ready? Here we go.
Ev'ryone you know has seen that goatse-goatse man,
Stretchin' out his anus as wide as he can!
Prolapsin' that rectum, go man go!
Showin the whole world his giant butt hole!
Ev'rybody wants to meet the goatse-goatse man,
He's been grossin' out web surfers from Maine to Pakistan!
You can see his picture on goatse dot c-x,
But who can say they've met him in the flesh?
Hey, Hey, Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!
Goatse-goatse man!)
(Doesn't that hurt?)
I want to meet the goaste man!
Goatse-goatse man!
(What's the biggest object you ever fit in there?)
Where are you goatse man?!?!
(four-to-the-three-to-the-two-to-the-one-and...
Goatse-goatse man!
(Can I have your autograph?)
I want to meet the goatse man!
Goatse-goatse man!
(So, what are some of your other hobbies?)
WHERE ARE YOU GOATSE MAN?!?!
Lyrics are freely distributable under the GPL, the Goatse Public Liscence.
I have had @Home in Seattle since March, and I was never blocked on port 80. I've been running a personal web server, for the purposes of accessing my home box from work (with appropriate security measures of course) without interruption for several months. Does anyone know why my account apparantly was uneffected?
i am thinking there is no keylogger. Paul Zimmerman left PGP because they closed their source allowing the potential for a backdoor. I am betting that PGP decided to go ahead and quietly add in some type of way in that the government has always been wanting. Do you think the military in their roll out of digital signing is using PGP the most widely used and accepted way to encrypt or digitally sign email. Hell no. Because if we can get in easily others will probably figure it out eventually, and once the back door is open it is wide open.
the whole key logger explanation was just fancy redirection away from the fact that they broke a supposedly incredibly strong encryption package.
Here here to GnuPG
i.e. whErE du joo LivE? Spouting off your "deep understanding of the sysadmin black arts" does NOTHING for this discussion.
I switched from USQwest/Telechoice (a wannabe in Omaha NE) to Cox@home and have had a definite improvement. My speeds with @home are fast as hell, darn consistent, and I only have the VERY rare outage (/me crosses fingers). With the other guys, they were great for a while, until Qwest got ahold of em...I won't bother wasting b/w describing it, suffice to say I know quite a few people that left and (except for the poor guy who stuck to his principles and is now on dialup again) we are all very satisfied. Here's to @home, the /. whipping boy !
just telnet/ftp/www to a site that logs something to the effect of "greetings users blah456789.someisp.com" and grep that out of your logs (you do keep them, right) and have it pasted to either an isp provided web page or one of the MANY free redirect services available. Make a nice script and you'll be golden. I used cjb.net and it even redirected to my non-standard ports. YMMV
first off....get outside more, and stop thinking in tv-terms, as the rules (if there really are that many at all) of human interaction aren't taught well by watching television/anime and then allowing wide eyed numb viewers to make conclusions during closing credits. As far as Tetsuo, his role in Akira had MUCH less to do with technology and its potential for abuse, than his immaturity and lack of emotional growth. His power/tech didn't corrupt him, see, he was corrupt and looking for revenge BEFORE he was changed. Watch the movie again, and notice how he his picked on and abused even by his friends earlier in the movie. If it wasn't the tech/psionics/whatever it would have eventually been something else that consumed him in his lust for revenge or his search for acceptance. Thanks for playing "a generation raised by television" ...see you next time
for real, go read stileproject...I think it's /goatse.html
Under the AT&T Roadrunner TOS, running a personal server is explicitly allowed. I believe it says something about not running a commercial one, but that makes perfect sense.
I agree, though, that they still have the right to turn off any inbound ports to protect their network integrity. I think it would be unreasonable for them to block ALL inbound traffic, because that blocks things that people expect to get from an online experience (like multiplayer gaming). But if there is activity on a certain port that is flummoxing things up, sure, block it.
Good point about http being a "nice" protocol, although I think you'll find that any protocol originating in the Unix world behaves similarly.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
"There is no a-priori model of the human. Humans have been evolving for thousands of years, and
our lifestyles and diets have a big part to play in that."
As far as I know, humans have been overwhelmingly genetically static for all of what we would consider "history". So, yeah, there is an a-priori model of the human. It's not like we're sprouting new limbs or migrating into the ocean or something.
But in any case, what is the rationale for "genetically engineering" humans? Is it so that we can live on fewer nutrients? Is it so that we can be more compassionate towards each other? No, it's merely to one-up a human-made technology. That's a ridiculous reason to entirely change the species (which is what the type of genetic engineering proposed by these two would entail). Should we just sacrifice our whole concept of humanity just to keep up with our own inventions? It's so aggravating...I just don't understand the point.
"Conscious manipulation of human intelligence is a scientific technology question and is morally neutral."
Ha! While I'm all for letting information free, and don't consider myself a luddite, it's just laughable that scientists don't have any moral responsibility.
"Sir, we invented a super-cool FOO technology"
"Oh, no, what are the implications of this for humanity!?"
"Sorry sir, I'm just a scientist and have no moral obligation to society, but I believe the solution is to fund me to invent a FOO-human interface so that we can maintain control over FOO technology"
"Ok, get right on it!"
"Sir, I just invented the super-cool FOO-HUMAN technology!"
"Oh, no, what are the implications of this for humanity!?"
"Sorry sir, I'm just a scientist and have no moral obligation to society, but I believe the solution is to fund me to invent a new BAR technology to combine with the FOO technology"
"What would be the point of that?"
"Sorry, I don't understand your question."
"Nevermind, you're the scientist and being morally neutral you must know what's right. Here's your lump of money, get to it! By the way, have you finished those nanobots which are supposed to sexually please us while removing tarter from our teeth and rendering crops immune to parasites?"
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
As of about a week ago I once again started getting hit by "Code Red" fallout.
You know, you would really think that by now people would fix their damned servers so they'd stop trying to infect mine.
Sheesh.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
nonsense post as i am abandoning my account
nal 11