Slashdot Mirror
The True Story of Website Results
Henry V .009 writes: "Salon is running a story on a dot.com called Website Results. Maybe you've heard of them. Viral Spyware makers. My God, these people are sick. Interview question: 'Imagine there's a peasant somewhere halfway across the world. If you could push a button and kill the person without getting caught, would you do it for a million dollars?' 'For them, it was yes, in a heartbeat.'"
If you could push a button and halfway around the world a starving child would get a meal, would you do it? Wait, that's not very intertaining...
In today's business climate, where major corporations can swindle shareholders out of billions of dollars, what's a faraway peasant worth to them?
Yes, corruption is evident, even in geek industries.
The three men ran the company like a cult, according to former employees, with most staffers routinely working 16-hour days without bonuses or overtime. Employees were afraid to openly question management, to blow the whistle or to quit.
.com's invented this kind of behavior. Companies have been abusing employees since before the .com era. 16 hours a day without bonuses or overtime? Boo-hoo, our servicemen do that shit everyday.
Give me a break, people act like
Isn't this a Twilight Zone episode:
BUTTON, BUTTON
Doesn't TV teach us anything?
Seriously, I don't know anyone that gets joy out of knowing the fact that they killed someone. Even the psychotic elements among us wouldn't get any enjoyment if they don't have the thrill of doing it by hand.
So, then, the people that would push the button are not evil monsters, more like people with a George Jetson complex... Those that will just push a button because it is there.
It's really not in the psyche to associate a button with a life. Even if it was a button on the wall of your living room, few people would go out of their way to avoid hitting it.
Now, pass the soilent green...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
So the founders of a company that writes viral spyware, forges search engine hit results, and attempts to earn money by outright lying and deception happen to be violent amoral pieces of tripe with no real place in society?
:)
My, I'm shocked.
Ahhhhhh!!!!!! What the heck! It must just be too early in the morning for most of you. More than half the posts already have said basically, "So what, wouldn't you do it too?" or "What's so wrong with that?" How is it that we find it so easy to place a value on a human life? If asked the question, "What is my life worth to you?", can you really respond to me with a dollar amount?
It's one thing to offer your life for anothers and that's regarded the greatest gift a man can give, but to put a price on someone? Come on people, I know it's just a web forum so I can't reach around the world and smack you up side the head, but have a little class...
Imagine there's a peasant somewhere halfway across the world. If you could push a button and kill the person without getting caught, would you do it for a million dollars?'
If not, at what price would you? Oh, so you've got morals, ay? What if you had no money, and your family and kids were starving to death? It's winter, you don't make enough money at your job to give your kids any shelter or food, and they're out hiding in the dumpster behind McDonald's trying to fend off frostbite while getting some free food. Would you do it then?
--
Better yet, for a little irony: what if the person at the other end of the button was Jack Valenti, George Bush, Osama bin Laden? Would your views be different then?
--
Every man has a price; You just have to find that price.
Let's not forget the old Twilight Zone ending as well (or is it Outer Limits, or Night Gallery???)
After you push the button, the guy comes to collect the button box.
You: So now what are you going to do with the box.
Man: I'm going to give it to someone else.
You: Who?
Man: Don't worry, it's someone you don't know.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Pushing a button to kill a peasant halfway around the world?
No Thanks.
I'll just stick to Black and White, where I can throw my peasants as I please. Its definitely more fun when you roll them down a hill to your waiting creature.
Lightning bolts and floods work well also.
Actually I remember reading about a test where students were asked to torture someone who they couldn't see, but only here the results. If I remember correctly most of them pushed the button given the right pressure.
an other alike question could be: would you eat meat of you had to kill and butcher the cow yourself..
As it seems, as long as the receiving end is anonymouse and unseen, many people can get themself to do things which they wouldn't consider when they were there in real life.
Nobody expects the spanish inquisition!
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The statement doesn't make the assumption of you getting found out. It's supposed to be a test of personal morals. If the only thing keeping you from murder is the fear of being chastised by others then you would fall to the yes side of this test.
Similar but not entirely related was the Milgram Expriment. A volunteer was told to give increasing electric shocks to a "subject" in the next room when the subject in the next room answered a question incorrectly. Now the guy in the next room wasn't really getting shocked but he was yelling like he was. The researcher was collecting results on how these volunteers ability to morally detach themselves from the act by saying he was told to do it.
(Spoiler below)
The person debates whether or not to push the button for quite awhile, and finally gives in to temptation. As the stranger departs, the person asks the stranger where he's going. The stranger replies, "To find someone who doesn't know you."
This is based off of memory, but I feel that I can sum up this story pretty well. A couple in financial straits is deciding what to do to pay the bills, when there is a knock at the door. In the doorway is a man with a box. On top of the box is a button. The man states that for a million dollars all they need do is press the button. The only hitch is that someone they don't know will die.
The man leaves them with the box stating he'll be back when they decide what to do. The couple struggle with the decision. They examine the box and see no wires, just a button. The money would solve all their problems, but can they take a chance that someone would die if they press the button. After spending several days thinking about it, the couple finally presses the button, the rationale being that since they really don't know the person and they can't be sure they will die it's okay.
Immediately, there's a knock at the door. The mysterious man is back with a briefcase of money. Inside, true to his word is a million dollars. As he takes the box back, the distressed couple asks if a person really died. Yes, he replied, but you have your million dollars.
But what about the box? What is to become of it? "Oh, don't worry. I'm just going to give it to someone you don't know," he remarks and leaves.
Look familiar?
*********
You've received this message because while visiting
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Flowgo is another one. I get loads of complaints from users who claim never to have opted-in to their junk lists.
My name iz Hanz
und My name iz Franz
And ve are here to pump
*clap*
up your website rankings...
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
It is amazing that people will abhor this kind of a test and then do far worse without even thinking about it.
Every time you buy a cheap product that was made by workers who are put in daily peril of death, you trade a dollar for one-in-a-million chance of killing a worker.
For a real eye-opener that goes far beyone fast-food, read Fast Food Nation (isbn: 0395977894). It's not an easy read, but its quite an eye-opener. A lot of reviews are linked here. Now I understand what some of the protests are about. It makes it hard to go shopping without thinking.
I suppose this depends on your definition of evil.
From J. Michael Straczynski's notes on the episode Intersections in Real Time:
The interrogator looked like an ordinary person.
Exactly. The banal face of evil. You look at most of the guys who ran Treblinka, or Bergen-Belsen, and they're largely ordinary looking guys, who could be accountants or repair men or car salesmen. They're *us*...and this was designed to remind us of that. The evil, mustache-twirling villain is too easy, and too far from the truth of it.
This was one of the elements that made the episode interesting for me; most SF tends to ignore the darker sides of the common person. They deal with the big bad guys, the evil federations and Darth Vaders and all the other major forces out there, but all too often the real damage is done not by the single Evil Leader, but by the ten million people who *follow* him, the bookkeepers who track the bodies and the trains and the pain by placing the right figures in all the right columns, who make the trains run on time, who run the gulags, who build the new state empires that will be built with slave labor, any or all of whom could say, as many have, "I was just doing my job."
Not so much "following orders," we've heard that before, applied to the military...but just "doing my job." To the interrogator, he was simply doing his job, and doing it to the best of his ability. It is something he does, then he goes home to his wife and kids, and has dinner, and sits out on the porch trying to forget what he does because he thinks he *has* to do it...assuming he thinks about it at all.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
I have to disagree....
Survival of your self, your family, your genetic lineage, by any means necessary is not human nature, because those traits are very common in the animal world. It is Mammalian Nature of which you speak. The protection of family, an extension of yourself, to survive.
What differentiates us from animals is our human nature. The ability to live with a code of ethics, to die for a cause that is greater than yourself (for your community, for some immaterial gain, for love, for god, faith, etc.).
Acting out of personal interest and greed is just a complicated mammalian process that is the result of our societies determination of what we need to survive (Money, wealth, prestige).
Acting like a true human is hard. Living by any code of conduct, respecting every living being, having compassion and understanding at the most difficult times, that is the human potential. That is what makes us different from animals.
I read the article and added it to my ".com stories to get sick from" and decided that maybe the internet would be a better place if the people out to make money would just pack their bags and go away. I could do just fine surfing around looking at not-for-profit sites that people run as a hobby and maybe pour a hundred bucks or so a month into. And there would always be USENET, IRC, P2P and other ways to hang out.
I think there may be a place for selling goods and services online -- but marketing and advertising is where the devils congregate...And the second a legit business gets into bed with the devil -- they become evil by association and deserve to spend the rest of their misserable existence with toothpicks holding their eyelids open as they watch their stock go to 0.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Read the friggin article, for god's sake. It's interesting, it's about technology and misuse of technology, and it has little to do with that damn button.
Evil is the money of root.
Psychology 101 -- in the early 60's, Stanley Milgram wrote the book on how depraved people can be.
http://www.new-life.net/milgram.htm
What he was really studying was the varying levels of conformity (or conformability) in various cultures, and how willing people are to follow orders, even when those orders are morally wrong.
One simple rule for its versus it's
The company is still issuing happy talk press releases, but most of the press releases that mention them mention lawsuits. "... Files Suit Against Merrill Lynch and Henry Blodget on Behalf of Investors of 24/7 Real Media, Inc."
>Wrong. Yes it is. SURVIVAL UNDER ANY POSSIBLE MEANS is human nature.
This survival under any possible means seems to be comflicted by every person that has died in a war. It would seem that most men that died in WW2/American Revolution/Civil War valued freedom and country over personal survival. (I've only named conflicts with americans because their the ones I'm most familuar with).
Part of being an 'adult' is realizing that you are not the center of the universe, and you must sometimes forgo your needs, ie survival in this case, for a greater good.
You get interviewed and show up to work in someone's apartment. You see two or three no neck dudes with roid range towering over you telling you to do shit. Nobody really knows how you're making money and all the conversations are about (more or less) breaking the law. Your job is how to steal from customers and lie about it. Your boss tells you your new job is to produce a 'movie' in the apartment. Days go by when the bosses arent't around and when they are they're threatening to kick you ass and fuck your shit up.
So tell me why you work for this operation again? Are you so fucking deluded about making a krazillion dollars that you will literally eat shit, give head and fork over your lunch money to a psychopath to get it?
"I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image."
-- Stephen Hawking
No further commentary. Make the connections to the article, resp the interview question about that button yourself.
+++ath0
SURVIVAL UNDER ANY POSSIBLE MEANS is human nature.
No, it is animal nature. Human nature is that which is unique to humans, that which is beyond other animals: the ability to reason.
It is in my SELF-INTEREST to take care of me and my family. If it came down to my kid's life or some random stranger's life, I'll keep my kid's life.
Each of your actions is an expression how you think humanity should behave (NOTE: If you disagree with this, then you are somehow exempting yourself from the rules that apply to everyone else).
"In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be."~ Jean Paul Sartre ~
Your arguments indicate that you believe it is perfectly fine for families to kill each other if it is in their own self-interest. Thus, you are advocating a return to pre-civilized society. Your judgements about what is threatening are completely subjective and your willingness to sacrifice others to benefit yourself is frightening. What if you managed to create humanity in the image of your beliefs? Modern civilization would collapse and humanity would revert back to small hunterer-gatherer societies each looking after their own. The mark of civilization and morality is that we have developed alternatives to violence. Recourse to violence is only justified when violence is brought against you first.
Your beliefs lead to a conundrum: what if the person you were to kill with that button found out and decided to kill you before he could be killed? Who is in the right? You who are trying to save your family, or the stranger who is trying to save his life? Don't you see the huge problem with this moral relativism? The only possible resolution to this problem is that the initiator of violence is always wrong.
The point the original poster was trying to make is that you would not appreciate it if you or your kid was killed because someone pushed a button. If you don't want it to happen to you, then don't do it yourself.
Similar thing: If I had to sacrifice my life to save my kid's life, I would do the same.
Not even close to a similar thing. Your life is your own; you have no say over someone else's life.
If someone broke into your house at midnight, and you didn't know why they were there, what would you do?
The difference here is that the people who broke into your home initiated violence which forces you to defend yourself.
The moral judgement in all circumstances is "the initiator of violence is always in the wrong." Your willingness to kill by pressing a button when not in immediate danger yourself is thus immoral. Killing a stranger who has nothing to do with your plight to feed your family is also wrong. There is no, repeat NO, moral justification for initiating violence.
Under the right circumstances, you will kill.
Under the moral circumstances, yes.
It's not only HUMAN nature, but ANIMAL NATURE to survive AT ALL COSTS.
It is animal nature to survive at all costs; it is human nature to weigh the consequences of our actions and override our instincts if the costs are too high. I think you should re-examine your view of humanity.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Its like those 'too good to believe' get rich quick schemes that con greedy prats to blow wads big time.
IE, its natural justice & serves the bastards right.
These people complaining about Website Results are like the greedy pensioner who gets on telly complaining about being ripped off his life savings on some silly over-the-top get-rich-quick scheme. Or like those who lost out over Enron or Worldcom that now want socialist regulations to protect their share trades.
AFAIC people who buy shares deserve to get burnt every so often, IE good onya Worldcom & AA.
I actually matriculated on economics & one of the few things I remember is that only when a prospectus is 1st floated is buying shares a true capital investment. Otherwise buying shares (that already existed) is just an exchange of ownership & adds nothing to the productive output of an economy. Just as stamp collectors buying/trading stamps at philatelic meets adds nothing to productive output of those stamps.
All increasing share prices mostly indicate is increasing demand, caused by increasing share prices, IE basically a pyramid scam, which is exactly what the dot-com boom was.
A genuine invester doesn't give a fuck what the value of a share is, as long as the company is doing well & paying dividends, because the value of shares is irrelivent unless you are selling them.
I've got shares in Telstra & I haven't checked their value in years. I know that as Telstra has a virtuall monopoly of most sectors of telecommunications in Oz, they'l always be profitable & pay dividends. So I have no intention of selling them, so why should I care what they're worth. Our family also owns Royal Dutch shares purchased for 500 guineas back in the 1920's, fuck knows what they are worth today. Royal Dutch became the senior partner in a merger with Shell Oil arround the same time. Now if Shell or Telstra went bust due to bad accounting, etc, I wouldn't like it but I wouldn't complain about it, I'm already ahead anyway.
Really at the end of the day, as far as the community is concerned the only thing that matters is the productive output of the company relative to its consumption - Profit is the shareholder concern, productive output is the community concern. Now in the rational world output - consumption = profit, but in our mixed semi-capitalist economies (basically the best there is but not perfect & definitly not rational) that isn't always so. Whether expences are amortized over one year or many years is irrelivent as far as the productive output of the company is concerned, so it makes no difference to the greater community. Even if the company goes bust & the assets are lquidated & taken over by others, the assets will still be 'doing their stuff' so to speak, just for someone else, well that is unless the company decides to burn their assets in a big bombfire. So as far as the community is concerned, companies going bust is mostly irrelivent.
Sure the shareholders get a bum rap but that was their gamble, & every dollar they lose will be made up by some bugger buying up the assets at firesale prices, etc. My responce is 'Who cares?' Again it's another case of natural justice for shares to crash every so often. If people don't want to risk investing on shares that crash they shouldn't buy shares.
Now when it comes to employee entitlements (paid long service leave, acrrued annual leave, etc) & employee superannuation funds (pension plans), if voters arn't willing to vote in a govt that is prepared to start a govt run insurance scheme to cover employee entitlements 'n super (like many European countries have) from corporate collapses, then the public gets what they deserve.
Mindyou, due to tax reasons, there are profitable companies, like MS, that don't pay dividends & just re-invest profits back into the company, knowing that shareholders are better off tax wise on capital gain not dividend income. This is the attitude that fueled the dot-com boom - 'if we don't need to pay dividends, then why make a profit, all we have to do is pump the media with press releases on increasing virtual market share to increase the demand for our shares, because that what shareholders want, not dividends.'
Socialist regulations are JUST not need to protect capitalists - people will always being greedy enough to risk their dollars - look at the billions traded on the (by Western standards) virtually unregulated Hang Seng (well not so unregulated now, but you know what I mean, past tense up to about 1990). If they don't like it there's alway honest hard toil. See what I'm mean. I'd imagine that if thousands of day traders stopped & went back to productive honest toil it would add to the productive output of the country.
Well that's enough ranting, the basic jist is that there's more important things to protect with regulations than corporates & philatelic collectors/cum share traders.
So good-onya, the Website Results triumpherate, hopefully they'l spend some of their ill-gotten gains on soil-regeneration & reforestation, there's hoping.
For shame!
Perhaps you would rather have your dollars taxed by George W. Bush, so he can go "finish the job" in Iraq, where his father's policies have already contributed to the deaths of half a million children. That's just what the middle-eastern tinderbox needs.
When I read posts like the parent comment, I sometimes wish for additional nuclear proliferation. If the more of the third world got the bomb, perhaps they would all the sudden be our close personal friends like Pakistan is all of the sudden. Those nukes have sent more US aid to Pakistan than all the charity commercials on television.
I just wanted to kill someone in a far away land! Now I've got an invisible "toolbar" embedded in Explorer!