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The Best and Worst Technologies of 2003?
Phoe6 asks: "Last year, at Hexadecimals discussion group we shared a news that Worst Technology of 2002 was TIA (Total Information Awareness by DARPA).
What is the Worst Technology of 2003? For the Best, Time Magazine seems to have adjudged Steve Jobs' iTunes as the Invention of 2003.
What are your ratings?"
Oh, the horror...
While I agree that the Slashdot DDoS attack caused many people quite a bit of annoyance and frustration, I think leaving the impact at that is very short sighted.
Firstly, I don't think the blame for this DDoS can be centered on just one person or group. Obviously, those who attacked Slashdot are to blame, as are Slashdot's sysadmins, and the people at Arrowpoint. And secondly, the costs of this are much greater than you might think.
I have an eight year old daughter. We had a family pet - a rabbit, black, named Midnight, and my daughter was very fond of it. Midnight, sadly, passed away about two months ago. A week or two after Midnight died, my daughter came to me in tears and asked me, "Daddy, why won't God bring Midnight back? I've been praying like Deacon Simmons told me to."
Naturally, I had to think about how to respond to this. I finally answered, "well, honey, God is a little like Slashdot. He can seem arbitrary, cruel, and unresponsive, but he's really a nice guy who's just a little out of touch and is a little slow at responding to requessts."
This was fine, and I thought that would be the end of it. However, when Slashdot went down last week, my daughter burst into my den, positively sobbing and wailing, and managed to choke out "Daddy! Daddy! I can't get to Slashdot!" "Honey," I said, "it's just a website." But, between sobs, she said, "but you said God is just like Slashdot, remember? Does this mean God is dead?"
I tried to console her as best I could, but nothing seemed to work. When Slashdot came back up, she seemed to return to normal, but she hasn't been quite the same since. She doesn't ask me about God so much any more, and she seems less interested in Church.
As a good Christian, I will turn the other cheek, and not call for the punishment of those responsible. But to the heinous criminals and negligents responsible for this, I must ask, how do you feel about destroying a small girl's sense of innocence and wonder about the world? About crushing her childish dreams and idealism? About shattering her faith in God and his benevolence? About possibly having crushed her soul and emotion forever, leaving her to live the rest of her days in spiritual agony as a broken, scarred husk of a person?
I hope all of you think long and hard about what you've done. What is the soul of a child worth, next to a few double-checks of the router?
Thank you.
link here: http://web.media.mit.edu/~hayes/mas863/urinecontro l.html
And remember, urine control
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
you're forgetting the true technological breakthrough that Iraq's technologists made when they perfected cloaking for said WMDs ;)
Software Freedom Day!.
Agreed, the latency is a bit a high but it's easy to increase troughput with very high level parallelism. Plus models need hardly any food.
And you only have to wait 14-16 years(incidentally also the best age for natural self-replication) with models. Unless you prefer women in their prime (30 yrs.)
Nevertheless, the ROI is huge even if only 1 out of 10 model clones make it Super.