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The Economics of Executing Virus Writers
applemasker writes "Slate.com has an article titled Feed The Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms which argues based on economic theory (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that it is a 'better investment' to execute the creators of worms, virus and trojan authors, than murderers. Anyone who has tried to resurrect a network or computer after a nasty infection may agree. Although the author does not seriously argue for capital punishment for the script kiddies, it does raise some interesting issues about how much 'value' society puts on certain types of harm and the author's view of a government's role in protecting us from it."
Politicians love to associate their names with "get tough on crime" laws that raise the punishment for certain crimes... but you rarely here about anybody supporting lower sentances for crimes.
Is it just me, or is there an inflation effect hitting our criminal justice system as over time the punishments keep getting higher for the same crimes...
"They never would be missed, They never would be missed."
Wouldn't nuking Redmond be a better investment then killing worm writers?
When someone develops a virus tuned to someone's DNA to kill them, then the virus writer is a murderer.
First, let's execute some spammers, _then_ we can move on to the virus & spyware folks. Viruses and worms only are a problem for one segment of the online population, spam has to be dealt with by all of us.
Well, there's a thought. Though some would say the punishment wouldn't really fit the crime. Unless a worm/virus/whanot caused someone's death because it screwed up the computer that ran air traffic control. Or, you know, something a bit less unlikely and somewhat more likely.
Kind of scary the process by which people can take anything and reduce it to a number somehow. That's probably why I hated statistics class.
>insert witty sig file here
They may not fear death. I'd suggest limiting them to 33.6 kbps internet connections. That's the real hell.
Killing people is wrong. No matter who does it.
I think along these lines each time I'm stuck in a traffic jam because of some bonehead. Makes me want to holler to the dipshit parked on a highway lane because they ran out of gas: "You just wasted the total sum of more people's time than 20 years of your life, asshole!"
I say first we take their fingers and toes, and rub them down with sandpaper, taking a break every 5 minutes to dip the stumps in salt. How can you program viruses if you have no fingers, you fucking script kiddy.
we should add spam to the list of capital crimes as far as wasting the world's time, resources, bandwidth, and money.
worms will always be there whatever they try to do...
Tounge-in-cheek or not, this article is comparing a person's life to a dollar figure. Now, I'm as much a fan of cleaning out virii as anyone else, but that's just messed up. How much is a human life worth?
<insert witty linux comment here>
Does anybody actually believe the government will be able to do anything serious about this problem? For one, it's an international issue, and secondly, the technological arena in which the battle is fought changes far too quickly for most government agencies to adapt.
I say, follow Microsoft's example and put bounties out on these guys...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
Execute the lazy/ignorant sysadmins and infrastructure guys who fail to keep their servers patched, have their firewalls set to "Allow all" and who leave the default passwords on their systems.
Yeah, right.
As soon as there is a virus/trojan/etc. that spreads easily and is highly destructive (overwrites crucial hard drive sectors, for example) I think everyone will start seeing the punishment of virus writers in a whole new light.
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
by putting them in a room with a bunch of spammers on penis enlargement pills and viagra.
Start with the virus writers. Then go on to the bio-weapon developers. Next execute all mass murderers. How about people who design crappy electronics? Or force non-standard "industry standards" on those of us who are too enlightened to fall for the sales pitch. How about bureaucrats who waste billions of dollars on overpriced widgets? I know. I know. I know. Let's kill all the lawyers next. Ppfftt.
We should just feed them worms, that should be punishment enough. While we are at it, why not feed the spammers SPAM?
Adrian
Give them 1200 bps
It's an easy way out for people like this.
Any execution of anyone is a bad idea, no matter how much they "deserve" it.
thisnukes4u.net
...64-bit windows viruses here!
execute everyone
I suggest feeding the worm writers to these worms.
Nothing like a worm with a bazooka
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Execute bad CEOs first.
Just ban them from eating pizza and drinking coke, that'll be much worse
as a murderer. That is the most stupid thing I have read today.
ok, if you are thinking about executing a person for writing a piece of malicious software (that didn't even cause any human harm), you need to step away from the computer, turn off the power, get out of your office and walk through the woods for a while.
and if you come back and tell me "financial harm is human harm" i say go back and walk through the woods some more. maybe read a book while you are out there... something that doesn't mention computers. Something by Emerson.
In the old days, you might die at 40 or 50, and now you can live on until you're 70 or 80. That means the old 30 year sentence for a 20 year old, which would've released him near the end of his life, isn't nearly as effective. He could get out of jail at 50 and commit a bunch more crime.
About modern society when resurrecting a computer is considered to be as serious a crime as murder.
What is exactly the value of the damage. Is it the time lost, productivity lost, data lost? We see values like 5 billion dollars assigned to damage done by a virus, but who comes up with those figures and decides what is worth what?
And how about this: Why do we talk about executing virus writers, but don't talk about executing say - crooked polititans who ruin our country, or CEO's who destroy companies through their own incompetance/bad judgement.
I'll agree with that, but only if the same punishment is given to spammers.
Is that a joke? I don't know...
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance." Isaac Asimov
recursive worms eaten by worms eaten by worms...
recursive worms eaten by worms eaten by worms...
.
What about the companies that feed the worms?
Same punishment could apply.
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
I think that it would be even better to execute the senior management at companies that release their software to the general public while it is still full of holes that can be exploited by authors of malcious code...
;o)
Infact... wasnt this what Tarintinos new flick is about... I havent seen it yet!
I do wonder, though, whether things would be different today if a couple of the early spammers had met with serious retribution instead of nothing worse than floods of unwanted magazine subscriptions ("Spam King" Jeff Slaton boasted he was building a rammed-earth house in Albuquerque using all the magazines that he was getting...)
Microsoft's press wing advocates executing intelligent teenagers rather than writing secure software. Film at 11.
Maybe a better punishment is to make them live in the hell they created. They have to spend all day working at computers running windows that are left unsecure and always being infected.
Evolution or ID?
i have actually seen a fair amount of similar sentiment - not always "tongue in cheek" - expressed, lately, on the net.
i can not believe that anyone, in their right mind, can seriously equate an action which causes a temporary inconvenience with one which causes a permanent end to a human life.
i find this trend very disturbing.
So why destroy Abu Ghraib prisons in Iraq? Seems like a worthy use of these facilities!
About 3.4 million.
If one uses the airlines approach to safety as a guide, at the point where it costs them more than 3.4 million dollars in liability and litigation per person is what each person's life is worth. The number varies, but has been quoted on the Discovery Channel's "air disasters" tv show several times.
By that measure, any worm creator can have his economic impact translated into "if they'd murdered instead" numbers.
When damage estimates are in the billions... at a certain point even if the estimates are way wrong... you gotta figure the death penalty is not out of the question.
Seriously though, intent is a big portion of how severe the punishment is, thus the difference between manslaughter and first degree murder. the problem is these guys always have the "well I was just fooling around and didn't mean it" excuse to make them not seem so bad.
The problem with capital punishment are that (1) it's irreversible, and (2) it is dangerous to give governments that kind of power. The economic costs resulting from these two properties of capital punishment are probably enormous. The first means that you need a complex judiciary and review process (and, in fact, executions seem to be more expensive than life imprisonment). The second means that it creates a serious risk that governments become totalitarian.
I suspect the evidentiary situation for virus writers is even hazier than for your average murder, so capital punishment would, on balance, probably be worse.
Incidentally, there is an easy way to avoid paying a high cost for the effects of viruses: don't let them infect your systems in the first place. And that's easy: keep them patched and up-to-date. So, while virus writing isn't nice, I think people whose systems get infected are contributing to the damage through their negligence. By comparison, while stealing cars is illegal, if you leave your car unlocked and running with the key in the ignition and it gets stolen, you won't get much sympathy from either the police or your insurance company.
> it does raise some interesting issues about how much 'value' society puts on certain types of harm and the author's view of a government's role in protecting us from it. Someone robs a quick-e-mart, steals 200 bucks, and gets 10 years in prison for armed robbery. Someone robs a company of billions and little or nothing happens, maybe mansion arrest.
expand this to the people who buy herbal viagra, the people who open the "official_paper_virus_not_found.scr" attachments, and anyone who clicks on a flashing banner because they're "visitor number 22194!"
Death penality opponents point out that under most state laws, a death sentance generates an automatic grounds for appeal and other safety measures to designed to lower the risk of executing an innocent person... therefore, it actually costs "the system" more to go through the execution process than it does to lock the person up in prison for life.
This article neglects the fact that a death penalty case spends more time in court than a typical case, which would impact the financial values the author is assigning.
This is just dumb. Perhaps if the monetary value were higher than the 83 cents they've calculated. They also fail to take into account that the safety increase is not just for that individual, but also for everyone they care about. So, would you rather have 83 cents, or the knowledge that you, your family, and friends are slightly safer?
Stupid, pointless article.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
I first laughed at the simple concept of it.
But what happens if a nasty worm/virus starts disrupting food transport, shredding hospital documents, places trains on the same track, open the doors in the CDC, route airplanes into skyscrapers?
A properly designed infection could wreak havoc, and kill hundreds, thousands?
I realize that I'm being overly dramatic, but there's probably a point where capital punishment WOULD be a justifiable answer.
While reading the article, just bear in mind that Slate is owned and paid by Microsoft.
Ironclad Security only exists when you have Chuck Norris on the shift. Do we really have to discuss this? (Plutonite)
Want to eliminate certain types of crime?
Make the punishment so harsh, no one will want to commit said crime.
This either:
(a) Solves the problem
or
(b) Turns your country into a police state.
Which will it be?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
should we also execute fraudulent managers of big corporations?
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hackers.
Kill em all, and let God sort it out!
saved. Capital punishment deters the ammount of people killed. You cant quntify that a life is worth 10 millions and argue based on that.
Python script to convert photos into "artsy" portraits: http://p2pbridge.sf.net/pyPortrait/
Capital punishment is inexcusable. Full stop.
Even tongue in cheek, it's just wrong to say that another person should die for writing computer viruses. It's also wrong to say that another person should die for killing someone.
Confiscate computers, not somebody's life.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
SK: d00d, I just got sentenced to death.
l4Mer: sux0r
SK: At least I'm going to die for something important.
l4Mer: I'll sell you one of my lives. PayPal me.
Best Windows Freeware
I swear to god, if they nerf archery, I'll write a worm that'll bring the world to it's knees!
Xel'Naga
I tired of "white-collar" crime that ruins family, lives, and dreams getting such light punishment.
A ghetto-born man who kills a police officer gets executed.
A suburb-born CPA that ruins the retirements of thousands of families gets a slap on the
wrist.
It's not fair, just, or right.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I would be more persuaded by Landsburg's argument if it had hit a little more close to home for Landsburg: Execute Those Criminals in Steve Landsburg's Social Stratum.
We're not talking about human beings, we're talking about virus writers :-)
:-)
(*cough*) Not that *I* would ever do anything like that
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
How can killing people be better than educating them (do not open suspicious e-mails, do not download suspicious software, write better software, etc;)
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Starting one year from today, each major virus outbreak will result in the execution of one senior Microsoft executive selected at random.
This whole article is an accountant's view of morality. Its repugnant to hear anyone discuss the merits of another peron's death based upon how much it will cost someone else. It seems as though people with money should have the right to demand executions. Damn that Linus fellow, he cost me 30 billion dollars, he is _so_ executed.
On top of this whole problem is a cause and effect error. Are these virus and worm writers helping software and hardware makers build more secure systems or are they causing the downfall of western civilization? Imagine if there was no virus writers for the last few decades and then throw in a really nasty fellar that destroys all the data of every networked device on the planet.
"I'm a loner Dottie, a rebel."
- Pee Wee Herman
Who do more damage in my opinion before we start executing the script kiddies and bored teenage hackers.
I think the real reason that people take murder more seriously than worm-authoring is because, for most of us, even when the computer's completely hosed, we still have our TVs. But if you're dead, you're going to miss all your favorite shows. Screw that!
If someone writes a worm/virus that ends up costing me money...well, I can always make more money.
There's really no way to recover from being murdered.
Your mind looks a little cramped. Why don't you stretch it a little?
Tounge-in-cheek or not, this article is comparing a person's life to a dollar figure. Now, I'm as much a fan of cleaning out virii as anyone else, but that's just messed up. How much is a human life worth?
How about equating this in term of life-hours destroyed? A murder takes, at most, 872,000 hours (100 years) of one person's life. But a virus creator takes hours from each of millions of people's lives. The total "life lost" is worse with computer viruses.
Moreover, I'd argue that the victim's life destroyed by virus/worm/trojan infections is far worse than murder as it is more a prolonged torture rather than a quick end.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Would this idea merit more worth if a hospital claimed Sasser crashed medical equipment resulting in a patient's death?
(And yes, some newer hospital equipment runs on Windows)
Better still, start calling them software terroristorisers. That should get the Shrub's interest.
Good to see that the style of Jonathan Swift's famous modest proposal for aleviating poverty in Ireland is still around. His idea was to treat impoverished Irish children as livestock to be fattened up for consumption. A tongue cannot become more firmly embedded in a cheek!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
which argues based on economic theory (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that it is a 'better investment' to execute the creators of worms, virus and trojan authors, than murderers.
Maybe this is also a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that perhaps exicuting people itself is stupid? most of the rest of the world has stopped it already.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
If cost-effectiveness ruled us, we'd quickly euthanize all with Alzheimers, mental and emotional disabilities not to mention those with chronic addictions like tobacco, heroin etc. -- they just COST too much.
Because casualties tie up needed resources on the battlefield, all wounded (both sides) would be killed.
This would be cognitive Darwinism at its most extreme -- eliminate the ineffective and inefficient. So what if we lose a Hawking here or there.
OTOH, this has been tried before: By the Third Reich and through the sterilization of "mental defectives" in the U.S. in the first few decades of the last century.
The decision to extend MERCY, to make a decision to be compassionate in the face of raw efficiency is the essence of what makes us human.
Society has a right to protect itself, but there are better ways of doing it than checking our humanity at the door.
I think people are slightly out of touch on the real value of a human life.
Even if a worm destroyed every corporate workstation on this planet, it wouldn't do as much damage to the world as one human being killed.
No-one has a price on their head.
Dude, this is teh lamest First Post ever!
Only an American would think that killing is the solution to every problem.
I would argue that virus and worm writers fulfill an important role in software ecology. Billions have been spent on making computers safer from Ninja, CodeRed and Sasser. Without these threats the money would not have been spent and nearly every PC would be wide open today. Can you see how much power that would give to those who do not fear the death penalty?
If we were to kill all harmful bacteria today, infections will go back dramatically. But when, in 80 years, a new strain happens to come into existence, nobody will have any immunity system and humanity will be wiped in 24 hours.
As for myself, I hold that the government's job is to improve our lives, not to impose its morality. In this, I take my stand with the president of the United States, who, in a 2000 debate against Al Gore, said quite explicitly that nothing other than deterrence can justify the death penalty.
:P
Well... that lack of morality might be what is causing said president problems in Iraq right now.
But, seriously, it was my impression that the president constantly mixed religion and politics... It doesn't get much more moral than that.
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
Let the little shits SEE their brethren being publicly humiliated. Let the little shits SEE that this will follow them for the rest of their lives.
www.eFax.com are spammers
depends on the life insurance policy.
Zero Windows, Zero Worms. Period.
:)
Virus, Trojans and related "threats" are just logic consequences of the poor quality of Microsoft products.
Shall we kill anyone for that, we'd better send the Microsoft staff to death row
Criticising your king, er, sorry, 'president' eh? Stand by to be labelled unpatriotic. Ten bucks says you get at least one 'troll' mod for that one!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
As soon as someone shouts for capital punishment after IT crimes, writing viruses or sending spam would be the least of all cases, compared to intellectual property violations. RIAA, MPAA, BSA and others would like to see thousands of software/media pirates executed. These associations have much more power than all anti-spam initatives together.
Of course economists have yet to work out that the real standard of living (as measured on one's death bed) is only loosely related to the number of DVD players one can afford, once hunger has been satisfied.
Why should taxpayers have to pocket the bounties?
Most of the problems have their basis for what comes out of Redmond. I say encourage Microsoft to put out more bounties!
Here in the US, that's the beginning of a TV show: "MS's Most Wanted"
Every time someone says that X is just a property crime, stop and think about it. Someone spent a substantial part of their life earning the money that paid for the stuff that was stolen or destroyed. That's time that they are not going to get back. It's also why I support severe penalties, including capital punishment, for so-called white-collar criminals who knowingly defraud the public. If someone puts thousands of people in the poor-house, they should pay a severe penalty.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
"...a government's role in protecting us from it."
The same governement that pays certain companies to build the infrastructure that makes it possible for a 12y old to write a virus/worm/whatever that can take this infrastructure down in seconds is supposed to help us protect it????
They are too busy fighting "evildoers" and other shadows.
here
That the economics would be massively improved by auctioning the job of executioner hehehe
Don't put off until tomorrow what you can leave until the day after.
This is, by far, the most retarded thing I've read on /.
Must-not-watch TV!
Anyways I'm not surprised this was on slate. MS has everything to gain to push politicians to make it a bigger crime, that way they don't have to fix their problems, politicians do it for them.
Speeding on the roads causes lots of accidents. And more importantly (by this guy's logic) uses more gas. If we started executing people for speeding, imaging how much money "we" could save.
He's nothing but a low-down, double-dealing, backstabbing, larcenous perverted worm! Hanging's too good for him. Burning's too good for him! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive! -- Hanover Fiste, Heavy Metal (1981)
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Yet highly destructive viruses can't spread easily if they kill their host machine before spreading! It's like the ebola virus: it kills its host so efficiently that it often dies with it. If you really wanted the virus to spread easily and be destructive, it should only deliver its payload if it can't reach the network. But if it can't reach the net, then it won't spread so easily. It's a reverse chick-and-the-egg problem!
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
A virus writer creates a computer virus which causes a minor inconvenience for a relatively large number of people (and a major inconvenience for a few system administrators). Keep in mind that these people are the people who open up a word document called "I love you".
A murderer kills someone. He ends their life, forever. They will no longer feel happiness, or sadness, or laugh, or click on "I love you" attachments". A murderer devastates the lives of the countless people who are friends and family of their victim.
These two acts are not comparable. An "equivalent punishment", be it captial (which I'm opposed to in either crime) or some other, only makes sense if you have a greatly over-inflated view of the "value" of economics.
This works from an economic standpoint... but that has never been what justice is about. There's the whole "does the punishment fit the crime" issue. Economicly, it also makes sense to execute the unemployed. Also, my parents could really clean up by executing me... they'd save thousands a year on doritos and mt. dew costs... not to mention all that extra basement space... thank god they don't read /.
(IANAVA ...virus author)
Lets not treat patient who are terminaly ill because they cost more than millions of dollars.
How can we even be talking about killing misguided teenagers ? If everything is about money then someone should kill Steven Landsburg's family and pay him the equivalent for it. Will he accept that ?
Clueless bastard !
The author starts off with the misconception that Capital Punishment reduces murders. If that is the case then Canada and the UK should be awash with bodies from all the unrestrained psychopaths. Why is it then that the US, with its death penalty in many states, still can't get a grip on its murder rate?
The author makes a great point on the value of a deterrent.
We focus all of our efforts on futilely trying to prevent easy-to-commit crimes, such as writing Windows virus scripts, when we should be concentrating more on deterrence. For example, stealing horses a hundred years ago was ridiculously easy. You just walked up to the hitchin rail, grabbed the reins, climbed aboard, and rode off over the horizon...no key required. It would have been impossible to 'prevent' the crime so the punishment focused on deterrence. Horse thieves were publicly derided and executed...sometimes without the benefit of a trial.
The modern day equivalent of a horse thief is a virus author...or a spammer.
The Economics of Executing People that Don't Patch Their Computers
It's kind of like having a gun (loaded) out for the kids to play with. Everybody does it, why patch?
I think this is quite interesting.
When estimating the value of human life when making laws, a decent estimate would probably be the value of that life to society.
I'd pay quite a bit to continue my own life, or someone in my family, but that's for selfish and sentimental reasons only. Odds are, people in Montana couldn't care less whether I live or die, despite what some might say to the contrary. There are only a small amount of people who are actually aware and affected by my existence.
A simple means of measuring an individual's effect on society as a whole then is the economic impact that person would have over his lifetime. Like him or not, Bill Gates will obviously have a much greater impact on society over his lifetime than your average joe. Many more people have an interest in his continued well-being than they have an interest in mine.
Should this be weighed when making laws? I don't know. It would seem to me that since Bill Gates has a measurably greater impact on society, he deserves greater compensation for wrongs done to him and also has more responsibility to do the right thing, knowing that his actions affect millions.
But the economic impact is not the only consequence of crime. I'm not scared to walk through a bad neighborhood at night because I think Martha Stewart is going to jump out of the bushes and rob me. Her crime has little impact on the order of society and the perceived safety of its citizens.
Similarly, should we prosecute someone who kills a homeless man? They have little impact on society, and their lives aren't worth as much in economic terms. I think, however, most people would reject the idea that some murders are more ok than others based on economic reasons.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
One of the major assumptions by the author of the article (and most people) is that the death penalty deters murder. It doesn't.
:(
;P
Check out The Death Penalty Inormation Center for more facts, info, and studies.
All of the authors economic number crunching is totally invalid because of this.
However that doesn't mean that I don't WANT to execute them.
If the RIAA were given the authority to summarily capture, try, and execute people who deal in illicit mp3's, would that solve the problem of music theft?
i think the whole point is that while an infected system can be fixed, someone you executed cannot be rehabilitated, so to speak, and become a wholesome citizen again. same reason why many people are against capital punishment-- unlike any other sentence, it is irreversible. perhaps i should add that i am for capital punishment...
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
If that ever happens, I am starting a violent revolution. If anyone ever decides that a person deserves a harsher punishment for monetary harm than murder, our capitalist society has taken things too far.
In all seriousness, money doesn't matter. It isn't real. It isn't what we're here for.
... The author seems to condone punishment for people who have too much knowledge that could be used for bad? Hemlock anyone?
This guy is a frickin MORON!!!! and so are all who agree with him. Strange that the article is on MSN.COM
.... run something else if you are sick of viruses and worms, there are other options besides Winblows.
.. "Eye-for-an-eye" ... Money can never replace LIFE!!!!
You have a choice
People are just lazy these days and are so caught up whith what everyone else is doing that they fail to think for themselves.
I say execute the murderers
Grow up!
The base problem with this article is the author actually believes you can put a dollar value on life. Once one believes this, crazy statements like this follow:
"Execute the people who write computer worms"
"Harvard professor Kip Viscusi estimates the value of a life at $4.5 million overall, $7 million for a blue-collar male and $8.5 million for a blue collar female"
Laissez faire optimizes efficiency, not morality. This story illustrates an excellent counterexample to the prevalent unstated hypothesis that the dollar is the ultimate measure. No moral theologian would agree with the outcome of this economic analysis, let alone agreeing to use economics in the first place as the sole basis for analysis.
Politicians need to butch up to get elected every few years in a public pissing match. A Judge's merit is not found by slinging bullshit every election but by being fair. Where I come from judges are appointed for life, the only way they can loose their job is by making bad choices, therefore a judge has nothing to gain by promising to crucify small time pot dealers in a publicity grab.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Worm writers: a) make software more reliable, even buggy EE/OE b) create and feed new industry - antivirus. I bet some of worms were created by antivirus guys c) create more jobs - in other words *give* money to the people not *steal* them away d) make end-user more educated and computer literate Certainly worms irratates but put a good AV filter and use good OS/Browser and you are safe
Drill baby drill - on Mars
And they wouldn't even execute mass child murders.
And, more importantly, if we didn't have so many viruses & trojans then it would be more likely that systems wouldn't be patched and vulnerabilities wouldn't be fixed - leading to the occasionaly virus causing much more damage (eg Chernonbal virus in Far East at the end of the 90's).
But I'll tell you what's different in this particular case. On a Tuesday this November, the jury of peers is going to be a bit larger than 12. Even if the punishment is "just" a kick in the ego and removal of fingers from the power pie, we--well, a lot of the we's here--can say something individually and directly about what we think in this "case".
Don't blow it off this year. Don't be "too busy." Get out, get registered, and vote.
Since we've thrown the entire world on one ad-hoc network without securing anything, those pranks are damned expensive right now and there's a real problem. But.... most of the people causing these untold trillions of dollars of damage are bored teenagers, just as antisocial as a lot of other teenagers who are out smashing post office boxes, spray painting walls, and sniffing glue, that happen to be somewhat adept at using a computer.
There do seem to be a few pro's in the field that could be linked to the spam operations and possibly even corporate and government espionage, but they're still seriously in the minority.
So - does some kid doing something stupid warrant destroying the rest of the kid's life? Do these kids really understand the consequences of what they're doing and what kind of destruction they're causing? I think in most cases - no, they don't. In the rest, well - they're still kids. Punish them, let them know what they did was wrong, but don't try to lock them up for the rest of their lives or bury them under the jail for what to them seemed like a funny prank. There's a huge difference between creating a piece of code and shooting someone in the head.
I think we need to do two things.
I write code.
This is kind of a retarded premise...
The reason that we execute/incarcerate murderers is not that they cause economic damage, but that we believe murder is immoral and hurts our society in general. Murder is takinf someone's life away.
Virus-writer cause economic trouble, but they never take another human's life. They take some money away.
Believe it or not, but not everything people do is economically-motivated.
$8.95/mo web hosting
let's compare the cost of oil to a human life.
I don't think anybody would want to put the 10 year old kiddie with his parents computer to death for writing some code. Can you image the bad press on that.
"10 Year Old Script Kiddie Executed for releasing a virus that prevented people from using msn messenger"
You execute a murderer because they deserve a taste of their own medecine.
Sure, virus writers might cause a lot of damage in economic terms, but that doesn't mean they deserve death...
Perhaps we should execute those who deprive large numbers of people of food and a decent life. People who are forced to work 18-hour days to live and end up dying before they've even reached adulthood simply from exhaustion.
The 6th Commandment is clear enough:
Thou Shall Not Kill
(Exodus 20:13)
Supporting anything else is blasphemy and
the accuesed shall be punished by death.
So many people want capital punishment for murderers, yet the real serious crimes are commited by corporations. You'll never see people demand that a CEO of a major corporation be executed for knowingly distributing unsafe products that resulted in the death or serious injury of many people. Now playing devil's advocate one could argue that spammers and virus writers provide jobs for many people
Capital punishment is always wrong. Worm authors should get life in prison.
Commies! That's the type of thing that is seriously considered in countries like soviet russia and china, and if a country's actions don't denote it's govermental system, then what does?
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
Since all of those claims of dollar costs of viruses and worms are bogus from beginning to end, I'd say the author's economics-based premise suffers a fatal flaw.
It would be nice if this kind of economic analysis were applied (and publicized) for things like national health care. If the government spends a billion dollars to save 10 lives, we lose about 200 lives due to that money not being spent on other things (assuming it's used efficiently).
Have you read my blog lately?
A microsoft economist suggests capital punishment based on economic reeasons. And lots of clueless sysadmins on slashdot cheer for it. Apart from highlighting the moral values of ppl on slashdot, it shows its filled with half baked sysadmin types who think they are geeks but actually know very little about computers. I meet quite a few of them everyday.
Given that Microsoft will write software that can be exploited, I'd much rather have it exploited by something that reboots my machine and some script kiddie gets a kick out of it, than have it exploited secretly and repeatedly by someone with worse motives. If we didn't have these occasional public displays of how insecure our software is, it would be far easier for other people to take advantage of it, people like the terrorists and governments. That would be a hell of a lot worse than having all your machines reboot, or even losing a hard drive here and there.
The real solution is quality software, and punishing virus writers won't get us any closer to that.
This argument is of course only valid as long as the viruses are relatively benign.
For a virtual crime, the right punishment probably should be virtual death. Lifetime ban on using computers.
That might make a hacker think twice.
A modern version of a Modest Proposal?
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
If it's such a treat, then why haven't you managed to get yourself into prison?
Let's do the math. What do we get out of executing a murderer? Deterrence. A high-end estimate is that each execution deters about 10 murders. (The highest estimate I've ever seen is 24 murders deterred per execution, but the closest thing to a consensus estimate in the econometric literature is about eight.) That's 10 lives saved...
Now, I'm no expert on these matters, but would there really be ten times more murders in america if capital punishment was substituted with life in prison?
That number sounds completely ridicoulous to me. I would probably put that number lower than 2 and closer to 1... without taking the time to compare all 38 states with capital punishment to those who don't it doesn't look like theres anywhere near a factor of ten difference between them.
this article looks like yet another example of the fact that 86.2% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
maybe a worm writer can be reformed to write better AntiMalware software. They got obvious talent, why not use it for good instead of evil?
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
1) Script kiddie writes virus
2) If virus is successful you hire the writer to continue writing viruses.
3) Writing virisus becomes exponentially more difficult as easy exploits are found and patched.
Result: Stronger software. Instead of wasting time paying people trained to create things to discover the flaws that destroy things, you hire specialists who have the correct mindset.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
...but IMHO these things are perpetrated by some of the trolls owned by antivirus solutions providers...after all, they gotta eat, too. I mean, where would they be without a new infestation every now and then?
Besides, i dont know about you, but i'm sure suspicious of the speed with which the anti-[worm, virus] solutions are rolled out by these same companies, as also the monotonous regularity with which new plagues descend upon us.
To me, it's far more likely that there's a bunch of worm-creating trolls in some dank dungeon in the rancid underbelly of some nameless anti(haha)virus firm, than to think there are so _many_ different sick-minded individuals who would simply create network havoc as they have no better business.
Granted, some of the worm-virus-cleaner patches are offered at no cost, but i guess that's just the corporate way of first scaring you into utter sh*tless terror and then offering you a comforting hug saying "There there, it's alright, you'll be completely fine when you upgrade to our upgrade costing ${lotsa bucks}...See, we love you, not your money".
So we might as well make a clean sweep of it, while we're contemplating suitably violent ends to perpetrators of such misery. Oh, and did i mention euthanizing microshaft?
Sure if you are M$. But shouldn't the entity that produced the vulnerable code be executed as well. Virus writers cannot be used as escape goats. Virus writers are important part of the society. Even though they don't use the best means to communicate but they make people aware of the weaknesses. Which would you prefer your system crashing due to a virus or somebody blackmailing you after getting access to some confidential information after exploiting a weakness? Think about it. If there were no virus writers would M$ bother to plug the holes in their code? You can't assume the world is a perfect place because it isn't and never will. But you can make an effort to try and perfect things on your end rather than blaming somebody else for your mistakes.
Although virii and the like do not cause human harm, the financial damage(and the damage to productivity) is absolutely massive. We, as a society, have become most reliant on computers and electronics. Think, if all of America suffered a virus that infected half of all computers(or a massive power faliure like in california). The loss in productivity is huge, it's as if the world stops.
Point is, although I'm sure that the author does not actually advocate putting Jolted-up 16 year olds to death, I think I would agree that more severe punishment for these kind of crimes should be adopted.
That's just wrong, man!
R3
Stuff that matters: circuitbreakers, vacuum-cleaners coffee makers, calculators generators, matching salt+pepper shakers
From the article
Assuming that half the $50 billion cost of malicious hacking is concentrated in the United States and that you bear your proportionate share of that cost, we're putting about 83 cents in your pocket.
You mean every time someone kills a virus writer every US citizen gets 83 cents. Wow!! Did you guys switch to communism while I wasn't looking!
cL0h
While it sounds cool on the surface to kill the vermiscripters (along with the lawyers and the spammers), it seems that we're creating new despised classes of people for the digital age. Geeks and nerds have never been very popular to begin with, and now the government is getting in a position where it can finally punish this despised class just as ethnic minorities have similarly suffered disproportionately at the hands of the government. For my money, I'd still rather get the truly violent off the streets rather than offing some pimply faced hacker.
So let's hope that this talk of killing virus writers won't become more than talk. Next thing you know, the Department of Justice will be rounding up file sharers for RIAA...oh wait...
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
I think it's a two way deal. People will try and take advantage of people who are unaware of any holes in their sequrity... So people should be prepared, and the worms and the virusses will have less effect. If you don't know what you are doing, you should be out there and playing on the web. AND: Ignorance is not an excuse!!! be prepared, patch yourself ;-)
Maybe we could set up a site with a Lyddie England avatar dragging their avatars around on leashes, or something.
It's just you.
Some penalties for some crimes have gone up over the last 15 years (and some have gone) but over the last, say, 100 years, the severity of punishments served out has gone down dramatically. Think of the hanging judges in the wild west, or the justice system of any European country 150 years ago.
Yeah... I like deterence. Let's round up a few dozen of these vermiscripters and just downright kill them, on live TV (think of the ratings!!). We can use all sorts of different ways to make it painful and exciting, too. Like shooting them with slow acting poison darts; or unleashing a hungry tiger on them; or dropping them in a tank of live piranha. What entertainment!
And then when THAT deters the vermiscripters, we can go after the SPAMMERS! After a few dozen of those scum die in agony, we will have our networks, our computers, AND our e-mail back. What could be better??
Does this sound a bit medieval to you? Well, until we get a new sheriff in town to take care of these lowlifes, maybe medieval solutions are what we need. If the law won't take care of it, maybe we need some Internet vigilante groups. Now THERE is a thought. The trouble with that thought is: How do the vigilantes differ from the people they are going after in the first place? Where is the rightousness?
Oh, well.... It's all just a silly mind exercise...
Chris Rock taught us that all societal crime is resolved by proper implementation of the "Tossed Salad Man" concept....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
I don't know where he got the information that a each execution would deter 10 murders. THIS IS NOT TRUE! At most it would prevent the killer from killing again.
Capital punishment have nothing to do with deterrence; capital punishment is about revenge.
While I do believe that there are some that have earned death for their crimes. It is simply not morally right of the state to kill its citizens! There have been enough innocents sent to their deaths to make any man shiver in horror; at least if a person is sent to prison you can right the wrong if he was wrongfully convicted, I wonder how the state would right the wrong if an innocent man was executed?
Luckily I live in the EU, so I don't have to deal with a government that kills its citizens.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Actually, in the original text, it is "Thou shalt not murder". It has been mistranslated in the King James Version.
http://www.focusongod.com/TenCommandments-06.htm
Just like the viruses that attack the human body on a daily basis and make our immune systems stronger.
With out them pounding on the operating systems insecurities what motivation would you have for making something more secure?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Because, right now there are a bunch of numbskulls in my office babbling in a panicked, nearly Shakespearean earnestness about how SPAM has affected the motherboard and the person who bought the computers is *directly responsible.* I'd hate for them to be able to put office managers to death.
Monster Zero is the reason we cannot live on the surface, but must live forever live underground like this.
Air travel is the safest way to go, and driving to the airport is still the most dangerous part of flying. Yet people still fear flying.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
it is a 'better investment' to execute the creators of worms, virus and trojan authors, than murderers.
You could execute the creators of worms, virus and trojans, but their code will still be floating around on the net waiting for another person to pick up where they've left off. Rinse, lather, repeat.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
By that argument, we should ban Cars. When you are 100% sure that you will not kill someone while you are driving a car, then you can drive again.
Remember 100% sure. Before you argue that you are 100% sure, you are a careful driver etc, check how many road deaths there were last year in your country. I'd be willing to bet a large number of the drivers involved would have said they were 100% sure they would never kill anyone by their driving.
100% is pretty absolute. It's not negotiable.
How many viruswriters / hackers continue writing viruses / hacking after they got caught, convicted, served time and were released? How many viruswriters / hackers get job in the computersecurity industry and thus contribute to society?
How many murderers continue murdering after they got caught, convicted, served time and were released? How many murderers get a job with the police / FBI and thus contribute to society?
Privacy is terrorism.
After all, they have cost the public purse a hell of a lot more than the virus writers and I'm sure that they've also cost a great many lives as well.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I don't know about judging a cumulative effect as the same as a one time effect.
If I give 100,000 people paper-cuts, causing them pain and wasting cumulatively a whole lifetime of hours when they take time out to apply band-aids, am I really as bad as someone who kills another person? Are people going to be afraid to go outside because of the paper-cut man? Are neighborhoods going to decay because of me?
I don't think so.
Even if a pickpocket steals from thousands of people over his lifetime, he is only guilty of many counts of petty theft. He doesn't graduate to grand larceny after a certain cumulative dollar amount.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
And not because I'm a writer.
I make money when people get a nasty virus that needs some fixing. MY economy would drop if virus writers were executed.
-Tim Louden
...Till you realize it's a satire.
And that is exactly what this is.
For more satirical fun, go to SatireWire
I remember a Larry Niven book - Flatlander - which is set in the futuristic world (which Niven created through several literary works). It deals a lot with the issue of how medical science can pretty much graft any organ from one individual to another, but there is a shortage of organs.
People want to live, so the government drafts that criminals have XX years before - if not found innocent - they are reduced to pieces for the organ banks.
The problem? We run out of criminals. So then we up the penalties... DUI becomes a penalty worthy of dissection, etc.
The result is that while overall crime decreases, particularly nasty ones (such as organlegging, where people are murdered for their organs for the black market) become more profitable - the theory of supply VS demand etc.
While it might stop a few hackers by upping the penalties... most don't believe they'd be caught and the heightened penalty would probably even drive up the thrill for most of them. In addition, like the book, upping the penalties for one such crime (non violent, financial) would be a stepping stone for upping other such crimes as warez trading etc.
In the end, we might have less criminals, but the ones that exist would become more elite and the profit greater.
Castration is better. Then you could understand why the politicians don't have the balls to take a stand and stick to it!
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
(and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) ... Although the author does not seriously argue for capital punishment for the script kiddies,
I think you may have missed some of the article, or you are injecting your own moralism into the discussion. The author makes it very clear that he's talking about the actual dollar value that people place on their own risk of death. He arrives at this number based on research related to the amount of money people will forego to reduce their risk of death. He also makes it clear that moral humanists (who place an additional, incalculable value on life) will wildly disagree. Economists are a peculiar bunch - I know, because I am one (armchair variety) - we genuinely do believe that all government activity can and should be reduced to simple economic equations.
He does make one mistake though - he implicitly asserts that a willingness to spend one dollar to avoid a one in ten million risk of death equates to a human valuing their own life at $10,000,000. I think this misses some psychology; humans are generally optimistic about risk. I think it might be the case that the same person would forego more than $5,000,000 to avoid a one in two chance of death. This must be considered since the death penalty, once executed, has a one in one chance of causing death (though arguably he takes this into account by valuing the vermiscripter at one hundred million).
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Here's the problem.
Worm writers do not get caught. The ones that do are the least likely to write another worm again. Intelligent worm writers (IMHO the guy that coded Nimda is one of these) simply will not get caught or will target some guy that has *almost* the capabilities of themselves and pin the blame on them. Or shift suspisicion.
A lot of the real coders talk like they are 15 when they are really in their 30s. Hard ta buld a profil on me wen I talk leik dis, K?
Vecna (one of the most notorious vxers of the Win9x era) all but disappeared. He got a job. He timed his leaving with the arrest of someone else so he could pin blame. Beautiful.
Another good one: mafiaboy.
Was he caught? Yeah. Was he really the one responsible? Well, depends. Maybe you should find the guy that gave him the scripts and his first "botnet". Don't know about that? Of course you wouldn't. He's happy. Hell, he'll get out of jail and get a job somewhere. Maybe. He never was much of a coder.
So now 'we' are mad at script kiddies?
Gimme a break. Yes, there is something negative to be said about the true 'black hat' nefarious uber-criminals.
But your common everyday script kiddie?
It's your OWN damn fault.
Secure your system. Barring that, get a better OS. Barring that, run safer software.
Even if Linux/Mac OS X are not impervious, they are far less worm/virus prone than Windows.
Learn what a firewall is. Use one.
Don't use outlook (unless you are absolutely FORCED to). Don't use IE. Ever. Or IIS, for that matter.
Most of this should be pretty easy for home users.
If you are a corporate office drone, I feel sorry for you. It's really too bad that your IT management staff hasn't embraced something more secure (not necessairly switching to Linux, but dumping the Exchange/IIS/Outlook bandwagon).
Yes, yes, I know, the age old argument--- If someone enters your house, even if you did leave the door unlocked, they are the one commiting wrongdoing, not you.
But in the end, since a small amount of effort on your part could have saved you a huge amount of pain, its your OWN damn fault.
It's not like you didn't have the opportunity to avert whatever 'disaster' the worm du jour is causing.
It's coming. Your system will get infected. Wise up.
Don't blame the script kiddies.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Ummm, financial loss DOES cause human harm. Do you not remember the Savings and Loan or ENRON scandals, ? All of those people losing their life savings or pensions? Imagine working hard your entire life, retiring with enough money to just get by, and then, "oops, sorry, we no longer have your money, good luck." My point? viri and worms cost companies millions to guard against and to clean. Who do you think gets hurt when companies are losing money due to worm or viral infections? The little guy who gets laid off, thats who!
What would be the consequence of the government refusing to punish virus-authors? It would amount to a privatization of software security. (And isn't privatization supposed to give us faster and more efficient results than government control?) Publishers like Microsoft would have no choice but to make security job #1, or be ruined in the marketplace. It'd be sink-or-swim... and those product-lines which survived would be hardened fortresses of supreme security.
Reducing the punishment to virus-authors is equivalent to removing a government subsidy on sellers of insecure software- and cutting a subsidy always unleashes the free market to do it's optimizing work.
Worm authors are like punk kids who break into corporate offices or bank vaults and kick over all the furniture before running away. Yes, they've caused some inconvenience in knocking stuff over, which can equate to lost chance for revenue, which is somewhat like damage. But they've also revealed a gaping security flaw in a way that the company can no longer deny and will thus fix before real thieves start to use it. Most of the "costs" attributed to worm-authors are actually spending to fix security holes that should've been done anyhow.
Software is more secure today than it would be if nobody wrote worms and virues.
If in 40 years Osama BinLaden Jr discovers a flaw in Microsoft(tm) WindowsGJ44(r), he might be able to cripple the world economy and kill thousands of people- and he's already accepted his own death, so the threat of one more execution won't stop him.
You've uknowingly touched on a central issue regarding crime prevention. It is commonly regarded that there are 2 factors influencing one's propensity to commit a crime: Certainty and Severity. In other words, there are only two things a (sane) criminal considers in deciding whether or not to commit a crime: "How likely am I to get caught?" and "How severe is the punishment if I do get caught?"
If you increase one of the factors, but the other is still low enough, then you'll not have an impact on the crime rate. For example, if the crime for speeding was "death," but there was only one cop out there patrolling America's highways, do you think people would slow down? No.
Don't believe me? Then why are there millions of otherwise law-abiding citizens so nonchalantly downloading terabytes of copyrighted music without permission? "Copyright Infringement" is a crime, but people know they're not likely to get caught, so they do it anyway. These are people like you and I, people who otherwise "know better." I don't shoplift, I don't tresspass, I don't sneak into theatres without paying... but I have downloaded music from Napster back in the days. Why is that?
Certainty and Severity. The "Certainty" was so low that the "Severity" doesn't matter. That's why the RIAA is trying to ramp up the "Certainty" factor, rather than the "Severity." The "Severity" is already high enough. If people thought they had a realistic chance of getting caught, the current Severity level would be enough to deter them already.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
No, really, theese are not the times to make fun of killing people.
Remember, there is a war going on.
YOU ARE TORTURING AND KILLING PEOPLE
If you don't think financial harm is human harm, give me all your money. It won't hurt a bit, right?
a bit of perspective please. it wouldn't be the end of the world. obvious scenario: give me all your money or i'll shoot you. what do you do? you can only do one or the other. no other options. easy choice.
50 billion are lost? Where did it go? did someone actually burned that money? or was it buried? perhaps it was sunken into the deep oceans ...
...
...
Most likely it went to pay the industry that most benefits from virus/worms, the computer industry.
This starts right at the Administrators that should have done their job in maintaning a secure computer environment, to the subscription based Enterprise Anti-Virus software suite, to the unsecured Operating Systems whose later releases are always more secure then previous release, yet not secure enough
You get the drift
A friend of mine advocates a multi-pronged approach to dealing with spammers and virus writers: a baseball bat with nails driven through it.
Personally I think just executing Bill Gates and liquidating Microsoft would be sufficient.
And that Bonzai Buddy who just now is in the taskbar
The weird Linux kid -- I've got him on the list!
All spammers, 1337 speakers, and vb scripters by far
They'd none of them be missed -- they'd none of them be missed.
And apologetic astroturfers of a compromising kind
Such as what d'ye call him, Marc Fleury, and likewise, never-mind
And t-t-t and what's his name, and also you know who
The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you
Bravo, treehouse, on the Gilbert and Sullivan ref
...what about forcing these script-kiddies to repair the damage they've done... thus they might even learn some proper programming and might devote themselves to something more useful and profitable for society....
hmmm... too many "mights".
What about like thousands of hours of community service... that would benefit society much more than putting them in prison and throwing the key to the depths of the sea... which is what they deserve in MNSHO.
... y Dios vio que Linux era bueno... Genesis 99.666
From the article: What do we get out of executing a murderer? Deterrence. A high-end estimate is that each execution deters about 10 murders.
How about 0? There are no executions in Europe, so murder rates should be 10 times higher over here? In short: That's a bullshit figure and how anyone could calculate such a thing is a mistery to me.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
I hate to see such rubbish published, even if the article is half joking. You may get deterrence but you also get brutalization. Personally i doubt there will be a positive (lives saved) balance. Crime figures of countries with and without capital punishment leave some doubts concerning this. But the point is not about capital punishment.
Why do we have courts and just don't hang'em high? Because "Deterrence" is only a secondary goal of serving justice. The primary goal ist restoration of judicial peace. If we forget this, we may also toss the idea of the rule of law outside out of the window. Punishment may be one measure to achieve it. All those strange procedures during prosecution and at court are to ensure that in the end, even if the ruling is faulty, we have a state of judical peace.
This notion may seem strange, but you always have to be aware, that there can never be a "perfect justice".
Regards, Martin
Maybe we should execute politicians whose districts receive more money than average (say $4.5 million more than average, since that was the "value" of a white-collar worker in the article).
The "trick" to the "value of a human life" point in the paper is that humans do not assign value linearly. The author simply converted a point on a value curve into a dollar amount. Dollars are normally valued linearly with risk (.1 chance of 10 == 1 chance of 1), so he started doing linear calculations, then converted back into value. This does not work.
It's very clear that the author is wrong. For example, we may pay a dollar to avoid a one-in-ten-million chance in being killed. However, if someone offers me $10 million dollars to be killed, I wouldn't take it -- simply taking what I would be willing to pay and multiplying it by ten million does not correctly predict my actions. My value/risk curve is not linear (and isn't likely to be, until we turn into perfectly rational beings).
May we never see th
Hey, this is slate.MSN.com!!!
Now think, who will benefit most from executing script kiddies? (Hint hint: which OS is most often targeted by viruses...).
Jesus, I can't believe you actually wrote what you did. Riiight, of course we need to learn the "mentality that crime can be low enough."
It's only ever low for those who haven't been raped, murdered, stabbed, robbed, etc.
For those that have, the rate is always too high.
I can see which of the two categories you fall in.
The issue at hand is how long do we wait for the "just in case we were wrong."
Capital punishment with the appeals process is a joke. While some individuals are obviously screwed up no matter how long they're incarcerated, others - by the time they're ready for the long march - have at least in some way turned their lives around. Facing almost certain death gives some reason for one to examine one's life, after all.
The killer who goes into jail may not be the person that goes down in the end.
In China it seems to be more simple. Guilt, Gun, bullet. The family of the deceased even gets sent a bill for the bullet. Expense-wise it's much more efficient.
The issue and cost at hand though, isn't really the death, it's the incarceration leading up to death, and then trying to make that death as "humane" as possible. Personally, I believe that a bullet to the head is probably fairly quick and painless (depending on calibre). Perhaps something such as the guillotine would be equally or more effective.
I like his new word. It seems to me he's angling for a spot on wordspy, but it's a good word and I think it deserves a spot alongside kiddiot and packet monkey.
Jeez, people, it's satire! This form of satire has been around for a long time. I love how someone can write a "punishments go up, never down" hyperbole and another can write "how can we compare human life to a dollar figure?" (Hint: It's done all the time) and it gets modded insightful. I hope the original posters were extending the joke, but somehow, I get the sense that they were posting in earnest.
If you don't see the humor in this article, I beg of you to abstain from watching Farrelly Brothers and Austin Powers movies and recommend you pick up some books and read some Jonathan Swift or Oscar Wilde, to name a couple. There's more to humor than dick and fart jokes, and if you understand that, I'm sure you'll live longer.
"Thou shalt not believe in fiction"
The government views the loss of information, and the loss of the use of the computer itself, in a manner similar to a property crime. When my car was broken into and the cd player and airbag stolen - along with massive surrounding damage to the car itself - the police were scarcely interested. You file a report for insurance purposes, and that's it. Similarly, when a box of checks was stolen from the mailbox (stupid! stupid!) years ago, only businesses that cashed the checks could pursue complaints legally, even after the culprits were caught with the checks - never mind the hours and hours over two years it took me to repair the mess to my record. Virus writers, and the damage they cause, I think are viewed in the same manner. They can perpetrate their destruction with little fear of consequences, unless the damage is too great to ignore. Human nature, I suppose, there being bigger fish to fry.
If we can effectively deter malicious hackers by cutting off their supply of Twinkies or crippling their EverQuest avatars, then there's no need to fry them.
Some would no doubt prefer death....
Hey, I'm not (very much) ashamed to admit that I write VBscript. But it's for white-hat purposes* and never leaves my place of business. Let's be careful not to cast the net too widely, please!
----------
* You know, set a new user's default printer automagically, scan for an outbreak of KaZaa, etc.
Among the many questionable assumptions is that worms cost the world 50 billion dollars annually. Where did this soft number come from?
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I for one welcome our organ-bank overlords!
I was about to post something about Larry Niven's Known Space series, where punishments were increased until almost everything was a capital offense in order to keep the organ banks full (one stipulation of execution was that your organs were donated). I was then going to comment about how this hadn't happened, due to the unsuitability of most capital criminals' organs due to drug abuse, AIDS, hep-C, etc. Finally, I was going to point out how in one of his stories the perpetrator was to be executed for committing a minor crime...
Drunk Driving. In the 1970's (when Niven wrote the story), it was a "slap on the wrist" offense. Now, with pressure from MADD, multiple DUIs result in prison time, mandatory counseling, and exposure civil damages that can easilly (if justifiably) ruin an offender.
It isn't the same as being taken apart for spare parts, but it does represent the same phenomenon you cite. Odd how these things seem to come full circle.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
But don't just kill them, use their bodies as food to feed the poor. That way you counteract any public anti-death penalty feelings and you recycle!
That guy took the words right out of my mouth. There is a cost of reducing crime, and it is not worth my freedom.
That said... I have been robbed, my wallet was taken from a locker at a gym (yes it was locked, no I never figured out how they got in...) I found my wallet, devoid of all cash, in a nearby trash can. I was also assaulted about 10 years ago, fortunatly no harm came to me, he took one swing at me, missed, and I ran... A lot faster than he could...
I think crime is pretty low right now. Of corse I wouldn't complain if the crime rate was lowered, but if big brother is needed to lower crime, I will take my chances, thank you very much...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
I'm sorry, but there's no nicer way to say things when I read tripe like this.
First, economic theory/"basic economics"/capitalism is broken to all those that care to look at it through less than rose coloured lenses. To base anything on a broken theory only results in broken solutions.
Second, the death penalty is also broken. You'd think that the country with the highest murder rates in the developed world would have figured this out by now, but I guess not.
Americans like the article's author would do well to emerge from their glass towers every now and again and join the real world, if only temporally.
I like Emerson lots too, but that doesn't mean I can't keep my head on straight.
Sorry, but you're wrong in thinking that financial harm doesn't ultimately harm people in the end.
You're confused becuase immediate financial harm usually does not have obvious immediate human effects (and the effects tend to be spread out a bit over a group of people).
Let's say a virus costs mutual fund companies to lose $500 million. That doesn't kill anybody today, but in the end it does hurt the savings of a family somewhere, savings that may have been used for sending a child to college one day, or to pay for needed medical expenses of a parent.
Another example: Wipe out $10 billion from a bunch of Wall Street investment banking firms. Yay!, you say? But what if some of that money was to have been used to fund a small biotech startup firm in San Francisco that was working on a new cancer treatment that ultimately, 15 years down the road would have save a bunch of lives? Now that money is not invested, and the treatment is never developed (or has to wait another 15 years further). HUMAN lives are lost.
Sorry, friend - but we are all interconnected in this society of ours. Harm one part, and you do end up harming other parts.
Please grow up a little - money is not evil. It's a important tool, nothing more, nothing less.
In England we are trying our best NOT to send people to our overcrowded prisons!
One of the latest ideas is not to lock people up if they mug/assault you, oh unless they have a weapon.
Good job I am actually THE ONE(tm) or else I may be worrying.
Thank you Mr Tony sir!
my original reaction to this post follows, copied from its original location here:
It's articles like this one that make me think we should round up all the economists, stuff them in burlap sacks and throw them into the nearest convenient river. Allow me to explain. Slate's latest journalistic atrocity claims that, after a diligent consideration of all the relevant make-believe economic factors, one must inescapably conclude that it makes more sense to execute the authors of computer virii, trojans and worms than it does to execute murderers.
Now, put aside the fact that this article's fourth-and-a-half sentence is "What do we get out of executing a murderer? Deterrence." (oh really?) Further, ignore how conveniently round all the numbers are (people deterred by an execution? 10. Value of a human life? $10 million. Economic benefit of executing a murderer? $100 million). And disregard when the author unabashedly says "...I take my stand with the president of the United States, who, in a 2000 debate against Al Gore, said quite explicitly that nothing other than deterrence can justify the death penalty," despite the fact that President's resume isn't exactly burgeoning with the names of states known for their nuanced philosophical consideration of capital punishment.
No, all you have to know about this article is that the author, Steven E. Landsburg, writes the following:
First, Steve, there are names for these sorts of people. This oversight can perhaps be forgiven -- sure, it reveals that you did absolutely no research or background reading prior to declaring a number of misguided teenagers fit for death, but this pales in comparison with your second offense: implying that "vermiscripter" constitutes a "good name."
Ladies and gentlement, if you should run into Steven Landsburg on the street, do not make eye contact. Keep him away from your children. And for god's sake, don't let him start to draw any graphs.
Virus and Worms writer are protecting our job because related damange-recovery is the only thing in our profession that cannot be outsourced to India!
We must unit and lobby our Government against all unfavourable acts against those holy fighters!
"Dear Senator, if virus/worms writers have to be executed, then those who let their phone rang and answer to it should be killed on sight...."
Is twofold.
First, without virus writers (and other crackers), there is no need for the kind of security the malware led to. In other words, in an everything's-great-we-all-get-along world, why do we need to spend billions on computer security?
I remember group settings where the computers were not secure at all. We were on the honor system to not bother each other's data. It is bad behavior that leads to the need for security. As a matter of point, executing the virus writers *may* reduce the need to continue to spend money on developing more and more secure systems that are more and more complex (and costly).
Second, the analogy between biological viruses and bacteria is flawed in this instance. Bioorganisms just grow and evolve. There is no conscious decision to do harm, it's just in their nature. In contrast, the malware writers do in fact make a specific decision to create something potentially harmful (and for little good reason most of the time).
Your prediction about 80 years from now is shakey at best. Why can the bacteria evolve, but we our immune systems cannot? Just as you say our computer systems have evolved to fight the virus threat.
If we removed *some* of the pressure to program for security (by eliminating malware writers), programmers could then focus more on directly productive tasks.
Computational Chemistry products and services.
I already successfully protect myself from worms, viruses and Trojans.
Execute *SPAMMERS*, the _real_ enemy.
The usual response is that economics is not about money, it is about choices. The basic theories of economics are about measuring the value of different choices as numbers. Once an economist has estimated numerical values for different moral choices, it's a simple matter to find an exchange rate between dollars and the numbers measuring moral decisions... at least this is the theory.
The author has completely missed the entire point of privatizing the penal system in America. It makes FAR more sense, economically, to send criminals to a private jail for a very, very long time. It creates jobs, particularly the sorts of jobs that can't be shipped overseas, pay very little, and probably don't even require a high school education. Which is pretty much the only types of jobs being created in America any more.
Why does America have over one million prisoners, roughly half of them non-violent drug offenders? Take a look at Corrections Corporation of America, their stock ticker is CXW on the big board. Draconian laws and harsh sentencing guidelines pad the bottom line. You can bet there will be Congressional support for even tougher laws if it lowers unemployment.
There's no more money to be made after a prisoner has been executed. Get with the times.
There's a lot of people besides worm and virus writers who have done enough damage to exceed the economic value of a life. We could justify executing hundreds of thousands of executives. Spammers like Scott Richter too, but they deserve it. Microsoft programmers work for peanuts to drain billions of dollars out of the software industry and into the hands of mostly already wealthy investors. Shall we execute them too? And what about those wealthy people, the few who spend their money in ways that cause significant waste the world's resources, and who didn't really deserve that money in the first place? Or what about a politician who helps pass a bad bill? There's a lot of those. Just kill them all?
You can justify any decision with logic and statistics.
Not that I support worm and virus writers, but without them, software would have many more security holes than they have today, and a lot fewer systems would be protected behind NATs. And you can bet that governments work harder at finding exploits than anyone, and they don't report them to be patched. A well planned attack under these circumstances could wipe out most of the systems on the internet, a result more costly than all the past and present worms and viruses combined.
The goal of legal penalties is to prevent crime, not to get revenge equal to the damage. An adequate deterrent for most of those kids would be to punish them by not letting them use a computer, read or watch sci fi or fantasy, role play, look at porn, or play "Magic" ever again. But 5-20 years in prison, or death, well they're not afraid of that at all. Most of those kids have no social lives, are miserable, and are bordering on suicidal anyway. The only effective punishment would be forcing them to live, without any of the enjoyments life has to offer them.
Take a good, hard look at where the world is going in terms of networking everything, and every network interlaced. Today, when a virus strikes, a virus loses a corporation lots of money. (sarcasm) But that's okay, because they're The Man, and we all hate The Man. It's not like it did anyone any harm, right? The Man just didn't get to buy another Learjet that year. (/sarcasm)
But seriously, I don't believe an economic crime demands a lethal punishment. Yet. Why? Because preventatives, insurance, investment, and policy (wise business decisions) can all decrease the effects of these crimes.
However, take into account Hospitals. As more medical equipment comes online, and has to be administered via network, medical care becomes more automated by computer. Medical Files are already on vulnerable networks. As a rule, most hospitals are understaffed, overworked, and in a constant state of emergency. So what happens when a virus brings down an entire hospital's networks for the day? People die. Perhaps the virus only corrupts here and there, unnoticeably. Suddenly medical info is incorrect, or unavailable in a time of crisis during an operation. Someone dies. Perhaps, further down the road, processes (such as medication, or life support) become networked, and a virus brings those systems down, or corrupts the system enough to cause a problem.
That's the most obvious way of a virus writer committing murder. Now apply it to other constant-crisis situations. Flight control-towers, airplanes, filled with people, might in the future be vulnerable as well. Entire planes full of innocent passengers could be lost in mid-air collisions, or ground collisions in low-visibility weather. Traffic control systems in major cities are already online. Corrupting them might cause redlight/greenlight problems, resulting in deaths by car wreck. Or perhaps it just causes a huge traffic jam, and all those in an ambulance, or needing one, are lost due to this virus.
As silly as this article seems, and as smug as the attitude of some posts I've read here, you can't always protect against all virii 100% of the time. There's always going to be something new and clever enough to take advantage of a weakness in the software.
Currently, computer viruses are not a capital offence, but once they start resulting in the loss of human life, and guilt is established, I say let the writer fry/hang/burn/choke/etc... at that point they have just become a premeditated murderer, no different than a bomber.
-The Libra
"You've got no kids, no wife, no job, and you're not in The Tigger Movie!!!"
- my best friend's son, Gabe, at 5 years old.
-The Libra
"Please be patient--The future will begin momentarily."
It is a pattern one sees repeated in societies over and over again -- that an early emphasis on such land value taxation, property taxation, etc. is, as wealth concentrations rise, replaced by taxation of economic activity, followed by a slower rate of economic growth.
The reasons for this are obvious:
If you accumulate enough assets during a time of insured growth, you eventually become influential enough to alter tax policy and thereby shift your insurance premiums onto those who might compete with you for status within your society: upwardly mobile economic producers.
Seastead this.
If you simply play a nubers game, then "economicaly" you're better off by killing people for being retarded, old, or simply lazy. Basicaly anyone who's a drain on society.
Also, if we whent by pure economics, there would be no reason to prosecute date rape, or even things like Child Molestation and kiddy porn. After all, while those things might affect someone's mental health, they probably won't be too damaging. And hey, with kiddy porn there's a demand for it right...
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
In that case, add an extra $1.5 billion to our Iraq expenses. More significantly, we'd owe the Iraqi people about $20 billion more in reparations. Of course we've already spent those amounts several times over...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
You make a good point--politicians will do anything to stay in power, and that is sad. Just one more reason i want to term limits of less than 10 years for congress/house/other high power positions. Also they need their "perks" castrated--life insurance for life after something like 2 years in office for congressment-its sick. Dont get me started on their penstions. oh, and my personal opinion about this topic---if virus writers etc are killed/punnished/etc--it may stop a good majoriy of them, BUT you will be breeding in weakness--software will not "need" to be coded as strong, and when you have a virus writer who has no regard for his own life--just watch as your network and data get dessimated from his virus. I think anything on a network should be legal--provided it does not DOS. Then, code writers would be requested to write everything securely, and you in turn breed in security.
Troll, Troll, go away and flame again some other day
You might learn a thing or two.
First, the article had nothing to do with capitalism per se. All the talk of society implicitly putting a value on a life applies to communist and socialist societies as well. If you knew a little bit more (and did not reflexively wallow in your prejudices), you would realize this.
Second, the article was intended as both satire and as a starting point for discussion. The article was not intended to be taken at face value. If you were a little more sophisticated, you would have picked up on this.
Also, the term is 'ivory tower' not 'glass tower'.
- An American (who may be dumb, but is still apparently much smarter than yourself)
Cheers!
and not a 111 baud repeater?
It's interesting--in some U.S. jurisdictions, he actually does.
It's one of the consequences of so-called 'three strikes' legislation and sentencing.
~Idarubicin
P.S. The above is strictly humorous, and any resemblance to grammar-naziism is strictly coincidental.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
Not patching your systems is like walking through dark alleys with large amounts of cash hanging out of your pockets. You are asking for it. It's almost entrapment.
On the other hand:
% of crime perpetrated by non-executed criminals = 100%
% of crime perpetrated by executed criminals = 0%
Sigh.
In the napoleonic era, a typical punishment for highway robbery was death. The punishment for plain old mugging was death. The punishment for burglary was death. The punishment for slipping a few florins from a stranger's pocket into one's own pocket was death. Crimes involving less personal contact were treated a bit more leniently -- the stealer of a sheep in the UK, for instance, could look forward to a mere 8 years or so in an Army penal battalion.
Crime was high, though, much higher than it is now, because of such factors as: the low chance of being caught (no detectives, few police), the large number of desperate people (no welfare), and the social disruption caused by having people EXECUTED THE WHOLE DAMN TIME.
But yeah, make the punishments harsher, it's bound to work.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Would you give up all your civil liberties for one day--if it meant that no one would ever get raped or murdered again?
How about for one year? How about the rest of your life?
I'm for public execution of spammers.
With the billions they cost the world, through lost productivity and theft of services, I have coined the following mantra:
If you have gone above and beyond the call to make yourself a blight upon society then you deserve to be removed form it.
- Alex Zavatone 2004
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
Nail some sense into him!
How ya like dat?
That's why he's trying to give you. You've taken a very extreme stance and don't seem to understand that.
Every heard of this:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal
When you start putting a monetary value on individual lives, greed has truly won.
Easy.
Even if a pickpocket steals from thousands of people over his lifetime, he is only guilty of many counts of petty theft. He doesn't graduate to grand larceny after a certain cumulative dollar amount.
Playing devil's advocate here (literally, I suppose): Why not?
A pickpocket steals from twenty people, gets caught, gets thrown in jail for a year. When he gets out, he steals from fifty people (because he knows better about how not to get caught) before landing in the stir again, this time for two years. Whereupon he gets out and repeats the cycle AGAIN, sucking up more and more of the taxpayer's money (for cops to catch him, DA et al to prosecute him, jailers to house him, etc.). At what point should we assume he won't learn his lesson and just let him rot? And if we should give him infinite continues (as it were), why bother when he's just going to go out and do it all over again?
I don't think the death penalty really should be applied to spammers/script kiddies/et al, but my patience is not infinite either. Neither, I suspect, is anyone else's. At a certain point in a career criminal's life, it should be "game over" and he sits in jail 'till the end of time. (Let's not take it to the extreme of twenty years for your third speeding ticket-- that's just plain absurd; anything on the level of a traffic violation or parking ticket would probably be exempt.)
"Why Subscribe?" Good question...
You can count me among those. However, I would be wary of talking about moral "costs" and "benefits"; that's economics-speak, not morality-speak.
This is where I part ways with the president of the United States and this article. The article is about an imposition of morality, about the way we calculate the value of a human life in money. But this entire research frame is morally suspect, if life and death are really about more than dollars and cents.
Further, policy debates like this one are full of different methods of decision calculus. This economics-inspired utilitarian accounting of the probable increase or decrease in human lives is just the most popular one, the one you learn in Political Science school and war-planning school. These are ethical methods and moralities too; it's not like policy-centered utilitarianism is "science" and deontology (or some other ethical framework) is "morality".
This utilitarian flavor in political science has real effects at the political level. For example, one woman went to nuclear war-planning school and learned to do this, but found that the decision-making methods used to fight nuclear wars are dehumanizing and illogical, not to mention immoral. Why should it surprise us that more of this warped kind of thinking should lead to warped conclusions?
Other ways to talk about life and death are possible in public policy debate; they're just not permissible. They're also not as tangible and easy to use in mathematics and write up in the annual budget. But who said they should be?
Perhaps this kind of measurement is unnecessary... and perhaps it is flawed... and perhaps, when we learn that it is "counterintuitive" but true that we should kill computer hackers to save money, we should not only seriously question our calculations, we should seriously question our sources of inspiration.
I, for one, would be pleased to have policymakers who are unserious, according to this columnist, who will appeal to the heart's reasons, who think that life is valuable beyond a cash settlement. For "The heart has its reasons, that reason does not know." This is what Pascal was talking about: not that the heart's reasons are inferior to the demands of logic, but that they are superior.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
``People need to learn the mentality that crime can actually be low enough. But try getting that through to a populace that can't be made to understand that life will always be imperfect.''
And don't forget the influence of media and polticians. Some will use a few criminal incidents to convince people that crime is assuming dramatic proportions and there needs to be more patrolling and wiretapping and all that.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
But financial harm is human harm, because money represents work performed and value created -- the product of expended hours of human life.
I've read Emerson. Try some Rand . . . .
So this Landsburg has officially now demonstrated he's a moron. luckily I can now ignore anything else this guy writes. so this was a public service message disguised as thought.
nothing to read here, move along...
Chico: (menacingly)I kill people for money. (looks at Harpo) I kill you for money.
Harpo: (looks worried)
Chico: (smiles). No, I no kill you for money. You my friend. I kill you for free.
Harpo: (smiles in relief)
I'm sure killing spammers will be very economic as many people would be willing to do it for free.
No more crime ever...all you have to do is kill everyone of your friends and family with a dull knife. THey will be conscious and strapped down.
Blar.
Whether it is hedonism or pessimism, utilitarianism or eudaemonism - all these ways of thinking that measure the value of thing in accordance with pleasure and pain , which are mere epiphenomena and wholly secondary, are ways of thinking that stay in the foreground and naivetes on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience will look down not without derision, nor without pity. Pity with you - that, of course, is not pity in your sense: it is not pity with social "distress", with "society" and its sick and unfortunate members, with those addicted to vice and maimed from the start, though the ground around us is littered with them; it is even less pity with grumbling, sorely pressed, rebellious slave strata who long for dominion, calling it "freedom". Our pity is a higher and more farsighted pity: we see how man makes himself smaller, how you make him smaller - and there are moments when we behold your very pity with indescribable anxiety, when we resist this pity - when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any frivolity. You want, if possible - and there is no more insane "if possible" - to abolish suffering . And we? It really seems that we would rather have it higher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it - that is no goal, that seems to us an end , a state that soon makes man ridiculous and contemptible - that makes his destruction desirable .
The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin. its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting and exploiting suffering and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness - was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form giver, hammer, hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is for the "creature in man". for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified - that which necessarily man and should suffer? And our pity - do you not comprehend for whom our converse pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and weaknesses?
Thus it is pity versus pity.
But to say it once more: there are higher problems than all problems of pleasure. pain. and pity; and every philosophy that stops with them is naive.
-Nietzsche, "Beyond Good And Evil", aphorism 225
You forgot to factor in the costs of the funerals, you insensitive clod!
it does raise some interesting issues about how much 'value' society puts on certain types of harm
It gets better if you think it's actually easier to murder someone than rob a bank. And get away unpunished, btw.
Scientia est Potentia
There only a few instances where I'd back capital punishment. Because capital punishment only garentees one thing: That individual will never commit another crime. So a repeat sex offender (3 strikes for a rapist 2 strikes for a pedofile if I had my way) would require execution. Why? because that type of crime has an exstremely high recidivism rate. theft? it's not as serious and it's more of a socio economic crime. But why not. You garentee that exact person will never steal again. Just make it 6 strikes for stealing to ensure a healthy margin of error. For murder a serial killer shoudl be executed right away why a crime of passion deserves jail time.
Just beign pragmatic. Justice shoudl be served quick. If it took 2 convictions to put you on death row, it's unlikly you didn't do both. As long as both cases were seperate and not related. So no appeals. just take them out of the court house after the second or third conviction of murder or rape and cut off his head. or shoot him twice in the back of the head.
When people argue against capital punishment they say it cost mroe to kill them then to jail them. No it doesnt. It cost more to hear all the appeals the criminal goes through before the execution date. So why not wait for 2 convictions (very hard to convict a innocent man twice.. or 3 times) and then just a sumamry execution. No appeal. No whiny activists. This guy went through the proccess twice (or three times or six times) so in the interest of preventing future crime from thsi one individual. kill him/her in the most cost effective way possible (leathal injection aint cheap why not try throwing them off a cliff. then let their families collect the body. make sure it's a bloody tall clif and they go over head first.)
Mercy is for the potential innocent, Vengence for the naive. I prefer practability.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
P.S. We're currently looking for couriers, so if you've got mad bandwidth then apply within!
Breakfast served all day!
and we all know how well Microsoft knows security - I guess if they can't build better locks, they would figure that executing people for breaking and entering is reasonable.
Lets see, people are worth about 10 million a piece. That's based on how many people there are in the US, and what they are willing to spend to have a safer job and all the other BS mentioned in the article.
So lets play the numbers for other countries. How does population, exchange rates, etc play in? Is it worth it to kill vermiscripters in England? Russia? Canada? China? India?
He is essentially suggesting that a life is worth a certain amount of cumulative computer/network uptime. How would you like your SLA to say you get 5 nines or someone dies?
Consider that if you kill someone, they may have been a moderator on Slashdot. On the other hand your that much closer to getting first post. How will that affect your Karma? The world wants to know.
Every so often, I hear about the Free State Project, and chuckle. It's right up there with those Texans that argue about the legality of annexing Texas from Mexico, therefore they are independent. Or the "don't pay your IRS taxes the IRS isn't really legal" crowd. [/me plays the Twilight Zone theme...]
:)
Forgive me for not reading all of the rhetoric, but do any of these people actually LIVE in New Hampshire?? Or even visited the state?
I don't see what 20,000 "free" people would do to the legal, cultural or political makeup of New Hampshire. I'm sure they get TWICE that many "Mass liberals" moving up to shirk mass taxes. Most people in NH are Mass exiles living between the Mass border and Manchester NH. I know because I've lived around both sides of the NH border for 34 years (and remember 31 or so
I wouldn't be surprised if 40% of NH residents worked in Mass, because they actually have schools, and in turn, better jobs. No one wants a career in a retail mall.
I was not advocating the death penalty. Go back and re-read my post.
Hey, I would rather have a virus than being murdered. Non-sense argument, again only nerds trying to make themselve look bigger than they really are.
If we execute all the virus writters then we can have a peacefull world ruled by crappy software and lazy coders. We can forget about encryption and nobody will need passwords. Can you feel the love?
Slate.com has an article titled Feed The Worms Who Write Worms to the Worms which argues based on economic theory (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) that it is a 'better investment' to execute the creators of worms, virus and trojan authors, than murderers.
I genuinely don't want to start a cross-Atlantic slanging match, but actually some of us don't think its such a hot idea for the state to execute anyone.
I seem to remember that in THX-1138 all decisions were economic decisions.
;-)
The final "chase" wall called off because it had gone over budget.
Maybe we're heading for a THX-1138 world where all decisions are based on economics.
Could be we'll elect a "grand nagus" someday
Absolute statements are never true
Then what would the penalty be for selling software which was designed (either through fault or negligence) to propagate viruses?
The worst of it is that Microsoft isn't embarrassed that a college student built a more reliable OS than them. In fact, they don't care - instead of accepting responsibility for their faulty design, they blame the victim - the end user. After all, once the license fee is paid, it's not their problem.
Think about it. If virus infection is such a problem, a company who sells software to millions has a moral obligation to do something about it. But virus infection is not a serious problem - if it were, Microsoft wouldn't be in business. Everyone would run Linux.
And what exactly is the cost of viruses? Well, it is less than the perceived burden of installing and learning to use Linux. Yes, we could port every single app to Linux, and retrain everybody on Linux. Corporations don't, because they believe that doing so would actually cost them more money. Given that corporations are going out of their way to outsource to India, one can pretty much be assured that if Linux was suitable for a company, they'd be using it. Most companies hate the licensing deals Microsoft foists on them, but use their products simply because they believe them to be less expensive than Linux.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The Slashdot of the past would never have entertained an idea like this. The solution would be to better engineer the software, not control the rest of the world.
Assassination Politics combines the free-market mercenary idea with added bonus of using cryptography, anonymous digital cash, and the distributed nature of the internet. All the things a geek would love;-)
Does it require a framework of steel I-beams and pylons driven into the bedrock?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Ahem.
I've been both stabbed AND robbed.
Personally, I think the 'horrendous crime problem' in the US is more a product of the Media trying to sell advertisements than an actual problem. Hell, a study came out a while back showing that violent crime in the UK was the highest in Europe... and a throw away line in the report was that the US ("Known for its violent crime") was lower than any of the European countries being compared.
Yes. Crime is a problem. But, like the grandparent said, there comes a point where the cost of trying to lower crime more is more costly than the crimes themselves...
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
I think, infact, laws on many crimes are becoming far more slack and certain thigns are no longer being considered crimes. I think that we aren't seeing a penalty inflation, we're just seeing the judicial focal point shifting. Of course maybe this is just becaues i'm in canada, and maybe the war against drugs, gay marrige, and such is still raging strong in some states, but up here we've been pruning off the laws that society is starting to see as silly, while maintaining the laws that actualyl protect people.
The Neo-Bohemian Techno-Socialist
Or perhaps they should have their lives shortened by the amount of time they steal from others?
Has anyone seen Bowling For Columbine yet? ...
Exactly, that's part of the problem..
Who do you want choosing your anti-terrorism laws? Terrorism experts and lawmakers, or victims of 9/11? Which do you think is more likely to choose a reasonable, balanced approach that addresses the fundamental issues involved? Which will craft laws based on feelings of "revenge" and "closure"?
I'm not trying to disrespect the victims of crime, but you must admit that emotions have the possibility of clouding reason. Victims should only have a say in punishing the criminals that hurt *them* specifically.
Watch CNN one evening and you'll see what I mean. No reports on, say, technical issues or reports about decreasing crime (or very short ones), but long, horrible reports on death and sex and health risks that are blown way out of proportion. That's why I listen to NPR and watch BBC America; they're less concerned with sensationalism because of the differences in their funding processes.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Murderers want to kill. Justification is just a means to whatever end you choose. You can just as easily say that virus writers save lives.
People dont value time equally. The time you spend on the jon does not compare to time spent with your family at the beach right ? Which will you remember and consider a valued use of your time?
Time spent working generally does not make happy memories either, if it makes memories at all. If you didnt live through the time you worked would that really be so bad ?
So a virus goes through a load of computers. Everyone who would have been working, now goes and spends the time better, a day off. After all there are no computers to do the taxes, recipts, yadda yadda. On average they will value this time now more than had the virus not done its work.
For a few it will be their last day alive, and for them, instead of dropping dead at work, they get to enjoy their last hours with the ones they love.
What could be more valuable than that ?
So lets all write viruses, and make them cause as much damage as possible and if anyone stands in our way lets execute them, so we can save lives.
Thank You.
Nonsense. Heard of "privatization"?
Yeah, it's that process whereby a group of people who have at least the veneer of responsibility to the populace outsource their responsibility to a different group of people who don't hold any responsibility except to their shareholders.
Fucking beautiful concept. That's exactly what I want my government to be: by the Business, for the Business.
But some never learn and remain selfish, egotistical bastards. We call those people "sociopaths" (e.g. criminals and some politicans). Having said that, I agree in that we should try to teach them to be good, but many are just not willing or don't care to learn. That's why they are criminals.
a good prosecution could convince a jury that a virus writer, who built a malicious thing on purpose was at least indirectly responsible for the death of a patient if the software/monitoring systems were down and it was shown to cause the health providers to not be able to do their job effectively (being alerted to a crash)... I can almost hear the discourse:
"Did you write this software"
"yes"
"To attack anyone and everyone it could"
"yes"
"And this binary dump is your code?"
"Yes"
"And is this machine,the source of the demonstrated code,is unable to function due to your software?"
"Yes"
"This Machine is the very machine that was monitoring Billy Bobs life on June 2nd, 2004.."
Well, except for all the cross-examination and objections - you get the idea.
meh
Even worse.
I seem to recall that the value put on Afghan or Iraqi civilians that are killed "inadverently" is much lower than that (in the thousands of dollars).
Anyone has a dollar figure or link?
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Indeed, skepticism abounds today, for I cannot believe that you wrote what you did.
There are these wonderful things called "statistics" and arguments like yours are designed solely for the purpose of keeping people irrational and avoiding thinking about them.
The basic thrust of your argument (and I'm hoping that thrust was unintentional) is that, so long as there is a one in six billion chance of being the victim of a violent crime, we as a society are responsible for taking whatever measures are necessary to alleviate that risk.
Let's pull a number out of the air and say that the U.S. spends $100B for state and federal law enforcement every year. Let's also imagine that each time we double that number, we halve the crime rate. Maybe it would be worthwhile to spend $400B to reduce the rate to 1/4, or $800B to get it down to 1/8th the current level. But what about 1/256th? That would cost $25T, which would mean that pretty much the entire economy would be channeled into crime prevention. Forget other wonderful things like medical research, we might not even be able to feed ourselves. And still, people are getting killed, raped, stabbed, and shot.
Nothing in the previous analysis even mentions the secondary costs that come with living in a de facto police state.
I think you're going out of your way to be insulted. When the grandparent says crime is "low enough," he doesn't mean that we just don't give a crap about the victims who remain. He means that the costs associated with getting it down further are unjustifiable. Going back to my earlier example, imagine if we halved the current law enforcement funding. Assume that caused the crime rate to double. Would that be a bad thing? Certainly. But that doesn't eliminate the possibility that it might be the best thing to do, if funneling that money into medical research lead to an overall improvement in the quality of life.
I could sit here and make precisely the same arguments you do, but in favor of such medical research. After all, for the parents of a child who died of cancer, there is no way the cancer rate was "low enough." But how big a tax increase would we allow to reduce it further than we already have? Would we allow the government to step in and start outlawing certain foods, or require that every citizen take an anti-oxidant tablet every morning? Would we sit by while those who refused the pills were jailed?
The whole idea is that we allocate things like resources and government regulations where they will produce the most good. Simple economics.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
so if the value of a person's *whole life* is somewhere between $1 and $6.3 million, why do we not cap salaries at $6.3 million? I'm pretty damn sure most people don't see that much in a year, and I'm also pretty damn sure that nobody does a lifetime of work in a year.
From TFA
I don't know where he gets his numbers, by all measures I've ever seen, they show that capital punishment isn't a deterrence. I guess this may go along with the idiom about lies, damn lies, and statistics.
-Turkey
And this is all true?
US Political Prisoners do exist, in case you forgot.
Let's just keep some things in perspective here, any nation-state government will attempt to make other's human rights records seem abhorrent to make their own look good.
We see examples of it all the time...people killing other people over abstract concepts like 'god'!
Blar.
People who write virii and trojans for Wintel boxes/routers should be getting money, recognition and babes ( or hunks if it's a female hacker ). These hackers expose flaws in flawed networking architectures that mainstream industries are very reluctant to expose. Who's committing the crime again?
Covering your ass by denying an insecurity or vulnerability exists while blaming hackers wastes everyones time. Even black hats should get credit. Give them a screamin' P4, a fractional T1 and new problems to tackle, not jail time. Some of these hackers just want to play. Let them. No one corporate entity, operating system or hacker group can destabilize or monopolize all of North America's IT infrastructure.
Why not force a corporation to disband if it has done the most serious crimes that it can do!
Exxon Valdez
MS Antitrust
Enron Fraud
These are just a few examples of firms who have done more damage than a human ever could, but we leave it to the market to destroy them, so only one out of three goes down. By analogy, if we left murderers to the mercy of vigilantes, I'll bet that a similar proportion could fight their way out.
Is twofold.
First, as long there are programmers, there will always be virus writers. The concept of everything's-great-we-all-get-along is awesome. However, as much as I wish we lived in a society like that, we do not.
When all is said and done, systems must have better security than they do now.
Second, the analogy between biological and digital virii seems to hold up quite well to me. Intellegent Humans are directing the creation of computer viruses, so you can in fact treat them like they are living evolving things.
We need MORE pressure put on security. Always more.
People need to remember that a human life isn't really just a series of consecutive hours. It's one complete unit. Thinking of it as a series of hours reminds me of one of Zeno's paradoxes. Just because a hacker may steal millions of hours overall, he steals zero complete lives. This is why murdering is of course worse than writing viruses.
The original post was about the economics and cost-effectiveness of executing virus writers.
My post directly addressed this by pointing out that if cost-effectiveness was the only criterion, then we'd have a whole world of atrocities (see repeated post, below).
The ultimate point is that the very things that make us human also motivate us to do things that we see as "right" or "moral" but which are not efficient.
Thus the problem with executing virus writers and how this ties directly into the topic.
----- ORIGINAL POST -------
If cost-effectiveness ruled us, we'd quickly euthanize all with Alzheimers, mental and emotional disabilities not to mention those with chronic addictions like tobacco, heroin etc. -- they just COST too much.
Because casualties tie up needed resources on the battlefield, all wounded (both sides) would be killed.
This would be cognitive Darwinism at its most extreme -- eliminate the ineffective and inefficient. So what if we lose a Hawking here or there.
OTOH, this has been tried before: By the Third Reich and through the sterilization of "mental defectives" in the U.S. in the first few decades of the last century.
The decision to extend MERCY, to make a decision to be compassionate in the face of raw efficiency is the essence of what makes us human.
Society has a right to protect itself, but there are better ways of doing it than checking our humanity at the door
The one question I have is, using all the resources in the world can an operating system be written an run that is not vulnerable to viruses? Now I do seriously mean *all* the resources, ie unlimited manpower/budget/R&D etc.
If not then we will be putting up with this for ever so we mine as well start putting them away now. Other wise I would feel that it would be the responsibility of the manufacturer and let them keep trying to put a square peg into a round hole till they get it right.
In that sence I think the people who write viruses should be paid for their work because they are now helping us to innovate and refine our code. As for all us admins, this is what we are paid for get over it, if some loud mouth kid didnt send out "Supper l337 killer" version 1.0 some one with a brain would do it and screw us royally with out anyone knowing.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
I'll agree, so long as time spent watching NASCAR and WWF is deducted from the total.
Okay, that was simple trolling. I do apologize.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
I am! FRY THEM!!!
</tougue-in-cheek>
Okay, here comes a rant...
Sure the cost of a "statistical" life may be between $5 and $10 million dollars. So what. What meaning does that have? To put it another way, if someone offered you that amount of money to kill you, would you accept it? No? Why not? Isn't that the "value" of your life?
Just because we can assign a value to a human life doesn't make it a meaningful value. Heck, the "value" is based in part upon a persons perception of risk. People are really bad at determining risk (familiar dangerous things considered safer than unfamiliar safer things) and our willingness to mitigate risk may be based on other factors (gee, this job is dangerous, but I kind of like having a place to live, or I don't have the skills to change a job etc.). Just because economists think they can put a value on a human life doesn't mean they are correct.
Finally, if you really can put a single number value on a human life, then do they really have a inherent right to exist?
Rant off...
No comment.
personally i think all these worms may be worthwhile in the long run, i mean they DO make people and microsoft aware of the vulnerabilities of windows and its security problems.
According to your theory, you must also consider 9-11 to have been worthwhile too? After all, it did make us aware of lax airport security and also there will never be a "thou shalt let the hijacker have his way" policy ever again.
Overdose them with Viagra then lock them in a jail cell with Michael Jackson.
I buy the economic argument that we should execute verminscripters (and spammers while we are at it). But how about we also calculate the deterrence effect of executing officials of software companies if their products are so insecure that we have to download daily patches to keep from having our work utterly destroyed. What would the economic benefit to us be then?
I agree, it's repugnant to place a monetary value on SOMEONE ELSE's life.
However, the author of this article is talking about numerous studies where people show, by their actions, what value they place on THEIR OWN life.
As the author says, people consistently show that they prefer to have $1 in cash rather than improving their chance of living by 1 part in 10,000,000. That's individual people making decisions about THEIR OWN lives and thus revealing their preferences.
For example, do you drive a car? How much did you spend on after-market safety systems, such as a five-point crash harness or a Snell-approved motorcycle helmet? These are expensive ways to lower one's mortality risk, and very few people choose to spend the money for these things.
Have you gotten a $3000 physical exam lately? Chances are better than 1/1000 that it will diagnose something important in your health.
And so on. To be sure, a $3000 preference for a 0.1% mortality chance does not equate to $3,000,000 for a 100% mortality chance. Economic preferences are ordinal, not cardinal/additive. But the point is, people place values on their OWN lives, and econometricians merely observe these preferences.
Not sure if you're a confused yankee or just trolling, but I'll bite...it's a slow day.
;-)
Texas was not annexed from Mexico, we was a soverign republic from 1836-1845 before ALLOWING the US to annex us in exchange for better highways for our trucks and an expanded market for sellin' that sweet nectar known as Bluebell ice cream. In Texas History class we got learnt as to how the great general Sam Houston used the Battle of the Alamo (REMEMBER!!) as a dee-version to tie up the Mexican army, so's he could build up his own army for the Battle of San Jacinto...at which time we opened such a Texas-sized can o'whoopass on the Mexicans that to this day they still mow our lawns as part of the cease fire. At first the US didn't want nuthin' to do with us, but after 9 years of Texas showin up the yankees they finally got wise and came a'beggin for us to join 'em. Now, in school they tell how's we tricked the US into annexing us, but my grandpappy telled me the truth about how some durn fool lost Texas to the US in a rigged poker game, and didn't even shoot the cheatin' bastard.
Nowadays, we hear nothin but yankees makin fun of us for drivin trucks, or always having a gun within arm's reach (let alone many guns that would necessitate an entire RACK), or about how's the grocery store by my house sells horse bridles and salt licks in the pet aisle right next to the Puppy Chow. But oh here comes a war, somebody call the Texans to come pull our bacon outta the fire! How you whiny hippies beat England without no Texans to fight for you, I will never know.
What? Topic? Oh yeah. Virus writers. We had one of them down here back in the summer of ought'02. Some good ol' boy hitched him up to his truck and drug him around the corral a few times. No problems since.
The truth is here! All the rest is lies!
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
a study came out a while back showing that violent crime in the UK was the highest in Europe...
If you believe that 25 fistfights is more violent crime than a single gunshot to the head, that is...
Hmm is "how's" the correct form to use there? Better check my "Hicked on Phonics" book.
IIRC from Texas History class, we are the only state in the union whose constitution allows for legal secession. It also provides for breaking the state up into five smaller states...although why we would do so I have no idea.
"No man's life, libery, or property are safe when the Texas legislature is in session".
Study everything, you'll find something you can use - Jason Bourne
If you think that malware has a positive benefit because it generates publicity for the weaknesses in popular operating systems, how do you feel about spam and the weaknesses that spam reveals in popular mail protocols?
(My view: prison sentences for both malware writers and spammers)
If you accidentally release a worm on the world, like Robert Morris did back in 1988, would you be held accountable?
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
I'll do the math in hours
That's fair. And in a way, more accurate, too. Instead of converting human-hours to dollars, just work directly in the raw human-hours.
The trouble is doing things like multiplying 1 hour by 1,000,000 people to get a million human-hours. Here's an example: suppose that I deprive 1000 people of their water supply for 1 hour (I shut off the pipes to one building). That's major vandalism. Suppose I deprive 1 person of water for 1000 hours. That's murder.
Or suppose I steal $10 from you. Now you can't buy a CD. Then I steal another $10. Now you can't buy a shirt. Eventually I'm stealing your rent money, and that hurts a lot more than the first $10. Thus, it's less harm to steal "entertainment money" * 5 than "entertainment + clothing + medical care + food + rent" from one person.
In technical terms, it's about marginal utility and diminishing marginal returns.
Nevertheless it's still a great crime to skim 1 hour each from 1,000,000 people.
First of all, you're not asking me to give up only my civil liberties, you're asking me to give up everyone else's civil liberties as well.
More to the point, I would not give up my civil liberties for the rest of my life if it meant that no one would ever get raped or murdered again, so I'm definitely not going to ask society in general for the same thing.
One aspect of this discussion that Landsburg does not touch upon is the theory, influenced by biological immunology, that computer vandalism such as writing an Internet worm contributes positively to the Internet's collective resistance to more targeted forms of computer crime, hacking into personal computers in order to perform fraudulent online banking transactions, for example. How could we measure the positive economic value of malware authoring in terms of it's net impact (if any) on reducing the net impact of computer crime? While this question will likely remain unanswered, I doubt we will identify a prosocial angle on murder.
i just want to play go
I don't know where they come up with the idea that viruses and spam cost the economy money. Think about it for a minute: a virus attacks your computers and you are down all day and therefore don't sell any of the goods you would have sold on an average day. Did you lose money? Maybe. Some of your customers will simply come back tomorrow. Others, you will have lost, but they will go to competitors next door. The economy as a whole loses nothing.
The only way it loses money is if your customer decides to go to an overseas supplier. I suspect the fact that one's system was down for a few hours is not a common cause of the usa losing business to overseas firms.
Well then, you say, how about the money paid to IT geeks to clean up after an attack? Well, that money stays in the us economy as well, and therefore no net loss to the us economy. Loss to your company, maybe, but gain by the employee and the irs and well, it all totals up to exactly what it was prior to the virus/worm/earthquake/tsunami/whatever.
We live in a Capitalistic society, it's not the government's job to play Robin Hood.
First of all, you don't live in a pure capitalistic system - you live in a tightly regulated market economy where the Government engages in massive redistributive programs. You ant a pure "Capitalistic" system go back to the 19th century, eliminate social programs, eliminate progressive taxation, eviscerate your middle classes, and reintroduce slavery and debt bondage. Oh, and bring back hanging for larceny and petty theft.
Secondly, does the phrase "of the people, by the people, for the people" mean anything to you? Governments serve people and provide for the common good; they are not mere rubberstamps for corporations or capital - despite what many fringe ideologues in the US would have you believe.
Da Blog
I wouldn't either. That was my point. Rape and murder are terrible, terrible crimes, especially to victims and their families, but dealing with these ills may be the price we pay for enjoying our civil liberties. Thus, it isn't very useful to say things like "the rate is always too high," as did my parent poster.
Good. There's a reason why DUIs are treated this way: it results in people dying. When a supposed adult drinks, that's fine. That's their right. When they get drink - knowing how it will affect their judgement, reaction times, and ability to concentrate - and then get behind the wheel of a car, they have knowingly and callously decided to put the lives of other people in danger because they would rather not be inconvenienced.
I think the real reason that DUI laws are changing has less to do with the "get touch" stance mentioned, and more to do with a change in perceptions and better education about how utterly, abysmally, incredibly and mind-bogglingly STUPID you need to be to think that drinking and driving is anything except unreasonable and dangerous.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
shrikage, need I say more
Stating that 'a human life equals X Dollars' is hartless and stupid. There are things which cannot be measured in money. This is a stupid extension of capitalist economy to areas where it cannot be applied.
The idea that human life is priceless lead to abolishing the capital punishment in most civilised countries. We cannot create life (not yet); it is thus unfair to take life from an individual if you cannot give it back to him.
It does not matter that that individual is a monster or not. If necessary you can kep him in prison for life.
If you want to read a good book on why this is, read "Internal Bleeding (The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes)" by Robert M. Wachter, MD and Kaveh G. Shojania, MD (ISBN 1-59071-016-9). In this book, the authors relate various true stories of medical mistakes (indeed, they open with their own personal mistakes), what went wrong, why, and how to fix the issue. In some cases, a computer system would have helped. In other cases, computer systems actually helped to cause the harm!
As you read the book, what you will see (if you have every studied networks and emergent systems) is that it isn't the technology or lack of tech causing problems - it is the system and attitudes about medical care (by both doctors, nurses, and patients) causing misdiagnosis, misplacement (of drugs and patients!), and general failures - leading to at best embarassment, and at worse, death.
This isn't to say that there shouldn't be more computers involved in medicine and healthcare - in deed, the authors make a strong case that there isn't enough (and why more is needed, as well as how to bring the users into the fold of designing the system well so that they use it!). These new systems will need to be hardened and protected against viruses.
In the end, though - it all comes down to people and the overall system they work in. The authors of "Internal Bleeding" make a strong case that it is this system (of people, attitudes, knowledge, technology, etc) that is broken - and that it need fixing, and soon.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Stating that 'a human life equals X Dollars' is hartless and stupid. There are things which cannot be measured in money. This is a stupid extension of capitalist economy to areas where it cannot be applied.
The idea that human life is priceless lead to abolishing the capital punishment in most civilised countries. We cannot create life (not yet); it is thus unfair to take life from an individual if you cannot give it back to him.
It does not matter that that individual is a monster or not. If necessary you can keep him in prison for life. Killing people because it is cheaper than keeping them in jail is equally stupid; one again himan life CANNOT be measured in money.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
With this said, however, I don't think these DUI penalties would have come to be unless there was an overall trend towards harsher penalties for all offenses. When mandatory sentencing required throwing a pot user away for an extended period, MADD knew perfectly well that it became hypocritical not to start nailing DUIs. They used that as leverage to push their agenda and our society today is all the better for it. I view harsher DUI penalties as a just another part of the 1980s War on Drugs, perhaps the only part of that crusade that everyone can agree was just and socially beneficial (I will keep silent on my personal views of the WoD).
You come across as someone with strong views and I'm not entirely sure if you were attacking DUI, my comments, or me. I just want to be sure you understand my point: I believe that harsh DUI penalties are a good thing, even if they owe their existence to "penalty inflation." The long term effects of that inflation in other venues, however, are still in question.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
How cliched. The author has merely used a utiltarian argument. It just weighs the pros and cons in tangibles but doesn't take in to account humanitarian and rights based ideas.
Ethics philosophy encourages utilitarian ideas as a first step in an ethical theory, but suggest that when it comes to human life, that it lacks coherence.
He's preforming a first year university philosophy trick for your shock and amusement. No wonder you Americans are so easily bamboozled by your politicians. You're like new born babes in the woods.
It doesn't raise any interesting issues whatsoever. It's all been done before my uneducated friends. It's sad to see people who call themselves nerds not having the brains and education to recognise the flawed argument for what it is.
So you'd have 10 Senators, instead of just 2?
What would the 5 states be called, I wonder?
Watch CNN one evening and you'll see what I mean. No reports on, say, technical issues or reports about decreasing crime (or very short ones), but long, horrible reports on death and sex and health risks that are blown way out of proportion.
Ha. If you're lucky. The last two times I've flipped by CNN they were 1) talking endlessly about the Friends finale on "CNN People" and 2) having one of their reporters try firebreathing. Man that channel sucks.
Here is a report of international crime statistics which shows that there is, in fact, far more violent crime in the US than in Western Europe.
The following are average numbers of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants per year from 1997 to 1999
US : 6.26
England : 1.45
Germany : 1.28
France : 1.63
Norway : 0.85
Russia : 20.52
S.Africa: 56.49
Interestingly, the land of the free also has the extremely high prison population (from the same source, again per 100.000 inhabitants)
US : 682
England : 125
Germany : 97
France : 91
Norway : 56
Russia : 729
S.Africa: 327
I hope that people don't lose sight of the point of virus'.
The Virus writers put out a violent statement, pointing to errors that need to be fixed.
Getting rid of the virus writers, or railing against them, will only make you lose sight of the problem.
The holes need fixed!
It's easy to persicute, ridicule, to pretend that the problem is not the problem but rather the person taking advantage of the problem is the problem. It's a lot harder to swallow your hurt pride and fix the problem, not the problem abusers.
My sig is as boring as you...
Only kill them ? Or torture them first ?
The problem with the economics is that by calculating value based on total harm does not reflect how the economics would shift if such a perseptoion was adopted. To the point...a policy that punishes on the order of total harm vs severity of crime would be an issue of group rights vs individual rights. A group rights sided government would exacute the virus writter while a individual rights sided government would exacute the murderer. The problem with a streight line analysys is that it fails to recognize that historicaly individual rights sided govenerments hands down out compete group rights sided government in economic prosparity.
stendec@gmail.com
This causes all sorts of problems. Like tariffs and subsidies, which hurt a lot of people a little but benefit a few greatly.
Why not make them economically responsible? If they cause fifty million in damages they must pay fifty million in restitution. Virus writers would find themselves little more than indentured servants. Also life time bans on computer access with stiff jail sentences for accessing computers. Juries would hesitate to ever impose life sentences let alone death for such crimes but would view loss of access and compensation as fair. Do you let child molesters work in child daycare centers? Loss of computer rights would hit them where they live and repaying damages is fair eventhough the payment in many cases would be a token amount. Large numbers still risk it because they are hard to catch and tend to get a slap on the wrist when they are caught. You have to make the punishment hurt. Then again you could sentence them to write code patches for Windows and not release them until all the holes are patched and it doesn't crash. A life sentence in hell without the possiblity of parole.
The activities of a spammer has a negative economic value for those of us who have to bear the burden of his lifestyle.
A spammer has no value as a human being.
Tech Public Policy stuff
The estimate of my life in Dollars is X, where x is infinity.
By the way I walk to work, about 2x5km=10Km, that is 2 hours, every day.
Many meople have a crazy habit. Instead of walking to work, drive. Then at home, they start running like loonies in the neighborhood to lose weight or something. Why not use all that energy for getting to work?
Microsoft!!!!!
For once microsoft bashing is on topic hehe!
afterall they cause most problems, without their bugs there would be buch less pwoblems so eliminate them and their buggy software.
When was the last time you heard a grandparent say crime was "low enough"?
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"-T.S.Eliot
Let's say that there was a free suit of armor that's skintight and amazingly lightweight -- you wouldn't know you were wearing it if not for the logo that appears on your hand under a black light. You can even have sex in one, and it serves as the most amazing condom in the world -- you wouldn't know you were wearing it, if it didn't prevent pregnancies. Even throw in a rape guard -- it refuses entry unless it receives verbal consent from you. Oh, and it's bulletproof, acid-proof, and so on.
In short, the only way you can die is through outright suicide or neglect. You can cut a hole in it or take it off, thus making you vulnerable to attack. If your mouth is closed, only you can open it, so you have to consciously eat something you don't trust (without first allowing your suit to check it for obvious poisons). You could let the battery run out.
Let's further say that the suit has all its features activated automatically at birth. In fact, it attaches itself to each new baby. So if your mother was using this armor, you have to consciously disable it to be attacked in any way.
The only drawback is that if you didn't grow up with it, you may need to learn a little bit about it, like how to move that larger penis. Some people are so retarted that they look at the larger penis and cry and think that it's a bad thing. Or maybe you need to learn that you are now much stronger and faster, and could accidentally break things, such as buildings. Or maybe you need to learn to change the batteries every few days. Sure, it'll take some time -- maybe a few hours -- but it's well worth it.
Linux (particularly Debian and Gentoo) is like that, BSD even more so. I can see why people use OSX instead of those, but for someone to use Windows, they must really not give a shit about security. The better analogy is someone who strips naked, walks into a bar with no weapon, hands and feet bound, and shouts "You're all pussies!" or something to that effect, and gets the shit beaten out of him. Maybe he gets killed. Now, yeah, you can execute all the bar thugs, but that time, energy, and money is better spent educating people on how to not walk into bars nude, bound, and drunk.
That's what I'd do in the real world -- I would take every dollar spent tracking down the script kiddie and spend it hiring a new sysad and training people to use Linux or BSD. I would also do that with money saved from not using Windows -- spend it training people to not use Windows.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
is that governments need to maintain a monopoly on violence. Its a pretty standard concept in social theory.
In order to be effective, government can't have other actors competing for control of the citizenry. If everyone can run around killing anyone they want, you have what is referred to as anarchy.
The New Hampshire state constitution also allows for secession.
The Free State Project is certainly not a joke. We aren't "fringe" types of people, for the most part. We're ordinary citizens looking to stem the tide moving this country toward more and more centralized power, and less and less freedom and personal responsibilty.
I am moving next month, TX -> NH. I just want to raise my daughter in freedom. I just want to be left alone by the hordes in Washington DC. Is that so much to ask?
Kat Dillon
No, they have to shout about stiffer penalties, and making it a separate crime to use a Foo in the commission of a Bar.
What they are saying is, in a career of making laws, they've never gotten it right yet.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
IIRC from Texas History class, we are the only state in the union whose constitution allows for legal secession.
Popular legend, but untrue.
It also provides for breaking the state up into five smaller states...although why we would do so I have no idea.
You'd do so because the slave states wanted to be able to balance the admission of free stats.
However, Article IV, Section 3 of the US constitution trumps that, sort of... Congress *and* the state(s) in question have to agree to any dividing, combining, or trading. Texas ends up with no more and no less ability to do it than any other state has.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
I was thinking the best answer is to genetically engineer a noncontageous ebola virus that only attacks people who write and distribute worms and virii. Spread it throughout the populace and the unwanted network attack gene should be eliminated from our collective genome in about 6 months :-)
Genda
"That's a joke son... a joke I say..." --Foghorn Leghorn
Time to drop MS-Slate from Slashdot altogether. It's just MS tripe to distract from the real problems which include defective design and production.
For crying out loud - is killing people the answer to every anti-social issue that you mindless morons in the USA come across? Politicians in the USA don't like Saddam Hussein - so killing a lot of innocent people to catch him and his buddies doesn't seem to matter a whole lot... Politicians in the USA don't like Yasser Arafat - so the USA refuses to condemn actions by the Israeli army that kill innocent children... Some mindless smear of a human being doesn't like script kiddies or virus authors - so why not kill them as well??? Are you so COMPLETELY ignorant of the fact that when the world sees the USA killing people for any reason then they think they are also justified in killing people... Life is sacred ... all this bullshit about killing people is so incredibly stupidly ignorant.
Therefore, I would suggest frying a bunch of those simple-minded economists first. The world would be better off without their brain-dead advice, and millions of lives (not to mention huge funds) would be spared in the process.
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Question... what are the birth rates per viable female for the following groups?
So next time they "visit" prison givem the option of getting fixed for a reduced "visit" and prevent the next generation of crime. Apply this to all classes from the Michael Milkin's to the crackhead bob's and watch what happens for the next 40 yrs to...
dumb ass remains dumb ass
White collar crimes can cause massive economic disruption. If you can make a case for hackers then why not for **other** 'misguided adventures'.
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
it does raise some interesting issues about how much 'value' society puts on certain types of harm
Yeah, for example pedophilia and "child abuse". Even when bad things do happen, they are not worse than murder, yet more people would support killing a paedophile than a murderer, perhaps even if the pedophile only raped the victim.
I don't think the "value" is on the harm. It's the association with the value itself. The western world considern children to be godly, and so what they consider to be crimes with them is so dastardly that it deserves the death penalty.
The same can be seen elsewhere as well, depending on the amount of people affected, and who it affects. Popularity allows actors to get away with various things, so much so, that before anyone would agree to pubishment, their popularity would first have to be stripped.
There are other issues as well, like people not having their own values, so they grab onto societies values. Being group think, they are not well thought out, and therefore the clarity must be made up for with fierceness. As can be seen by many religous folk who simply don't understand their own religion.
As for virii writers, i say whip 'em. Corporeal punishment has almost always worked. If the few caes where it doesn't, incarciration can be used.
Have you read my journal today?
And those guys who have operatings systems that they have to reboot every day spend even more time waiting for their computers to boot.
Does that mean they're are even worse?
While the concept of competition stills exists.
..
... there's a way to heal ..
Kill the virtues and ideas of "competition".
and you kill 95% of all crime... in an instant.
So the only law you really need is
to make "competing" against one and other illegal.
and all crime evaporates into almost nothing.
Then it's only the true wacko's and sick and twisted that you have to worry about
and for them
if they want it - otherwise.
just lock em up and throw away the key.
End of story.
All crime "solved". in an instant.