Slashdot Mirror
Hackers Forced Announcement of 10th Planet Find
JCY2K writes "According to The Inquirer, hackers gained access to the secure server where the data about the new planet was being held and threatened to reveal it. Evidently the discoverers have been withholding this information from the public since 2003 while they waited for full analysis."
while they waited for full analysis
So, waiting for a full analysis is a bad thing now?
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
The summary misspells "confirmed observations" as "withholding this information".
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
No it doesn't, and please stop anthropomorphizing it.
Open-source software advocates want information to be free, as do civil liberty groups and other political organizations that fall near the Slashdot line of thinking.
But to say information wants to be free is like saying my computer monitor wants to be plugged into a high-end video card: it may be better for all parties, but in the end, the monitor is just a monitor. Likewise, information is just information.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
The people involved in this should be banned from using public equipment due to their clear lack of ethics!
No, they should be commended for not rushing out their findings until they had been properly analyzed and validated. The public doesn't track or care about retracted or falsified scientific studies, so to come out with unchecked data would end up confusing most people if the conclusion made based on that data was proven to be incorrect. And it's not like this was some big discovery that was actually going to change the average person's life... they aren't sitting on the cure for cancer or something.
Congratulations and Thank You to the Astronomers/Researchers involved with this discovery. Thank You for discovering something and then waiting for a full peer review and analysis before presenting your data to the public. WAAAAY too much today that process does not occur, because of bad scientists, and gives a bad name to good science and scientists.
Fuck you to the hackers who feel that something like this needed to be public without review. If it was 'revealed' and then found to be false, nobody would have remembered some script kiddie illegally, immorally, and unethically published the data before it was reviewed. Everyone would have jumped on the Astronomers/Researchers and science in general like a bunch of ignorant cattle (like they always do) and the true facts would have been buried in the mess.
Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance. What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.
There are 'planetoids' that are bigger than pluto that are considered simple KBO even though some consider them to be planets.
Really, name one.
You cannot, as this is the first KBO discovered that is larger than Pluto.
SteveM
Seriously, I've seen less biased articles from the RIAA's anti-piracy campaigns. The reason Brown held onto the information was so he could get all the data before making an announcement. He wanted to be able to say, "New object is 2.73 times as large as Pluto," not "New object is probably bigger than Pluto." Is the existence of another Kupier Belt object really going to affect anyone? It's not like this was cancer research.
Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that things "want" to fall to the ground; it's the path of least resistance.
/. world.
Things don't want to fall to the ground; the ground is merely in the way.
What the statement means to me is that information usually becomes free in the absence of measures taken to prevent it from doing so. I think we can agree that that's true.
No, in the absence of any measures, information ceases to exist. Fail to remember, fail to record it, fail to anything with it and it doesn't exist. It may be true, but information is a concept relative to those holding it as such. This is why 1984 is so relevant to information technology. What people consider to be true or factual is dependent upon information as recorded or held in the minds of others and transmitted to them. 1984 tells you why hackers can be dangerous. Should information not be held in the mind and be changed in some database and it not exist in anyone's mind until it is read after the changes, it is assumed to be right and it becomes "information" at that point.
Information doesn't want to be at all. People insist on it being. The fewer the people with it, the closer it gets to its ephemeral basis of nonexistance, just waiting for some entity to come along and encompass it back into being.
You may now return to not-so-deep end of the
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
Nature records information all the time. There will always be information available to any who wish to retrieve it. It will always exist: a single atom of hydrogen at coordinates 5.28E25, 1.92883E18E298, 42 contains information and, some might argue, is information itself. It not only contains the information of where it is, but the information of where it is not. Watch its path and it will tell you what has influenced it in the past.
"Information wants to be free" may not be as accurate as "people generally want to share information and make it available", but sounds a bit more philosophicalisticalish.
Personally, I'm on the information-should-freely-flow side of things. With the exception of anything that requires massive quantities of money and very expensive machines and large collections of disciplined manpower there is nothing that the government can do even half as efficiently as the collective power of tens of millions of people with nothing better to do with their time than plink.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"