It's always amazing to me how much people think that God needs defending.
Your relationship with God is the only important thing in the universe, and you don't need a government to tell you how to have a good relationship with your deity.
And I don't need the government telling me how to have a good relationship with your deity. And you don't need the government telling you how to have a good relationship with my deity.
Our country is also strong enough to not have to declare that it exists through God's will. We made it, not God. The prophet George Washington didn't see a burning bush that implored him to lead his soldiers across the Delaware.
Our nation, like every human institution, is fallible. The more we bring God into it, the less we respect him, our nation, and ourselves.
God might help you make your personal choices, but you make bad decisions, too. Giving God the credit for your successes, and taking personal blame for your failures is dehumanizing to you and everyone else, and it leads to both a sense of false security (in your bad decisions), and false insecurity (questioning your relationship with God, just because you messed up.)
P.S. - if this comment pissed you off, then contemplate living in a country that forces you to worship a God that you don't believe in. Now, recognize that's exactly what you're asking other people to do in America. It's not YOUR country - it's OUR country. And the only way we can all get along, is to keep separate our personal and political worlds.
You have your personal relationship with your God, I have my personal relationship with my God - and the laws of this land should not give either one of us preferential treatment.
You, sir, are such an ass that it hurts my eyes to read!
Go to your friend's house, you know, the one who owns the $20,000 salt-water aquarium.
Place a big chunk of ice in the aquarium. Then sit back and see how the melting of ice does not rise the water level. Oh, wait, but it does kill all of the fish in the aquarium.
Then get back to your biology books and figure out why it does.
Oh, and PS - huge amounts of ice in Antarctica, which you point out, is sitting on the continent, is freaking melting. You may remember? In the news? Something something ice melting? Antarctica? Ring a bell?
In my experince, accepting the first piece of data that fits your assumptions is not the way to get at truth, but a way to sell books and get on the 6:00 news.
Oh yeah? What about stating that the increase in CO2 is undeniably a "Coincidence"? Is that bad science, too? Is there any evidence to back up your assertion that the one thing has nothing to do with the other?
We need experiments and more data before any sound scientific conclusion like that can be made.
I'm not saying it definitely is the cause of temperature increase, either - but starting your argument off with, "Coincidence" doesn't ring of scientific integrity, buddy.
By the way, I just came across this (highly topical) article:
U.S., ABC Go To War
Upset federal officials are threatening criminal action against ABC News and its reporters for smuggling depleted uranium into the country to test customs inspections. "It is a question of whether or not journalists should be breaking the law in the pursuit of a news story," Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy told the Associated Press. "It's not right for a reporter to rob a bank to prove the bank has lax security." Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Asa Hutchinson accused the reporter, Brian Ross, of "trying to carry out a hoax on our inspectors." Pointing out that the depleted uranium was harmless and that it was not the intent of the ABC news crew "to defraud the U.S. government, to smuggle in contraband or to avoid duties," ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider maintained that the sole purpose of the report was to call attention to lax screening procedures at the border. The report is due to air on ABC's Primetime Thursday tonight, on the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the U.S.
The blaster patch was an optional download. It wasn't integrated into the normal Windows XP "New updates are ready; install them now?" update mechanism.
I don't really advocate what this guy's done. But it's not too far a walk from "hacked this specific company, pointing out their security problem" to "hacked this specific software, pointing out its security problem." The first case is covered by things like laws on theft and trespassing, etc. Unfortunately, the second case is also covered - by DMCA. I think the DMCA is absolutely rediculous in this manner.
You could make the case that if I hack Outlook, and send an email to Microsoft telling them how to fix it - that I've done almost exactly the same thing as Lamo. I've damaged the property of Microsoft - their Outlook software, and their reputation. That, in fact, I've broken the law (DMCA), and am a criminal. That's nuts.
If I don't do any direct harm (by exploiting the bug), then I should be thanked. And if I'm not thanked, then the laws (DMCA) should be changed to protect me from them. Give me whistle-blower protection.
This case isn't a perfect one-to-one case to what I just described, but in my mind, there's some gray in there. They're 100% within their rights to prosecute him. But I don't think they should have. I think they're acting in an immoral manner. Pretty similar to the kind of immoral behavior that whistle-blower laws exist to protect us againt.
Thank you for the interesting conversation. Sorry about calling you a moron, earlier.
Well, if you watch the video, Lamo explains that when he tried to tell them how to fix the problem, they wouldn't even write down what he was telling them. So, to them, apparently, it's not "obvious that bugs and security lapses should be repaired, however they are discovered."
I'm going to phrase a hypothetical, and walk you down the path, to show you the gray that you apparently can't see in this issue.
Stealing company confidential documents. "Whatever the motion, whatever actions are taken afterwards, breaking the law remains breaking the law, and anyone who does that is a criminal. To believe otherwise is to believe that anyone has the right to [steal company confidential documents], and that any criminal action vis-a-vis [stealing company confidential documents] is excusable if the criminal simply tells someone about the..."...toxic dumping that a corporation was doing.
If someone "steals" corporate documents that prove that the law was being broken, they are pretty well sheltered by whistle-blower laws. That's because society recognizes that more good is done by rewarding those who took a risk for the benefit of everyone. I mean, you can look into the legal arguments for whistle-blower laws, but I'm just paraphrasing those arguments down to "we protect them, because otherwise, we'd never know about the toxic dumping."
Now, yes, I am stretching the case to talk about a company with security holes, and someone outside the company who's blowing the whistle.
But I'm not going to passively sit here and let you call my example "utter nonsense."
Look, there's basically two ways of looking at this...
It's good to find bugs, because you can fix them.
It's bad to find bugs, because it's embarassing.
When someone logs a bug report, you're supposed to take it seriously. You're supposed to thank the person for reporting the bug. You're supposed to tell them that people will investigate the cause of the bug. You're supposed to try to reproduce the bug. You're supposed to hand the reproducable bug over to people whose responsibility it should be to fix the problem. They should track down the root cause, and attempt to fix it. They should also try to figure out what caused the bug to occur in the first place. They're supposed to report exactly what the bug was, exactly what caused it, and exactly how they fixed it. They might also log suggestions about how to resolve further bugs like this in the future. Some of this information is supposed to filter all of the way back to the person who logged the bug in the first place, to demonstrate that you took the bug seriously, and that the issue is resolved.
Any of that sound familiar?
Now, people like you, who apparently don't understand the value in removing bugs, get all upset as soon as the location the bug occured was a "security" problem.
I'm not suggesting that every company should put a $1000 bounty on its own security. Or that the company always ignore any damages that occured. But I am saying that, in many cases, the most responsible thing a company can do is to thank someone for pointing out their mistakes, especially if no real harm is done. I understand that this exact case might be slightly different (the LexusNexus searches added up real quick, apparently), but you seem to be completely inflexible on your stance that any "security breach" is a violation of law, and should therefore be punished to the maximum extent that the law provides.
In other words, cover up the mistake by prosecuting. It's this inattention to security that causes the security breaches in the first place.
You don't make crime go away by prosecuting the criminals. You make crime go away by trying to figure out how to stop it in the first place. Anyone that's willing to show you how to stop it in the first place is helping you.
If I'm a stockholder in a company that has such lax security that "a kid with an inflated ego" was able to break into their system, you're damn right I'd reward his behavior. Especially since he told them how to fix their problem.
The real harm that corporations should worry about is stockholders selling like crazy, because it becomes public information that their security was so horrible.
When the "kid with an inflated ego" tells you in a private forum that you've got a problem, and how to fix it, do you
A) thank him, fix the problem, and then fire your incompetent security team - thus protecting yourself from further intrusions, and maintaining your stock price, and protecting the investment of your stockholders...
or B) yell at him, take a few days to fix the problem, and file criminal charges, thus inviting investigation and reporting about your incompetence - thus inviting further intrusions from kids with even more inflated egos (who think they won't be caught), potentially dipping your stock price, and screwing up the investment of your stockholders...
You're damn right I'd thank him. And I wouldn't press charges, unless he had done real damage.
Crime on networks is serious. That's why you thank people for pointing out your problems without doing real damage. Because they help you to stop network crime.
When I said "economic benefit," I was refering to the fact that a cost-benefit analysis of a private corporation developing the technology to go faster than sound would never have yielded the results of a government-instituted program. In other words, there are some things that you just can't privatize. And I was saying that the fact that we had a huge government program to do it has yielded unbelievable results. You may be right that some benefits were self-evident, but we in no way could have predicted the cold war or our eventual dominance at the time that we developed supersonic travel. Therefore, no, the economic benefits were not self-evident. You think that merely because hindsight is 20/20.
There's no correspondingly obvious explanation for how getting to Mars will have a practical benefit.
Well, if we can settle on Mars, there's a pretty obvious practical benefit of not having every human being be subject to the same extenction-causing meteor. Another one of those things that would seem obvious in hindsight.
Furthermore, each incremental improvement to airplane speed was a measurable advantage in air superiority.
I don't think you're correct in that assertion. I think that air superiority at the time was measured either in terms of payload ("dropping bombs"), or maneuverability ("dog-fighting"). Also, you have to remember that the envelope that they were pushing had two sides - speed and altitude. Altitude wasn't a part of that air superiority. Anything beyond a few miles was completely meaningless, in any economic sense, in terms of the understanding of the people at the time.
But flying to Mars is all or nothing- if you travel it 20% of the way or 80%, you're still just lost in space.
Well, we've already been to Mars... So, your assertion about 20% or 80% might have meaning if we hadn't already succeeded. Now we're just delivering larger and larger payloads. And maybe someday, people.
How could Portugal have measured the potential benefits to the world of Columbus's voyage?
Recognizing human stupidity is being realistic. Hoping that humans will stop being stupid is being both irrational (we've never done it before, what makes you think that we can just CHANGE?), and will result in bad things (cutting funding for vital programs, for one).
Given that humans are stupid, we have to do everything we can to craft a smarter government that can make better decisions.
Heck, relying on corporate intelligence is just as dumb. Picture a stupid executive who can't imagine failure. Picture him making a nuclear power plant in downtown Manhattan. His Return for his investment could be HUGE! His investment is relatively TINY! His ROI is almost infinite! Except he fails, and kills 10 million people.
Stan 'The Man' Lee put it best, "With great power comes great responsibility."
You're right that corporations have the potential to do tremendous good for society, and that to a large degree, we as citizens can count on them to compete in such a way that we all get a lot of benefit from it. But corporations are only as smart as the people who run them, and they are under one hell of a lot less scrutiny than our government is. Checks and ballances. That was really the best part of the Constitution, if you ask me. I can better trust my Government to make non-harmful decisions than I can trust [insert random CEO here]. Especially since I'm the boss of that Government, and I get a say in how they work. I can't afford to own stock in every company, vote intelligently in every investment meeting, and advocate responsibility in every other stockholder. But I can sure as hell elect someone, and pay taxes, to make sure that there's at least SOME intelligence in double-checking every corporation.
You might argue that by buying or not buying a product, I'm making all of the difference that I need to. But what if I don't fscking want whales to go extinct? Boycotting whale meat canners won't cut it. And I can't get EVERYONE to care about my goal. Instead, I try to make sure that my government makes whale canning illegal, or at least hard enough to do that, even though there's a market (and there IS), that there's no way to do business with it.
What's the ROI for spending money to make whale extinction illegal? If you can answer that in economic terms, then maybe there's hope for your vision. But I think your response has to be, "I don't know." And maybe you say, "Nuke the whales," because of that very argument. And that, my friend, is why I'm glad that Government spends money on things that, if put to a vote, we'd never spend money on.
The answer is more money for government, not less. More regulation, to get what I want. More spending on research, and education, and investing in our future. Responsible Intellectual Property rights. On and on...
Competition in nature results in animals eating their young. Why do we assume that no bad results can come from competition in business?
A Government literally changes the Environment of Corporations. I can better control the actions of corporations by influencing my government's regulations than I can influence the decision of EVERY corporation.
To put it in Genetic Algorithm terms, every corporation tries to maximize ROI(x). A Government literally changes the function "ROI", thus influencing every corporation.
The "risk versus reward" analysis of "ROI" forgets that the rewards for incredibly risky behavior can be ENORMOUS. Like, for instance, building a cruddy nuclear power plant in the middle of Manhattan.
Alright, I'm rambling. I wish Slashdot had a better "ongoing conversation" mechanism... *shrug*
There was no benefit to going faster than speed of sound, either - until we built the best airforce in the world.
There was absolutely NO economic benefit of going faster than the speed of sound. In fact, there hardly ever was, and right now, you can't buy it if you want to, in the U.S. There was never any, ANY economic advantage to doing it.
Except that, our entire way of life today is predicated upon the fact that we did it - that our government paid for it, and we benefit from it.
NASA is the same exact thing! We were better than the Russians at flying into space, and Reagan convinced them that we could drop nukes on their head - stalemating and then finally ENDING the Cold War. (By bankrupting the Russians.) Ending the U.S.S.R. has created untold markets, not to mention the fact that even maintaining the Cold War prevented ALL-OUT war the likes of which the world has never seen.
You beneffited from that!!!
Stop saying that it has to make economic sense to have ANY VALUE. You're wrong!
To attack your Sprint point - if the government didn't regulate the airwaves, Sprint could never build their digital network. We spend money regulating them - that's not watching out for individual rights! Why do it? Because there's a huge benefit! Gah!
It's too "Friday before a three-day weekend" for me to remain entirely detached about this conversation... Enjoy!
There were brilliant models of the Earth as the center of the universe, with the Sun moving around it.
There were brilliant models of the Earth being flat - they were pretty simple, actually.
You're not interested in what you don't know, within an arbitrary amount of time.
You're right - you can't spend infinite money exploring every avenue in the hopes of learning everything. But that doesn't mean you stop altogether, or that there's no value to be had in searching.
Time and time again, the benefits of exploring things that we don't know has paid off huge - and often those explorations have been paid for by government money. We didn't know for sure if an atomic bomb could be made, for instance. The benefit of that has been, what?, 60 years of relatively peaceful world leadership for our society?
How about stopping polio? Or malaria? Those were pretty good public programs, too.
It's easy to think "I can buy anything I need" when you don't appreciate what others have bought for you.
- The people are smart enough to govern themselves.
- Capitalistic forces will always find the optimal solution to any problem.
You're wrong on both counts.
If you put it to a vote, everyone in the United States would have to worship Jesus Christ, and the Death Certificate of Elvis Presley would be declared invalid. And universities would get funding money for "astrological research." The world is too complex to let all of our decisions be made by people who merely BELIEVE in things. It's far, far better to try to elect a government that will make the best decisions they can. Sometimes they make bad moves, and sometimes they make good moves. Your primary role as a citizen in the U.S. is to make sure your government is run in a way that you agree with. Not that you necessarily agree with all of their choices, but that the process works.
How would you make national freeways? How can capitalistic forces balance the rights and freedoms of the individual versus the needs of society? People are not smart enough to research which lipstick manufacturer pours less toxic waste into the ocean - and to boycott the one that dumps more. They just aren't. And hoping that "concerned citizens" and the media will help achieve that optimal solution is pure foolishness. For one, media is run by corporations. The best way to achieve that balance is to give the power to make those decisions over to a government, and keep your government in check.
I'm glad that we as a society don't directly vote for government funding. I think we would make HORRIBLE choices. For one, we would probably vote away our national debt ("why should we pay?!"). We would probably stop aid to Afghanistan ("feed Americans, not Afghans!"). We would probably chop public schools ("I have a right to raise my kid like I want to - in Catholic schools!"). We would probably stop AIDS research ("Why should we pay to find a cure to a disease they got by sinning against God?"). We never would have gotten involved in the European Theater in WWII ("what have the Nazis ever done to us?"). There would be no national archive ("who cares about old books?"). The results of the Human Genome Project would be patented and copyright by [insert major corporation here] ("Why should taxpayers pay for something that a private company is perfectly willing to do?"). Hell, there would be no public domain! ("You mean someone could make pornography with Mickey Mouse in it! Hell no! Let Disney hold the Copyright forever, so we can PROTECT THE CHILDREN!")
Never underestimate the stupidity of a crowd. I, for one, am glad we don't live in a true Democracy.
You could - but the real problem is that right now, the cards aren't capable of enough instructions that you can do that "little bit of logic" that would allow you to intelligently "use a few pixels."
Also, the instructions you write don't have the random access to the pixels that you'd really need to do what you're suggesting. In essence, you can think of each pixel as being its own processor, but the program you can run on it is SEVERELY limited in capability.
Most of the time, you're able to decompose the problem into layers, and inspect each layer's output - but it's still pretty tricky.
It's kind of like being able to have only one printf("%f", data) in your entire program with which to debug. You can eventually figure out what's wrong, but it sure takes a while!
Fortunately, the programs are not really complex enough to make debugging in this manner that involved - but it's still pretty rough. And as the capabilities of the card increase, you'll be able to run longer and more complex programs - but the debugging tools are just not going to get much better - you'll still only have the one pixel to write to! You can write several different values at once, but you can only visually inspect one, two, or maybe as many as four of them at a time. (R, G, B and you might be able to visually tell something about Z.)
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Birth control is easy: don't want to get yourself or someone else pregnant? Don't fuck them... ALL other birth control methods have a failure rate associated with them, so to think it's 'safe' is a fallacy.
Well, according to Christians, sometimes virgins have babies, so there's a failure rate associated with abstinance, too.
*ducks flying Bible*
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Okay, just to piss in your cereal real quick...
We are warming the earth.[1]
There are three fundamental questions - does the earth regulate its temperature, is it regulating its temperature well enough to keep up with how fast we're warming it, and if not, is that dangerous in the long term.
Your answers to those three questions might differ from mine, but saying that it's "fiction" that we are warming the earth is asinine.
Yeah, I believe in the speed of light being constant - and I believe that space-time can be so curved that light cannot escape that region. (Effectively making time stop to zero, or to flow in the other direction.)
Throwing in the phrase "rapidly expanding matter" only pisses me off. That seems to say "sometimes, matter can go FASTER than light!" =) That's where the thought "utter tripe" jumped into my head.
The way I can see the argument, though, as another poster mentioned, was to think not of "rapidly expanding matter," but of "matter which exists in space that is rapidly expanding." It doesn't get me much closer to understanding, though...
To skip to your first point in this post, another way for me to insert "event horizon" into Big Bang solutions, is to look at the definition of an event horizon - "The event horizon is a boundary beyond which information will never reach an observer." I can see that as saying that "information will never reach someone outside of the universe." In other words, "An observer can't be outside of the universe." I don't think I used any clever semantic tricks in that argument, I'm just saying that, if our universe were (inside) a black hole inside of another universe, we could never know about it, and an observer in the larger universe would never get any information from inside our universe. Do you see where I'm going with this one?
I'm not saying the event horizon is caused by a gravitational singularity that we can observe inside our universe - I'm saying that we couldn't tell the difference between our universe existing inside of a gravitational singularity of a larger universe.
I'm confusing things by talking about this "larger universe," which I don't actually think exists. I'm just saying that my limited understanding of black holes and my limited understanding of the Big Bang lead me to believe that you can think of our universe as existing inside of a black hole. I guess I shouldn't actually say "black hole," here, though. I should say that I think that nothing will ever escape our universe (by moving away from it, anyway - I'm not talking about black holes in our universe), that space-time in our universe is curved but infinite, that expansion is accelerating, that the universe will burn out, rather than crunch back. All of these things are consistent with my understanding of a black hole (or at least, what MIGHT be happening, on the INSIDE of a black hole). Not necessarily a "gravitational singularity," but just a "singularity" of some sort, with an event horizon. *shrug*
Yeah, I'm talking as though there can be space within a black hole, where the very definition is a point singularity... *shrug* My layman mind is comfortable with that. =)
Thanks for the conversation, though. Like I said, I really do appreciate your time and thought on this one. I wish I could speak in person with someone who could help me understand some of these questions... I'd pay good community college money for something like that! =)
Slashdot Mirror
It's always amazing to me how much people think that God needs defending.
Your relationship with God is the only important thing in the universe, and you don't need a government to tell you how to have a good relationship with your deity.
And I don't need the government telling me how to have a good relationship with your deity. And you don't need the government telling you how to have a good relationship with my deity.
Our country is also strong enough to not have to declare that it exists through God's will. We made it, not God. The prophet George Washington didn't see a burning bush that implored him to lead his soldiers across the Delaware.
Our nation, like every human institution, is fallible. The more we bring God into it, the less we respect him, our nation, and ourselves.
God might help you make your personal choices, but you make bad decisions, too. Giving God the credit for your successes, and taking personal blame for your failures is dehumanizing to you and everyone else, and it leads to both a sense of false security (in your bad decisions), and false insecurity (questioning your relationship with God, just because you messed up.)
P.S. - if this comment pissed you off, then contemplate living in a country that forces you to worship a God that you don't believe in. Now, recognize that's exactly what you're asking other people to do in America. It's not YOUR country - it's OUR country. And the only way we can all get along, is to keep separate our personal and political worlds.
You have your personal relationship with your God, I have my personal relationship with my God - and the laws of this land should not give either one of us preferential treatment.
God != America
Right, the grand-parent is informative, and the parent is Flamebait. Good call, /. moderators. </sarcasm>
You, sir, are such an ass that it hurts my eyes to read!
Go to your friend's house, you know, the one who owns the $20,000 salt-water aquarium.
Place a big chunk of ice in the aquarium. Then sit back and see how the melting of ice does not rise the water level. Oh, wait, but it does kill all of the fish in the aquarium.
Then get back to your biology books and figure out why it does.
Oh, and PS - huge amounts of ice in Antarctica, which you point out, is sitting on the continent, is freaking melting. You may remember? In the news? Something something ice melting? Antarctica? Ring a bell?
In my experince, accepting the first piece of data that fits your assumptions is not the way to get at truth, but a way to sell books and get on the 6:00 news.
Oh yeah? What about stating that the increase in CO2 is undeniably a "Coincidence"? Is that bad science, too? Is there any evidence to back up your assertion that the one thing has nothing to do with the other?
We need experiments and more data before any sound scientific conclusion like that can be made.
I'm not saying it definitely is the cause of temperature increase, either - but starting your argument off with, "Coincidence" doesn't ring of scientific integrity, buddy.
That reminds me of the old joke...
At a lecture series, a scientist proclaimed that the sun would explode in two billion years, destroying all life on earth.
After the lecture, an old woman approached the scientist and asked, "Did you say the sun would explode in two million years?"
"No, ma'am," he replied, "I said it would explode in two BILLION years."
To which she responded, "Oh, thank heavens! I thought we all had something to worry about!"
I'm just picking on you, because you brought up the whole ice cube thing - which always drives me nuts.
Okay, so fresh water displaces salt water, and the levels stay about the same because of yadda yadda, hand-waving, yadda yadda.
Have you ever dropped a salt-water fish into a fresh-water tank?
An inside source reported that the break-up was partly due to the fact that one part of the ice shelf was seeing Yoko Ono. ;)
By the way, I just came across this (highly topical) article:
U.S., ABC Go To War
Upset federal officials are threatening criminal action against ABC News and its reporters for smuggling depleted uranium into the country to test customs inspections. "It is a question of whether or not journalists should be breaking the law in the pursuit of a news story," Homeland Security Department spokesman Dennis Murphy told the Associated Press. "It's not right for a reporter to rob a bank to prove the bank has lax security." Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Asa Hutchinson accused the reporter, Brian Ross, of "trying to carry out a hoax on our inspectors." Pointing out that the depleted uranium was harmless and that it was not the intent of the ABC news crew "to defraud the U.S. government, to smuggle in contraband or to avoid duties," ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider maintained that the sole purpose of the report was to call attention to lax screening procedures at the border. The report is due to air on ABC's Primetime Thursday tonight, on the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the U.S.
How do you feel about that?
The blaster patch was an optional download. It wasn't integrated into the normal Windows XP "New updates are ready; install them now?" update mechanism.
So, he's right. You're wrong.
That clear?
Thank you. I appreciate it.
I don't really advocate what this guy's done. But it's not too far a walk from "hacked this specific company, pointing out their security problem" to "hacked this specific software, pointing out its security problem." The first case is covered by things like laws on theft and trespassing, etc. Unfortunately, the second case is also covered - by DMCA. I think the DMCA is absolutely rediculous in this manner.
You could make the case that if I hack Outlook, and send an email to Microsoft telling them how to fix it - that I've done almost exactly the same thing as Lamo. I've damaged the property of Microsoft - their Outlook software, and their reputation. That, in fact, I've broken the law (DMCA), and am a criminal. That's nuts.
If I don't do any direct harm (by exploiting the bug), then I should be thanked. And if I'm not thanked, then the laws (DMCA) should be changed to protect me from them. Give me whistle-blower protection.
This case isn't a perfect one-to-one case to what I just described, but in my mind, there's some gray in there. They're 100% within their rights to prosecute him. But I don't think they should have. I think they're acting in an immoral manner. Pretty similar to the kind of immoral behavior that whistle-blower laws exist to protect us againt.
Thank you for the interesting conversation. Sorry about calling you a moron, earlier.
So, you just absolutely compltely refuse to even comment on my whistle-blower analogy?
Fine. I guess the conversation is over.
Well, if you watch the video, Lamo explains that when he tried to tell them how to fix the problem, they wouldn't even write down what he was telling them. So, to them, apparently, it's not "obvious that bugs and security lapses should be repaired, however they are discovered."
...toxic dumping that a corporation was doing.
I'm going to phrase a hypothetical, and walk you down the path, to show you the gray that you apparently can't see in this issue.
Stealing company confidential documents. "Whatever the motion, whatever actions are taken afterwards, breaking the law remains breaking the law, and anyone who does that is a criminal. To believe otherwise is to believe that anyone has the right to [steal company confidential documents], and that any criminal action vis-a-vis [stealing company confidential documents] is excusable if the criminal simply tells someone about the..."
If someone "steals" corporate documents that prove that the law was being broken, they are pretty well sheltered by whistle-blower laws. That's because society recognizes that more good is done by rewarding those who took a risk for the benefit of everyone. I mean, you can look into the legal arguments for whistle-blower laws, but I'm just paraphrasing those arguments down to "we protect them, because otherwise, we'd never know about the toxic dumping."
Now, yes, I am stretching the case to talk about a company with security holes, and someone outside the company who's blowing the whistle.
But I'm not going to passively sit here and let you call my example "utter nonsense."
Look, there's basically two ways of looking at this...
It's good to find bugs, because you can fix them.
It's bad to find bugs, because it's embarassing.
When someone logs a bug report, you're supposed to take it seriously. You're supposed to thank the person for reporting the bug. You're supposed to tell them that people will investigate the cause of the bug. You're supposed to try to reproduce the bug. You're supposed to hand the reproducable bug over to people whose responsibility it should be to fix the problem. They should track down the root cause, and attempt to fix it. They should also try to figure out what caused the bug to occur in the first place. They're supposed to report exactly what the bug was, exactly what caused it, and exactly how they fixed it. They might also log suggestions about how to resolve further bugs like this in the future. Some of this information is supposed to filter all of the way back to the person who logged the bug in the first place, to demonstrate that you took the bug seriously, and that the issue is resolved.
Any of that sound familiar?
Now, people like you, who apparently don't understand the value in removing bugs, get all upset as soon as the location the bug occured was a "security" problem.
I'm not suggesting that every company should put a $1000 bounty on its own security. Or that the company always ignore any damages that occured. But I am saying that, in many cases, the most responsible thing a company can do is to thank someone for pointing out their mistakes, especially if no real harm is done. I understand that this exact case might be slightly different (the LexusNexus searches added up real quick, apparently), but you seem to be completely inflexible on your stance that any "security breach" is a violation of law, and should therefore be punished to the maximum extent that the law provides.
In other words, cover up the mistake by prosecuting. It's this inattention to security that causes the security breaches in the first place.
You don't make crime go away by prosecuting the criminals. You make crime go away by trying to figure out how to stop it in the first place. Anyone that's willing to show you how to stop it in the first place is helping you.
If I'm a stockholder in a company that has such lax security that "a kid with an inflated ego" was able to break into their system, you're damn right I'd reward his behavior. Especially since he told them how to fix their problem.
The real harm that corporations should worry about is stockholders selling like crazy, because it becomes public information that their security was so horrible.
When the "kid with an inflated ego" tells you in a private forum that you've got a problem, and how to fix it, do you
A) thank him, fix the problem, and then fire your incompetent security team - thus protecting yourself from further intrusions, and maintaining your stock price, and protecting the investment of your stockholders...
or B) yell at him, take a few days to fix the problem, and file criminal charges, thus inviting investigation and reporting about your incompetence - thus inviting further intrusions from kids with even more inflated egos (who think they won't be caught), potentially dipping your stock price, and screwing up the investment of your stockholders...
You're damn right I'd thank him. And I wouldn't press charges, unless he had done real damage.
Crime on networks is serious. That's why you thank people for pointing out your problems without doing real damage. Because they help you to stop network crime.
Moron.
When I said "economic benefit," I was refering to the fact that a cost-benefit analysis of a private corporation developing the technology to go faster than sound would never have yielded the results of a government-instituted program. In other words, there are some things that you just can't privatize. And I was saying that the fact that we had a huge government program to do it has yielded unbelievable results. You may be right that some benefits were self-evident, but we in no way could have predicted the cold war or our eventual dominance at the time that we developed supersonic travel. Therefore, no, the economic benefits were not self-evident. You think that merely because hindsight is 20/20.
There's no correspondingly obvious explanation for how getting to Mars will have a practical benefit.
Well, if we can settle on Mars, there's a pretty obvious practical benefit of not having every human being be subject to the same extenction-causing meteor. Another one of those things that would seem obvious in hindsight.
Furthermore, each incremental improvement to airplane speed was a measurable advantage in air superiority.
I don't think you're correct in that assertion. I think that air superiority at the time was measured either in terms of payload ("dropping bombs"), or maneuverability ("dog-fighting"). Also, you have to remember that the envelope that they were pushing had two sides - speed and altitude. Altitude wasn't a part of that air superiority. Anything beyond a few miles was completely meaningless, in any economic sense, in terms of the understanding of the people at the time.
But flying to Mars is all or nothing- if you travel it 20% of the way or 80%, you're still just lost in space.
Well, we've already been to Mars... So, your assertion about 20% or 80% might have meaning if we hadn't already succeeded. Now we're just delivering larger and larger payloads. And maybe someday, people.
How could Portugal have measured the potential benefits to the world of Columbus's voyage?
Recognizing human stupidity is being realistic. Hoping that humans will stop being stupid is being both irrational (we've never done it before, what makes you think that we can just CHANGE?), and will result in bad things (cutting funding for vital programs, for one).
Given that humans are stupid, we have to do everything we can to craft a smarter government that can make better decisions.
Heck, relying on corporate intelligence is just as dumb. Picture a stupid executive who can't imagine failure. Picture him making a nuclear power plant in downtown Manhattan. His Return for his investment could be HUGE! His investment is relatively TINY! His ROI is almost infinite! Except he fails, and kills 10 million people.
Stan 'The Man' Lee put it best, "With great power comes great responsibility."
You're right that corporations have the potential to do tremendous good for society, and that to a large degree, we as citizens can count on them to compete in such a way that we all get a lot of benefit from it. But corporations are only as smart as the people who run them, and they are under one hell of a lot less scrutiny than our government is. Checks and ballances. That was really the best part of the Constitution, if you ask me. I can better trust my Government to make non-harmful decisions than I can trust [insert random CEO here]. Especially since I'm the boss of that Government, and I get a say in how they work. I can't afford to own stock in every company, vote intelligently in every investment meeting, and advocate responsibility in every other stockholder. But I can sure as hell elect someone, and pay taxes, to make sure that there's at least SOME intelligence in double-checking every corporation.
You might argue that by buying or not buying a product, I'm making all of the difference that I need to. But what if I don't fscking want whales to go extinct? Boycotting whale meat canners won't cut it. And I can't get EVERYONE to care about my goal. Instead, I try to make sure that my government makes whale canning illegal, or at least hard enough to do that, even though there's a market (and there IS), that there's no way to do business with it.
What's the ROI for spending money to make whale extinction illegal? If you can answer that in economic terms, then maybe there's hope for your vision. But I think your response has to be, "I don't know." And maybe you say, "Nuke the whales," because of that very argument. And that, my friend, is why I'm glad that Government spends money on things that, if put to a vote, we'd never spend money on.
The answer is more money for government, not less. More regulation, to get what I want. More spending on research, and education, and investing in our future. Responsible Intellectual Property rights. On and on...
Competition in nature results in animals eating their young. Why do we assume that no bad results can come from competition in business?
A Government literally changes the Environment of Corporations. I can better control the actions of corporations by influencing my government's regulations than I can influence the decision of EVERY corporation.
To put it in Genetic Algorithm terms, every corporation tries to maximize ROI(x). A Government literally changes the function "ROI", thus influencing every corporation.
The "risk versus reward" analysis of "ROI" forgets that the rewards for incredibly risky behavior can be ENORMOUS. Like, for instance, building a cruddy nuclear power plant in the middle of Manhattan.
Alright, I'm rambling. I wish Slashdot had a better "ongoing conversation" mechanism... *shrug*
God, you're driving me nuts.
There was no benefit to going faster than speed of sound, either - until we built the best airforce in the world.
There was absolutely NO economic benefit of going faster than the speed of sound. In fact, there hardly ever was, and right now, you can't buy it if you want to, in the U.S. There was never any, ANY economic advantage to doing it.
Except that, our entire way of life today is predicated upon the fact that we did it - that our government paid for it, and we benefit from it.
NASA is the same exact thing! We were better than the Russians at flying into space, and Reagan convinced them that we could drop nukes on their head - stalemating and then finally ENDING the Cold War. (By bankrupting the Russians.) Ending the U.S.S.R. has created untold markets, not to mention the fact that even maintaining the Cold War prevented ALL-OUT war the likes of which the world has never seen.
You beneffited from that!!!
Stop saying that it has to make economic sense to have ANY VALUE. You're wrong!
To attack your Sprint point - if the government didn't regulate the airwaves, Sprint could never build their digital network. We spend money regulating them - that's not watching out for individual rights! Why do it? Because there's a huge benefit! Gah!
It's too "Friday before a three-day weekend" for me to remain entirely detached about this conversation... Enjoy!
There were brilliant models of the Earth as the center of the universe, with the Sun moving around it.
There were brilliant models of the Earth being flat - they were pretty simple, actually.
You're not interested in what you don't know, within an arbitrary amount of time.
You're right - you can't spend infinite money exploring every avenue in the hopes of learning everything. But that doesn't mean you stop altogether, or that there's no value to be had in searching.
Time and time again, the benefits of exploring things that we don't know has paid off huge - and often those explorations have been paid for by government money. We didn't know for sure if an atomic bomb could be made, for instance. The benefit of that has been, what?, 60 years of relatively peaceful world leadership for our society?
How about stopping polio? Or malaria? Those were pretty good public programs, too.
It's easy to think "I can buy anything I need" when you don't appreciate what others have bought for you.
It comes down to two fundamental beliefs:
- The people are smart enough to govern themselves.
- Capitalistic forces will always find the optimal solution to any problem.
You're wrong on both counts.
If you put it to a vote, everyone in the United States would have to worship Jesus Christ, and the Death Certificate of Elvis Presley would be declared invalid. And universities would get funding money for "astrological research." The world is too complex to let all of our decisions be made by people who merely BELIEVE in things. It's far, far better to try to elect a government that will make the best decisions they can. Sometimes they make bad moves, and sometimes they make good moves. Your primary role as a citizen in the U.S. is to make sure your government is run in a way that you agree with. Not that you necessarily agree with all of their choices, but that the process works.
How would you make national freeways? How can capitalistic forces balance the rights and freedoms of the individual versus the needs of society? People are not smart enough to research which lipstick manufacturer pours less toxic waste into the ocean - and to boycott the one that dumps more. They just aren't. And hoping that "concerned citizens" and the media will help achieve that optimal solution is pure foolishness. For one, media is run by corporations. The best way to achieve that balance is to give the power to make those decisions over to a government, and keep your government in check.
I'm glad that we as a society don't directly vote for government funding. I think we would make HORRIBLE choices. For one, we would probably vote away our national debt ("why should we pay?!"). We would probably stop aid to Afghanistan ("feed Americans, not Afghans!"). We would probably chop public schools ("I have a right to raise my kid like I want to - in Catholic schools!"). We would probably stop AIDS research ("Why should we pay to find a cure to a disease they got by sinning against God?"). We never would have gotten involved in the European Theater in WWII ("what have the Nazis ever done to us?"). There would be no national archive ("who cares about old books?"). The results of the Human Genome Project would be patented and copyright by [insert major corporation here] ("Why should taxpayers pay for something that a private company is perfectly willing to do?"). Hell, there would be no public domain! ("You mean someone could make pornography with Mickey Mouse in it! Hell no! Let Disney hold the Copyright forever, so we can PROTECT THE CHILDREN!")
Never underestimate the stupidity of a crowd. I, for one, am glad we don't live in a true Democracy.
You could - but the real problem is that right now, the cards aren't capable of enough instructions that you can do that "little bit of logic" that would allow you to intelligently "use a few pixels."
Also, the instructions you write don't have the random access to the pixels that you'd really need to do what you're suggesting. In essence, you can think of each pixel as being its own processor, but the program you can run on it is SEVERELY limited in capability.
Most of the time, you're able to decompose the problem into layers, and inspect each layer's output - but it's still pretty tricky.
It's kind of like being able to have only one printf("%f", data) in your entire program with which to debug. You can eventually figure out what's wrong, but it sure takes a while!
Fortunately, the programs are not really complex enough to make debugging in this manner that involved - but it's still pretty rough. And as the capabilities of the card increase, you'll be able to run longer and more complex programs - but the debugging tools are just not going to get much better - you'll still only have the one pixel to write to! You can write several different values at once, but you can only visually inspect one, two, or maybe as many as four of them at a time. (R, G, B and you might be able to visually tell something about Z.)
*BUZZ* Thanks for playing!
The OpenGL 2.0 Shading Language instructions are executed on the video card's GPU. (That's why I mentioned it as a counter-example.)
There's no files to fprintf to, no console to output to - you're kind of up a creek.
Yeah, printf works real great for coding in OpenGL 2.0 Shading Language.
</sarcasm>
Birth control is easy: don't want to get yourself or someone else pregnant? Don't fuck them... ALL other birth control methods have a failure rate associated with them, so to think it's 'safe' is a fallacy.
Well, according to Christians, sometimes virgins have babies, so there's a failure rate associated with abstinance, too.
*ducks flying Bible*
Okay, just to piss in your cereal real quick...
We are warming the earth.[1]
There are three fundamental questions - does the earth regulate its temperature, is it regulating its temperature well enough to keep up with how fast we're warming it, and if not, is that dangerous in the long term.
Your answers to those three questions might differ from mine, but saying that it's "fiction" that we are warming the earth is asinine.
[1] Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Cool.
Yeah, I believe in the speed of light being constant - and I believe that space-time can be so curved that light cannot escape that region. (Effectively making time stop to zero, or to flow in the other direction.)
Throwing in the phrase "rapidly expanding matter" only pisses me off. That seems to say "sometimes, matter can go FASTER than light!" =) That's where the thought "utter tripe" jumped into my head.
The way I can see the argument, though, as another poster mentioned, was to think not of "rapidly expanding matter," but of "matter which exists in space that is rapidly expanding." It doesn't get me much closer to understanding, though...
To skip to your first point in this post, another way for me to insert "event horizon" into Big Bang solutions, is to look at the definition of an event horizon - "The event horizon is a boundary beyond which information will never reach an observer." I can see that as saying that "information will never reach someone outside of the universe." In other words, "An observer can't be outside of the universe." I don't think I used any clever semantic tricks in that argument, I'm just saying that, if our universe were (inside) a black hole inside of another universe, we could never know about it, and an observer in the larger universe would never get any information from inside our universe. Do you see where I'm going with this one?
I'm not saying the event horizon is caused by a gravitational singularity that we can observe inside our universe - I'm saying that we couldn't tell the difference between our universe existing inside of a gravitational singularity of a larger universe.
I'm confusing things by talking about this "larger universe," which I don't actually think exists. I'm just saying that my limited understanding of black holes and my limited understanding of the Big Bang lead me to believe that you can think of our universe as existing inside of a black hole. I guess I shouldn't actually say "black hole," here, though. I should say that I think that nothing will ever escape our universe (by moving away from it, anyway - I'm not talking about black holes in our universe), that space-time in our universe is curved but infinite, that expansion is accelerating, that the universe will burn out, rather than crunch back. All of these things are consistent with my understanding of a black hole (or at least, what MIGHT be happening, on the INSIDE of a black hole). Not necessarily a "gravitational singularity," but just a "singularity" of some sort, with an event horizon. *shrug*
Yeah, I'm talking as though there can be space within a black hole, where the very definition is a point singularity... *shrug* My layman mind is comfortable with that. =)
Thanks for the conversation, though. Like I said, I really do appreciate your time and thought on this one. I wish I could speak in person with someone who could help me understand some of these questions... I'd pay good community college money for something like that! =)