The phraseology of the report seems to mean guilty conscience yes, but to play the devil's advocate:
How long was this silence? was it a week, a month? Five minutes, before the sup was on the horn with our colo-admin here? Scale is a very important factor.
Does access mean adjustment? If a log states they read the page for thirty seconds, and made no edits, does this count as "accessing" or perhaps a mis-entered command? Again, scale of incident creates scope of outrage.
re arguments further up: If a plumber finds dirty magazines under my sink while fixing a pipe, fine. If I hear him say something about all those drugs behind my bedroom wall, I'd be a bit frightened. In short; was the database accessed related to the problem at hand and, perhaps, distracting to the helldesker? It says he missed the boat, but by how far? Another db entry, or a completely different db altogether?
This might be a scary case. As a designer who hosts third-party for a number of reasons, I've always been at the mercy of my web lessor, and I've come to understand that sometimes they gloss over some things they do in their attempts to help because, by and large, small independants have no clue what it would mean anyway.
That being said, there should have been a report. If not permission, then at least an explanation of some kind, which it doesn't sound as if there was.
Sad but true. Patricularely, with public focus so heavy on music and movies as the IP currency-du-jour, other artists are feeling the strain of reduced focus. It's getting harder, for example, for new writers to get into the business.
Publishing houses are less profitable than ever, compared to other industries, and as such look ever more for blue chip authors and bigger names to spend their capital on, rather than expanding the market and diluting the shares.
Readership appears to be hitting rock-bottom. My last book study group dropped from fifteen to five, mostly because seven of the members joined a World of Warcraft clan and "no longer had time" for trivial study.
It always surprises me, even though by now it shouldn't, to see yet more bureaucracy offered as a stop-gap answer to public concern.
There's a thick marketing campaign in Canada to eliminate phosphorous from household fertilizers, calling for people to choose "X-0-X" rated fertilizers (where the X values are other chemicals, and phosphorous is 0). It'll be interesting to see if there's any effect, or if commercial over-fertilizing is just too high a share of the damage.
This week's lesson: this discovery comes not long after phosphorus was eliminated from most household laundry detergents by federal law.
According to a chemistry major I know, adding one gram or so of phosphorus can cause more devastating algae ownage than adding two or three kilograms of carbon.
Long term planning is nothing new. The Antikythera Mechanism, for one, was designed long before computers and had the task of calculating(very accurately in fact) the exact paths and positions of the local celestial bodies. However, while the mechanism itself withstood enough chronological decay to allow current epoch researchers to piece it back together, it's unlikely that it was constructed with forethought, and no documentation or preparation seemed evident in its discovery. As Hillis mentions in his essay:
"I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?
I wonder if other current builders use this practice, or if our "Now Now Now" attitude precludes it's usefulness?
Fiction explores this concept often. The Kwisatz Haderach in Frank Herbert's Dune is a great example. The Babylon 5 series and it's undercurrents of recursive history is another. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. The Lexx series - the original movies, not their child series that has been recently run.
Interpritation is at least nine-tenths of law; intention is deffinately much weaker. Who decides what is immoral? A lot of things that seem part of my every day life might be anathema to my employer, especially if it's in a vague area like general morality (I'm not talking religion or creed here, just ethics).
If I'm a hunter and my boss is a vegan, can he fire me? Likewise, if I go to a pro-union seminar, and the corporation I work for is anti-union, I might be labelled as a rabble-rouser and blacklisted. Where does this fall under the rule of online disclosure? It's easy to argue that you shouldn't post stupid stuff online, but everyone's definition of stupid differs.
No one can watch out for every possible angle they might be attacked from. All law being retroactive, it's IMPOSSIBLE to act in a "perfectly legal" manner, and to expect otherwise is foolish.
If engineering is bound by laws, we're all tanked. Law is always (I must stress this, ALWAYS) written in hindsight. If anyone, under any objective engineers around expected law, or with the paranoia over future legal distinction that some people work under, nothing is ever going to get done.
Adversarial programming may be a bore, but it's better than nothing. Recall how many advances are made in wartime, versus complacent progress during peace. Now, this is not to say that war and peace can be equated easily with any kind of format war, but with the majority of commercial developers striving to find some kind of hook by which to hoist the quality of their products, advances are tumbling over each other. HSDPA roll-out for wireless here in N.America - 1.8mbps, then 3.6mbps and now (golly gee) 7.2mbps! Less than a year from roll-out, and some providers are still struggling with level1 launch dates! It's an amazing thing!
Net Neutrality is a hot-button issue for a lot of people. But I can't help thinking that without a very tough adversarial system, none of these concerns would ever have come up. What we need is not less competition; it's less sore winners and losers. We might be going about things differently, but the goal is still the same: advancement over stagnation.
"My religion says nothing about the physical world, and my science says nothing about the supernatural."
Well said. Confused or not, I'd say it's worth noting the Loud Minority almost always get their way faster than the Silent Majority. Unfortunate facts of life.
Don't discount the size of this discovery. Single cellular mutations in tissue can have very far-reachign effects. When it (re: spontaneous changes) occur in the human body, it's called cancer and is often dire.
And Dire Bacteria is a very frightening thought.
So, not one person playing MMOs these days spent any time online gaming before there WERE MMOs? I feel old.
I recall, fondly, the days when half of my online compatriots disappeared for weeks on end after being booted out of college for spending too much time online chatting, playing -text based- roleplaying games, -freeform- on chats such as Alamak and The Keep. Hell, I barely graduated high school thanks to my own idiocy: spending night after night up developing characters, cohesing storylines, sketching out designs for newer, better villains. I know one person who lost out on a fellowship because of the Game - and another who dropped out of university three times because they couldn't (or wouldn't) get a handle on what was going on.
And people are making a big deal over this as if it's the latest version of crack since - well - crack? Give me a break.
People will always be addicted to something. We're human; we like being altered. Be it caffiene, meth, pot - sex, sports, stock trading. Whatever it is that blows your hair back, you want more of it. Sometimes I wonder if addictions only get labelled addictions because they can't be parleyed into some form of sociological benefit or industry.
At least not for those addicted. I'm sure it could be argued that Blizzard falls into the same category as some other EnablingCorporations I could mention. But who cares, right? People smoke and drink in the movies all the time. Who ever saw a hot film-noir leading lady who had a penchent for dungeon crawling?
Slashdot Mirror
we'd get stoned with a swarm of fragments instead of one big piece, yet the same mass and total energy.
Getting stoned is way more trouble than it's worth.
The phraseology of the report seems to mean guilty conscience yes, but to play the devil's advocate:
How long was this silence? was it a week, a month? Five minutes, before the sup was on the horn with our colo-admin here? Scale is a very important factor.
Does access mean adjustment? If a log states they read the page for thirty seconds, and made no edits, does this count as "accessing" or perhaps a mis-entered command? Again, scale of incident creates scope of outrage.
re arguments further up: If a plumber finds dirty magazines under my sink while fixing a pipe, fine. If I hear him say something about all those drugs behind my bedroom wall, I'd be a bit frightened. In short; was the database accessed related to the problem at hand and, perhaps, distracting to the helldesker? It says he missed the boat, but by how far? Another db entry, or a completely different db altogether?
This might be a scary case. As a designer who hosts third-party for a number of reasons, I've always been at the mercy of my web lessor, and I've come to understand that sometimes they gloss over some things they do in their attempts to help because, by and large, small independants have no clue what it would mean anyway.
That being said, there should have been a report. If not permission, then at least an explanation of some kind, which it doesn't sound as if there was.
You always expect college/uni educated people to go through life never once saying "YO! What's this do?" but apparently that just isn't the case.
I love how people who hate Slashdot spend enough time here to make inane and pedantic comments like this.
Way to go, lurker. Way to go.
The best way to make anyone else look bad, is to suceed and make yourself look better.
FSF Fails.
My understanding of slashdot culture says red meat and bar fights are nigh on impossible to inspire here anyway.
Somehow a group of rowdy sysadmins taking over the local rusty nail frightens me in a way only that sexy Bill Gates picture ever has.
Pastor Martin Niemoller
Sad but true. Patricularely, with public focus so heavy on music and movies as the IP currency-du-jour, other artists are feeling the strain of reduced focus. It's getting harder, for example, for new writers to get into the business.
Publishing houses are less profitable than ever, compared to other industries, and as such look ever more for blue chip authors and bigger names to spend their capital on, rather than expanding the market and diluting the shares.
Readership appears to be hitting rock-bottom. My last book study group dropped from fifteen to five, mostly because seven of the members joined a World of Warcraft clan and "no longer had time" for trivial study.
It always surprises me, even though by now it shouldn't, to see yet more bureaucracy offered as a stop-gap answer to public concern.
There's a thick marketing campaign in Canada to eliminate phosphorous from household fertilizers, calling for people to choose "X-0-X" rated fertilizers (where the X values are other chemicals, and phosphorous is 0). It'll be interesting to see if there's any effect, or if commercial over-fertilizing is just too high a share of the damage.
Asia Ferguson was killed by a roller coaster. [News Link]
I have NO IDEA where the bloody Batman thing comes from.
This week's lesson: this discovery comes not long after phosphorus was eliminated from most household laundry detergents by federal law.
According to a chemistry major I know, adding one gram or so of phosphorus can cause more devastating algae ownage than adding two or three kilograms of carbon.
But Will It Blend?
Long term planning is nothing new. The Antikythera Mechanism, for one, was designed long before computers and had the task of calculating(very accurately in fact) the exact paths and positions of the local celestial bodies. However, while the mechanism itself withstood enough chronological decay to allow current epoch researchers to piece it back together, it's unlikely that it was constructed with forethought, and no documentation or preparation seemed evident in its discovery. As Hillis mentions in his essay:
"I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?
I wonder if other current builders use this practice, or if our "Now Now Now" attitude precludes it's usefulness?
Fiction explores this concept often. The Kwisatz Haderach in Frank Herbert's Dune is a great example. The Babylon 5 series and it's undercurrents of recursive history is another. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. The Lexx series - the original movies, not their child series that has been recently run.
Interpritation is at least nine-tenths of law; intention is deffinately much weaker. Who decides what is immoral? A lot of things that seem part of my every day life might be anathema to my employer, especially if it's in a vague area like general morality (I'm not talking religion or creed here, just ethics).
If I'm a hunter and my boss is a vegan, can he fire me? Likewise, if I go to a pro-union seminar, and the corporation I work for is anti-union, I might be labelled as a rabble-rouser and blacklisted. Where does this fall under the rule of online disclosure? It's easy to argue that you shouldn't post stupid stuff online, but everyone's definition of stupid differs.
No one can watch out for every possible angle they might be attacked from. All law being retroactive, it's IMPOSSIBLE to act in a "perfectly legal" manner, and to expect otherwise is foolish.
That's as many as six tens.
And that's terrible.
If engineering is bound by laws, we're all tanked. Law is always (I must stress this, ALWAYS) written in hindsight. If anyone, under any objective engineers around expected law, or with the paranoia over future legal distinction that some people work under, nothing is ever going to get done.
Adversarial programming may be a bore, but it's better than nothing. Recall how many advances are made in wartime, versus complacent progress during peace. Now, this is not to say that war and peace can be equated easily with any kind of format war, but with the majority of commercial developers striving to find some kind of hook by which to hoist the quality of their products, advances are tumbling over each other. HSDPA roll-out for wireless here in N.America - 1.8mbps, then 3.6mbps and now (golly gee) 7.2mbps! Less than a year from roll-out, and some providers are still struggling with level1 launch dates! It's an amazing thing!
Net Neutrality is a hot-button issue for a lot of people. But I can't help thinking that without a very tough adversarial system, none of these concerns would ever have come up. What we need is not less competition; it's less sore winners and losers. We might be going about things differently, but the goal is still the same: advancement over stagnation.
"My religion says nothing about the physical world, and my science says nothing about the supernatural." Well said. Confused or not, I'd say it's worth noting the Loud Minority almost always get their way faster than the Silent Majority. Unfortunate facts of life.
Don't discount the size of this discovery. Single cellular mutations in tissue can have very far-reachign effects. When it (re: spontaneous changes) occur in the human body, it's called cancer and is often dire. And Dire Bacteria is a very frightening thought.
You don't have enough vespene gas!
So, not one person playing MMOs these days spent any time online gaming before there WERE MMOs? I feel old. I recall, fondly, the days when half of my online compatriots disappeared for weeks on end after being booted out of college for spending too much time online chatting, playing -text based- roleplaying games, -freeform- on chats such as Alamak and The Keep. Hell, I barely graduated high school thanks to my own idiocy: spending night after night up developing characters, cohesing storylines, sketching out designs for newer, better villains. I know one person who lost out on a fellowship because of the Game - and another who dropped out of university three times because they couldn't (or wouldn't) get a handle on what was going on. And people are making a big deal over this as if it's the latest version of crack since - well - crack? Give me a break. People will always be addicted to something. We're human; we like being altered. Be it caffiene, meth, pot - sex, sports, stock trading. Whatever it is that blows your hair back, you want more of it. Sometimes I wonder if addictions only get labelled addictions because they can't be parleyed into some form of sociological benefit or industry. At least not for those addicted. I'm sure it could be argued that Blizzard falls into the same category as some other Enabling Corporations I could mention. But who cares, right? People smoke and drink in the movies all the time. Who ever saw a hot film-noir leading lady who had a penchent for dungeon crawling?