Ok. So if I can't refute your premise, and you can't refute my premise, then the problem with this site is what, in your eyes? That the people who hunt down exploits might make more money? That this could start an economy in glitches, where a programmer might intentionally insert exploitable flaws in software he's working on, with the intention of selling the exploit, then patching the program the next day? Something else?
So if this site never goes up, the exploits will never get into the hands of evil people? Yeah, that's likely. With this, the security companies would get a chance to bid too, and potentially keep the bug in-house.
Sure. Reverse Engineering - Legal. Stealing source code - Illegal. Just because you're discovering potentially exploitable flaws doesn't mean that you're actually breaking the law yourself.
Pacemakers don't beat the heart, they just tell the heart when to beat. If the heart can't beat on its own, you don't get a pacemaker, you get a transplant. Or a large pine box.
Heh. I remember my shop teacher teaching safety. He picked up a wooden dowel, compared it's thickness to that of his thumb, started the bandsaw, and swung the dowel into the blade in a sorta careless fashion. He then turned off the bandsaw, held up the bisected dowel, and said, "This is why safety is important."
Yes, my list was a steaming load, plus a Douglas Adams reference. The Hawking radiation one does subtract from the mass of the black hole, and follows the laws of thermodynamics, and thus could be a valid free energy mechanism, if we knew it existed, and could gather it, and could utilize it efficiently.
Everything else was just off the top of my head crap that didn't immediately seem completely implausible.
Doesn't have to violate anything. Don't forget about things like mining the past, utilizing Hawking radiation, utilizing vacuum energy, pulling energy from other universes, converting dark matter to energy, and a whole slew of things that seem stupid/impossible right now, but mathematically should be possible.
How much money do I really need? My needs and wants are actually fairly simple. Nice house. Decent car. Good food, which I sometimes wish to cook myself, and I sometimes want to have provided to me by a restaurant. Computers, at least one of which should be above average, the rest just need to be functional for my purposes (testing, mostly). High speed internet. Travel. Getting fixed when I break.
With an excess of time and money, I'd probably go back to school, take classes that interest me. But I don't need the kind of money you're talking about. Quite honestly, I don't want it. I like my life quiet, I don't want to deal with interviews and reporters and all the other crap that comes with the kind of fame that crushing Big Oil like a tiny bug gives you. I'd put some clause in the contract that involves my design being open-sourced after however many years, just so people can try to refine it, and to keep monopolies from continuing into perpetuity, no pun intended, but I don't want fame, and after a certain point, I don't want the money either.
I suppose that's a passable list, at least after that guy from Duke stole the beer-launching fridge. I know that there are a great many people who are interested in the bathroom webcams, especially if they are small and hard to detect.
With a little more seriousness, a material that allows air to pass at 1 atmosphere of pressure but doesn't allow water to pass regardless of pressure would be pretty cool.
Are you kidding me? If I were to invent something like this, it would be easy for "big oil" to bury it. $1,000,000,000. After taxes. That's enough for me to live well the rest of my life, doing the things that are interesting to me. I'm no marketing guru to be able to turn this into oodles of money on my own. Any attempt I make would likely result in much less money for me, and much more time spent. People on here are always talking about how no one ever laid on their deathbed and wished that they had spent more time working. This gets the best of both worlds.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one, either. It may be impossible for "big oil" to kill it without your consent, but they've got the money to make you consent.
What a wonderful way to train terrorists. Now you don't even need to find people who believe this is all for the best, you can just kidnap someone and have them brainwashed in a fairly rigorous couple of weeks. Do this mentally scarring thing. If they don't do it, you abuse them. If they do it, you make all the mental scarring go away, and reward them. Classical conditioning, with a lot less effort involved in making bad things seem good.
Need for gainful employment? Sure. But not that particular job.
Suppose I work at Google, and I get fired for something. This does not preclude my ever having a job again. I can get hired by Microsoft or Intel or ATI or some place that isn't a tech company where I'd be working on their internal IT staff. In the meantime, I can collect unemployment. The flip side is that if a company gets a reputation of firing people for frivolous reasons, people will start to ignore them when they're searching for work, and they'll have to settle for the employees that can't get hired at the places they wanted to work.
Here's another thing. Ethics are subjective. Some people find homosexuality to be morally bankrupt. Some don't. Death penalty. Abortion. Pick a controversial topic, and you will find that people on both sides of the debate hold the belief that they have the moral high ground. This is why we have laws for these things. If you would like to argue with the way a business treats its employees on an ethical basis, go ahead, but don't bother to mention laws that don't apply.
Oh, and businesses can make their own rules about who is and isn't allowed to have firearms on the premises. The 2nd amendment allows a well-regulated militia (everyone that isn't underage/felon/non-citizen) to have guns. The bank can say no, even if it's concealed and you have a valid permit. Actually enforcing that rule is likely to be difficult, if you don't know the gun is there, but you can be charged with trespassing for not following the rules that you need to to be there.
Story: Baldur's Gate. The original PC one, not the PS2 version. Gameplay: Half-Life 2 Graphics: Valkyrie Profile 2 Sounds: Valkyrie Profile 2 Replayability: Galactic Civilization 2 Uniqueness: Shadow of the Colossus
Only two of my games hit the list. And Tomb Raider made it on. There's no justice.
Because it isn't actually valid. The government is the only group constrained by the Bill of Rights. You want some examples? 1. You do not have freedom of speech in a theater. You have freedom of shutting the hell up. Theaters can remove you for talking, and they don't even have to give you a refund. 2. You do not have the right to keep and bear arms in many businesses. Try exercising your 2nd Amendment in a bank sometime, see how that works out for you. 3. Ok, this one is narrowly defined enough not to have a ready example. 4-8. These are all covered separately under other laws. Like murder, kidnapping, and theft. 9-10. Quite obviously and narrowly referring to the government.
You can get fired for saying bad things about your boss, even if they're true. You can get fired for playing Solitaire on a company machine during your coffee or smoke break. If you're an hourly wage slave instead of a salaried one, and you happen to live in an at-will employment state, you can be fired for looking a little too long at the boss' wife when she stops by, or even for no reason at all. There is a strict set of things that you can't be fired for. Everything else is fair game, and freedom of speech doesn't enter into it.
Which is why I brought up my friend with four distinct handwriting 'templates' across a couple months. There are a lot of ways to change your handwriting out of tolerances, assuming tolerances aren't so slack that they don't mean anything anyway. Broken finger, sprained wrist, dislocated shoulder, tennis elbow, allergic reactions, cuts, or even holding a pen/pencil/stylus of a different width.
This technology not only is not mature, but can likely never be made useful.
I remember a friend of mine breaking his wrist while wrestling. He had to learn how to write left handed for the duration. Believe it or not, his writing was notably different in each of four stages: pre-break, immediately post-break, later when he was getting used to the southpaw thing, and after it was healed and he could start writing right-handed again. There are other problems with this password system than some people just suck at writing.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok. So if I can't refute your premise, and you can't refute my premise, then the problem with this site is what, in your eyes? That the people who hunt down exploits might make more money? That this could start an economy in glitches, where a programmer might intentionally insert exploitable flaws in software he's working on, with the intention of selling the exploit, then patching the program the next day? Something else?
So if this site never goes up, the exploits will never get into the hands of evil people? Yeah, that's likely. With this, the security companies would get a chance to bid too, and potentially keep the bug in-house.
Sure. Reverse Engineering - Legal. Stealing source code - Illegal. Just because you're discovering potentially exploitable flaws doesn't mean that you're actually breaking the law yourself.
Or so he hears.
Pacemakers don't beat the heart, they just tell the heart when to beat. If the heart can't beat on its own, you don't get a pacemaker, you get a transplant. Or a large pine box.
Want to know what it will take to get perfect meaningful weather forecasting? Read Asimov's Caves of Steel.
Heh. I remember my shop teacher teaching safety. He picked up a wooden dowel, compared it's thickness to that of his thumb, started the bandsaw, and swung the dowel into the blade in a sorta careless fashion. He then turned off the bandsaw, held up the bisected dowel, and said, "This is why safety is important."
IT'S A TRAP!
Yes, my list was a steaming load, plus a Douglas Adams reference. The Hawking radiation one does subtract from the mass of the black hole, and follows the laws of thermodynamics, and thus could be a valid free energy mechanism, if we knew it existed, and could gather it, and could utilize it efficiently.
Everything else was just off the top of my head crap that didn't immediately seem completely implausible.
Doesn't have to violate anything. Don't forget about things like mining the past, utilizing Hawking radiation, utilizing vacuum energy, pulling energy from other universes, converting dark matter to energy, and a whole slew of things that seem stupid/impossible right now, but mathematically should be possible.
How much money do I really need? My needs and wants are actually fairly simple. Nice house. Decent car. Good food, which I sometimes wish to cook myself, and I sometimes want to have provided to me by a restaurant. Computers, at least one of which should be above average, the rest just need to be functional for my purposes (testing, mostly). High speed internet. Travel. Getting fixed when I break.
With an excess of time and money, I'd probably go back to school, take classes that interest me. But I don't need the kind of money you're talking about. Quite honestly, I don't want it. I like my life quiet, I don't want to deal with interviews and reporters and all the other crap that comes with the kind of fame that crushing Big Oil like a tiny bug gives you. I'd put some clause in the contract that involves my design being open-sourced after however many years, just so people can try to refine it, and to keep monopolies from continuing into perpetuity, no pun intended, but I don't want fame, and after a certain point, I don't want the money either.
I suppose that's a passable list, at least after that guy from Duke stole the beer-launching fridge. I know that there are a great many people who are interested in the bathroom webcams, especially if they are small and hard to detect.
With a little more seriousness, a material that allows air to pass at 1 atmosphere of pressure but doesn't allow water to pass regardless of pressure would be pretty cool.
Are you kidding me? If I were to invent something like this, it would be easy for "big oil" to bury it. $1,000,000,000. After taxes. That's enough for me to live well the rest of my life, doing the things that are interesting to me. I'm no marketing guru to be able to turn this into oodles of money on my own. Any attempt I make would likely result in much less money for me, and much more time spent. People on here are always talking about how no one ever laid on their deathbed and wished that they had spent more time working. This gets the best of both worlds.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one, either. It may be impossible for "big oil" to kill it without your consent, but they've got the money to make you consent.
What a wonderful way to train terrorists. Now you don't even need to find people who believe this is all for the best, you can just kidnap someone and have them brainwashed in a fairly rigorous couple of weeks. Do this mentally scarring thing. If they don't do it, you abuse them. If they do it, you make all the mental scarring go away, and reward them. Classical conditioning, with a lot less effort involved in making bad things seem good.
Or, you could end up having the drive stolen from you. What do you think is more likely?
Wrong! It was actually secret option C: accidentally drop the last Syquest drive, thus dooming civilization!
That's not uncommon either. Look at some of the names kids these days are getting stuck with.
Need for gainful employment? Sure. But not that particular job.
Suppose I work at Google, and I get fired for something. This does not preclude my ever having a job again. I can get hired by Microsoft or Intel or ATI or some place that isn't a tech company where I'd be working on their internal IT staff. In the meantime, I can collect unemployment. The flip side is that if a company gets a reputation of firing people for frivolous reasons, people will start to ignore them when they're searching for work, and they'll have to settle for the employees that can't get hired at the places they wanted to work.
Here's another thing. Ethics are subjective. Some people find homosexuality to be morally bankrupt. Some don't. Death penalty. Abortion. Pick a controversial topic, and you will find that people on both sides of the debate hold the belief that they have the moral high ground. This is why we have laws for these things. If you would like to argue with the way a business treats its employees on an ethical basis, go ahead, but don't bother to mention laws that don't apply.
Oh, and businesses can make their own rules about who is and isn't allowed to have firearms on the premises. The 2nd amendment allows a well-regulated militia (everyone that isn't underage/felon/non-citizen) to have guns. The bank can say no, even if it's concealed and you have a valid permit. Actually enforcing that rule is likely to be difficult, if you don't know the gun is there, but you can be charged with trespassing for not following the rules that you need to to be there.
Ok, I'm worried about the perverted mod who thought the doll thing was interesting instead of funny.
Story: Baldur's Gate. The original PC one, not the PS2 version.
Gameplay: Half-Life 2
Graphics: Valkyrie Profile 2
Sounds: Valkyrie Profile 2
Replayability: Galactic Civilization 2
Uniqueness: Shadow of the Colossus
Only two of my games hit the list. And Tomb Raider made it on. There's no justice.
Now can you show me on the doll where that bad man compiled you?
Because it isn't actually valid. The government is the only group constrained by the Bill of Rights. You want some examples?
1. You do not have freedom of speech in a theater. You have freedom of shutting the hell up. Theaters can remove you for talking, and they don't even have to give you a refund.
2. You do not have the right to keep and bear arms in many businesses. Try exercising your 2nd Amendment in a bank sometime, see how that works out for you.
3. Ok, this one is narrowly defined enough not to have a ready example.
4-8. These are all covered separately under other laws. Like murder, kidnapping, and theft.
9-10. Quite obviously and narrowly referring to the government.
You can get fired for saying bad things about your boss, even if they're true. You can get fired for playing Solitaire on a company machine during your coffee or smoke break. If you're an hourly wage slave instead of a salaried one, and you happen to live in an at-will employment state, you can be fired for looking a little too long at the boss' wife when she stops by, or even for no reason at all. There is a strict set of things that you can't be fired for. Everything else is fair game, and freedom of speech doesn't enter into it.
No, the fun way to discharge a capacitor is to toss it to your buddy. Good times in the Electrical circuits classes...
Also, you learn how to diagnose a circuit quite quickly when it's liable to be faulted every time you step out of the room.
Which is why I brought up my friend with four distinct handwriting 'templates' across a couple months. There are a lot of ways to change your handwriting out of tolerances, assuming tolerances aren't so slack that they don't mean anything anyway. Broken finger, sprained wrist, dislocated shoulder, tennis elbow, allergic reactions, cuts, or even holding a pen/pencil/stylus of a different width.
This technology not only is not mature, but can likely never be made useful.
Maxwell's Demon.
I remember a friend of mine breaking his wrist while wrestling. He had to learn how to write left handed for the duration. Believe it or not, his writing was notably different in each of four stages: pre-break, immediately post-break, later when he was getting used to the southpaw thing, and after it was healed and he could start writing right-handed again. There are other problems with this password system than some people just suck at writing.