Has "security researcher" become the code for for confidential informant?
No. The guy is literally a PhD student who studies computer security.
Why else would the "researcher" go out of his way to "inform" the FBI?
I don't know why "inform" was in quotes. He did it because he saw that an HVAC system at a hospital was compromised, and thought that could pose a danger to human beings. He called the police and FBI with information about who had done it. And considering that the person with remote control of the HVAC system was planning on shutting it down in a hospital, causing ? deaths on July 4th, the reporting researcher saved lives.
Why do articles even call them "security researchers"? Now if this guys job is to investigate hackers, then he should be called a "cyber crime investigator"
Again, because he was a guy who researches security. Who noticed something and reported it. It's not his primary or official job to find hackers. Or, in this case, self-aggrandizing script kiddies.
Equality is not the sacred thing you seem to think it is. To paraphrase Margaret Thatcher, it is better to have a higher standard of living for the majority in a society with a high disparity than it is to have a lower standard of living for the majority in a society of greater equality.
You could go with Rawls (paraphrased): Inequalities are acceptable if they makes the worst off in the new system better off than the worst off without those inequalities.
"So what if I mess around with the HVAC controller in this hospital? I have SERIOUS HACKER BUSINESS to conduct!"
He had been experimenting with fucking with the HVAC controls on purpose (turning off automated alarms for temperature levels, shutting down AC), and was going to fuck up the hospitals air conditioning, in Dallas, TX, on July 4th.
Exactly. As Cullen Hightower said: "There's always somebody who is paid too much, and taxed too little - and it's always somebody else."
I'm not paid too much, but I am taxed too little. I would gladly raise my own tax rates by 5% if it applied to everyone making as much as I am or more (esp. if it applied to Warren Buffet, etc. who currently have their salaries as investment income.)
I always ask people, at what magical number does 'theft' become 'economic justice'?
That stupid rhetorical device has been done to death. At what level does a full head of hair become bald? At what level does the sand grains I collect one at a time in a location become a heap?
Obviously, if one person owned everything, it would be justified (if only so that people he did not like could eat), and if everyone was equally wealthy it would not be justified. The presence of a grey area may lend itself to long arguments about the optimum points to put tax rate changes, but it cannot be used to dismiss the concepts out of hand.
copyright protections would not apply to works that were "released" globally but not available in your territory. Which would, in most cases, give the industry a choice between "simultaneous worldwide releases" or "three days of legal, state endorsed piracy-mania in Europe".
So your solution is to stop having them call it "globally-released", and instead call it "US-released"?
Which would, in most cases, give the industry a choice between "simultaneous worldwide releases" or "three days of legal, state endorsed piracy-mania in Europe".
I don't see how that follows at all. Once I can release at a non-global scale (something that is important to sell publishers a manuscript, for instance), all you've done is insist that nothing is ever "globally released". Suddenly you're paying for access to a late beta, or a US-version release (never to be released in Europe... that's a totally different product with a totally different color menu).
There is a story about the dresses Lindsay Lohan wears to her court dates on the New York Times home page right now
No it doesn't. Right now, the front page of the digital version covers the news in Japan (quite a few articles), an article on UN resolutions about Lybia, a couple of articles about the Arab revolutions in general and an article about the value of not getting a college education.
There are also lots of fluffy pop stories like "Proud to be Japanese" and how to find a drink in Times Square.
Yeah, "Proud to be Japanese" was an editorial about how the uptick in national pride as a result of the response to the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear problems. It's an editorial. It's allowed to be a little fluffy. It also talked about the long-term lack of national pride, and the causes thereof.
It's a paper for NY. All papers have local resturant/bar reviews.
But compare to foxnews.com for example. Stories on the top of their front page are pretty sensical, dealing with major international issues. As you go down to features, you see the following offshoots (with pictures): 50 Stars in Nude Pic Sting;
St. Paddy's Without Beer?; Pole Dancing for Jesus?
How cheap would it be if they had access to everything you purchase to eat (in home or at restaurants), and you chose to change your lifestyle to maximize those discounts? Life insurance would obviously follow suit, as they would be privy to all of your daily activities and risk mitigation.
Fuck that. Seriously.
Smoking/not smoking is a legitimite line. But I don't want my life dictated by insurance companies. Because what happens is that the pool will become 'low-risk' and 'high-risk', and people will be pushed into eating correctly, according to some company. Which means the 'high-risk' pool gets risker, and thus more expensive. Continue down this feedback loop until I cannot get a fucking hamburger and keep my health insurance.
Insurance is insane these days...health, life, car, home, renters, flood, the list goes on and on and on. I don't know how you feel, but as an average American, I'm rather sick and tired of watching a good portion of my income disappear every month just so I can abide by local laws (car insurance), or make myself and my family feel semi-comfortable that we won't be financially ass-raped in the event that a medical emergency happens.
There are lots of other ways to lower insurance rates. Health care is about making that 1 stitch free as opposed to covering 7 of the 9 later, and still making the families bankrupt. Car insurance is about increasing the compliance rates. Home insurance rates are primarily about attacking the root causes of crime. For flood insurance, we could stop building million dollar homes on flood plains.
Even if everybody is tracked this information is available to everyone, it still isn't fair to individuals. Everyone can watch and pick apart the lives of an individual, but an individual cannot watch everyone else at the same time to the same degree.
Yeah, Scott Adams added a whole mess of supercomputers with AI that everyone could use for data-mining to his hypothetical. I mean, a lot of what he says "you can drive really fast because you would know no people/cars/pets were around, leading to conditional speed limits" make sense, but it's more "perfect knowledge-ville" than "everyone tracked using modern technology-ville". I mean, he even insists that confusing cell-phone plans would be obviated, by law or sufficient knowledge on everyone's part.
TFA says that you can save up to 30% on your car insurance because of reduced vandalism. Then it goes on to speculate about how people would be willing to give up privacy for a cost saving of 30% in their cost of living.
It does neither. It says that in the current real world, you can get 30% off your car insurance by letting them place a GPS tracker in your car. He then uses it as the basis for a thought experiment for how much money people could save by living in no-privacy city. He expressly does not try to compute the savings. The final line is "I'm just curious what sort of price, in economic terms, and in convenience and in social benefits, we pay for our privacy. My guess is that it's expensive."
Ha, I bought lunch at Burger King yesterday and couldn't even buy a milkshake for dessert without raising suspicion and an ID check due to running a second transaction too soon after the first. Compared to cash, electronic payment has far more options for preventing theft.
Actually, that's a way of mitigating the damages from theft, not preventing theft. Similar to how a $25 purchase doesn't usually require a signature or your ATM has a daily withdrawl limit.
Buying things on the web has benefits for me. Prices are cheaper, and stuff shows up at my door instead of taking my time to get. In other words, I don't go to the grocery store, and use the Internet to pay. It solves a problem I really have. How does this solve any problem?
I already have to carry my wallet because it has my ID and cash in it. I already need to make an active selection of which account to use. I can already carry just a method of payment that doesn't use batteries, is waterproof, thinner (smaller in every dimension), more flexible and I can get replaced for free if I don't want to carry my whole wallet.
As opposed to the victim is blameless bullshit from the Democrats? Really?
"The banker didn't tell me that there would be a balloon payment at the end of my 5-year adjustable rate. I took out a loan that I didn't understand. I'm a VICTIM!!"
"Real-estate ALWAYS goes up in value. Nobody told me this was a bubble, even though prices were doubling every few years. I'm a VICTIM!!"
"I was just trying to cash in on the 30% returns of these financial products that I didn't understand AT ALL! I'm a VICTIM!!"
Yeah, none of those examples tanked the economy or hurt me. The aggregate did. But the people who were supposed to measure the overall volatility and risk of the those loans failed. People should lose their homes, and the bankers should be held accountable by losing their jobs and/or bonus. Hell, I can see rolling-back past bonuses as well.
So those thinks support wealth creation, but they do not represent wealth creation. When the highway is complete, the money taken from citizens has not provided additional wealth, it has simply turned into a highway
What do you think wealth creation is, other than turning some amount of resources into goods worth more than that. Yes, the Internet and GPS increased the wealth of the world. So did building a highway, assuming it was worth more than what was paid for it.
None of those things will fill a silo with grain, allow a family to buy a bigger house, or allow a manufacturer to expand his production facility.
And that's actually retarded. For instance, a highway system allows someone to live further from a city and keep the commute at max_time_for_commute. That means that the amount of land people can live on increases. Which directly translates to bigger parcels of land for the same cost, which again directly into bigger houses for the same cost.
Similar land costs apply to increasing production capacity.
But you're right. Technological innovation and infrastructure don't directly lead to increased agricultural yields. That's at least one level of indirection away.
My mom likely uses 1GB or less a month... why should she get charged the same as me who uses 100GB easily? Granted, it shouldn't be linear... but I put more load on the system, I should pay more.
You haven't proven this. You use more in aggregate, but load depends on when you used it. If you only use the internet between 3 and 5 am, and distribute your 100GB evenly, while your mother downloads her one gig when the system is most congested, then she is probably putting more strain on the system.
If being raped in prison is to be part of the punishment then the judge should state the number of times during sentencing.
I disagreed with the statement about the fitness measure for a society. I also disagree with allowing prison rape to continue.
Why not just use the death penalty for every crime? Cheaper than imprisoning people, zero re-offending rate, what's the catch?
For one, you don't want to encourage kidnappers, armed robbers, etc to commit murder. So you do need something worse. Secondly, it's not cheaper. But third, I never said that they weren't deserving of some rights. I think if we can rehabilitate them, bully for society. I'd like that. I just see how society treats children born into poverty by providing them the means and encouragement to become middle-class+ to be a good measure of society, and how society treats criminals by rehabilitating and deterring future crimes to be a good measure of society. So if electroshock is the best way to accomplish both of those goals (without encouraging more witness killing), then great.
Why do we have a whole bunch of people taking money from us without our consent, deciding what we should or should not do, and then enforcing those rules upon us?
They don't. You're free to move to another country and denounce your original citizenship. There are legitimate reasons to oppose government policies. That is not one of them.
Or did you mean "Why do I have to pay for a package of government services, as opposed to only the ones that I like?"
Yeah, it's not like there was a story on Slashdot today about how the German government got fed up and went back to Windows after a decade long experiment, citing among other reasons Ubuntu switching around the UI constantly.
So time spent fiddling with a Windows system is somehow magically free?
I have a Windows machine and a Ubuntu machine. The Windows machine gets used for a lot more, while the Ubuntu machine gets used primarily for surfing/word processing (without Flash). The Ubuntu machine locks up (in Firefox) and needs to be rebooted more often than the Windows machine.
That is to say, I spend less time fiddling with Windows
Also, will someone please explain to me why I have/bin and/read-write/bin and/readonly/bin (and then every other directory doing the same thing)?
Slashdot Mirror
No. The guy is literally a PhD student who studies computer security.
I don't know why "inform" was in quotes. He did it because he saw that an HVAC system at a hospital was compromised, and thought that could pose a danger to human beings. He called the police and FBI with information about who had done it. And considering that the person with remote control of the HVAC system was planning on shutting it down in a hospital, causing ? deaths on July 4th, the reporting researcher saved lives.
Again, because he was a guy who researches security. Who noticed something and reported it. It's not his primary or official job to find hackers. Or, in this case, self-aggrandizing script kiddies.
You could go with Rawls (paraphrased): Inequalities are acceptable if they makes the worst off in the new system better off than the worst off without those inequalities.
He had been experimenting with fucking with the HVAC controls on purpose (turning off automated alarms for temperature levels, shutting down AC), and was going to fuck up the hospitals air conditioning, in Dallas, TX, on July 4th.
Fuck him right in the ear.
Hey, he assembled a mighty 14-large computer cluster to DDoS rival group Anonymous. He was totally gonna kick their ass!
I'm not paid too much, but I am taxed too little. I would gladly raise my own tax rates by 5% if it applied to everyone making as much as I am or more (esp. if it applied to Warren Buffet, etc. who currently have their salaries as investment income.)
That stupid rhetorical device has been done to death. At what level does a full head of hair become bald? At what level does the sand grains I collect one at a time in a location become a heap?
Obviously, if one person owned everything, it would be justified (if only so that people he did not like could eat), and if everyone was equally wealthy it would not be justified. The presence of a grey area may lend itself to long arguments about the optimum points to put tax rate changes, but it cannot be used to dismiss the concepts out of hand.
Then you would never be able to return anything for more than 1/2 of what you paid for it.
So your solution is to stop having them call it "globally-released", and instead call it "US-released"?
I don't see how that follows at all. Once I can release at a non-global scale (something that is important to sell publishers a manuscript, for instance), all you've done is insist that nothing is ever "globally released". Suddenly you're paying for access to a late beta, or a US-version release (never to be released in Europe... that's a totally different product with a totally different color menu).
Paul Krugman.
No it doesn't. Right now, the front page of the digital version covers the news in Japan (quite a few articles), an article on UN resolutions about Lybia, a couple of articles about the Arab revolutions in general and an article about the value of not getting a college education.
Yeah, "Proud to be Japanese" was an editorial about how the uptick in national pride as a result of the response to the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear problems. It's an editorial. It's allowed to be a little fluffy. It also talked about the long-term lack of national pride, and the causes thereof.
It's a paper for NY. All papers have local resturant/bar reviews.
But compare to foxnews.com for example. Stories on the top of their front page are pretty sensical, dealing with major international issues. As you go down to features, you see the following offshoots (with pictures): 50 Stars in Nude Pic Sting; St. Paddy's Without Beer?; Pole Dancing for Jesus?
Well, this is their third attempt at digital subscriptions, so I would hope they are improving.
And Murdoch has nothing to do with the NYT.
In response to someone who says they use Netflix? If only there was a way to watch Netflix on your Xbox.
And if not streaming, it's no harder to select a DVD on Netflixs than a torrent on BT.
Fuck that. Seriously.
Smoking/not smoking is a legitimite line. But I don't want my life dictated by insurance companies. Because what happens is that the pool will become 'low-risk' and 'high-risk', and people will be pushed into eating correctly, according to some company. Which means the 'high-risk' pool gets risker, and thus more expensive. Continue down this feedback loop until I cannot get a fucking hamburger and keep my health insurance.
There are lots of other ways to lower insurance rates. Health care is about making that 1 stitch free as opposed to covering 7 of the 9 later, and still making the families bankrupt. Car insurance is about increasing the compliance rates. Home insurance rates are primarily about attacking the root causes of crime. For flood insurance, we could stop building million dollar homes on flood plains.
Yeah, Scott Adams added a whole mess of supercomputers with AI that everyone could use for data-mining to his hypothetical. I mean, a lot of what he says "you can drive really fast because you would know no people/cars/pets were around, leading to conditional speed limits" make sense, but it's more "perfect knowledge-ville" than "everyone tracked using modern technology-ville". I mean, he even insists that confusing cell-phone plans would be obviated, by law or sufficient knowledge on everyone's part.
It does neither. It says that in the current real world, you can get 30% off your car insurance by letting them place a GPS tracker in your car. He then uses it as the basis for a thought experiment for how much money people could save by living in no-privacy city. He expressly does not try to compute the savings. The final line is "I'm just curious what sort of price, in economic terms, and in convenience and in social benefits, we pay for our privacy. My guess is that it's expensive."
Hey, I can hate NFC, applaud Apple in this one case, and have the only Apple product I own be an old USB keyboard from an iMac.
Actually, that's a way of mitigating the damages from theft, not preventing theft. Similar to how a $25 purchase doesn't usually require a signature or your ATM has a daily withdrawl limit.
Buying things on the web has benefits for me. Prices are cheaper, and stuff shows up at my door instead of taking my time to get. In other words, I don't go to the grocery store, and use the Internet to pay. It solves a problem I really have. How does this solve any problem?
I already have to carry my wallet because it has my ID and cash in it. I already need to make an active selection of which account to use. I can already carry just a method of payment that doesn't use batteries, is waterproof, thinner (smaller in every dimension), more flexible and I can get replaced for free if I don't want to carry my whole wallet.
I'd be pretty scared if I couldn't remember five minutes ago.
Yeah, none of those examples tanked the economy or hurt me. The aggregate did. But the people who were supposed to measure the overall volatility and risk of the those loans failed. People should lose their homes, and the bankers should be held accountable by losing their jobs and/or bonus. Hell, I can see rolling-back past bonuses as well.
What do you think wealth creation is, other than turning some amount of resources into goods worth more than that. Yes, the Internet and GPS increased the wealth of the world. So did building a highway, assuming it was worth more than what was paid for it.
And that's actually retarded. For instance, a highway system allows someone to live further from a city and keep the commute at max_time_for_commute. That means that the amount of land people can live on increases. Which directly translates to bigger parcels of land for the same cost, which again directly into bigger houses for the same cost.
Similar land costs apply to increasing production capacity.
But you're right. Technological innovation and infrastructure don't directly lead to increased agricultural yields. That's at least one level of indirection away.
You haven't proven this. You use more in aggregate, but load depends on when you used it. If you only use the internet between 3 and 5 am, and distribute your 100GB evenly, while your mother downloads her one gig when the system is most congested, then she is probably putting more strain on the system.
I disagreed with the statement about the fitness measure for a society. I also disagree with allowing prison rape to continue.
For one, you don't want to encourage kidnappers, armed robbers, etc to commit murder. So you do need something worse. Secondly, it's not cheaper. But third, I never said that they weren't deserving of some rights. I think if we can rehabilitate them, bully for society. I'd like that. I just see how society treats children born into poverty by providing them the means and encouragement to become middle-class+ to be a good measure of society, and how society treats criminals by rehabilitating and deterring future crimes to be a good measure of society. So if electroshock is the best way to accomplish both of those goals (without encouraging more witness killing), then great.
Why do it's enemies matter?
And these people are treated badly because they are criminals, not because they are the least powerful or least valued.
They don't. You're free to move to another country and denounce your original citizenship. There are legitimate reasons to oppose government policies. That is not one of them.
Or did you mean "Why do I have to pay for a package of government services, as opposed to only the ones that I like?"
Yeah, it's not like there was a story on Slashdot today about how the German government got fed up and went back to Windows after a decade long experiment, citing among other reasons Ubuntu switching around the UI constantly.
I have a Windows machine and a Ubuntu machine. The Windows machine gets used for a lot more, while the Ubuntu machine gets used primarily for surfing/word processing (without Flash). The Ubuntu machine locks up (in Firefox) and needs to be rebooted more often than the Windows machine.
That is to say, I spend less time fiddling with Windows
Also, will someone please explain to me why I have /bin and /read-write/bin and /readonly/bin (and then every other directory doing the same thing)?