Not a chance. MS has chosen to tie DX10 to their new display driver model (they completely rewrote the line between user-space DX and kernel-space DX), which is tied to changes in the kernel...which interacts with all sorts of other shit in Vista (etc, etc). It's not that it can't be implemented without the new driver model (after all, NVIDIA's already supporting DX10 equivalent OpenGL extensions on XP - and Linux), just that it has been implemented that way. There's no way MS will spend money doing a massive re-write/back-port of DX10...especially since that's one of the main selling points of Vista (now that an actual DX10 game has been released).
Haha. There's an old Bulgarian joke that runs along those lines:
The Soviet engineers have come up with a new plane that goes faster than anything the world's ever seen before. Only problem is that when it hits top speed the wings tear off. The engineers spend months trying different support structures, strange new materials, anything to make it work. Finally, one of them decides to try drilling a series of small holes where the wings meet the plane plane which, of course, solved the problem.
I guess it was funny back when my parents were still young...
Funny then how my web browser glitches up on my dual-core system exactly like it did on my old single core, and still doesn't manage to put more than a 30% load on the whole CPU. This isn't a case of one thread doing so much that others don't have a chance to run, it's just some engineer being bad at not synchronizing everything the worker threads do.
While many desktop applications can benefit from a multi-threaded design, it really isn't the same thing as parallel programming. The need to use threads has nothing to do with multiple cores suddenly being available, and everything to do with the fact that certain API calls block, certain operations can be done in the background, and that pure UI threads rarely use their entire time slice - something that's been true for a long time.
Everything means something to someone. That doesn't mean we should put everything on the news.
You should chose to tolerate them instead of hating them. You know, the word "love" is often used as a substitute for "really like". Stunningly enough, this is also true of the word "hate". I don't actually hate the reports - I'm sure as hell not going to kill anyone or even lose any sleep over it (but thanks for your concern, I think).
So, to elaborate on my prior post, what bothers me is that most of the "good thing" stories amount to "human interest" fluff pieces - which are nothing more than mindless entertainment that neither provokes thought nor enspires action. This piece has some of the characteristics of one of these stories, and I was just saying that it was nice to see some actual content.
It might improve your outlook on life. My outlook on life is exactly where it needs to be - neither despairing, nor paralyzed with joy. Go find someone else to make assumptions about, you insensitive clod!
It's useful for gaming and multimedia. Four cores can give some very impressive results when you're willing to put three of them to work on physics, or decoding an ultra-high-resolution movie stream, and then optimize (down to the level of minimizing cache misses) and debug the shit out of that code.
As for using Java or.NET, well, not so much. The memory model in most VMs is blissfully unaware of things like NUMA, and a shared allocator is bad - especially when you're in a runtime that encourages you to create many short-lived objects and then blocks all threads when it does a collection. Not saying that the VMs couldn't be written to handle these sorts of algorithms, it's just that AFAIK they aren't written that way now.
Just because a program is multi-threaded does not mean it is a parallel program. Agreed. Poor choice of words on my part. Replace multi-threading with parallel algorithms and the point still stands.
Note that win threads/pthreads/Java and the like are NOT in that subset. I don't disagree, thought I'd rather not pick on that point since people often use a tool built for one purpose for something completely different, and I really don't care to get into a flame war over which framework does what best right now.
It's useless in cases where you don't have shared memory (though, really, most "general-purpose" solutions are going to be useless in this case).
It's implementation is, essentialy, compiler magic. This automatically rules it out in a lot of cases where you need precise control of what your code is doing. If, for example, you need logic to spin for a few cycles while a DMA operation completes (so as to not interrupt/stall something else - and yes, people do actually optimize to that level on some platforms) you can't really add that to OMP unless your compiler vendor is willing to make the change for you. With a library based solution you can grab the code and hack your little change into the scheduler without relying on third parties who may or may not be willing to accomodate you.
That said, it's certianly not useless. I mean, it's damn amazing when it comes to quickly hacking some parallelism into a loop that wasn't really designed with multi-threading in mind.
It just became economical for just about every application to be written in parallel. Not really. Especially not in the desktop world. Seriously, why would any developer waste time and money multi-threading something as inherantly serial as an event loop that doesn't come anywhere near saturating even a single core?
What does a web browser need more than one core for? Or a word processor? Or an IM client? The only "desktop PC" type tasks I can think of that might actually be able to saturate even a single CPU are multimedia and gaming. In the case of the former, it's usually enough for the OS put the media player's threads on one core and everything else on another so they don't have to fight. In the case of the latter, well, video games hardly qualify for "just about every application".
Yes, I RTFA'd. I know, he didn't dwell on TBB. Yes I saw his conclusion:
But don't waste my time with new languages. With hundreds of languages and API's out there, is anyone really dumb enough to think "yet another one" will fix our parallel programming problems? No, I still don't agree. If people think they can do better than all the others they should damn well try, and if they do manage to do better (and don't license themselves into obscurity) then their ideas will spread and be useful to many. If he doesn't want to hear about it, fine, his loss. I for one dislike the notion of locking ourselves into turd-polishing mode.
[And next time I won't hit submit and then reply to myself when I meant to just hit preview...I hope]
They created two displays of gourmet jams. One display had 24 jars. The other had 6.
The larger display was better at getting people's attention. But the number of choices overwhelmed them and they just walked away with out deciding to purchase a jam. Er. Sorry, in my experience programmers tackle parallel programming because it's somewhere in the requirements of their program that they do so, not because it sounds cool. It's not like multi-threading is a random fad or anything. The only way this would have been a relevant comparison is if the group of people had been pre-screened to those who definitely intend to buy a Jam of some sort.
On top of that, if this really is something that affects programmers then why the hell aren't we all rendered utterly useless by the number of programming languages? Or all the possible ways one could format code? Etc.
But hey, the guy's writing in a "research" blog and, as in academia, when you don't have anything real to contribute you can cite something completely unrelated and pretend it has relevance.
Honestly, this sounds vaguely like "there's too much to choose from, so everyone just use Intel Thread Building Blocks, K? You can't possibly do better so just use our stuff because we cover all cases..."
On the one hand, this sounds like one of those feel-good bullshit non-news stories about Joe Random Public Being a Good Person (Let's All Feel Good About It), which I hate.
But on the other, the content isn't total bullshit. The man's doing something useful (and spreading Linux), which is pretty kick-ass.
China could do that, but it would be tantamount to economic suicide for them. You mean like the Great Leap Forward which was also a dumb idea but which they did anyway? Ideology drove Mao to implement the Great Leap Forward; anger could just as easily drive his successors to do something as drastic.
There's also the issue of whether China's leaders actually believe they need us in the first place. After all, they could easily tank the dollar, watch calmly as all their corporations go bankrupt (revert to total government ownership), declare free markets a failure, and revert to traditional communism. At that point boxes and boxes of trinkets become damn useful in terms using them to buy back the public's favor. Yes, the transition would be chaotic and their people would suffer, but they have a government that has considered mass suffering to be an acceptable trade-off for "progress" in the past.
Why they would even bother to open that can of worms is beyond me In light of all the other crap I've seen about AT&T, I wouldn't be surprised if they know that someone in power's got their back on this one. I mean, if someone's assured them that the Supreme Court will take their side no matter what, or that Congress is about to change the laws governing these issues, then their actions aren't as crazy as they seem.
Either that or their executives are insane and actually believe themselves to be gods or something...
Main Problem: NO experience, or education etc would increase a person's dependence on career staffers to give advice. Career staff members could gain enormous power and become targets for corruption. The end-result may not be as free and democratic as you'd like. Er, the system we have now doesn't particularly require experience or education because those aren't the qualities we choose our leaders for. We don't elect people for their ability to actually do things (I think most people understand that Bush isn't in Iraq flying fighter planes or shooting at the evil terrorists himself). We elect them based on their ideas, and trust that they'll delegate their authority to people who can, and are willing to, implement those ideas. Most of the government's actual power rests with those people, and their underlings, and in the beurocracies they inherit and leave to their successors.
The main problem isn't that the government is full of corrupting forces. The whole world is full of corrupting forces, it can't really be any other way, and trying to dance around the issue with elaborate electoral systems is pointless. The problem is that we don't have leaders that care enough about the ideas we elected them for. Time and time again they choose to make excuses, do nothing, propose a pathetic (and ultimately wrong) compromise, or attach themselves to some idiotic ideal that some university professor somewhere came up with in a vain attempt to sound intelligent because all they care about is their standing in the polls (or their next bribe). That's the problem: leaders that won't take risks for what they believe in because they're afraid that someone will boo, and that they won't be able to explain why their actions, while seemingly bad, were actually good.
That's the thing that really pisses me off about Bush. He's got the whole "do what I think is right" thing down. He just refuses to actually explain himself (no, Mr. President, just saying "terrorists" doesn't count - we know they're out to get us, that's why they're called "terrorists", go back to the part where you explain how your policies actually make us safer). But that's probably because his reasons are stupid (or criminal) and he knows that they'd be rejected, and he understands that if he acknowledges that "the people" really do exist, he might actually have to listen to them and be democratic about the way he's running the country.
The only risky thing about choosing strong leaders is that we might end up with a demagogue like Hitler. Then again, that's what the separation of powers and the legislative process are supposed to be for - allowing strong, popular or otherwise, leadership while making sure it stays sane.
No, no one will be arrested because a flag. Don't you realize what this system is supposed to do. Reduce the amount of material that has to go through human eyes. In theory I agree with that statement but in practice I'd be worried about the cops getting lazy (lazy occasionally being pronounced as "overwhelmed with other aspects of their work") and, over time, turning "the computer said he's suspicious" to "the computer said he's being subversive - arrest him now".
In the latter case though, it means monitoring guys trusting the system too much and not watching the NON FLAGGED videos, and missing on ACTUAL suspicious activity which doesn't look suspicious to a computer system. I absolutely agree with this bit. The more police focus on guys with beards and turbans, the easier it gets for real terrorists (you know, the kind that's laughing as we throw out all the real security measures for high-tech placebos, waiting for the right moment to strike) to shave, put on a suit and a pair of nice shoes, style their hair, and walk into a building of their choice with a briefcase full of [insert doomsday device here].
We don't need devices that measure deviation from "the norm" (whatever that means in a society as diverse as ours). We need real, trained, skilled, and disciplined people walking the streets, keeping an eye out for trouble.
Nah. They'd be smarter to find a way to get their enemies to fight them on their own land. Kind of like the Russians did against Napoleon and in WWII (not sure about WWI - I understand that was kind of a mess due to the revolution). They just kept falling back until winter set in or the invading force is so overstretched that they could easily be crushed. Both times they won with inferior forces (though admitadely at great cost).
After all, you don't have to project power when your enemy is willing to come to you at their own expense.
Come to think of it they could do both. Lure the enemy close and then simply hide the important power structures and surrender the rest. See how long a few invading soldiers can enforce their will against the Chinese masses. As soon as the enemy declares victory and withdraws the old regime comes out of hiding and either sets up shop like before or works to control the new regime from behind the scenes (which is smarter since then enemy wouldn't be provoked into immediately returning).
First off: I'm not completely convinced that this is just a case of government represses eccentric citizen. As the parent noted, there isn't enough information to say what the motivations for the fraud charge were. But, whether the man's innocent or not, there are some interesting issues here...
Now again, they should not have handled it the way they did. They should have been a lot nicer and lest gung ho about the whole situation, but they should have, and did, handle the situation, and that's good.
Agreed. There's really no reason to harrass this guy. Keeping an eye on him might be a good idea (cue surveilance state rhetoric) but making his life miserable isn't warranted (yet, as far as I can tell).
He admits that he was recreating germ warfare experiments from the 50s using different bacteria. He says the bacteria isn't harmful, but his rig is similar to one used on extremely harmful ones.
This, in my mind, is enough to justify some serious police scrutiny. Just to expand on that a little:
Think of this as the reverse of AT&T filtering the internet for pirated movies. In the AT&T case, they can go ahead and spend all the money in the world building the filters and the P2P comunity will thwart them in a hartbeat. End of story, right? Wrong. Because once they have all those computers sitting there, hooked up to the communications infrastructure, it doesn't matter if they're currently assigned to a pointless task (screwing with illegal torrents), because they can easily be reassigned to other things like, say, filtering religeous/political/whatever views off of the internet (again, all this info could be P2P'd but this would cut off huge numbers of people that simply aren't going to think to look for news in a torrent site).
Furthermore, it becomes much easier to institute other forms of content filtering without generating public outcry. All the work to put the servers in place will have been done for "legitimate" reasons. Switching the servers to "filter political candidate X out of existence" can then be done remotely by someone who can be keep his mouth shut, with no pesky employees talking to the media about "boxes and boxes of strange equipment being installed all over the country".
The problem with what he did is similar. He's setting up equipment that could be used for germ warfare. And the "well, that mouldy loaf in my fridge..." argument doesn't even begin to apply here since he's building a lab that exist specifically for that purpose - this is not a case of "Oh, is that your alarm clock? I thought it was a bomb. It is ticking". The issue isn't that he can't really cause any harm by applying germ warfare procedures to benign bacteria, it's that there's no guarantee that he won't put some harmful bacteria into it in the future. He hasn't committed a crime, but he's set himself up so that, if he ever intends to commit said crime, he can do so more quickly, and while taking fewer risky actions that might alert the authorities to his intent.
But as I said above, this is probably a good reason to watch this man, but it isn't a good reason to be a dick. If the mail-order bacteria happens to be harmless, so much the better, appologize to the man for delaying his shipment (if he even notices) and make sure you test the next one and the next one after that in case it turns out he really is a lunatic/terrorist that's out to kill a bunch of people. It sounds like a lot of work, but really it is the best way to go, since enforcement ends up committing its resources where threats actually exist and doesn't waste money pushing bogus charges through the legal system (and then on PR when the public is outraged over the abuses).
And, as onerous as being watched by the government sounds, it's worlds better than being, publicly, shoved through the legal system. The former has a creepy sort of vibe and leaves you feeling violated (if you even notice, that is). The latter can cost you your job and all the things that job
I'm just surprised this guy wasn't hired by their government. A cyber-attack would be a pretty good start to their next war, especially against their highly industrialized (and networked) neighbors. You could disrupt their economy for days (or weeks, depending on how good the worm is) before launching an actual attack and nobody could really counterattack right off the bat because they'd think it was just another random teenager in his basement up to no good...
wild-eyed theory that bad regimes make for a smarter and more motivated populous How is this "wild-eyed theory"? It should be fairly obvious. If group A goes through school surrounded by peers and media that tell them they need to be pretty or sexy or cool and that being a nerd is uncool, and group B goes through school constantly reminded that if they fail and can't find jobs they'll end up starving on the street - which group will, on average, be more motivated to study? Do you really not see the difference between a culture where reckless behavior is encouraged (go ahead, waste your hard-earned money, buy stuff...we have cheap credit to bail you out!) and a culture that's had 70 years of "your uncle lost his (manual labor) job due to an injury and died on the street because we had no room to take him in and no money to feed him" and "your great-grandfather died in a labor camp, he was sent there because he constantly skipped work"?
Arguing over "smarter" is pointless (we'd probably flame each other to death just defining "smart") but I certainly think a case can be made for "more motivated" and, say, "more disciplined". Interestingly enough, discipline is something that has been shown to have a positive effect on education...but let's not go drawing any conclusions...
There's a difference between "excel in school and you'll magically get a job that earns you more money" and "excel in school and find a way to be useful to someone with power, or live your (significantly shorter) life subsistence farming/in the infantry/in abject poverty". Let's not forget that the lower bound on their standard of living is a hell of a worse than ours is, and that the prospect of starving to death can be an excellent motivator.
On top of that their culture doesn't waste its energy pushing kids to be popular/pretty/famous/waste their money on idiotic media trash/etc. It's rather busy teaching them to survive.
shocking corruption under increasingly authoritarian rule could be so enlightened. Bwahaha.
Yeah, because people that live a hard life under evil dictator overlords could never possibly figure out how to get (slightly) ahead in life all by themselves. Only people in western, democratic nations with massive runaway bureaucracies under weak-willed poll-chasing "leadership" could ever be clever enough to figure out the basics of survival.
(Dumbfuck.) Yeah...right...
The sooner the so-called "First" world gets over the notion that people living in the "Third" world are "just like us, except poorer", the better.
They're going to treat it just like they do when they use Windows. No. They aren't. They're going to do everything they can to become proficient with the technology. They're going to do this because intelligence is highly valued in Russia and life is much better for those that can prove that they have it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not a chance. MS has chosen to tie DX10 to their new display driver model (they completely rewrote the line between user-space DX and kernel-space DX), which is tied to changes in the kernel...which interacts with all sorts of other shit in Vista (etc, etc). It's not that it can't be implemented without the new driver model (after all, NVIDIA's already supporting DX10 equivalent OpenGL extensions on XP - and Linux), just that it has been implemented that way. There's no way MS will spend money doing a massive re-write/back-port of DX10...especially since that's one of the main selling points of Vista (now that an actual DX10 game has been released).
Fixed!
Haha. There's an old Bulgarian joke that runs along those lines:
The Soviet engineers have come up with a new plane that goes faster than anything the world's ever seen before. Only problem is that when it hits top speed the wings tear off. The engineers spend months trying different support structures, strange new materials, anything to make it work. Finally, one of them decides to try drilling a series of small holes where the wings meet the plane plane which, of course, solved the problem.
I guess it was funny back when my parents were still young...
Funny then how my web browser glitches up on my dual-core system exactly like it did on my old single core, and still doesn't manage to put more than a 30% load on the whole CPU. This isn't a case of one thread doing so much that others don't have a chance to run, it's just some engineer being bad at not synchronizing everything the worker threads do.
While many desktop applications can benefit from a multi-threaded design, it really isn't the same thing as parallel programming. The need to use threads has nothing to do with multiple cores suddenly being available, and everything to do with the fact that certain API calls block, certain operations can be done in the background, and that pure UI threads rarely use their entire time slice - something that's been true for a long time.
So, to elaborate on my prior post, what bothers me is that most of the "good thing" stories amount to "human interest" fluff pieces - which are nothing more than mindless entertainment that neither provokes thought nor enspires action. This piece has some of the characteristics of one of these stories, and I was just saying that it was nice to see some actual content. It might improve your outlook on life. My outlook on life is exactly where it needs to be - neither despairing, nor paralyzed with joy. Go find someone else to make assumptions about, you insensitive clod!
It's useful for gaming and multimedia. Four cores can give some very impressive results when you're willing to put three of them to work on physics, or decoding an ultra-high-resolution movie stream, and then optimize (down to the level of minimizing cache misses) and debug the shit out of that code.
.NET, well, not so much. The memory model in most VMs is blissfully unaware of things like NUMA, and a shared allocator is bad - especially when you're in a runtime that encourages you to create many short-lived objects and then blocks all threads when it does a collection. Not saying that the VMs couldn't be written to handle these sorts of algorithms, it's just that AFAIK they aren't written that way now.
As for using Java or
It's useless in cases where you don't have shared memory (though, really, most "general-purpose" solutions are going to be useless in this case).
It's implementation is, essentialy, compiler magic. This automatically rules it out in a lot of cases where you need precise control of what your code is doing. If, for example, you need logic to spin for a few cycles while a DMA operation completes (so as to not interrupt/stall something else - and yes, people do actually optimize to that level on some platforms) you can't really add that to OMP unless your compiler vendor is willing to make the change for you. With a library based solution you can grab the code and hack your little change into the scheduler without relying on third parties who may or may not be willing to accomodate you.
That said, it's certianly not useless. I mean, it's damn amazing when it comes to quickly hacking some parallelism into a loop that wasn't really designed with multi-threading in mind.
What does a web browser need more than one core for? Or a word processor? Or an IM client? The only "desktop PC" type tasks I can think of that might actually be able to saturate even a single CPU are multimedia and gaming. In the case of the former, it's usually enough for the OS put the media player's threads on one core and everything else on another so they don't have to fight. In the case of the latter, well, video games hardly qualify for "just about every application".
[And next time I won't hit submit and then reply to myself when I meant to just hit preview...I hope]
On top of that, if this really is something that affects programmers then why the hell aren't we all rendered utterly useless by the number of programming languages? Or all the possible ways one could format code? Etc.
But hey, the guy's writing in a "research" blog and, as in academia, when you don't have anything real to contribute you can cite something completely unrelated and pretend it has relevance.
Honestly, this sounds vaguely like "there's too much to choose from, so everyone just use Intel Thread Building Blocks, K? You can't possibly do better so just use our stuff because we cover all cases..."
I had exactly the same reaction. I'm going on the assumption that there's a flying pig hidden somewhere out of sight.
On the one hand, this sounds like one of those feel-good bullshit non-news stories about Joe Random Public Being a Good Person (Let's All Feel Good About It), which I hate.
But on the other, the content isn't total bullshit. The man's doing something useful (and spreading Linux), which is pretty kick-ass.
There's also the issue of whether China's leaders actually believe they need us in the first place. After all, they could easily tank the dollar, watch calmly as all their corporations go bankrupt (revert to total government ownership), declare free markets a failure, and revert to traditional communism. At that point boxes and boxes of trinkets become damn useful in terms using them to buy back the public's favor. Yes, the transition would be chaotic and their people would suffer, but they have a government that has considered mass suffering to be an acceptable trade-off for "progress" in the past.
Absolutely. Someone please mod the parent up.
Either that or their executives are insane and actually believe themselves to be gods or something...
Mod parent, er, um...
The main problem isn't that the government is full of corrupting forces. The whole world is full of corrupting forces, it can't really be any other way, and trying to dance around the issue with elaborate electoral systems is pointless. The problem is that we don't have leaders that care enough about the ideas we elected them for. Time and time again they choose to make excuses, do nothing, propose a pathetic (and ultimately wrong) compromise, or attach themselves to some idiotic ideal that some university professor somewhere came up with in a vain attempt to sound intelligent because all they care about is their standing in the polls (or their next bribe). That's the problem: leaders that won't take risks for what they believe in because they're afraid that someone will boo, and that they won't be able to explain why their actions, while seemingly bad, were actually good.
That's the thing that really pisses me off about Bush. He's got the whole "do what I think is right" thing down. He just refuses to actually explain himself (no, Mr. President, just saying "terrorists" doesn't count - we know they're out to get us, that's why they're called "terrorists", go back to the part where you explain how your policies actually make us safer). But that's probably because his reasons are stupid (or criminal) and he knows that they'd be rejected, and he understands that if he acknowledges that "the people" really do exist, he might actually have to listen to them and be democratic about the way he's running the country.
The only risky thing about choosing strong leaders is that we might end up with a demagogue like Hitler. Then again, that's what the separation of powers and the legislative process are supposed to be for - allowing strong, popular or otherwise, leadership while making sure it stays sane.
We don't need devices that measure deviation from "the norm" (whatever that means in a society as diverse as ours). We need real, trained, skilled, and disciplined people walking the streets, keeping an eye out for trouble.
Nah. They'd be smarter to find a way to get their enemies to fight them on their own land. Kind of like the Russians did against Napoleon and in WWII (not sure about WWI - I understand that was kind of a mess due to the revolution). They just kept falling back until winter set in or the invading force is so overstretched that they could easily be crushed. Both times they won with inferior forces (though admitadely at great cost).
After all, you don't have to project power when your enemy is willing to come to you at their own expense.
Come to think of it they could do both. Lure the enemy close and then simply hide the important power structures and surrender the rest. See how long a few invading soldiers can enforce their will against the Chinese masses. As soon as the enemy declares victory and withdraws the old regime comes out of hiding and either sets up shop like before or works to control the new regime from behind the scenes (which is smarter since then enemy wouldn't be provoked into immediately returning).
Now again, they should not have handled it the way they did. They should have been a lot nicer and lest gung ho about the whole situation, but they should have, and did, handle the situation, and that's good.
Agreed. There's really no reason to harrass this guy. Keeping an eye on him might be a good idea (cue surveilance state rhetoric) but making his life miserable isn't warranted (yet, as far as I can tell).
He admits that he was recreating germ warfare experiments from the 50s using different bacteria. He says the bacteria isn't harmful, but his rig is similar to one used on extremely harmful ones.
This, in my mind, is enough to justify some serious police scrutiny. Just to expand on that a little:
Think of this as the reverse of AT&T filtering the internet for pirated movies. In the AT&T case, they can go ahead and spend all the money in the world building the filters and the P2P comunity will thwart them in a hartbeat. End of story, right? Wrong. Because once they have all those computers sitting there, hooked up to the communications infrastructure, it doesn't matter if they're currently assigned to a pointless task (screwing with illegal torrents), because they can easily be reassigned to other things like, say, filtering religeous/political/whatever views off of the internet (again, all this info could be P2P'd but this would cut off huge numbers of people that simply aren't going to think to look for news in a torrent site).
Furthermore, it becomes much easier to institute other forms of content filtering without generating public outcry. All the work to put the servers in place will have been done for "legitimate" reasons. Switching the servers to "filter political candidate X out of existence" can then be done remotely by someone who can be keep his mouth shut, with no pesky employees talking to the media about "boxes and boxes of strange equipment being installed all over the country".
The problem with what he did is similar. He's setting up equipment that could be used for germ warfare. And the "well, that mouldy loaf in my fridge..." argument doesn't even begin to apply here since he's building a lab that exist specifically for that purpose - this is not a case of "Oh, is that your alarm clock? I thought it was a bomb. It is ticking". The issue isn't that he can't really cause any harm by applying germ warfare procedures to benign bacteria, it's that there's no guarantee that he won't put some harmful bacteria into it in the future. He hasn't committed a crime, but he's set himself up so that, if he ever intends to commit said crime, he can do so more quickly, and while taking fewer risky actions that might alert the authorities to his intent.
But as I said above, this is probably a good reason to watch this man, but it isn't a good reason to be a dick. If the mail-order bacteria happens to be harmless, so much the better, appologize to the man for delaying his shipment (if he even notices) and make sure you test the next one and the next one after that in case it turns out he really is a lunatic/terrorist that's out to kill a bunch of people. It sounds like a lot of work, but really it is the best way to go, since enforcement ends up committing its resources where threats actually exist and doesn't waste money pushing bogus charges through the legal system (and then on PR when the public is outraged over the abuses).
And, as onerous as being watched by the government sounds, it's worlds better than being, publicly, shoved through the legal system. The former has a creepy sort of vibe and leaves you feeling violated (if you even notice, that is). The latter can cost you your job and all the things that job
I'm just surprised this guy wasn't hired by their government. A cyber-attack would be a pretty good start to their next war, especially against their highly industrialized (and networked) neighbors. You could disrupt their economy for days (or weeks, depending on how good the worm is) before launching an actual attack and nobody could really counterattack right off the bat because they'd think it was just another random teenager in his basement up to no good...
Arguing over "smarter" is pointless (we'd probably flame each other to death just defining "smart") but I certainly think a case can be made for "more motivated" and, say, "more disciplined". Interestingly enough, discipline is something that has been shown to have a positive effect on education...but let's not go drawing any conclusions...
On top of that their culture doesn't waste its energy pushing kids to be popular/pretty/famous/waste their money on idiotic media trash/etc. It's rather busy teaching them to survive. shocking corruption under increasingly authoritarian rule could be so enlightened. Bwahaha.
Yeah, because people that live a hard life under evil dictator overlords could never possibly figure out how to get (slightly) ahead in life all by themselves. Only people in western, democratic nations with massive runaway bureaucracies under weak-willed poll-chasing "leadership" could ever be clever enough to figure out the basics of survival. (Dumbfuck.) Yeah...right...
The sooner the so-called "First" world gets over the notion that people living in the "Third" world are "just like us, except poorer", the better.