"Well, considering that burning coal puts out more radioactivity than nuclear energy (not to mention all the soot, CO2, CO, etc)".
I assume you are not including the Chernobyl Disaster, nor the 3 mile island release (small but alarming). The problem here is not how much containment but what is the failure mode. Try as we may, we still make mistakes and materials are not perfect, and business and governments cut corners to save money, sometimes taking bribes on the way. There will be some administrator or polititian that will say, "I don't want to pay for repairs, they cost too much." and pass a problem on the the next administator until it becomes too costly and things will go wrong, very wrong and a portion of the country (some country) will be un-inhabitable for thousands of years. Because someone thought they could squeeze a little more out of the money sponge.
We generally don't figure the costs correctly. There is a big ballon payment potential with nuclear energy that is generally not considered. Not just the long term storage of waste, (reprocessing lessens but does not remove this fact) and the potential for long term disaster recovery costs.
Coal's disaster risks are far less, if you look at all the costs and/or potential costs.
Coal on the other hand is aiding in global warming which may help hasten the distruction of most life on the planet, so from that standpoint it may be an even trade off. The eventual decision will probably be made on the basis of who can make the most money off the energy in the short term. That is one thing our system of government has shown, especially recently with their denial of the global warming reality, that is can be bought by special interests and that making short term gain the most important thing.
What ever happened to the thinking that scientists actually made sense and that when they tell you that there is a major problem looming that you take action and stay the course. We did that with the preservation of land, with the air and water quality. But now with those that believe in Creationism in power, you would think that we should be able to at least say that it is clear that God would have... repealed the minimum wage, rolled back the air quality standards and automobile emission standards, and affirmed that our fellow human prisoners were not subject to the Geneva conventions on prisoner treatment, and our crusade on the oil rich country of Iraq on the flimsiest of false public cover.. You would think that we must be talking about a different God. A different ethic, a different responsibility to the people of the country and the people of the world.
I'm sorry, you don't seem to have a correct view of history. Wealth historically has be accumulated by a seperate priviledge class who specialized in gaining and keeping power by use of force. Usually forcing people to work (slave) for them in either slavery or as in the medival model serfs that were considered owned, they were part of the land and considered the property of who owned the land. The ones that "killed an extra animal" is only true since the stone age when the animal you are talking about was people. Of course they found that institutionalizing their control through custom and religion make life easier.
If you think that a modern chief exectutive that applies political preasure to get an envirionmental law not passed or enforced so he can make uddles of more money polluting your air and my air and the land for our children, then I think we have a better picture of what is happening and for what reason. This is not progress, they are only interested in their own bottom line, they don't care about the future other than their own.
This article was about logging companies that don't care if species on this planet go extinct (that is gone forever, never to return, done finished for all generations to come) because they can make some money for themselves by gutting the public lands, or lands that they purchased for pennies per acre. They for the most part are stealing from public lands, lands that you and I own, but that the conservative government thinks that someone should make a profit from it. And oh by the way they probably will have a job waiting for them when they get out of public office in the industry they helped.
These bozo's are going up to scientists who have use scientific methods to come up with as clear and unbiased a finding on some issue using accepted scientific methods and peer review and careful review of experiment design and all the controls that go along with that process and are being told, I don't want to hear about your findinds. Or more specifically, I don't want that truth because it affects some busness interest I am connected with philosophically, or finacially, through contributions to parties or promises of quid pro quo.
Rather than be honest and say, I am rich and I want to be richer, I want to take all the trees off that land because I have the equipment and I have a buyer for the trees already. I understand the consequences of my doing that is to wipe our yet another endagered speices, but I don't care, I want that second yacht and my jacuzzi needs cleaning. Rather than accept the responsibility they are going to the receptive government and whispering, "Well lets not tell anyone what I am doing".
That is the issue. Political presure changing the facts for personal gain. That is the evil here. It should never happen. If people want to pollute, if they want to kill that last Condor for personal gain, let them stand up and say "I don't care if that happens, I want to make that money" and take the heat from the rest of us that will suffer the lose from now till eternity.
As to your "No they expect them to share it with the lazy people or the people that do not have the means because they do not want to get out of there lazy chair and work."
These are the same people that have fought to have the minimum wage abolished and have successfully fought to have it not raised so inflation has reduced it effectively in real dollars over the years. They want to only pay the minimum wage if they can as they get multi-million dollar salaries. Just try to break out of poverty if you have to work a minimum wage job, just try to live a good human life. These people arent lazy, on the contrary they are the ones out there working long hours each day and not out on the golf course.
I think someone has sold you on a model that is not accruate and you can't see the reality that this article is talking about and the danger of allowing changing any fact to suit personal need, instead of someone accepting the responsibility for thier actions.
Global warming is a good example. Bush has relaxed the polution standards. He will be out of office when we all have to live with the devastation that is going to cause.
I understand from the previous posts that the thought is that the flooding is done carefully and like a precision guided weapon it only takes out the building that it is suppose to, but other posts also tell of action these sites are taking to re-route that traffic to the actual bank sites. This in military parlance is collateral damage.
Is it your contention that any collateral damage is worth it?
My point is that "then end does not justify the means"
Once a arrow is loosed, it can not be recalled. Actions such as this can have unintended consequences and one has to be careful when you take action.
You learn this with age and experience. It comes from the pain of doing something you thought was for good but did bad, or having someone do bad to you that they thought was good. The worse thing is the latter when the person who did the bad is unrepentent because their intention was good, so what if bad happens it was not because I wanted to do bad.
You have to take responsibility for your action and the end does not justify the means. This kind of hidden attack means that the people resonsible for the attack are not taking responsibility and are hoping to not get caught doing it. That is in conflict with the stated goal of doing good.
There are ways of doing it. Alerting the banks, certainly they are the ones that have the most interest, alerting the law enforcement they have the time the money and the charge to fix the problem, alert the media, newpaper, radio, TV, internet forums they can help people being aware of these problems and be informed, alert the local state and federal officials to craft laws and programs to deal with the issue. There are other ways.
I always am suspicious of masked men, are they Robin Hood or are they KKK both groups were working for what they saw as the greater good and fightning evil. What about Mao? The danger is in people who are certain that they are right and are not afraid to take their own actions. Our whole government and laws are set up to keep the power out of their hands. With masked men hidden in the shadows there is no check and balance. There should be.
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing"
Let me start with your shallow qoute then. I never advocate doing nothing. Never had. My counsel was, as Doctors are under oath to do, "Do no harm".
Your quote "There might be some pain for some people but that is what life is about." is exactly my point and I think the term vigilante is apt. That is exactly what that mind set is. "We will take matters into our own hands, some people might get hurt, but it is for the greater good, and we decide not only what that greater good is but how to achieve it".
My point is that this attitude lacks the humility that "you might be wrong" and maybe this group wants to live with the consequences of thier being wrong, but they most likely have no consequences, someone else will be adversely affected. The flooders remain hidden like guerilla fighters.
Correct me if I am wrong, this attack on the bad guys is done in a hidden anonymous way. My terms are apt from the standpoint of the definition of the words compared to the thought process behind and the tactics uses and who is affected. I think calling a spade is a spade and two wrongs don't make a right to put some more simple common sense logic to it. You can call it freedom fighting or "the net trying to find a way to deal with a problem" but thats just spin. It is not the net doing it, it is individuals taking matters into their own hands, and doing something that would otherwise be considered illegal and/or certainly bad net manners.
When someone does this for monetary gain, trying to bring down or interfer with someones legitimate site, the crys go up, the justice department is brought in to find and punish the perpetrators.
another simple common sense quote that gets to the heart of my argument.
"The ends does not justify the means"
look at Abu Grab (or however is is spelled). An extreme example but one that came from the administration carefully making the argument that our terrorist captives because they were part of a movement not a country did not fall under the Geneva convention on prisoner treatment. What they were really saying is, I want to do anything I want to these human beings because I want information and I dont care about the means I use to get it (with the possible outrage of the world and subsequent trial at the World Court for war crimes being maybe the only brakes on that process).
Again "the end does not justify the means"
I advocate taking action. Alerting the banks that they are being scammed, alerting the various law enforcement agencies that it is going on, alerting the media that it is going on, talking about it in open forums that it is going on. Writting your local, state and federal officials that it is going on. I have done all these things and advocate a pro-active stance.
See my other reply. Well lets just say its a good idea (only for the sake of argument because its not). and like all good ideas it takes off. Then it becomes popular and then there is nothing left of bandwidth or it is so expensive for everyone the internet gets abandoned. Look at the spam idea, it has grown steadily to the point that email is in jeapordy.
Look at the idea of just dumping pollution into the air. Good idea, its cheap, I can make lots of money at it. Pretty soon we can breath and we have to try and correct before its too late.
What we need to do is see bad ideas and all agree that they are bad ideas and not behave badly from the start.
The potential for bad has already been commented on in other posts in that some of these sites that the flooding traffic and just route it to the real bank. So these mindless out of control machines start to innocently effect the innocent banks.
Besides having someone decide who the target is going to be is dangerous vigilaneism and just like terrorism in that one group will make an innocent group suffer for what they feel is a greater good.
There are other legitimate ways of fighting this kind of crime and you have to make sure that the guilty parties and only the guilty parties suffer.
As to the Hosting Company. What if it is a small struggling company with real people with real children needing care and feeding. You callously let them pay or the other customer of that company pay. Your assumption is that they are not doing something, where they might be. They might have turned over the information to law enforcement who were investigating. Maybe you should flood the FBI site for not investigating fast enough.
The issue is that you are making a judgement on limited information, taking action that effects people without their knowledge and consent. And the effect of that action might do more harm than good. Its just a badly thought out wrong approach.
"If not, then you're a selfish ass", I think my point was a more central point that had to do with the approval of vigilante action. Our system of justice has a central important principle that is "innocent until proven guilty". Which I would say fits here with some group taking it apon themselves to take action with the assumption that they are correct and doing justice or Gods work or whatever. It is a real danger. The other central theme is that the use of a public resource (not actually public but here we can consider it such) for some purpose without the consent of those that resource is taken from. I for one might say, no I don't think that is the right action to take and would want to have the ability to veto that action. It would be the same as someone saying, that person over there is evil, I know it, trust me, give me your money so I can cause him grief, cause he is evil and I know it.
Well it seems that in this day and age you would have to watch out for someone asking to borrow your PC for good (bad) use because you wouldn't know that they werent the bad guys to begin with.
So in summary, I don't approve of taking the vigilante action, I don't approve especially if it costs me. I am suspicious of anyone wanting to borrow my PC for some arbitrary probably illegal action that might land me a fine or imprisonment, and I uphold the principle of innocent until proven guilty.
If as one replier suggested, the fake sites just re-route that traffic to the legitimate banks then the action taken by these Screen savers inadvertently compounds their offence by punishing the innocent.
Let no good deed go unpunished.
By the way, if you think this is a good thing then you havent thought it through, maybe you don't have that ability. Seek help
Well bandwidth on the internet is an issue. Using it up for this type of "operation" is stealing bandwidth from everyone else. Then there is always the problem with trusting that your code does what you say and that all the sites targeted are ones that are evil.
Who makes that choice? Do the sites have any recourse to appeal if you make a wrong decision?
Is the code which turns someones PC into your Zombie ever at risk of your benevolent control being taken over by someone else, or someone in your group with their own hidden agenda?
Sound like a risk on many levels. And I personally don't think this is the way to take matters into someone other than mines own hands. Good intent these sites are bad, but wrong method on so many levels.
The point is that it should not be an issue to connect your PC to an unprotected internet. The software should not allow infection and people should not try to infect. Two seperate problems.
"A communist system where all the power of redistribution resides in the hands of a few self-interested, wealthy, powerful party members?"
or as you seem to suggest a capitalistic system where "all the power of redistribution resides in the hands of a few self-interested, wealthy, powerful Capitalists?"
I think we have had a good system, healthy economy and improving air and water quailty, better human rights, stronger social safety net, government surplus's in prior years. We have gone towards lower IRS taxes (delayed taxes through deficits) government deficits, lower standards for air and water quaility in just a few short years. It was not broke, and what has gone on clearly has not fixed it but made it worse.
Your right since the lawmakers know the (and create) the loopholes in the law, we should not have law and regulation of capitalism.
"The public's too busy working to keep up with the tax burden to scrutinize anything."
Yes, probably we should abandon the poor and homeless, let our forests be denuded (looks like that will happen very soon anyway because of the run away capitalism that has fostered global warming). Lessen the burden on industry to keep your air and water safe for human consumption. Lets criminalize copying of music so we can fill our jails more with children and grandmothers and ruin our public education, give our tax money away to churches, invade sovereign nations for little or no cause, send hundreds of thousands of our citizens into the fray. Abandon the Geneva convention because we found a loophole. Declare a perpetual state of war, limit our citizens rights and freedoms.. Reduce the burden on our supporters today with huge deficits to be paid by the children and their children and their children but not the very rich. Its a wonderful world this future and burden of the current government.
I agree that the tax burden (this includes the future tax burden due to deficits run up by this administration) is too great but the moral and ethical one currently in place is far worse.
Your right it takes a graduate degree to understand capitalism or at least all the reasons given why controlled greed is a good thing for us all.
But you forget that capitalism works in a market and it is market opinion and habit that is one of the only control mechanisms on it, government regulation is one of the others, stockholder ire another. I feel you think that it should not have any controls and that government regulation is an evil. But then you tell a tree by its fruits, Enron a big one, World Com a big one, the Savings and Loans Scandals, The Tea Pot Dome scandal, now Health South case coming up.
I don't think it needs the graduate degree to see plainly that there are mega dangers to unfettered capitalistic practice without the controls given by law and regulation and close scrutiny by the public. Internal self contols certainly failed with Arthur Anderson and Enron costing all of us, you included real dollars from our pocket. It went into someone elses. Should it have?
I don't think I am out of line in mentioning these things. I don't see you mentioning any counter argurment, or any rationale why my examples lack merit or consideration.
I assume you had more than one year of univerity rhetoric training on capitalism that gives you the intellectual authority to make that comment. I would think then that a more learned response than "blah blah blah" would be in order. Or as it seems, you have little depth on the subject and no more than trusting some politian or financial commentator's missives that capitalism is without spot or blemish and should not be questioned nor criticized.
This is true and the way it works is that people who approve of that behaviour would give The Planet more business and those that dis-approved would walk.
It is a self leveling scheme and can be responsive to public sentiment if and only if there is not a monoploy or virtual monoploy at work, such that there was no outlet for a disenting oppinion.
And I think that rabble that through the tea in the harbor should be shot for distruction of private property and the interfering with God given, royal sanctioned monopoly on tea trade. What was their name, Halliburton or something.
Yes this is the evils of Capitalism not the evil of government here probably. Its a good thing we have a government that does look out for our interests, Enron, World Com and now Health South. The evils of capitalism unchained can be devistating not only to individuals but to the entire world economy.
Well maybe if the thefts had not been discoverd only thousands of retirees would have been effected not the entire world econonmy. Maybe we should have capitalism take of the the government to prevent this.
Modderation in all things is important, most importantly moderation.
Self-censorship, we should require it, by law, or medicate when we get behaviour out to the norm don't you think. Come speak into the mic.
What might be considered abberant behaviour gives us the Arts and Science and Literature and all those other things essential to civilization. Lets not throw out the baby with the bath water.
He did say that each mention of the word was checked manaully to classify its context as either legal or illegal.
He also said
"For example, two people discussing the new features in the latest version of Microsoft Word would be regarded as a legal context."
but I agree with the assessment that this article/research is a good example of academic research that measures something real but then comes to completely erroneous conclusions without any reality check as in, a count of total IRC usage, total IRC users. I suspect much of the drug and war preparation research/marketing is done in exactly this manner.
I think is was more of an issue of the rural religious thinking that since God told Bush he should be president that that was the way to go. Besides he was just mistaken about that Iraqy thing, we can't fault him for stomping on another soveriegn country that had no designs on attacking us and no way to do it and no connection with the war on terrorism, just oil and a threat to his father. Hey he's for traditional family structures, and wants to pay good government money to church programs and church schools, a saint surely.
Sorry there was a clear choice that would have made a difference. You people that did not vote blew it big time for all of us. More war, more religion in government, more business interests at home and abroad protected, social security ruined, schools ruined, envirionment trampled, clean air and water ruined. You blew it because you could not see the glaring differences. Pity
The model described is an economic model. That is a limited monopoly so the "protected creator" would be able to "profit" exclusively from that invention. The idea was that if one could profit from an invention (helped by this artificial legal concept, patent) then more invention would be done. I don't think the Founding Fathers forsaw the limited monolpoly to span more than a lifetime as in the extended copyright laws for "Steamboat Willy" protection for the Disney Corp.
They probably did not invision, nor I conjecture would condone the practice of buying patents to suppress there use.
The patent protection of profit from use is one model to promote sciences and useful arts. The acedemic model I described has the same goal and I would submit has been equally if not more successful in furthing the knowledge of the sciences and the useful arts. Especially or more so in the pure sciences.
We can see with the open source movement which is a threat to the patent model, a more acedemic model of promoting innovation and making it freely available without cost or hinderance to others who want to continue to innovate on that base of innovation. The patents and license fees only get in the way of development and innovation in many areas.
You can look at another shift in economic model to innovation that occured not too many decades ago when all language compilers were vary expensive. That is until Borland came out with Turbo Pascal for $19.95 (or some such price) and took over the computer market in a short time, until people understood that the large price of compilers was short sighted against the huge latent demand of people wanting to use the innovations of the computer and computer languages to do work and play. That was an important shift that started a boom period in general software development that we still feel the effects of.
The open source movement, Linux, and Java as still freely or cheaply available alternatives provide the basis for continued development by keen mines that do not necesarily have the money to contend with the very high prices you say pay for a lot of the application framework producsts say on the market today.
The perspective was of the founding fathers the promotion of innovation. We should monitor the existing system and any changes to it to see if it is still achieving that goal or if there are adjustments or even other models that can or should be adopted instead of or in parallel to what is in place.
I agree that patents and copyrights were originally designed to protect the inventor/creator. But the large companies with legal aggreements own your work. A subversion of the protection from the system.
The fostering of invention only happens when it is economical for someone to make invention/creation. With the system now with extended copyright the system has turned around and it is starting to stifle invention. With patents the controls on what constitutes a patent are not well done and invention in software is starting to be stifled.
Another more radical model is followed by the academic world with PHD's required to add something new to the field. There work is essentially public domain and the whole feild progresses. They have innovation built into the system at the beginning. Maybe we should publictize the system if we really want invention in ideas. For patents we are talking product. Software we might argue straddles the fence of ideas and product in the sense that they are virtual products. There needs to be a new view, a new system.
It is tremendously burdensome when you write a new software program for someone to even think of doing a patent search on your code to see if you are using any ideas that someone got awarded a patent for because they applied for it first. We see the same thing with the speculation on Internet domains. There is no value added here, no fostering of innovation. Just someone trying to cash in.
(appologies to the true innovators with inventions that are worthy of patent and should have thier ideas protected and should benefit from the unique creations they made).
It used to be that the electromagnetic spectrum was all Public Domain (as it should be). Now it is illegal to listen in on certain frequencies and radios in the US can not be allowed to tune in on anything but the frequencies the government says it is allowed to.(hardware fixes to release that restriction are common).
Who told the govenment that they owned the air anyway. I cant wait for the time when we have that breath-o-meter charging us for each breath. Well more likely someone in govenment will sell the rights to that to some private company to charge for that and pay a tax on it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Well, considering that burning coal puts out more radioactivity than nuclear energy (not to mention all the soot, CO2, CO, etc)".
... repealed the minimum wage,
I assume you are not including the Chernobyl Disaster, nor the 3 mile island release (small but alarming). The problem here is not how much containment but what is the failure mode. Try as we may, we still make mistakes and materials are not perfect, and business and governments cut corners to save money, sometimes taking bribes on the way. There will be some administrator or polititian that will say, "I don't want to pay for repairs, they cost too much." and pass a problem on the the next administator until it becomes too costly and things will go wrong, very wrong and a portion of the country (some country) will be un-inhabitable for thousands of years. Because someone thought they could squeeze a little more out of the money sponge.
We generally don't figure the costs correctly. There is a big ballon payment potential with nuclear energy that is generally not considered. Not just the long term storage of waste, (reprocessing lessens but does not remove this fact) and the potential for long term disaster recovery costs.
Coal's disaster risks are far less, if you look at all the costs and/or potential costs.
Coal on the other hand is aiding in global warming which may help hasten the distruction of most life on the planet, so from that standpoint it may be an even trade off. The eventual decision will probably be made on the basis of who can make the most money off the energy in the short term. That is one thing our system of government has shown, especially recently with their denial of the global warming reality, that is can be bought by special interests and that making short term gain the most important thing.
What ever happened to the thinking that scientists actually made sense and that when they tell you that there is a major problem looming that you take action and stay the course. We did that with the preservation of land, with the air and water quality. But now with those that believe in Creationism in power, you would think that we should be able to at least say that it is clear that God would have
rolled back the air quality standards and automobile emission standards, and affirmed that our fellow human prisoners were not subject to the Geneva conventions on prisoner treatment, and our crusade on the oil rich country of Iraq on the flimsiest of false public cover.. You would think that we must be talking about a different God. A different ethic, a different responsibility to the people of the country and the people of the world.
I'm sorry, you don't seem to have a correct view of history. Wealth historically has be accumulated by a seperate priviledge class who specialized in gaining and keeping power by use of force. Usually forcing people to work (slave) for them in either slavery or as in the medival model serfs that were considered owned, they were part of the land and considered the property of who owned the land. The ones that "killed an extra animal" is only true since the stone age when the animal you are talking about was people. Of course they found that institutionalizing their control through custom and religion make life easier.
If you think that a modern chief exectutive that applies political preasure to get an envirionmental law not passed or enforced so he can make uddles of more money polluting your air and my air and the land for our children, then I think we have a better picture of what is happening and for what reason. This is not progress, they are only interested in their own bottom line, they don't care about the future other than their own.
This article was about logging companies that don't care if species on this planet go extinct (that is gone forever, never to return, done finished for all generations to come) because they can make some money for themselves by gutting the public lands, or lands that they purchased for pennies per acre. They for the most part are stealing from public lands, lands that you and I own, but that the conservative government thinks that someone should make a profit from it. And oh by the way they probably will have a job waiting for them when they get out of public office in the industry they helped.
These bozo's are going up to scientists who have use scientific methods to come up with as clear and unbiased a finding on some issue using accepted scientific methods and peer review and careful review of experiment design and all the controls that go along with that process and are being told, I don't want to hear about your findinds. Or more specifically, I don't want that truth because it affects some busness interest I am connected with philosophically, or finacially, through contributions to parties or promises of quid pro quo.
Rather than be honest and say, I am rich and I want to be richer, I want to take all the trees off that land because I have the equipment and I have a buyer for the trees already. I understand the consequences of my doing that is to wipe our yet another endagered speices, but I don't care, I want that second yacht and my jacuzzi needs cleaning. Rather than accept the responsibility they are going to the receptive government and whispering, "Well lets not tell anyone what I am doing".
That is the issue. Political presure changing the facts for personal gain. That is the evil here. It should never happen. If people want to pollute, if they want to kill that last Condor for personal gain, let them stand up and say "I don't care if that happens, I want to make that money" and take the heat from the rest of us that will suffer the lose from now till eternity.
As to your "No they expect them to share it with the lazy people or the people that do not have the means because they do not want to get out of there lazy chair and work."
These are the same people that have fought to have the minimum wage abolished and have successfully fought to have it not raised so inflation has reduced it effectively in real dollars over the years. They want to only pay the minimum wage if they can as they get multi-million dollar salaries. Just try to break out of poverty if you have to work a minimum wage job, just try to live a good human life. These people arent lazy, on the contrary they are the ones out there working long hours each day and not out on the golf course.
I think someone has sold you on a model that is not accruate and you can't see the reality that this article is talking about and the danger of allowing changing any fact to suit personal need, instead of someone accepting the responsibility for thier actions.
Global warming is a good example. Bush has relaxed the polution standards. He will be out of office when we all have to live with the devastation that is going to cause.
I understand from the previous posts that the thought is that the flooding is done carefully and like a precision guided weapon it only takes out the building that it is suppose to, but other posts also tell of action these sites are taking to re-route that traffic to the actual bank sites. This in military parlance is collateral damage.
Is it your contention that any collateral damage is worth it?
My point is that "then end does not justify the means"
Once a arrow is loosed, it can not be recalled. Actions such as this can have unintended consequences and one has to be careful when you take action.
You learn this with age and experience. It comes from the pain of doing something you thought was for good but did bad, or having someone do bad to you that they thought was good. The worse thing is the latter when the person who did the bad is unrepentent because their intention was good, so what if bad happens it was not because I wanted to do bad.
You have to take responsibility for your action and the end does not justify the means. This kind of hidden attack means that the people resonsible for the attack are not taking responsibility and are hoping to not get caught doing it. That is in conflict with the stated goal of doing good.
There are ways of doing it. Alerting the banks, certainly they are the ones that have the most interest, alerting the law enforcement they have the time the money and the charge to fix the problem, alert the media, newpaper, radio, TV, internet forums they can help people being aware of these problems and be informed, alert the local state and federal officials to craft laws and programs to deal with the issue. There are other ways.
I always am suspicious of masked men, are they Robin Hood or are they KKK both groups were working for what they saw as the greater good and fightning evil. What about Mao? The danger is in people who are certain that they are right and are not afraid to take their own actions. Our whole government and laws are set up to keep the power out of their hands. With masked men hidden in the shadows there is no check and balance. There should be.
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing"
Let me start with your shallow qoute then. I never advocate doing nothing. Never had. My counsel was, as Doctors are under oath to do, "Do no harm".
Your quote "There might be some pain for some people but that is what life is about." is exactly my point and I think the term vigilante is apt. That is exactly what that mind set is. "We will take matters into our own hands, some people might get hurt, but it is for the greater good, and we decide not only what that greater good is but how to achieve it".
My point is that this attitude lacks the humility that "you might be wrong" and maybe this group wants to live with the consequences of thier being wrong, but they most likely have no consequences, someone else will be adversely affected. The flooders remain hidden like guerilla fighters.
Correct me if I am wrong, this attack on the bad guys is done in a hidden anonymous way. My terms are apt from the standpoint of the definition of the words compared to the thought process behind and the tactics uses and who is affected. I think calling a spade is a spade and two wrongs don't make a right to put some more simple common sense logic to it. You can call it freedom fighting or "the net trying to find a way to deal with a problem" but thats just spin. It is not the net doing it, it is individuals taking matters into their own hands, and doing something that would otherwise be considered illegal and/or certainly bad net manners.
When someone does this for monetary gain, trying to bring down or interfer with someones legitimate site, the crys go up, the justice department is brought in to find and punish the perpetrators.
another simple common sense quote that gets to the heart of my argument.
"The ends does not justify the means"
look at Abu Grab (or however is is spelled). An extreme example but one that came from the administration carefully making the argument that our terrorist captives because they were part of a movement not a country did not fall under the Geneva convention on prisoner treatment. What they were really saying is, I want to do anything I want to these human beings because I want information and I dont care about the means I use to get it (with the possible outrage of the world and subsequent trial at the World Court for war crimes being maybe the only brakes on that process).
Again "the end does not justify the means"
I advocate taking action. Alerting the banks that they are being scammed, alerting the various law enforcement agencies that it is going on, alerting the media that it is going on, talking about it in open forums that it is going on. Writting your local, state and federal officials that it is going on. I have done all these things and advocate a pro-active stance.
but Again "The end does not justify the means"
See my other reply. Well lets just say its a good idea (only for the sake of argument because its not). and like all good ideas it takes off. Then it becomes popular and then there is nothing left of bandwidth or it is so expensive for everyone the internet gets abandoned. Look at the spam idea, it has grown steadily to the point that email is in jeapordy.
Look at the idea of just dumping pollution into the air. Good idea, its cheap, I can make lots of money at it. Pretty soon we can breath and we have to try and correct before its too late.
What we need to do is see bad ideas and all agree that they are bad ideas and not behave badly from the start.
The potential for bad has already been commented on in other posts in that some of these sites that the flooding traffic and just route it to the real bank. So these mindless out of control machines start to innocently effect the innocent banks.
Besides having someone decide who the target is going to be is dangerous vigilaneism and just like terrorism in that one group will make an innocent group suffer for what they feel is a greater good.
There are other legitimate ways of fighting this kind of crime and you have to make sure that the guilty parties and only the guilty parties suffer.
As to the Hosting Company. What if it is a small struggling company with real people with real children needing care and feeding. You callously
let them pay or the other customer of that company pay. Your assumption is that they are not doing something, where they might be. They might have turned over the information to law enforcement who were investigating. Maybe you should flood the FBI site for not investigating fast enough.
The issue is that you are making a judgement on limited information, taking action that effects people without their knowledge and consent. And the effect of that action might do more harm than good. Its just a badly thought out wrong approach.
Let no good deed go unpunished.
"If not, then you're a selfish ass", I think my point was a more central point that had to do with the approval of vigilante action. Our system of justice has a central important principle that is "innocent until proven guilty". Which I would say fits here with some group taking it apon themselves to take action with the assumption that they are correct and doing justice or Gods work or whatever. It is a real danger. The other central theme is that the use of a public resource (not actually public but here we can consider it such) for some purpose without the consent of those that resource is taken from. I for one might say, no I don't think that is the right action to take and would want to have the ability to veto that action. It would be the same as someone saying, that person over there is evil, I know it, trust me, give me your money so I can cause him grief, cause he is evil and I know it.
Well it seems that in this day and age you would have to watch out for someone asking to borrow your PC for good (bad) use because you wouldn't know that they werent the bad guys to begin with.
So in summary, I don't approve of taking the vigilante action, I don't approve especially if it costs me. I am suspicious of anyone wanting to borrow my PC for some arbitrary probably illegal action that might land me a fine or imprisonment, and I uphold the principle of innocent until proven guilty.
If as one replier suggested, the fake sites just re-route that traffic to the legitimate banks then the action taken by these Screen savers inadvertently compounds their offence by punishing the innocent.
Let no good deed go unpunished.
By the way, if you think this is a good thing then you havent thought it through, maybe you don't have that ability. Seek help
Well bandwidth on the internet is an issue. Using it up for this type of "operation" is stealing bandwidth from everyone else. Then there is always the problem with trusting that your code does what you say and that all the sites targeted are ones that are evil.
Who makes that choice? Do the sites have any recourse to appeal if you make a wrong decision?
Is the code which turns someones PC into your Zombie ever at risk of your benevolent control being taken over by someone else, or someone in your group with their own hidden agenda?
Sound like a risk on many levels. And I personally don't think this is the way to take matters into someone other than mines own hands. Good intent these sites are bad, but wrong method on so many levels.
The point is that it should not be an issue to connect your PC to an unprotected internet. The software should not allow infection and people should not try to infect. Two seperate problems.
It was here just a minute ago.
Indeed.
"A communist system where all the power of redistribution resides in the hands of a few self-interested, wealthy, powerful party members?"
or as you seem to suggest a capitalistic system where "all the power of redistribution resides in the hands of a few self-interested, wealthy, powerful Capitalists?"
I think we have had a good system, healthy economy and improving air and water quailty, better human rights, stronger social safety net, government surplus's in prior years. We have gone towards lower IRS taxes (delayed taxes through deficits) government deficits, lower standards for air and water quaility in just a few short years. It was not broke, and what has gone on clearly has not fixed it but made it worse.
Your right since the lawmakers know the (and create) the loopholes in the law, we should not have law and regulation of capitalism.
"The public's too busy working to keep up with the tax burden to scrutinize anything."
Yes, probably we should abandon the poor and homeless, let our forests be denuded (looks like that will happen very soon anyway because of the run away capitalism that has fostered global warming). Lessen the burden on industry to keep your air and water safe for human consumption. Lets criminalize copying of music so we can fill our jails more with children and grandmothers and ruin our public education, give our tax money away to churches, invade sovereign nations for little or no cause, send hundreds of thousands of our citizens into the fray. Abandon the Geneva convention because we found a loophole. Declare a perpetual state of war, limit our citizens rights and freedoms.. Reduce the burden on our supporters today with huge deficits to be paid by the children and their children and their children but not the very rich. Its a wonderful world this future and burden of the current government.
I agree that the tax burden (this includes the future tax burden due to deficits run up by this administration) is too great but the moral and ethical one currently in place is far worse.
Your right it takes a graduate degree to understand capitalism or at least all the reasons given why controlled greed is a good thing for us all.
But you forget that capitalism works in a market and it is market opinion and habit that is one of the only control mechanisms on it, government regulation is one of the others, stockholder ire another. I feel you think that it should not have any controls and that government regulation is an evil. But then you tell a tree by its fruits, Enron a big one, World Com a big one, the Savings and Loans Scandals, The Tea Pot Dome scandal, now Health South case coming up.
I don't think it needs the graduate degree to see plainly that there are mega dangers to unfettered capitalistic practice without the controls given by law and regulation and close scrutiny by the public. Internal self contols certainly failed with Arthur Anderson and Enron costing all of us, you included real dollars from our pocket. It went into someone elses. Should it have?
I don't think I am out of line in mentioning these things. I don't see you mentioning any counter argurment, or any rationale why my examples lack merit or consideration.
I assume you had more than one year of univerity rhetoric training on capitalism that gives you the intellectual authority to make that comment. I would think then that a more learned response than "blah blah blah" would be in order. Or as it seems, you have little depth on the subject and no more than trusting some politian or financial commentator's missives that capitalism is without spot or blemish and should not be questioned nor criticized.
Mock on!
"extemporaneous speech"?
Well speech might be stretching it.
"Give him a few days at the ranch to practice a highly crafted and focus group tested message"
Make that 2 months followed by some warmups in front of a kindegarten audience.
Wait that is a recipe for disaster isn't it.
This is true and the way it works is that people who approve of that behaviour would give The Planet more business and those that dis-approved would walk.
It is a self leveling scheme and can be responsive to public sentiment if and only if there is not a monoploy or virtual monoploy at work, such that there was no outlet for a disenting oppinion.
And I think that rabble that through the tea in the harbor should be shot for distruction of private property and the interfering with God given, royal sanctioned monopoly on tea trade. What was their name, Halliburton or something.
Yes this is the evils of Capitalism not the evil of government here probably. Its a good thing we have a government that does look out for our interests, Enron, World Com and now Health South. The evils of capitalism unchained can be devistating not only to individuals but to the entire world economy.
Well maybe if the thefts had not been discoverd only thousands of retirees would have been effected not the entire world econonmy. Maybe we should have capitalism take of the the government to prevent this.
Oh Wait, they just did. Damn!
Modderation in all things is important, most importantly moderation.
Self-censorship, we should require it, by law, or medicate when we get behaviour out to the norm don't you think. Come speak into the mic.
What might be considered abberant behaviour gives us the Arts and Science and Literature and all those other things essential to civilization. Lets not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Viva Le Difference!
Feeling insecure about Bush are we.
He did say that each mention of the word was checked manaully to classify its context as either legal or illegal.
He also said
"For example, two people discussing the new features in the latest version of Microsoft Word would be regarded as a legal context."
but I agree with the assessment that this article/research is a good example of academic research that measures something real but then comes to completely erroneous conclusions without any reality check as in, a count of total IRC usage, total IRC users. I suspect much of the drug and war preparation research/marketing is done in exactly this manner.
I think is was more of an issue of the rural religious thinking that since God told Bush he should be president that that was the way to go. Besides he was just mistaken about that Iraqy thing, we can't fault him for stomping on another soveriegn country that had no designs on attacking us and no way to do it and no connection with the war on terrorism, just oil and a threat to his father. Hey he's for traditional family structures, and wants to pay good government money to church programs and church schools, a saint surely.
Sorry there was a clear choice that would have made a difference. You people that did not vote blew it big time for all of us. More war, more religion in government, more business interests at home and abroad protected, social security ruined, schools ruined, envirionment trampled, clean air and water ruined. You blew it because you could not see the glaring differences. Pity
The model described is an economic model. That is a limited monopoly so the "protected creator" would be able to "profit" exclusively from that invention. The idea was that if one could profit from an invention (helped by this artificial legal concept, patent) then more invention would be done. I don't think the Founding Fathers forsaw the limited monolpoly to span more than a lifetime as in the extended copyright laws for "Steamboat Willy" protection for the Disney Corp.
They probably did not invision, nor I conjecture would condone the practice of buying patents to suppress there use.
The patent protection of profit from use is one model to promote sciences and useful arts. The acedemic model I described has the same goal and I would submit has been equally if not more successful in furthing the knowledge of the sciences and the useful arts. Especially or more so in the pure sciences.
We can see with the open source movement which is a threat to the patent model, a more acedemic model of promoting innovation and making it freely available without cost or hinderance to others who want to continue to innovate on that base of innovation. The patents and license fees only get in the way of development and innovation in many areas.
You can look at another shift in economic model to innovation that occured not too many decades ago when all language compilers were vary expensive. That is until Borland came out with Turbo Pascal for $19.95 (or some such price) and took over the computer market in a short time, until people understood that the large price of compilers was short sighted against the huge latent demand of people wanting to use the innovations of the computer and computer languages to do work and play. That was an important shift that started a boom period in general software development that we still feel the effects of.
The open source movement, Linux, and Java as still freely or cheaply available alternatives provide the basis for continued development by keen mines that do not necesarily have the money to contend with the very high prices you say pay for a lot of the application framework producsts say on the market today.
The perspective was of the founding fathers the promotion of innovation. We should monitor the existing system and any changes to it to see if it is still achieving that goal or if there are adjustments or even other models that can or should be adopted instead of or in parallel to what is in place.
I agree that patents and copyrights were originally designed to protect the inventor/creator. But the large companies with legal aggreements own your work. A subversion of the protection from the system.
The fostering of invention only happens when it is economical for someone to make invention/creation. With the system now with extended copyright the system has turned around and it is starting to stifle invention. With patents the controls on what constitutes a patent are not well done and invention in software is starting to be stifled.
Another more radical model is followed by the academic world with PHD's required to add something new to the field. There work is essentially public domain and the whole feild progresses. They have innovation built into the system at the beginning. Maybe we should publictize the system if we really want invention in ideas. For patents we are talking product. Software we might argue straddles the fence of ideas and product in the sense that they are virtual products. There needs to be a new view, a new system.
It is tremendously burdensome when you write a new software program for someone to even think of doing a patent search on your code to see if you are using any ideas that someone got awarded a patent for because they applied for it first. We see the same thing with the speculation on Internet domains. There is no value added here, no fostering of innovation. Just someone trying to cash in.
(appologies to the true innovators with inventions that are worthy of patent and should have thier ideas protected and should benefit from the unique creations they made).
It used to be that the electromagnetic spectrum was all Public Domain (as it should be). Now it is illegal to listen in on certain frequencies and radios in the US can not be allowed to tune in on anything but the frequencies the government says it is allowed to.(hardware fixes to release that restriction are common).
Who told the govenment that they owned the air anyway. I cant wait for the time when we have that breath-o-meter charging us for each breath. Well more likely someone in govenment will sell the rights to that to some private company to charge for that and pay a tax on it.