how do they determine who has "computer skills"? And is this really feasible? How will they make someone work for them? How will they even know if a computer programmer is a computer programmer? Do they have some kind of national database of them?
My guess is that is the point of the article; they're starting to develop that database. Hopefully, what they'll do is change the selective service forms and just tag new registrants as having computer skills. Otherwise, they'll just check your records... "Hm, BS in Computer Science... you get a gold star." It's not terribly difficult to find this stuff out, especially if your resume is available online.
still, don't you agree that netflix implies a slightly longer planning horizon than the blockbuster's down the street?
Nah, not really. We almost never rented movies from the video store. Occasionally we would, and then we'd get like five at a time because it's so much cheaper, and then we'd have to basically plan our week around watching all of them. With this, they just show up, and sit there until we feel like watching. Since we don't have to send them back by any particular time (we just keep them as long as we want, and they don't send us more until we send them back), we can be a lot *less* planned about our viewing.
(DVD rental via mail is a good step, but you need to plan in advance, so points off).
That's what I thought too, but then my husband subscribed to Netflix, and it turns out we don't have to plan anything. He spent a bit of time setting up our queue, and now movies we want to see just automatically arrive, and sit next to our DVD player until we feel like watching them. We didn't *plan* to watch "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" last night, but since it was there, we did. It would have been a lot more hassle to say "Hey, we'd like to see Butch Cassidy..." and then spend a couple hours downloading it (over DSL).
Tertullian c. 160-225 Origien 185-253/4 Augustine 354-430 Aquinas born 1225 Luther 1516-1525 Calvin 1509-1564 Wesley 18th c. C.S. Lewis 1898-1963
So the best you can do is someone writing three lifespans after stuff supposedly happened? That's supposed to somehow convince us all that it's true?
I can list as many people who have written about wood fairies, probably around the same timeline too. Does that make them real?
Not that I generally go around calling Xians nutbags... most of them are not so silly as to actually *believe* that the bible is historical fact. But "evidence" does not consist of people saying "Hey, this is what happened" eight to 100 generations later.
we're nearly paying that now in LA, and I believe the cost is currently higher than that in Europe now.
When I was living in England in 1996, petrol was about 55 pence/liter, with an exchange rate of around 1.65 dollars to the pound. That comes out to about $3.44 a gallon. *In 1996.* Just accounting for inflation, that's over $4 a gallon now.
Yeah, gas is substantially more expensive in Europe...
We have pilots who are in charge of a 320 million dollar airframe but can't figure out Outlook. We just got E-Pubs and with it pages of documentation on how to burn a CD using WinXP.
I'm sorry, I'm confused. You say that MS is best, but then you cite how difficult it is for your users to get anything done with two apps, which are both made by MS. You don't relate any experiences with non-MS apps to compare.
It sounds like your documentation and training suck, not so much your software. Even so, in my personal experience Outlook is a lot harder to use than many other mail clients, and burning CDs is really not that hard (for me, or the high-school dropouts I used to supervise at Kinko's). But your anecdote fails to support your initial proposition completely.
Ok, then. Create a file in Office 2000 or XP and try to open it in Office 97. Can't do it. Why? Because the format DID change.
I'll swear I've done this many times, when I had Office 2000 at home and 97 at work. It's been a while now, but I'm sure I have done it, at least with.doc and.xls files as the previous poster mentioned. Unless, of course, you use features within your document that are unsupported in '97 (i.e. avoid bar tabs in Word).
Recently I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome (I'm 21 and I was diagnosed 2 years ago.) This essentially means that I struggle to develop an effective theory of mind and lack a certain amount of human empathy.
A lot of folks on this thread seem to be skeptical about the suggestion of Aspberger's, but it was the first thing I thought of. I have a friend who worked through her BA in Psych with autistic kids, and my ex-husband figured out after we split that (besides being bipolar) he has Aspberger's.
If this might be the case (and I'd say keep it in your frontal lobe until it's categorically ruled out), about the best thing you can do is remember that it's not that he *doesn't care*, but that he actually *doesn't perceive* a lot of the social cuing that most of us pick up naturally. Body language, tone of voice, etc.... he's basically blind to it. This makes it really hard to know when people disdain you, or are making fun of you, and so on. It also makes it hard to care, since if you don't see it, it doesn't hurt you. It also makes you miss out on much of the positive interactions too... if a girl developed a crush on him (as unlikely as that may seem), he'd probably be utterly oblivious to even blatant signs of it.
In any event, it probably shouldn't be treated that much like a disease. It's simply something to be aware of and find out more about if you want to help this kid learn to negotiate the much more difficult world of social interaction.
unless I'm mistaken, you're privy to a large amount of information about doctors....education, training...basically anything relevant that has been recorded. Of course probably virtually no one actually capitalizes on this.
Well, almost.
When I was choosing my provider for my pregnancy, the appointments desk at the one and only office I could go to on my insurance could give me no info but the doctors' names. They suggested I go to the AMA's site to look up the doctors.
Of the six names I got, only *one* was actually registered with the AMA. For her, I found out her education, experience, and a brief blurb on her specialties. For the rest, I found out their education, and how long they'd been practicing, but in some cases, it was even incorrect about where they were currently practicing.
Patient testimonials? Attitudes toward care? Did I have time to interview six doctors, and did they have time to see me for an interview? No.
So I ended up going into the Nurse-Midwife program there. So far, the care I've received has been excellent, and I've very much appreciated the fact that the practitioners are focused on pregnancy and labor/delivery, rather than on the whole spectrum of gynecological issues. Lets them spend more time with me, and they also are very up-to-date on what they do, since they have less to research.
There are too many ignorant folks on juries...then again, the jury I was on was entirely professionals that all seemed to feel the same way about not getting out of the duty.
No kidding. I was on a jury (medical malpractice, no less) a few years back, with some fascinating people, including:
- The president of programming for Showtime (who gave us all copies of their remake of "12 Angry Men" at the end) - The head of new technologies research for Citibank (who was pretty annoyed at that point that he couldn't get any funding for research on smart chip implementation because all the money was going into the Y2K bug) - A supervisor in Customs at LAX (who, in spite of this being pre-9/11, had some great stories)
BTW, the guy's case was baseless, and we didn't get past the second question of the special verdict form. He was suing basically because he had no medical insurance and couldn't afford his doctor bills. Of course, if he'd sued his private practice doctor, the only one who made a legitimate mistake, he might have gotten somewhere... but instead, he sued the hospital doctors (presumably) because they had deeper pockets.
You talk about OBs, well if you've ever had a baby you would know that the doctor is usually only present for a couple of minutes, the nurses do everything. Guess who gets the bulk of the pay though...
Tell me about it. I'm in a program with a certified nurse-midwife as my primary care provider. After 23 weeks of pregnancy, I haven't seen a "doctor" at all (which I'm fine with). However, I've already paid a deposit on my expected co-pay for the *doctor's* delivery charges... which I won't owe them until sometime in late June or early July.
Granted, they are charging me in advance because apparently the routine visits throughout the pregnancy are all packaged in with the delivery according to my insurance company, so they get *no* payment until the baby is delivered... and have some difficulty collecting if I up and deliver somewhere else. But no one has ever been able to explain to me why I'm paying for a doctor's services in a program where I don't actually see one.
Not being clueless doesnt help when the so called "kiddy" has an undisclosed exploit for month. But you get the point:)
Sorry, maybe I should have extended the quote to include the part where Andy mentions that, on his Linux system, there was some nasty exploit that he was already immune to because he'd configured things more securely. It's right after the part I did quote.
So he definitely thinks that cluefulness plays a role in making one less vulnerable to this kind of hacking, whether or not they're 0-day exploits.
Ultimately though, I still say that studying the causes is counterproductive. By trying to differentiate between little shits who like destroying and "souls in anguish, trying to establish themselves," we are giving credence to one form of vandalism, whatever the medium used is. Studying and trying to ascribe causal connections to abberant behaviour does implicitly validate their actions to some extent.
It seems that for you, to analyze the causes for an action is to validate the action; in other words, to simply suggest there's a reason is to remove blame from the perpetrator. I don't agree. For example, I've spent a whole heck of a lot of time and money in therapy, because my parents screwed up big-time in a couple areas. They are the *reason* I have all this crap to deal with. But, rather than absolving me of dealing with it, it's a starting point for working it out. It's actually *impossible* for me to take responsibility for and solve my problems if I don't understand where they came from.
This is a similar case. It will do NO GOOD to try to prevent vandalism with enforcement and laws, so long as the things that make people think it's a good idea persist. They'll simply find new ways to do it. In my city, it's illegal to buy spray paint or paint markers if you're under 18. Great, so now the kids are asking the guy who buys their cigarettes to pick them up some cans of spray paint at the same time. That helps a bundle. *rolls eyes*
One does not have to give "credence" to any form of vandalism in order to examine its causes and determine if there is a cheaper, healthier, more effective way of preventing it. What you may be afraid of is discovering that certain types of vandalism serve an important purpose for some elements of society, and that removing the mechanism entirely would cause even greater problems. Unfortunately, if that turns out to be the case and we only find out *after* we've had some success at removing vandalism (without addressing the more pertinent issues), we have a bigger problem.
Of course, the other thing that frightens people is the idea that we might all share in the responsibility for and the solution to such problems. No one wants to give up any small part of what they consider theirs, even if the overall reasons seem very laudable. This is something that we may just have to outgrow as a culture before we can coherently address very many "societal ills," such as petty crimes like vandalism.
Personally, I don't think there's any difference between little shits who like destroying things and souls in anguish. I want to know what makes the little shits enjoy destroying things, and resolve that, because I believe they *are* souls in anguish. Maybe they need more, or less, discipline at home. Maybe they need more, or less, structure to their education. Maybe they need some serious therapy and a bit of medication to sort out chemical imbalances in their brain. *I* don't pretend to know. But I also don't pretend that it's some mysterious force, like the weather, over which we can exert no control except to lock it out of our lives.
Maybe companies might start providing more donations (like cheap lic fees) to a foundation that rewards freelance OSS programmers with cash for tackling certain problems (and does not pay until the code is peer reviewed and bug checked to a reasonable extent.) Maybe that would work better... Are certain organizations not starting to do that?
You make a very salient point about why Open-Source software may be less vulnerable to attack than proprietary software. Basically, if you discover a vulnerability in a closed-source program, there is NO honorable way to get recognition or respect for your digging... the best you can do is quietly report it to the company and hope they fix it, knowing they will not usually acknowledge you for reporting it. With OS, you can gain respect and recognition for reporting the vulnerability to the community and helping them fix it. In *both* cases, you generally get no fiscal reward for your work, so the recognition and the fix are all you're motivated by. Therefore OS gives more motivation to report bugs, while proprietary software gives more motivation to exploit bugs.
I find it really sad that they're just going to keep it around living like this. I mean, I feel bad about killing it, but I think that it needs to be done.
Well, it's not like they had much of a choice. They kept it confined for a while, but then it hopped away on its own when it had the opportunity. Seems like it's doing it's froggy best to express a will to live...
Wonderful. Now the vandals have a culture. Charming. Let's next do an article on the graffiti "artists" who spraypainted my brother's garage.
Actually, a fellow student of mine is doing his thesis in Urban Planning on that very topic. Mostly he's looking at how graffitti and tagging are an attempt to claim public space in an increasingly privatized world.
Vandalism is usually a reaction to something. Instead of bitching, if you find out what it's a reaction to and then see what you can do to address the issue, you'll have a lot more success and peace in your life. It may not always be something under your control, but the gut reactions we tend to have to these types of acts often simply make the root causes worse, and perpetuate the situation.
The key to stoping these people is to teach them that creating a program, or using their knowledge to fix the security problems they find will pay a lot better then simply attacking remote systems and downloading/writing damageing scripts and worms. Maybe not a perfect solution, but I think such reconditioning would certianly stop the majority of them.
Not until our child labor laws are tweaked to allow 15-year-olds to do contract development work. Until then, they'll still be doing what they're doing, because they can't do anything else for an eternity (i.e. at least three more years).
I know this is just asking to get flamed, but if these kids had some proper motivation and direction, they could probably do some pretty impressive stuff.
You're not asking to get flamed; you're asking to get volunteered to start a mentoring program.;-)
Where in the article are they talking about the users of the machine they hack being clueless?
Here:
Roblimo: One thing Microsoft spokespeople say is that if Linux were as popular as Windows, it would be attacked as much, and that as Linux starts getting used by more clueless people, those attacks will get easier.
Andy: With the sorry security history Microsoft has, and the low level of computing proficiency its customers have, not to mention the abundance of machines on cable and DSL IP ranges that aren't behind hardware routers, I agree to a good extent with Microsoft. People switching to Linux do not de facto get smarter.
Joe Average needs tax dollars spent ensuring the welfare of our society, not the welfare of Bob Businessman's T3 lines so profit margins remain high.
Generally I agree, except...
Bob Businessman is Joe Average's boss's boss's boss. When his T-3 line for the site that sells whatever widgets Joe Average is putting together gets sucked dry, it costs the company money. Six months later, when they have a shareholder meeting coming up, that expensive worm might cost Joe Average his job in a layoff.
It's important to recognize that the resources needed by some people aren't the resources needed by everyone. But by the same token, it's also useful to recognize when the resources sucked up by one abuse end up costing others important resources down the line.
Slashdot Mirror
how do they determine who has "computer skills"? And is this really feasible? How will they make someone work for them? How will they even know if a computer programmer is a computer programmer? Do they have some kind of national database of them?
My guess is that is the point of the article; they're starting to develop that database. Hopefully, what they'll do is change the selective service forms and just tag new registrants as having computer skills. Otherwise, they'll just check your records... "Hm, BS in Computer Science... you get a gold star." It's not terribly difficult to find this stuff out, especially if your resume is available online.
still, don't you agree that netflix implies a slightly longer planning horizon than the blockbuster's down the street?
Nah, not really. We almost never rented movies from the video store. Occasionally we would, and then we'd get like five at a time because it's so much cheaper, and then we'd have to basically plan our week around watching all of them. With this, they just show up, and sit there until we feel like watching. Since we don't have to send them back by any particular time (we just keep them as long as we want, and they don't send us more until we send them back), we can be a lot *less* planned about our viewing.
(DVD rental via mail is a good step, but you need to plan in advance, so points off).
That's what I thought too, but then my husband subscribed to Netflix, and it turns out we don't have to plan anything. He spent a bit of time setting up our queue, and now movies we want to see just automatically arrive, and sit next to our DVD player until we feel like watching them. We didn't *plan* to watch "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" last night, but since it was there, we did. It would have been a lot more hassle to say "Hey, we'd like to see Butch Cassidy..." and then spend a couple hours downloading it (over DSL).
His resume doesn't appear to be there anymore, though. At least, the link to it comes up not found.
;-)
Of course, how do we know you're the *original* Jason Slaughter? Maybe *you* copied the resume, and want to point the blame at someone else...
Erm....
Tertullian c. 160-225
Origien 185-253/4
Augustine 354-430
Aquinas born 1225
Luther 1516-1525
Calvin 1509-1564
Wesley 18th c.
C.S. Lewis 1898-1963
So the best you can do is someone writing three lifespans after stuff supposedly happened? That's supposed to somehow convince us all that it's true?
I can list as many people who have written about wood fairies, probably around the same timeline too. Does that make them real?
Not that I generally go around calling Xians nutbags... most of them are not so silly as to actually *believe* that the bible is historical fact. But "evidence" does not consist of people saying "Hey, this is what happened" eight to 100 generations later.
we're nearly paying that now in LA, and I believe the cost is currently higher than that in Europe now.
When I was living in England in 1996, petrol was about 55 pence/liter, with an exchange rate of around 1.65 dollars to the pound. That comes out to about $3.44 a gallon. *In 1996.* Just accounting for inflation, that's over $4 a gallon now.
Yeah, gas is substantially more expensive in Europe...
MS is the best way to do it....
We have pilots who are in charge of a 320 million dollar airframe but can't figure out Outlook. We just got E-Pubs and with it pages of documentation on how to burn a CD using WinXP.
I'm sorry, I'm confused. You say that MS is best, but then you cite how difficult it is for your users to get anything done with two apps, which are both made by MS. You don't relate any experiences with non-MS apps to compare.
It sounds like your documentation and training suck, not so much your software. Even so, in my personal experience Outlook is a lot harder to use than many other mail clients, and burning CDs is really not that hard (for me, or the high-school dropouts I used to supervise at Kinko's). But your anecdote fails to support your initial proposition completely.
Ok, then. Create a file in Office 2000 or XP and try to open it in Office 97. Can't do it. Why? Because the format DID change.
.doc and .xls files as the previous poster mentioned. Unless, of course, you use features within your document that are unsupported in '97 (i.e. avoid bar tabs in Word).
I'll swear I've done this many times, when I had Office 2000 at home and 97 at work. It's been a while now, but I'm sure I have done it, at least with
Recently I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome (I'm 21 and I was diagnosed 2 years ago.) This essentially means that I struggle to develop an effective theory of mind and lack a certain amount of human empathy.
A lot of folks on this thread seem to be skeptical about the suggestion of Aspberger's, but it was the first thing I thought of. I have a friend who worked through her BA in Psych with autistic kids, and my ex-husband figured out after we split that (besides being bipolar) he has Aspberger's.
If this might be the case (and I'd say keep it in your frontal lobe until it's categorically ruled out), about the best thing you can do is remember that it's not that he *doesn't care*, but that he actually *doesn't perceive* a lot of the social cuing that most of us pick up naturally. Body language, tone of voice, etc.... he's basically blind to it. This makes it really hard to know when people disdain you, or are making fun of you, and so on. It also makes it hard to care, since if you don't see it, it doesn't hurt you. It also makes you miss out on much of the positive interactions too... if a girl developed a crush on him (as unlikely as that may seem), he'd probably be utterly oblivious to even blatant signs of it.
In any event, it probably shouldn't be treated that much like a disease. It's simply something to be aware of and find out more about if you want to help this kid learn to negotiate the much more difficult world of social interaction.
I just ask my friends who they would suggest for some doctor.
That would work, IF I had any friends who had been through a pregnancy with UCLA insurance before.
Because my choices were so limited, and because I don't know that many folks who have had kids, that wasn't an option.
Otherwise, it's a good idea. My husband uses the same doctor as my mom, for that very reason.
unless I'm mistaken, you're privy to a large amount of information about doctors....education, training...basically anything relevant that has been recorded. Of course probably virtually no one actually capitalizes on this.
Well, almost.
When I was choosing my provider for my pregnancy, the appointments desk at the one and only office I could go to on my insurance could give me no info but the doctors' names. They suggested I go to the AMA's site to look up the doctors.
Of the six names I got, only *one* was actually registered with the AMA. For her, I found out her education, experience, and a brief blurb on her specialties. For the rest, I found out their education, and how long they'd been practicing, but in some cases, it was even incorrect about where they were currently practicing.
Patient testimonials? Attitudes toward care? Did I have time to interview six doctors, and did they have time to see me for an interview? No.
So I ended up going into the Nurse-Midwife program there. So far, the care I've received has been excellent, and I've very much appreciated the fact that the practitioners are focused on pregnancy and labor/delivery, rather than on the whole spectrum of gynecological issues. Lets them spend more time with me, and they also are very up-to-date on what they do, since they have less to research.
There are too many ignorant folks on juries...then again, the jury I was on was entirely professionals that all seemed to feel the same way about not getting out of the duty.
No kidding. I was on a jury (medical malpractice, no less) a few years back, with some fascinating people, including:
- The president of programming for Showtime (who gave us all copies of their remake of "12 Angry Men" at the end)
- The head of new technologies research for Citibank (who was pretty annoyed at that point that he couldn't get any funding for research on smart chip implementation because all the money was going into the Y2K bug)
- A supervisor in Customs at LAX (who, in spite of this being pre-9/11, had some great stories)
BTW, the guy's case was baseless, and we didn't get past the second question of the special verdict form. He was suing basically because he had no medical insurance and couldn't afford his doctor bills. Of course, if he'd sued his private practice doctor, the only one who made a legitimate mistake, he might have gotten somewhere... but instead, he sued the hospital doctors (presumably) because they had deeper pockets.
You talk about OBs, well if you've ever had a baby you would know that the doctor is usually only present for a couple of minutes, the nurses do everything. Guess who gets the bulk of the pay though...
Tell me about it. I'm in a program with a certified nurse-midwife as my primary care provider. After 23 weeks of pregnancy, I haven't seen a "doctor" at all (which I'm fine with). However, I've already paid a deposit on my expected co-pay for the *doctor's* delivery charges... which I won't owe them until sometime in late June or early July.
Granted, they are charging me in advance because apparently the routine visits throughout the pregnancy are all packaged in with the delivery according to my insurance company, so they get *no* payment until the baby is delivered... and have some difficulty collecting if I up and deliver somewhere else. But no one has ever been able to explain to me why I'm paying for a doctor's services in a program where I don't actually see one.
Not being clueless doesnt help when the so called "kiddy" has an undisclosed exploit for month. :)
But you get the point
Sorry, maybe I should have extended the quote to include the part where Andy mentions that, on his Linux system, there was some nasty exploit that he was already immune to because he'd configured things more securely. It's right after the part I did quote.
So he definitely thinks that cluefulness plays a role in making one less vulnerable to this kind of hacking, whether or not they're 0-day exploits.
Ultimately though, I still say that studying the causes is counterproductive. By trying to differentiate between little shits who like destroying and "souls in anguish, trying to establish themselves," we are giving credence to one form of vandalism, whatever the medium used is. Studying and trying to ascribe causal connections to abberant behaviour does implicitly validate their actions to some extent.
It seems that for you, to analyze the causes for an action is to validate the action; in other words, to simply suggest there's a reason is to remove blame from the perpetrator. I don't agree. For example, I've spent a whole heck of a lot of time and money in therapy, because my parents screwed up big-time in a couple areas. They are the *reason* I have all this crap to deal with. But, rather than absolving me of dealing with it, it's a starting point for working it out. It's actually *impossible* for me to take responsibility for and solve my problems if I don't understand where they came from.
This is a similar case. It will do NO GOOD to try to prevent vandalism with enforcement and laws, so long as the things that make people think it's a good idea persist. They'll simply find new ways to do it. In my city, it's illegal to buy spray paint or paint markers if you're under 18. Great, so now the kids are asking the guy who buys their cigarettes to pick them up some cans of spray paint at the same time. That helps a bundle. *rolls eyes*
One does not have to give "credence" to any form of vandalism in order to examine its causes and determine if there is a cheaper, healthier, more effective way of preventing it. What you may be afraid of is discovering that certain types of vandalism serve an important purpose for some elements of society, and that removing the mechanism entirely would cause even greater problems. Unfortunately, if that turns out to be the case and we only find out *after* we've had some success at removing vandalism (without addressing the more pertinent issues), we have a bigger problem.
Of course, the other thing that frightens people is the idea that we might all share in the responsibility for and the solution to such problems. No one wants to give up any small part of what they consider theirs, even if the overall reasons seem very laudable. This is something that we may just have to outgrow as a culture before we can coherently address very many "societal ills," such as petty crimes like vandalism.
Personally, I don't think there's any difference between little shits who like destroying things and souls in anguish. I want to know what makes the little shits enjoy destroying things, and resolve that, because I believe they *are* souls in anguish. Maybe they need more, or less, discipline at home. Maybe they need more, or less, structure to their education. Maybe they need some serious therapy and a bit of medication to sort out chemical imbalances in their brain. *I* don't pretend to know. But I also don't pretend that it's some mysterious force, like the weather, over which we can exert no control except to lock it out of our lives.
This guy deserves an insightful mod. (emphasis added)
*ahem*
[displays 46th chromosome, which is clearly an X]
Maybe companies might start providing more donations (like cheap lic fees) to a foundation that rewards freelance OSS programmers with cash for tackling certain problems (and does not pay until the code is peer reviewed and bug checked to a reasonable extent.) Maybe that would work better... Are certain organizations not starting to do that?
I certainly wish they would.
Dont you think a security hole that is VERY OLD and still there is a lot worse than one that just slipped in with the last revision?
But, what he's saying is, it's NOT still there. It's been fixed already.
You make a very salient point about why Open-Source software may be less vulnerable to attack than proprietary software. Basically, if you discover a vulnerability in a closed-source program, there is NO honorable way to get recognition or respect for your digging... the best you can do is quietly report it to the company and hope they fix it, knowing they will not usually acknowledge you for reporting it. With OS, you can gain respect and recognition for reporting the vulnerability to the community and helping them fix it. In *both* cases, you generally get no fiscal reward for your work, so the recognition and the fix are all you're motivated by. Therefore OS gives more motivation to report bugs, while proprietary software gives more motivation to exploit bugs.
I find it really sad that they're just going to keep it around living like this. I mean, I feel bad about killing it, but I think that it needs to be done.
Well, it's not like they had much of a choice. They kept it confined for a while, but then it hopped away on its own when it had the opportunity. Seems like it's doing it's froggy best to express a will to live...
Wonderful. Now the vandals have a culture. Charming. Let's next do an article on the graffiti "artists" who spraypainted my brother's garage.
Actually, a fellow student of mine is doing his thesis in Urban Planning on that very topic. Mostly he's looking at how graffitti and tagging are an attempt to claim public space in an increasingly privatized world.
Vandalism is usually a reaction to something. Instead of bitching, if you find out what it's a reaction to and then see what you can do to address the issue, you'll have a lot more success and peace in your life. It may not always be something under your control, but the gut reactions we tend to have to these types of acts often simply make the root causes worse, and perpetuate the situation.
The key to stoping these people is to teach them that creating a program, or using their knowledge to fix the security problems they find will pay a lot better then simply attacking remote systems and downloading/writing damageing scripts and worms. Maybe not a perfect solution, but I think such reconditioning would certianly stop the majority of them.
Not until our child labor laws are tweaked to allow 15-year-olds to do contract development work. Until then, they'll still be doing what they're doing, because they can't do anything else for an eternity (i.e. at least three more years).
I know this is just asking to get flamed, but if these kids had some proper motivation and direction, they could probably do some pretty impressive stuff.
;-)
You're not asking to get flamed; you're asking to get volunteered to start a mentoring program.
Here:
Joe Average needs tax dollars spent ensuring the welfare of our society, not the welfare of Bob Businessman's T3 lines so profit margins remain high.
Generally I agree, except...
Bob Businessman is Joe Average's boss's boss's boss. When his T-3 line for the site that sells whatever widgets Joe Average is putting together gets sucked dry, it costs the company money. Six months later, when they have a shareholder meeting coming up, that expensive worm might cost Joe Average his job in a layoff.
It's important to recognize that the resources needed by some people aren't the resources needed by everyone. But by the same token, it's also useful to recognize when the resources sucked up by one abuse end up costing others important resources down the line.