Anyone can download (or otherwise acquire) the source RPM's from other sites and set up their own silo that still other people can point to instead of the official government silos.
It seems that many people STILL do not understand that a computer "virus" (or trojan or worm) is NOT the same as a biological virus.
It is a computer program SPECIFICALLY designed to exploit a weakness in another computer program.
Simply by NOT running certain computer programs (example, anything related to ActiveX) you "immunize" yourself from any and ALL "viruses" that are designed to exploit that.
So, going forward, it doesn't matter how many people are using your system. Without those specific programs, the viruses cannot infect your system.
They do not "mutate" or "evolve" to attack other programs. The person writing the "virus" has to find a weakness in a different program and re-write the "virus" to attack that weakness.
So what if there is a segment that won't fit that business model? Sell to the segment that does fit it.
For businesses that do need hardware, sell them a pre-loaded, pre-configured system with a support contract that includes REAL support. Instead of having 100 client companies with 100 sysadmins all duplicating of the basics, sell your service of 10 sysadmins all monitoring and reporting to those 100 client companies.
Take the profit and put it into programmers who continually improve the software running on those systems.
Building a business on Free software doesn't mean that you cannot turn a profit. Just that you won't be the next Bill Gates. But you'll still be able to put your kids through college.
Then i always begin to wonder why this hasn't been done already; is the combination of narcissistic recklessness and technical competence really that rare?
Pretty much. The closest was the "I Luv U" email which overwrote media files.
Since then, it's all about profit. Why destroy a computer when you can use it to send spam?
If you want to be really cruel, your "virus" would randomly alter a few numbers on any Excel spreadsheet it could access.
I also disagree that privacy and freedom are inextricably entwined in such a way that a simplistic "if we have less privacy we have less freedom" is a justifiable position. Prove it.
There is no proof outside of mathematics.
Instead, I'll reference history. Read up on the totalitarian societies and the amount of spying they did on their citizens and how much information the citizens had to provide.
Its as simple as that. It is morally bankrupt and I have to say I see your position as both simplistic in the extreme and grossly myopic.
You can believe whatever you want.
But until you can provide at least one counter-example all you're doing is denying the historical facts.
What business do you have keeping information from the rest of society which could be used for a social good?
Look up the historical records of how "social good" is defined. You'll find everything from slavery to genocide.
Do you really think you live in some kind of vacuum where only you the individual matters?
See above. Individuals throughout history have opposed the "social good" of the time and we regard them as selfless heroes now.
It is the choice of the individual. Not the society.
How about if all these 'evil' insurance companies can drastically reduce the overall cost of health care to a point where it saves a large number of lives?
I worked for an insurance company. They aren't doing it because they think they're improving society.
They're doing it because the owners believe they, personally, can turn a profit. And they believe that the more information they can collect, the greater their profit (and the smaller their losses) will be.
Don't confuse "economical" with "good".
Is it ethical for you to want to withhold that information simply because it benefits you personally to do so?
Yes, of course it is.
Human society is more than the sum of the individuals which make it up, and the interests of that society are more than the sum of the interests of its individual members.
Again, look up slavery and genocide.
Not that I think we should mindlessly surrender all privacy, but to insist on mindlessly guarding everything about ourselves we are paying a price, and that price may well be higher than the price of openness. It may also be a lot higher than we think it is. Seems to me the issue bears a lot more study.
It "may well be"... but if you study history you'll see that the opposite seems to be the norm.
The more privacy the population has, the more "Free" that society is.
The less privacy the population has, the less "Free" that society is.
Christianity and western culture is really fucked up when it concerns nudity and sexuality when you compare it against other peoples, cultures and times.
EVERY culture is "really fucked up" when compared to any other culture... based upon the bias of the person doing the comparing.
Many modern people are more primitive then many ancient cultures in their behaviour and ethics.
You can find single examples to demonstrate that claim... but you cannot find multiple examples in a single ancient culture to support it. Again, depending upon the bias of the person doing the comparing.
Culture X was more enlightened regarding Y than modern cultures... but less enlightened regarding A, B, C and D.
The execs at all three of the "big three" made a LOT more than that.
Then they fly in the private jets to lobby for a bailout.
And people are complaining that UNIONS are the "problem"? No. It those execs were actually earning that kind of money (as opposed to just being paid that much) then they would have found a way to be profitable in spite of the unions.
What we're seeing here is the end result of there being no cost for failure. It means that those execs can implement whatever idiot idea comes into their heads. If it works, they get a HUGE bonus. If it fails, the government will bail them out. So we end up with riskier and riskier (and more idiotic) "plans".
Instead, they should have been focusing on the core business. Modernizing their production lines. Improving their systems.
Yet now the discussion is about whether we should reward their behaviour or not.
AIG through a half a million dollar PARTY after their bailout was supported.
We've been through this all before. If you give a million dollars to a millionaire, he's going to spend it differently than if you give a million dollars to a hundred people who only make $10,000.
The question then becomes, if we are giving $X away, what is the BEST segment to give it to in order to boost the economy.
And I do not see how paying someone to fly around in a private jet helps the economy more than giving it directly to the middle class.
They also have to deal with various groups trying to stop them. As in TFA:
"We have registered a couple hundred domains," Gong said, "but we made the decision that we cannot afford to spend so much money to keep registering so many [domain] names."
So the spammers had to have thought about and planned for such a contingency.
And still bring in enough money to pay for the connections they'll be using to control the zombies.
The updated Srizbi includes hard-coded references to the Estonian command-and-control servers, but Gong was unaware of any current attempt to convince the firm now hosting those servers to yank them off the Web.
So while attempting to register the domain names, work was going on to update the zombie software.
The question now is how to get those hard-coded references to the various ISP's in the world so that they can block traffic to/from them and stop the zombies from updating again.
Why isn't information such as that ever included in these articles?
Working with telcos is a pain. The problem is NEVER on their side. Why don't you reboot all your equipment first? Did that fix it?
I deal mostly with T-1's and that technology has been around for about 50 years. Yet I still cannot get the providers to TEST the lines when I say there is a problem. HELLO?!? You should ALREADY know there's a problem when one of the circuits goes into an error state.
Now, imagine trying to get the telco to deal with a problem connecting to your network with all your neighbors complaining to you.
From TFA:
The idea of customer-owned fiber may seem odd, but it is important to remember that many items that consumers buy today would have seemed very strange not long ago. Until the personal computer, a computer was something that only large companies owned. For decades, telephones were available only for lease, not for purchase. Home fiber could be the next technology that moves into the realm of consumer property.
No. Those are all devices INSIDE the house. They are NOT the connections themselves.
Lots of homes have water filters and water heaters. But very few homes own the water pipes.
So we're not 2nd generation?
on
Evolving Rocks
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· Score: 1
The research team, led by U.S. geologists Robert Hazen and Dominic Papineau of the Washington, D.C.-based Carnegie Institution, recounted how just 12 minerals are believed to have been present among the dust particles swirling through space at the dawn of planetary formation some five billion years ago.
So the Earth is not, at least, part of a 2nd generation system? With the heavier elements formed during a previous sun's life cycle and explosion?
The blame lies with the parents, not the person setting up the kill zone.
Why are you trying to phrase it as "blame" now?
I consider freeways, and keeping children off of them, to be pretty ethical behavior.
Again, freeways are about getting from point A to point B. Not about killing anyone who steps onto them.
Setting something to kill anyone who approaches would seem to be the opposite of an ethical action if an ethical action would be keeping people away from such.
No one accidentally wanders into freeway traffic. Either their wardens were faulty, or they ignored the signs on purpose.
A child can wander into traffic without intent to do so.
And the purpose of the field of fire is to prevent people from getting from point A to point B, and everybody knows it.
No. The purpose is to kill. Not to prevent. There's a difference. A safe can prevent people from getting from point A to point B (point B being inside the safe) without killing anyone.
The fact that you have to make so many false claims should be enough to tell you that you are wrong.
Machines cannot be ethical because they cannot choose between a more ethical and less ethical course of action.
The parents of the toddler should not have been picnicking on a hill overlooking the kill zone.
Who cares if they should or should not have?
The question is about whether it is ethical to kill an innocent child who accidentally wanders into the kill zone.
This is no different than a toddler wandering into freeway traffic.
Yes it is. Because no one has claimed that such an event would be "ethical". That would be termed an "accident". The same if ANYONE accidentally wandered into freeway traffic.
The major difference being that freeway traffic is more about getting from point A to point B and NOT about killing people on the freeway.
And a toddler wanders into your field of fire.
on
Ethical Killing Machines
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So, a family is picnicking on a hill overlooking your kill zone.
The toddler gets away and falls down the hill and then wanders into your kill zone.
Is it ethical to kill the toddler?
Machines cannot be ethical because they cannot make decisions based upon less / more ethical choices.
Don't forget file format lock-in and network effects.
If you're the only one who can make a 100% compatible word processor... and everyone uses that file format... then you can do just about whatever you want. As long as the damage you are causing to your customers is less than the cost of them migrating (and causing problems with THEIR suppliers and customers).
That's why there was such a big push for ODF. Once the file format is standardized, ANYONE can write a word processor and compete on quality and support instead of lock-in.
Effectively driving the cost of word processors down to zero.
A friend of mine is constantly annoyed that his son (who plays a lot of online games) would rather have Dad fix the problems than learn how to fix them himself.
But what really annoys him is how his son was picking up racial/ethnic slurs as acceptable casual conversation.
Personally, if I was in an organization where we had the wherewithal to mentor someone on their way up, show them how to learn things on their own, give them the latitude to make potentially-costly mistakes in a sandbox, I'd have no problem hiring inexperienced people.
The best way I've found is to set up situations that you've found in the past and let the new guy make the same mistakes you made. In a controlled environment.
In my experience, most of the mistakes are repeated over and over. For the same reasons. With the same expectations.
Experience is what differentiates what WILL work (and why) from what SHOULD work.
The best thing about learning from a mistake with a mentor is that you also learn what the characteristics of the breakage are. And how to look for them.
Slashdot Mirror
"Reasonable suspicion" is the key phrase here.
If the cop stops you for running a red light and sees something suspicious then he can go further.
But stopping you for one thing does NOT give them the authority to check for everything they can think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_suspicion
And anything destroyed by them SHOULD be able to be restored from backup.
Try it. Go to a USofA-based commercial site and check the shipping charges for your purchase.
Most of the sites are offering free shipping. I'm guessing that these two items are related.
I'm still waiting for one of the anti-virus vendors to just start implementing a white list to cut down on the false positives.
It's not really a "virus detector" if it hits more often on non-viruses on your system. It's a "new software is being installed" detector.
Anyone can download (or otherwise acquire) the source RPM's from other sites and set up their own silo that still other people can point to instead of the official government silos.
It seems that many people STILL do not understand that a computer "virus" (or trojan or worm) is NOT the same as a biological virus.
It is a computer program SPECIFICALLY designed to exploit a weakness in another computer program.
Simply by NOT running certain computer programs (example, anything related to ActiveX) you "immunize" yourself from any and ALL "viruses" that are designed to exploit that.
So, going forward, it doesn't matter how many people are using your system. Without those specific programs, the viruses cannot infect your system.
They do not "mutate" or "evolve" to attack other programs. The person writing the "virus" has to find a weakness in a different program and re-write the "virus" to attack that weakness.
So what if there is a segment that won't fit that business model? Sell to the segment that does fit it.
For businesses that do need hardware, sell them a pre-loaded, pre-configured system with a support contract that includes REAL support. Instead of having 100 client companies with 100 sysadmins all duplicating of the basics, sell your service of 10 sysadmins all monitoring and reporting to those 100 client companies.
Take the profit and put it into programmers who continually improve the software running on those systems.
Building a business on Free software doesn't mean that you cannot turn a profit. Just that you won't be the next Bill Gates. But you'll still be able to put your kids through college.
Pretty much. The closest was the "I Luv U" email which overwrote media files.
Since then, it's all about profit. Why destroy a computer when you can use it to send spam?
If you want to be really cruel, your "virus" would randomly alter a few numbers on any Excel spreadsheet it could access.
There is no proof outside of mathematics.
Instead, I'll reference history. Read up on the totalitarian societies and the amount of spying they did on their citizens and how much information the citizens had to provide.
You can believe whatever you want.
But until you can provide at least one counter-example all you're doing is denying the historical facts.
Look up the historical records of how "social good" is defined. You'll find everything from slavery to genocide.
See above. Individuals throughout history have opposed the "social good" of the time and we regard them as selfless heroes now.
It is the choice of the individual. Not the society.
I worked for an insurance company. They aren't doing it because they think they're improving society.
They're doing it because the owners believe they, personally, can turn a profit. And they believe that the more information they can collect, the greater their profit (and the smaller their losses) will be.
Don't confuse "economical" with "good".
Yes, of course it is.
Again, look up slavery and genocide.
It "may well be" ... but if you study history you'll see that the opposite seems to be the norm.
The more privacy the population has, the more "Free" that society is.
The less privacy the population has, the less "Free" that society is.
In those cases where they did all live in one big hut ... why did they choose that? What were their circumstances?
When those circumstances changed, did their choice of living space change?
I think that most of those situations came about because of a few circumstances.
#1. It's easier to heat one big hut with everyone in it during the winter.
#2. It's easier to defend one big hut from the enemy tribes.
#3. It's easier to re-build one big hut when the weather knocks it down.
And even in those cases, while it might have been one big hut, that hut was sectioned off into personal/family territories.
It's okay to have the information open ... as long as the information is not used in any way that you disapprove of.
The problem is that once the information is open, you no longer control it. You do NOT have a say in how it will be used.
If it is used in some way that you do not want it to be used, sucks to be you. That is why privacy is important.
EVERY culture is "really fucked up" when compared to any other culture ... based upon the bias of the person doing the comparing.
You can find single examples to demonstrate that claim ... but you cannot find multiple examples in a single ancient culture to support it. Again, depending upon the bias of the person doing the comparing.
Culture X was more enlightened regarding Y than modern cultures ... but less enlightened regarding A, B, C and D.
Toyota's CEO made less than $1 million in 2005.
The execs at all three of the "big three" made a LOT more than that.
Then they fly in the private jets to lobby for a bailout.
And people are complaining that UNIONS are the "problem"? No. It those execs were actually earning that kind of money (as opposed to just being paid that much) then they would have found a way to be profitable in spite of the unions.
What we're seeing here is the end result of there being no cost for failure. It means that those execs can implement whatever idiot idea comes into their heads. If it works, they get a HUGE bonus. If it fails, the government will bail them out. So we end up with riskier and riskier (and more idiotic) "plans".
Instead, they should have been focusing on the core business. Modernizing their production lines. Improving their systems.
Yet now the discussion is about whether we should reward their behaviour or not.
AIG through a half a million dollar PARTY after their bailout was supported.
We've been through this all before. If you give a million dollars to a millionaire, he's going to spend it differently than if you give a million dollars to a hundred people who only make $10,000.
The question then becomes, if we are giving $X away, what is the BEST segment to give it to in order to boost the economy.
And I do not see how paying someone to fly around in a private jet helps the economy more than giving it directly to the middle class.
How are your going to be able to explain NOT fixing a bug that got through in your code when you had time to include an un-spec'ed Easter egg?
This isn't about charm. This is about having to explain to management why a customer is unhappy.
They also have to deal with various groups trying to stop them. As in TFA:
So the spammers had to have thought about and planned for such a contingency.
And still bring in enough money to pay for the connections they'll be using to control the zombies.
So while attempting to register the domain names, work was going on to update the zombie software.
The question now is how to get those hard-coded references to the various ISP's in the world so that they can block traffic to/from them and stop the zombies from updating again.
Why isn't information such as that ever included in these articles?
Working with telcos is a pain. The problem is NEVER on their side. Why don't you reboot all your equipment first? Did that fix it?
I deal mostly with T-1's and that technology has been around for about 50 years. Yet I still cannot get the providers to TEST the lines when I say there is a problem. HELLO?!? You should ALREADY know there's a problem when one of the circuits goes into an error state.
Now, imagine trying to get the telco to deal with a problem connecting to your network with all your neighbors complaining to you.
From TFA:
No. Those are all devices INSIDE the house. They are NOT the connections themselves.
Lots of homes have water filters and water heaters. But very few homes own the water pipes.
So the Earth is not, at least, part of a 2nd generation system? With the heavier elements formed during a previous sun's life cycle and explosion?
Why are you trying to phrase it as "blame" now?
Again, freeways are about getting from point A to point B. Not about killing anyone who steps onto them.
Setting something to kill anyone who approaches would seem to be the opposite of an ethical action if an ethical action would be keeping people away from such.
A child can wander into traffic without intent to do so.
No. The purpose is to kill. Not to prevent. There's a difference. A safe can prevent people from getting from point A to point B (point B being inside the safe) without killing anyone.
The fact that you have to make so many false claims should be enough to tell you that you are wrong.
Machines cannot be ethical because they cannot choose between a more ethical and less ethical course of action.
Who cares if they should or should not have?
The question is about whether it is ethical to kill an innocent child who accidentally wanders into the kill zone.
Yes it is. Because no one has claimed that such an event would be "ethical". That would be termed an "accident". The same if ANYONE accidentally wandered into freeway traffic.
The major difference being that freeway traffic is more about getting from point A to point B and NOT about killing people on the freeway.
So, a family is picnicking on a hill overlooking your kill zone.
The toddler gets away and falls down the hill and then wanders into your kill zone.
Is it ethical to kill the toddler?
Machines cannot be ethical because they cannot make decisions based upon less / more ethical choices.
Don't forget file format lock-in and network effects.
If you're the only one who can make a 100% compatible word processor ... and everyone uses that file format ... then you can do just about whatever you want. As long as the damage you are causing to your customers is less than the cost of them migrating (and causing problems with THEIR suppliers and customers).
That's why there was such a big push for ODF. Once the file format is standardized, ANYONE can write a word processor and compete on quality and support instead of lock-in.
Effectively driving the cost of word processors down to zero.
A friend of mine is constantly annoyed that his son (who plays a lot of online games) would rather have Dad fix the problems than learn how to fix them himself.
But what really annoys him is how his son was picking up racial/ethnic slurs as acceptable casual conversation.
The best way I've found is to set up situations that you've found in the past and let the new guy make the same mistakes you made. In a controlled environment.
In my experience, most of the mistakes are repeated over and over. For the same reasons. With the same expectations.
Experience is what differentiates what WILL work (and why) from what SHOULD work.
The best thing about learning from a mistake with a mentor is that you also learn what the characteristics of the breakage are. And how to look for them.
That is, programmers who are familiar with Windows more than other systems.
And Microsoft is also looking to roll out a new language that is supposed to make parallel programming much easier for those programmers.
If it works, there would be a LOT more apps that take advantage of these systems.