Human morality is relative, but it isn't absolutely relative. It's based in animal instinct, and that instinct is constant even if it's not equally strong in everyone or potentially distorted by neurobiological disorders or injury. These religions have heaped needless made-up constructs on top of these. Also, living in relative poverty might have a lot to do with it.
Yes you're right, but he's not fully mentally healthy like a typical adult either, the truth is thus somewhere in between.
He doesn't seem mentally incompetent to me. It might be that he's stress-sensitive and unable to socially interact like a normal person, but Asperger syndrome doesn't affect moral perception as such. IANAL/IANAP, but I don't think this crime is remotely excusable in a legal sense by his condition even if he "lives in his own little world". Removing moral agency from individuals like that willy-nilly, especially for such a fluid and vaugely defined condition, seems inappropriate.
There's not much, of course. I was gunning more for the admins of the system rather than trying to imply that McKinnon is somehow innocent of a crime. However, if he broke into a military base or contractors facility using a wire cutter to look for UFOs I'd personally view it as roughly equivalent to his current actions in a moral/ethical sense.
Yes they did. Not to be an arrogant asshole but that's literally 80'ies security, people dialing in to networks and poking around. Whomever was responsible for setting up those networks had to know about the concept of wardialing or they'd be completely incompetent. Any system that can be broken into using a war dialer/port scanner and an appropriate brute-force program is insecure. We all know what happens to a server with an internet-visible SSH daemon that password-auths guessable username/password combinations, right?
And the door analogy breaks down quite fast, because most doors/locks AFAIK isn't designed to protect against actual burglary - real burglars mostly just smash a window or drill the lock open, or so I've read.
As for what he did, if the guards of a military base suddenly waltzes off for hookers and blow and some random nut looking for UFO's wanders in and peeks about the hangars before getting caught, would this even be an issue? Or would it just be laughed off?
No, you aren't. Personally I think this is because of the violence/power aspect - when someone asserts power over someone else by hacking/ddosing/whatever then the gut instinct is to counterattack and put them down. In the case of 'Script Kiddie", by accusing them of being ignorant idiots and so forth, whereas some people apparently might respect an adversary if he's powerful or skilled enough. If you aren't asserting power like that then the put-down aspect doesn't enter into the equation.
Are you so attached to the idea of performance and computer skills that you'd even consider it a relevant subject of discussion when such a young person has passed away? You're all like Scrooge, but with computers chained to your souls instead of cash.
Yeah, I've always felt a bit uneasy about the culture of Sweden (that I've known in my lifetime). I think it's like barbarism with all the non-childproof parts removed. It'd be awesome if they'd finish this with a twist though, like smuggling in Robert Gustavsson in character as old lady Lingon or something. Not like that's gonna happen.
In that case I'd strongly suggest to firstly make a visit in the spring or summer - making that early spring if you're into wintersports - and secondly to visit places other than Stockholm. The capital isn't really representative of the nation as a whole and many swedes find it boorish.
"In thee I'll live, in thee I'll die, thou North Land!" (x2) - line four, second verse of the official translation of the Swedish national anthem by Richard Dybeck (1811-77).
Who modded this troll, it's hilarious. Those exported cultural works should be seen as being about as indicative of Sweden as Disneyland is to the US. Or, like manga/anime is of Japan. It presents a view of the temperament of the populace, nothing else. My personal theory is that the obsession over misery in Swedish culture is some sort of psychological reaction to having it too good.
I couldn't care less about it, but we do have a religious party and so presumably there are religious swedes - and you can't tell me that "boring" isn't representative of the swedish national character, it'd only be fair to get a whole lot of them on to this thing.
No individual can be that stupid naturally. That sort of clusterfuck has to be the result of TSA agents being incompetent and unable to see the bigger picture, and the stress and pressure resulting from trying to do their job anyway. And everyone else plays along to keep the show moving. The question is then, how far up does the stupidity go? What is the character of this system of stupidity, and how does it interact with the rest of the government? I don't have the time or energy to attempt to find out, I have my own stuff to do - and so does everyone else that blindly trusts the US government to do their job properly.
Incompetence can perhaps be forgiven because of the circumstances of panic and war, but a system that's explicitly defensive against constructive criticism from the populace is working against the people, not for it.
In theory, but you'd need to generate a ton of fake personas that look real enough to (presumably a) human trying to comb through them, and they need enough content to actually carry some weight. You couldn't just re-use a small pool of fake pages because the people doing the combing would catch on. I suppose you could make template posts like "went to x with y, had fun" and throw in some extra words if you needed to auto-generate textual content but most real accounts on facebook have a lot of photos too. No idea what you could use to generate those. Using real people to generate the content might cause unacceptable cuts in your profit margin.
Also, facebook would obviously try to put an end to it since the users are the product etc.
The second this takes off, there's going to be a business in optimizing people's social profiles - if nothing else, the things you should have/not have on your profile will spread through word of mouth and experience. The reason facebook et al is used for evaluating people is the idea that people might not "keep up appearances" there, right? But if it impacts your personal finances or job prospects most people would just tighten up out of fear. It's self-defeating. It's also dreadful since it'd presumably lead to people making themselves out to be oily cookie-cutter smilies for financial benefit, conformity of the worst kind.
Could this be because they're "inside their heads", daydreaming? Other posters have already mentioned the old technique for memorizing things by visualizing locations and that obviously works. So if I'm a visual thinker then does that mean I intuitively carry around the context in my imagination? And would experience a "context switch" when having to switch focus to my surroundings whereas other people might be less prone to interruption by outside stimuli but more sensitive to the external context?
How's that? Just because you've agreed to deliver something by a set date doesn't mean that you're in an employer-employee relationship with that entity?
and all people involved are okay with it, I guess it's okay. But why would they spend resources on this in the first place? They pay for something to be done within a certain timeframe, and if they don't it's just a breach of contract right? Why would they care about the details?
and still having enough force to skip across the road and bounce off a roof? You'd think that friction would have stopped it. Wonder what the stairs looked like afterwards.
Did they develop this as a defense mechanism against predators, who presumably aren't immune to their toxic cell plasma? Also, the cell membrane must be pretty thick? (or my intuitive understanding of the effect of pressure on things at that depth pretty lousy.)
Are you kidding me? If they manage to develop this into artificial skin, you could record the sensations and sell them! And you'd have no worries of software piracy, because the same sensations over and over would probably get pretty dull. Imagine the possibilities!
Slashdot Mirror
Human morality is relative, but it isn't absolutely relative. It's based in animal instinct, and that instinct is constant even if it's not equally strong in everyone or potentially distorted by neurobiological disorders or injury. These religions have heaped needless made-up constructs on top of these. Also, living in relative poverty might have a lot to do with it.
Also, you've got a great set of metal lyrics going there.
It's available as a PDF from their site. I downloaded it and skimmed through a few bits, it looks nicely written and seems to contain concrete advice.
You apparently can use spider silk for cloth if you really try hard enough. (Warning: NSF arachnophobes.)
Yes you're right, but he's not fully mentally healthy like a typical adult either, the truth is thus somewhere in between.
He doesn't seem mentally incompetent to me. It might be that he's stress-sensitive and unable to socially interact like a normal person, but Asperger syndrome doesn't affect moral perception as such. IANAL/IANAP, but I don't think this crime is remotely excusable in a legal sense by his condition even if he "lives in his own little world". Removing moral agency from individuals like that willy-nilly, especially for such a fluid and vaugely defined condition, seems inappropriate.
There's not much, of course. I was gunning more for the admins of the system rather than trying to imply that McKinnon is somehow innocent of a crime. However, if he broke into a military base or contractors facility using a wire cutter to look for UFOs I'd personally view it as roughly equivalent to his current actions in a moral/ethical sense.
Yes they did. Not to be an arrogant asshole but that's literally 80'ies security, people dialing in to networks and poking around. Whomever was responsible for setting up those networks had to know about the concept of wardialing or they'd be completely incompetent. Any system that can be broken into using a war dialer/port scanner and an appropriate brute-force program is insecure. We all know what happens to a server with an internet-visible SSH daemon that password-auths guessable username/password combinations, right?
And the door analogy breaks down quite fast, because most doors/locks AFAIK isn't designed to protect against actual burglary - real burglars mostly just smash a window or drill the lock open, or so I've read.
As for what he did, if the guards of a military base suddenly waltzes off for hookers and blow and some random nut looking for UFO's wanders in and peeks about the hangars before getting caught, would this even be an issue? Or would it just be laughed off?
No, you aren't. Personally I think this is because of the violence/power aspect - when someone asserts power over someone else by hacking/ddosing/whatever then the gut instinct is to counterattack and put them down. In the case of 'Script Kiddie", by accusing them of being ignorant idiots and so forth, whereas some people apparently might respect an adversary if he's powerful or skilled enough. If you aren't asserting power like that then the put-down aspect doesn't enter into the equation.
http://datalossdb.org/
Are you so attached to the idea of performance and computer skills that you'd even consider it a relevant subject of discussion when such a young person has passed away? You're all like Scrooge, but with computers chained to your souls instead of cash.
Yeah, I've always felt a bit uneasy about the culture of Sweden (that I've known in my lifetime). I think it's like barbarism with all the non-childproof parts removed. It'd be awesome if they'd finish this with a twist though, like smuggling in Robert Gustavsson in character as old lady Lingon or something. Not like that's gonna happen.
In that case I'd strongly suggest to firstly make a visit in the spring or summer - making that early spring if you're into wintersports - and secondly to visit places other than Stockholm. The capital isn't really representative of the nation as a whole and many swedes find it boorish.
"In thee I'll live, in thee I'll die, thou North Land!" (x2) - line four, second verse of the official translation of the Swedish national anthem by Richard Dybeck (1811-77).
Who modded this troll, it's hilarious. Those exported cultural works should be seen as being about as indicative of Sweden as Disneyland is to the US. Or, like manga/anime is of Japan. It presents a view of the temperament of the populace, nothing else. My personal theory is that the obsession over misery in Swedish culture is some sort of psychological reaction to having it too good.
I couldn't care less about it, but we do have a religious party and so presumably there are religious swedes - and you can't tell me that "boring" isn't representative of the swedish national character, it'd only be fair to get a whole lot of them on to this thing.
No individual can be that stupid naturally. That sort of clusterfuck has to be the result of TSA agents being incompetent and unable to see the bigger picture, and the stress and pressure resulting from trying to do their job anyway. And everyone else plays along to keep the show moving. The question is then, how far up does the stupidity go? What is the character of this system of stupidity, and how does it interact with the rest of the government? I don't have the time or energy to attempt to find out, I have my own stuff to do - and so does everyone else that blindly trusts the US government to do their job properly.
Incompetence can perhaps be forgiven because of the circumstances of panic and war, but a system that's explicitly defensive against constructive criticism from the populace is working against the people, not for it.
Also, actually doing this would be scummy as hell IMHO.
In theory, but you'd need to generate a ton of fake personas that look real enough to (presumably a) human trying to comb through them, and they need enough content to actually carry some weight. You couldn't just re-use a small pool of fake pages because the people doing the combing would catch on. I suppose you could make template posts like "went to x with y, had fun" and throw in some extra words if you needed to auto-generate textual content but most real accounts on facebook have a lot of photos too. No idea what you could use to generate those. Using real people to generate the content might cause unacceptable cuts in your profit margin.
Also, facebook would obviously try to put an end to it since the users are the product etc.
The second this takes off, there's going to be a business in optimizing people's social profiles - if nothing else, the things you should have/not have on your profile will spread through word of mouth and experience. The reason facebook et al is used for evaluating people is the idea that people might not "keep up appearances" there, right? But if it impacts your personal finances or job prospects most people would just tighten up out of fear. It's self-defeating. It's also dreadful since it'd presumably lead to people making themselves out to be oily cookie-cutter smilies for financial benefit, conformity of the worst kind.
Could this be because they're "inside their heads", daydreaming? Other posters have already mentioned the old technique for memorizing things by visualizing locations and that obviously works. So if I'm a visual thinker then does that mean I intuitively carry around the context in my imagination? And would experience a "context switch" when having to switch focus to my surroundings whereas other people might be less prone to interruption by outside stimuli but more sensitive to the external context?
How's that? Just because you've agreed to deliver something by a set date doesn't mean that you're in an employer-employee relationship with that entity?
and all people involved are okay with it, I guess it's okay. But why would they spend resources on this in the first place? They pay for something to be done within a certain timeframe, and if they don't it's just a breach of contract right? Why would they care about the details?
and still having enough force to skip across the road and bounce off a roof? You'd think that friction would have stopped it. Wonder what the stairs looked like afterwards.
Did they develop this as a defense mechanism against predators, who presumably aren't immune to their toxic cell plasma? Also, the cell membrane must be pretty thick? (or my intuitive understanding of the effect of pressure on things at that depth pretty lousy.)
Are you kidding me? If they manage to develop this into artificial skin, you could record the sensations and sell them! And you'd have no worries of software piracy, because the same sensations over and over would probably get pretty dull. Imagine the possibilities!