You are quite right that, there is nothing wrong in being zealous, but rather in the ways which one expresses their zeal.
Let's see what the OED has to say about zealot:
Zealot:
1. A member of a Jewish sect which aimed at a Jewish theocracy over the earth and fiercely resisted the Romans till the fall of Jerusalem in a.d. 70.
2. One who is zealous or full of zeal; one who pursues his object with passionate ardour; usually in disparaging sense, one who is carried away by excess of zeal; an immoderate partisan, a fanatical enthusiast. Const. for, +of, +to.
Someone who not only has passion, but is so fervent about their passions as to place it above all other concerns--whether they be justice, morality, responsibility or equality. Not just zeal, but a disparaging excess of zeal.
Ultimately the framework of our society relies upon the give and take between individuals and groups. A sense of fairness that some people (dickheads) do not have. You're right, zealotry doesn't inherently imply that someone will act in a way that will be disparaging towards others, but it does happen far too much.
It's too easy to devalue passion by calling someone a zealot. You're right that the term is colloquially misused, and you're right, I'm party to it. I will be more careful where I use the term.
But we can't go the opposite direction either--zealotry can be a very dangerous thing. Zealotry is the crescendo of human emotion fixed upon a single idea. Many, many people fixate their entire sense of self upon that idea, and to have it broken would break their raison d'etre. It's a excruciating experience that--when faced with its possibility--many have resorted to hideous acts to avoid.
I'm sorry you felt somehow offended by what I wrote. It wasn't directed towards anyone who does have a vested interest.
I think it might be a good idea to go revisit what I wrote. If you still feel offended, I think you might take a hard look at exactly what's making you mad.
Take it from me--the words weren't directed against anyone who's spent a single hour developing, using, or learning about something, whether it's Linux, Windows or poetry. There's nothing wrong with being passionate about something you like doing.
What I do take issue with is when people start flaming and whining because other people don't feel the same way they do. What I take issue with is people who act as if the "other side" is morally bankrupt, is an enemy, or should change, simply because they don't agree. The thing about zealots is that they aren't comfortable enough in their passions to just let other people do something different.
I'm happy you feel passionate about OSS and Linux. Believe me, I'm quite passionate about OSS myself. But there's a clear difference between passion and zealotry.
Your freedom of speech doesn't equate to my having to listen, agree and silently acquiesce--especially when you are plainly biased and just plain wrong.
The irony is that its the zealots (whatever banner they ride under) that are the first to accuse everyone who doesn't agree with them of zealotry.
Listen up, buddy, it's a fricking tool. Get over yourself and find something worthwhile to fight for. It's a shame that hordes of idiots--who don't even have a vested interest in it--flame and whine until you drown out all relevant and reasonable discussion of what makes one tool the right one for a particular task.
I feel sorry for all the schmoes who put their time and energy into giving Experts Exchange their hard-earned knowledge.
I searched the other day on an issue with Exchange server; when I did a Google search for the relevant information I was pointed to Experts Exchange. The problem was, the page was no longer available--unless I paid for a subscription.
I had to read the google archive to get the info.
Experts Exchange is the epitome of what defines open vs. closed source products and knowledge. (And as much as I love the BSD's) Experts Exchange shows exactly what kind of protection the GPL provides us, as the valuable assets we are--whether it's our knowledge of building products, or building the documentation they require.
I'd say that most people have been taken advantage of at one time or another, and therefore are more readily able to sympathize with those who have been wronged. But that's a different story.
I don't doubt for a second that, when it comes to money, for the majority of this society your assertion is true. But I think there's a definite difference in the way people look at different crimes; crimes with victims are viewed quite differently than crimes without victims.
Greed is king in these times, and making money hand over fist is great--even if you do have to "bend the rules" to do it. But in the eyes of the public there's a clear and definitive line between bending the rules and breaking them.
There's a clear and definitive line between those who bent the rules and "got away with it" (Microsoft) and those who clearly acted in a nefarious manner for their personal profit (Enron). Microsoft may have acted in a manner which deserved punishment, but at the end of it all, there was no victim to associate with the crime; Microsoft looked as if it were guilty of being too successful. But in the case of Enron, there were clearly victims who were wronged by the executives. It's much easier to see a crime when there is a clearly nefarious breach of trust between a victim and a victimizer.
Corporate criminals are held to a different standard simply because they are supposed to be making money--by any means necessary. There's a soft standard held to business executives. This soft standard of right and wrong has been a part of this government since long before this administration, but I don't think it has been the underlying foundation of the day-to-day activities of any administration before this one.
We see day after day, the Bush administration bending the rules in order to achieve its ends. The public has quietly listened to this, and maybe--if you believe that people, at heart, would rather be victimizers--quietly grinned inside. But in the past, there's been no victims; even the dumfounded Democrats looking on like a pack of deer in headlights were just "outmaneuvered."
But here there is a clear breach of trust, a clear case of malfeasance and a clear victim. This is the kind of stuff that presidents have resigned over.
Updates are usually still handled manually with apt-get update/upgrade.
Sorry, but if I really felt stupid enough, I could have cron job'd my portupgrade, apt-get, urpmi or up2date long, long before Microsoft thought it was a good idea to push updates to clients; we could have been doing this back while microsoft was trying to convince the court that a HTML interface was the only way that they could update their OS.
You seem to have gotten lost somewhere along the way--updates are manual for a reason. The prudent admin takes the time to know what vulnerabilities or potential problems are going to affect their system. The prodent admin knows whether updating is necessary and what potential problems it may cause. Availability of new code doesn't mean that updates are required.
Automating updates isn't "progress." It isn't even hard.
Open Source developers might "hug" C, but they are much less aflicted by language myopia than are Windows developers.
What Windows IDE will do syntax highlighting for Python How about PERL? or PHP? or Ruby? or any of the other numerous languages that are not only supported, but are afforded real, working tools natively supported by the environment.
I think your point is something to take very seriously; but I don't see the Open Source community sitting, waiting for MS. Ultimately the idea is fallacious because it takes for granted the idea that new == better. There are many, many reasons to stick with something that works.
Words of wisdom that have been around much longer than you or I: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
It's not even keeping the services you formerly paid for. It's making us pay more for those services by shifting the tax structure from a progressive system (in which those who can afford to pay more, do) to a non-progressive system.
Ultimately this out of control deficit spending transfers the negative balance to the middle class. The shortsighted folk who talk about the bush "tax cuts" don't understand that it wasn't a tax cut, it was a tax shift. By shifting the tax burden from the federal to the state and local governments, the bush has ultimately made us and our children pay more for those services (while ensuring that his campaign contributors will pay less).
Sorry, but this isn't the 6:00 news, it isn't even a "news" site. Methinks maybe you put too much weight upon the funny slogan. There's no news published here; it's a discussion space. Topics are regularly provided by the "editors" for people read and dicuss, but that should not be mistaken for something which it is not.
Slashdot is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. If you don't like "Ask Slashdot" my suggestion is that you turn it off.
That seems like an awfully funny decision, since Berkeley vs Bell has already established legal protection for BSD.
Too bad you don't have any substantive evidence, in fact, you have nothing besides "he says" hearsay of what exactly would put BSD at risk (since the lawsuit is about whether IBM had a license to release code that it owned *NOTHING MORE*).
What's funny is seeing how many people are getting caught up in the SCO press releases and are forgetting what this is really about.
I agree, CD media is much more pervasive than 8 track ever was. I guess I should work on my delivery; my expression of humor was clumsy. But, I don't think usage by the computer industry really gives any particular medium much staying power.
Remember using cassettes to load programs? Remember using 5 1/4 floppies? And though the industry is desperately clinging to its 2 1/2 inch legacy, it's vanishing too.
Optical media will be pervasive for a while to come, but if you'd talked about PCs without floppy drives about 10 years ago, you'd have gotten a strange look right before you got laughed out of the room.
Moral: Physical media only last as long as it is supported by the industry. You can bet your ass that once they're ready to move on to the next 'big thing' your CD will be as good about as long as your CD player lasts.
It's as 'cracked' as it has been from the original release; you can pipe the digital output into a digital input. You're not doing anything different than you would be if you were burning it to a CD.
Music is not something you measure by the gigabyte... unless you really don't have a concept of what quality is.
I bet you're one of those guys that downloads that screechy crap just so you can try to impress SOMEONE (hint: no one is impressed) about the QUANTITY of DATA that you downloaded.
Most people actually look for QUALITY, not quantity. Most people, when they actually ENJOY what they're listening to talk about the WHAT they're listening to, not the DATA that they've downloaded.
And, sorry fella, quality isn't a bit-rate.
The idiot in this thread sure isn't someone who actually knows what they enjoy, and is smart enough to buy exactly what they're looking for (as opposed to someone who enjoys downloading a lot of crap).
You know, your whole argument rests on the assumption that the number of vulnerabilities associated with any platform is analogous to the number of script kiddies on any platform; i.e. script kiddie==vulnerability.
This is a spurious correlation. The number of vulnerabilities for any platform is not the result of the number of script kiddies out there on the platform. Script kiddies rely on the existence of hacks and software as well as vulnerabilities to exists. The script kiddies that exist for any platform are a symptom, not a cause.
So, your "not so obvious" definition of security through obscurity--though entertaining--doesn't really hold water.
Absurd. We are still finding Egyptian mummies and artifacts that are several millenia-old buried in the desert. We could find Saddam's weapons 250 years from now buried somewhere.
See, friend, there's a difference between digging up cultures that have been extinct, which have been forgotten with time, which have been lost under dunes of shifting sand and changing climates, and a chemical weapons arsenal that was supposed to be a threat to the security of the USA. An arsenal takes a weapons program to produce, takes people to produce; the same people who could still be interviewed (and have been). A chemical weapons program that was supposed to be in FULL PRODUCTION, cruising around the freeways of Iraq, preparing itself to attack 'merika at any moment (within 40 minutes of being told to do so).
Maybe in your bush & blair worldview, you think you can just bury whatever you feel like & no one will find it. But in most places outside the USA, that's not the way things work.
Listen, we can try to out PC each other to death about how we should be referring to this, but it doesn't do one whit of good. Anybody who has even half a brain knows that a DDoS attack against SCO.com doesn't do anyone but SCO good at this point. I doubt anyone believes the person responsible for the DDoS was someone who has time and work invested developing Linux or has the time and inclination to piddle with Darl. But that doesn't really have an effect upon the (though I loathe writing these words) "court of public opinion" or "the mob."
To the mob, you're guilty until proven to be "one of us." You're bad until proven to have our values. You're wrong until proven to think like us.
I guess I should at least be consistent if I'm going to spell it wrong. (I guess I probably should blame either the flu or Robitussin for that one.)
However, I really liked the complexity of characters brought out in the miniseries. Cylons aren't simply demons without reason, they have reasons for what they do, and it's not necessarily evil.
I think you point out something that never made it into the original series (as I remember it). Cylons in the original series were as inhuman as could be. They were caricatures that mainly served the purpose of being something that one could hate.
One of the biggest failures of the original series was a lack of depth. Of course they came up with new plots every week, but really there was nothing happening behind any of the characters.
This series definitely stands apart from the original because of the depth of not only the human characters, but also the Cylons.
Way to go astroturf. I'm biting your lame excuse for a troll.
The problem is, you pull some silly figure like 60% of defacing out of your ass while I rely on Netcraft to provide my statistics.
So, astroturf, why don't you tell me what specific security paradigm Windows 95 was built around...
So, astroturf, why are CERT advisories for remote root exploits of Microsoft Windows nearly every week?
So, astroturf, why do I still get a constant barrage of Gibe.F being caught by my mail server's antivirus scanner (ClamAV on FreeBSD, thank you very much)?
So in short, astroturf, maybe you should learn to better formulate your trolls. I'm being generous and replying to this one, because I'm feeling nice, not because it merits a reply.
My point was in the context of the article: he's specifically referring to Win 3.1 and Win 95.
I realize I opened a can of worms I should've kept well clear of. I was inaccurate in my phrasing of the origins of UNIX security, and I should've reiterated exactly what I was referring to.
I thought it was well answered not only by some of the dialogues between Gias and his cyclon, but also at the end; the cyclons are fighting for what they believe is self preservation.
They see humans as unmerciful, vindictive creatures that, if they ever got the chance, would destroy the silon race (as the humans thought they had). They use the philosophy of "preemptive war" for self preservation.
Correct, I guess I should be more clear about this:
When I say hostile environment, I not only mean the Internet, but also the fact that UNIX was built to run as a multi-user environment. This must be considered a hostile environment; much more so than a simple PC worldview where you have one single user sitting down to do their work.
Slashdot Mirror
Lion, it's Tres
You still using the speajeasy account?
Sorry for the OT, haven't been able to contact you, taoriver is not serving mail & I can't fine your phone number.
You are quite right that, there is nothing wrong in being zealous, but rather in the ways which one expresses their zeal.
Let's see what the OED has to say about zealot:
Someone who not only has passion, but is so fervent about their passions as to place it above all other concerns--whether they be justice, morality, responsibility or equality. Not just zeal, but a disparaging excess of zeal.
Ultimately the framework of our society relies upon the give and take between individuals and groups. A sense of fairness that some people (dickheads) do not have. You're right, zealotry doesn't inherently imply that someone will act in a way that will be disparaging towards others, but it does happen far too much.
It's too easy to devalue passion by calling someone a zealot. You're right that the term is colloquially misused, and you're right, I'm party to it. I will be more careful where I use the term.
But we can't go the opposite direction either--zealotry can be a very dangerous thing. Zealotry is the crescendo of human emotion fixed upon a single idea. Many, many people fixate their entire sense of self upon that idea, and to have it broken would break their raison d'etre. It's a excruciating experience that--when faced with its possibility--many have resorted to hideous acts to avoid.
I'm sorry you felt somehow offended by what I wrote. It wasn't directed towards anyone who does have a vested interest.
I think it might be a good idea to go revisit what I wrote. If you still feel offended, I think you might take a hard look at exactly what's making you mad.
Take it from me--the words weren't directed against anyone who's spent a single hour developing, using, or learning about something, whether it's Linux, Windows or poetry. There's nothing wrong with being passionate about something you like doing.
What I do take issue with is when people start flaming and whining because other people don't feel the same way they do. What I take issue with is people who act as if the "other side" is morally bankrupt, is an enemy, or should change, simply because they don't agree. The thing about zealots is that they aren't comfortable enough in their passions to just let other people do something different.
I'm happy you feel passionate about OSS and Linux. Believe me, I'm quite passionate about OSS myself. But there's a clear difference between passion and zealotry.
Your freedom of speech doesn't equate to my having to listen, agree and silently acquiesce--especially when you are plainly biased and just plain wrong.
The irony is that its the zealots (whatever banner they ride under) that are the first to accuse everyone who doesn't agree with them of zealotry.
Listen up, buddy, it's a fricking tool. Get over yourself and find something worthwhile to fight for. It's a shame that hordes of idiots--who don't even have a vested interest in it--flame and whine until you drown out all relevant and reasonable discussion of what makes one tool the right one for a particular task.
You mean Expert bait-'n-switch, don't you?
I feel sorry for all the schmoes who put their time and energy into giving Experts Exchange their hard-earned knowledge.
I searched the other day on an issue with Exchange server; when I did a Google search for the relevant information I was pointed to Experts Exchange. The problem was, the page was no longer available--unless I paid for a subscription.
I had to read the google archive to get the info.
Experts Exchange is the epitome of what defines open vs. closed source products and knowledge. (And as much as I love the BSD's) Experts Exchange shows exactly what kind of protection the GPL provides us, as the valuable assets we are--whether it's our knowledge of building products, or building the documentation they require.
I'd say that most people have been taken advantage of at one time or another, and therefore are more readily able to sympathize with those who have been wronged. But that's a different story.
I don't doubt for a second that, when it comes to money, for the majority of this society your assertion is true. But I think there's a definite difference in the way people look at different crimes; crimes with victims are viewed quite differently than crimes without victims.
Greed is king in these times, and making money hand over fist is great--even if you do have to "bend the rules" to do it. But in the eyes of the public there's a clear and definitive line between bending the rules and breaking them.
There's a clear and definitive line between those who bent the rules and "got away with it" (Microsoft) and those who clearly acted in a nefarious manner for their personal profit (Enron). Microsoft may have acted in a manner which deserved punishment, but at the end of it all, there was no victim to associate with the crime; Microsoft looked as if it were guilty of being too successful. But in the case of Enron, there were clearly victims who were wronged by the executives. It's much easier to see a crime when there is a clearly nefarious breach of trust between a victim and a victimizer.
Corporate criminals are held to a different standard simply because they are supposed to be making money--by any means necessary. There's a soft standard held to business executives. This soft standard of right and wrong has been a part of this government since long before this administration, but I don't think it has been the underlying foundation of the day-to-day activities of any administration before this one.
We see day after day, the Bush administration bending the rules in order to achieve its ends. The public has quietly listened to this, and maybe--if you believe that people, at heart, would rather be victimizers--quietly grinned inside. But in the past, there's been no victims; even the dumfounded Democrats looking on like a pack of deer in headlights were just "outmaneuvered."
But here there is a clear breach of trust, a clear case of malfeasance and a clear victim. This is the kind of stuff that presidents have resigned over.
Ha, he's smart as hell. Why do you think he's still gracing the world with his somewhat presence?
He knew long before anyone else did did what would keep him safe:
Dick Cheney as president.
and a long tail...
:-)
and fat fingers.
Sorry, but if I really felt stupid enough, I could have cron job'd my portupgrade, apt-get, urpmi or up2date long, long before Microsoft thought it was a good idea to push updates to clients; we could have been doing this back while microsoft was trying to convince the court that a HTML interface was the only way that they could update their OS.
You seem to have gotten lost somewhere along the way--updates are manual for a reason. The prudent admin takes the time to know what vulnerabilities or potential problems are going to affect their system. The prodent admin knows whether updating is necessary and what potential problems it may cause. Availability of new code doesn't mean that updates are required.
Automating updates isn't "progress." It isn't even hard.
Open Source developers might "hug" C, but they are much less aflicted by language myopia than are Windows developers.
What Windows IDE will do syntax highlighting for Python
How about PERL?
or PHP?
or Ruby?
or any of the other numerous languages that are not only supported, but are afforded real, working tools natively supported by the environment.
I think your point is something to take very seriously; but I don't see the Open Source community sitting, waiting for MS. Ultimately the idea is fallacious because it takes for granted the idea that new == better. There are many, many reasons to stick with something that works.
Words of wisdom that have been around much longer than you or I: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
It's not even keeping the services you formerly paid for. It's making us pay more for those services by shifting the tax structure from a progressive system (in which those who can afford to pay more, do) to a non-progressive system.
Ultimately this out of control deficit spending transfers the negative balance to the middle class. The shortsighted folk who talk about the bush "tax cuts" don't understand that it wasn't a tax cut, it was a tax shift. By shifting the tax burden from the federal to the state and local governments, the bush has ultimately made us and our children pay more for those services (while ensuring that his campaign contributors will pay less).
Sorry, but this isn't the 6:00 news, it isn't even a "news" site. Methinks maybe you put too much weight upon the funny slogan. There's no news published here; it's a discussion space. Topics are regularly provided by the "editors" for people read and dicuss, but that should not be mistaken for something which it is not.
Slashdot is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. If you don't like "Ask Slashdot" my suggestion is that you turn it off.
That seems like an awfully funny decision, since Berkeley vs Bell has already established legal protection for BSD.
Too bad you don't have any substantive evidence, in fact, you have nothing besides "he says" hearsay of what exactly would put BSD at risk (since the lawsuit is about whether IBM had a license to release code that it owned *NOTHING MORE*).
What's funny is seeing how many people are getting caught up in the SCO press releases and are forgetting what this is really about.
I agree, CD media is much more pervasive than 8 track ever was. I guess I should work on my delivery; my expression of humor was clumsy. But, I don't think usage by the computer industry really gives any particular medium much staying power.
Remember using cassettes to load programs? Remember using 5 1/4 floppies? And though the industry is desperately clinging to its 2 1/2 inch legacy, it's vanishing too.
Optical media will be pervasive for a while to come, but if you'd talked about PCs without floppy drives about 10 years ago, you'd have gotten a strange look right before you got laughed out of the room.
Yeah D00D 8-Tracks still kick ass.
Moral: Physical media only last as long as it is supported by the industry. You can bet your ass that once they're ready to move on to the next 'big thing' your CD will be as good about as long as your CD player lasts.
The format has not been cracked.
It's as 'cracked' as it has been from the original release; you can pipe the digital output into a digital input. You're not doing anything different than you would be if you were burning it to a CD.
Music is not something you measure by the gigabyte... unless you really don't have a concept of what quality is.
I bet you're one of those guys that downloads that screechy crap just so you can try to impress SOMEONE (hint: no one is impressed) about the QUANTITY of DATA that you downloaded.
Most people actually look for QUALITY, not quantity. Most people, when they actually ENJOY what they're listening to talk about the WHAT they're listening to, not the DATA that they've downloaded.
And, sorry fella, quality isn't a bit-rate.
The idiot in this thread sure isn't someone who actually knows what they enjoy, and is smart enough to buy exactly what they're looking for (as opposed to someone who enjoys downloading a lot of crap).
You know, your whole argument rests on the assumption that the number of vulnerabilities associated with any platform is analogous to the number of script kiddies on any platform; i.e. script kiddie==vulnerability.
This is a spurious correlation. The number of vulnerabilities for any platform is not the result of the number of script kiddies out there on the platform. Script kiddies rely on the existence of hacks and software as well as vulnerabilities to exists. The script kiddies that exist for any platform are a symptom, not a cause.
So, your "not so obvious" definition of security through obscurity--though entertaining--doesn't really hold water.
See, friend, there's a difference between digging up cultures that have been extinct, which have been forgotten with time, which have been lost under dunes of shifting sand and changing climates, and a chemical weapons arsenal that was supposed to be a threat to the security of the USA. An arsenal takes a weapons program to produce, takes people to produce; the same people who could still be interviewed (and have been). A chemical weapons program that was supposed to be in FULL PRODUCTION, cruising around the freeways of Iraq, preparing itself to attack 'merika at any moment (within 40 minutes of being told to do so).
Maybe in your bush & blair worldview, you think you can just bury whatever you feel like & no one will find it. But in most places outside the USA, that's not the way things work.
Listen, we can try to out PC each other to death about how we should be referring to this, but it doesn't do one whit of good. Anybody who has even half a brain knows that a DDoS attack against SCO.com doesn't do anyone but SCO good at this point. I doubt anyone believes the person responsible for the DDoS was someone who has time and work invested developing Linux or has the time and inclination to piddle with Darl. But that doesn't really have an effect upon the (though I loathe writing these words) "court of public opinion" or "the mob."
To the mob, you're guilty until proven to be "one of us." You're bad until proven to have our values. You're wrong until proven to think like us.
So, don't kill the messenger; it's not his fault.
I guess I should at least be consistent if I'm going to spell it wrong. (I guess I probably should blame either the flu or Robitussin for that one.)
However, I really liked the complexity of characters brought out in the miniseries. Cylons aren't simply demons without reason, they have reasons for what they do, and it's not necessarily evil.
I think you point out something that never made it into the original series (as I remember it). Cylons in the original series were as inhuman as could be. They were caricatures that mainly served the purpose of being something that one could hate.
One of the biggest failures of the original series was a lack of depth. Of course they came up with new plots every week, but really there was nothing happening behind any of the characters.
This series definitely stands apart from the original because of the depth of not only the human characters, but also the Cylons.
Way to go astroturf. I'm biting your lame excuse for a troll.
The problem is, you pull some silly figure like 60% of defacing out of your ass while I rely on Netcraft to provide my statistics.
So, astroturf, why don't you tell me what specific security paradigm Windows 95 was built around...
So, astroturf, why are CERT advisories for remote root exploits of Microsoft Windows nearly every week?
So, astroturf, why do I still get a constant barrage of Gibe.F being caught by my mail server's antivirus scanner (ClamAV on FreeBSD, thank you very much)?
So in short, astroturf, maybe you should learn to better formulate your trolls. I'm being generous and replying to this one, because I'm feeling nice, not because it merits a reply.
My point was in the context of the article: he's specifically referring to Win 3.1 and Win 95.
I realize I opened a can of worms I should've kept well clear of. I was inaccurate in my phrasing of the origins of UNIX security, and I should've reiterated exactly what I was referring to.
Thanks for your clarification, and your points.
I thought it was well answered not only by some of the dialogues between Gias and his cyclon, but also at the end; the cyclons are fighting for what they believe is self preservation.
They see humans as unmerciful, vindictive creatures that, if they ever got the chance, would destroy the silon race (as the humans thought they had). They use the philosophy of "preemptive war" for self preservation.
I thought it was very appropriate for our times.
Correct, I guess I should be more clear about this:
When I say hostile environment, I not only mean the Internet, but also the fact that UNIX was built to run as a multi-user environment. This must be considered a hostile environment; much more so than a simple PC worldview where you have one single user sitting down to do their work.
I think the gratuitous sex scenes weren't so gratuitous when you look who they involved.
One of the big things done during the show was to blend the lines between human and silon. Sex was one of the ways that that line was blurred.
Of course, I think there really wasn't a comfortable way to do that, and maybe the director had it in mind that we should be painfully aware of it.