Plasma has the potential to create huge amounts of damage.
Only to the vessel (ie box) that's trying to contain it, or possibly to someone who somehow manages to stick their arm into it, and even then only if it's a hot plasma.
All a plasma is is a cloud of partly or completely ionised particles; nothing more, nothing less. Some plasmas aren't even that hot (the ones in flourescent lighting tubes, for example).
I believe that the verbal user interface will become the dominant way that people deal with computers in the future
Imagine working in a room of 20odd programmers (I work in one, plus managers, admin staff, sysadmins, sales, and we're still hiring - 9 new people start on Monday...).
Still want a verbal interface to be the dominant interface to a computer? My office is noisy enough without people having to constantly speak to their PCs too...
I'm not even going to start on the problems with using such a method in public.:-)
I forget the exact figure (it's been a while since I last studied any astrophysics...), but trust me, 1 million tons is a minute fraction of the total mass of the Moon.
While removing that much mass (or indeed, any mass) would make a difference to the Moon's gravitational field, the effects would be far too small to be measured, yet alone to have any (noticeable) effect.
Don't forget that during the past few million years, the Moon has been hit by more than its fair share of rock, and its still "up" there.:-)
There's another factor, beyond just coding closer to the metal - the metal is different, too.
One of the reasons apparently lower-specced consoles can more than hold their own against even high-end PCs is that the architecture is designed from the ground up for running games code. PCs, by contrast, are designed to be general workhorses, and so excel at nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing PCs (I don't actually have a console myself), but for any given task, a machine designed specifically to perform that task is always going to beat a general purpose machine, all other things being equal.
Okay, yeah, implementing ActiveX on a platform other than Win32 would require implementing lots of other stuff - but this discussion is about DirectX.
On the other hand, I can also beleive that parts of that are tightly tied into Win32, too...
In fact, I refuse to believe that it is otherwise, unless someone can show me that it is - Microsoft are not known for giving the competetion any way in, let alone a relatively straightforward one.
After all, "God" being a (the) supreme being, then everything must be in accordance with this beings schedule, no? Including the scientists work on genetic engineering?
That's an argument I've used in the past, but it does have one fatal flaw - the concept of free will.
We have been granted free will to behave as we see fit - and that includes doing things that "God" would not approve of.
I know it's a work of fiction, but Paradise Lost discusses the concept, and "God's" reasons for giving us our free will. (And is a good read in itself, IMHO)
That merely makes the copy traceable, it doesn't stop you from making it.
Of course, if the copies could be traced back to you it would make distributing them riskier, perhaps to the degree where almost no-one would take the risk. It would only be a matter of time before someone figured out how to remove the watermark from the copy though, then we'd all be back to square one.
As I said in reply to another comment, what's to stop people from digging out their old microphones and recording the music the old-fashioned way?
You can encrypt the signal right up to the point where it has to become compressions and rarefactions of air; at that point, nothing can stop it from being ripped to another medium.
If I can hear something (or see it), I can copy it, one way or another. I may well lose some quality, but then mp3s are lossy, and it doesn't seem to have hurt their popularity at all.
And for those of us who aren't quite so good at hacking hardware, you can always just use a microphone to record the sound the "old-fashioned" way.
Sure, you'll lose some quality, but faced with a choice between a format that they have no control over, or a slightly lower quality format that they control completely, I think I know which way most people will go...
Not when I clicked on it, it didn't - took me straight to www.operasoftware.com. Admittedly, I didn't hang around long enough to see if it meta-refreshed me away somewhere else (I'm at work, and too busy even for this:-) ), but the page certainly looked genuine enough...
On the subject of Stevens, I have "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment", and would thoroughly recomend it to anyone wanting to get into "serious" Unix-based programming.
It is comprehensive, detailed and well written with clear examples; quite simply the best computer-related text I've ever read. It is pricey, but well worth the money.
Yeah, by the time you saw the comment, it was at 5, Insightful.
However, if you'd clicked on the link to take you to the "full" comment details, you would have seen that of that +5 score, one point was "insightful", and the others were all "Funny".
Don't forget that the comment that goes with the score is only the most recent one - hence you will see, on occasion, comments with socres up around 2 or 3 that are marked as being "Flamebait".
I don't condone what the poster said, but please don't attack the moderators without knowing all the facts.
(In fact the scoring on the comment at the moment is: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Insightful=1, Funny=4, Overrated=1, Total=9; hardly a glowing endorsement from the "community")
But what would you run that code on? They're not about to give away the hardware to any old developer...
If my memory serves me, the compiler is already being worked on (in fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't included in this package). But a compiler is useless without the machine to test the code on. As we can't have one (yet), this is the next best thing.
Re:Gnapster, Gnutella, and Gnetallica?
on
Napster Wars
·
· Score: 2
If it's because of the price of CD's, split cost between 5 people and make copies.
Isn't that just a scaled-down version of what everyone using Napster is doing though? One perosn buys the CD, rips it to mp3s, and shares it with the (Napster using portion of the) world.
The only differences are scale, and (dis)organisation...
Cheers,
Tim
Re:It's the License, stupid
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 2
Driver's License = You don't own the vehicle.
A good analogy, but I'm not convinced that that's the case (Disclaimer: I am a UK resident; YMMV;-) )
In the UK, you need a license to prove that you have passed the driving test, and so demonstrated the minimum level of skill and competence needed legally to be in control of a motorised vehicle on a public road.
You still own the car, and can do whatever you like with it (including resell it, hire it out, or crash it into a tree in your back yard). Admittedly, it must be registered; but that's to help combat crime (both of the car theft kind, and of the hit and run accident kind).
Oh, and don't worry about the subject; the content was fine:-)
Cheers,
Tim
Re:Welcome to the real world
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 3
Okay, I'm not going to start a flame war over this, although that seems to be what you want.
Your examples (apart from the R rated movies one) are all to do with limiting behaviour and actions that can endanger other people.
People aren't allowed to drive really fast because, no matter how good a driver you are, nor how good your car, you cannot be sure that it will not suffer some sort of mechanical failure. Say you're driving down the road at 100mph, and, for some reason (debris in the road, faulty tyre, whatever), your tyre blows out. Still think you'll be in complete control of your vehicle? I doubt it.
The airport example is completely facetious. The airport is private property; its owners have every right to say that you're not allowed to park your car anywhere they don't want you to park it. In the case of bought software, the software is my property, not that of the company that sold it to me.
You are right about the guns example, it would have been a much better one to use. However, as I live in the UK, it's pretty much a non-issue; very few people legally own guns here, so it tends not to occur to me.
Yes, you may well be getting the OEM version of the OS at a discounted price, but you are still paying for it. I don't know about the situation in the States, but here in the UK, it is almost impossible to find a PC retailer that will offer to sell you a machine without Windows. The "reinstall CD" option is bad, because that forces you to backup all your data should you ever need to reinstall the OS. If the reason that you need to reinstall is because it's trashed to the point that you can't even boot your machine, what are you supposed to do? Most people (in my experience) don't backup their data regularly, or have access to another machine to put the drive into to get at it (or the technical expertise required). Whether that's a failing of the users or not is an argument for another thread.
I don't really understand why you mention Office 2000, as I certainly didn't; and you critise my logic and arguments? (I'll ignore the implication that I've been using illegal registration codes and software, as being beneath contempt:-) )
It saddens me to see that you cannot believe that I really am just "lookin' out for all us poor suffering commercial software users". The fact that I, too, buy and use commercial software is immaterial; I do care about people other than myself. I am dismayed to see that you, apparently, do not.
Cheers,
Tim
Re:You've only got yourselves to blame
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 2
I expect that this is merely the first step towards "rectifying" that.
We are moving towards the day when broad band access is common enough to make the prospect of selling software for download over the internet a reality.
It probably wouldn't be too hard to put some sort of mechanism in place whereby the install program can only be run on the machine on which it was downloaded.
Sure, there would almost certainly be ways to circumvent this (which would, of course, be illegal), but that's not the point. The point is that the average end user would be unable to do anything about it, and would be forced to buy a new copy of the software whenever they upgraded their machine, regardless of whether or not they wiped it from the first machine. Depending on how the "protection" was implemented, merely upgrading the wrong part of the machine may force a similar repurchase.
Paranoid, unworkable filghts of fantasy? Perhaps. But I bet the software companies would love it.
I'm not advocating some sort of right to freely distribute software; merely the right to use a product that I have bought in whatever way I choose, short of infringing some law. (ie distributing illegal copies of software, or using a gun to commit murder)
"One licence per machine" is fair enough; "one licence per install" would not be, but this is how I see the outcome of this being, if we're not careful.
To quote John E. Warnock from one of the linked articles, "You're going to have a piece of music that will only play on one Walkman. You're going to have a piece of software that will only work on one machine."
That would be just plain wrong.
Cheers,
Tim
Re:You've only got yourselves to blame
on
Copyrant
·
· Score: 3
Your arguement sets an extremely dangerous precedent. "So many people copy software that you all must suffer this to prevent it"
Reminds me of the comic 200AD, and in particular, the Dark Judges. On their world, the "Judges" (read: combined police officer, judge and, if they saw fit, executioner) realised that all crime was committed by the living, and so outlawed life.
Effectively, MS and others have decided that all piracy is committed by people that own full install CDs, and so are attempting to prevent such ownership.
Sure, a lot of people do pirate software. But an awful lot don't - why should they be made to suffer this, when they are guilty of no cirme?
This must be stopped before it gains acceptance.
Companies must be reminded that when we buy something, we own it, completely and utterly.
Copyright law already prevents me from lawfully copying software. What's the next step, license everything and ban all removable, recordable media?
Sendmail 8.10 supports smtp auth; click here for details.
Incidently, just because you can fake the headers, doesn't mean that you should, or that we're not allowed to complain and, if allowed to do so by law, prosecute you if you do. This is a form of fraud that we're talking about here; claiming to be someone that you're not, or to represent someone/something that you do not. That's illegal in most other media, so why should email be any different?
I'll concede the first point, as I'm not entirely sure, and have no Physics texts to hand (as I'm at work:-) )
(Although, now I think of it, the photon has momentum, and so (as the two are related), probably does have KE; I'm willing to be proved wrong, however)
The second point, however, I feel I must contest. An infinite red-shift is identical to an infinite increase in wavelength. This is, in turn, identical to an infinite reduction in energy (the longer the wavelength of the photon, the lower its energy - E = h/lambda IIRC).
As the photon has no rest mass, it is pure energy, and so with its energy reduced to zero, it has effectively "destroyed" itself in its efforts to escape the event horizon.
No energy means no photon; no photon means nothing escaped:-)
(And before anyone starts shouting, no, you can't destroy energy; I'm guessing that the energy of the photon has gone to reduce the potential energy of the gravitational field)
Sorry, but that's just plain wrong. Any particle created within the event horizon must be created with sufficient kinetic energy to overcome the force of gravity and escape the potential well of the hole.
The reason that we cannot see black holes optically, is that light does not have sufficient kinetic energy to escape the gravitaitonal field at a distance outside the event horizon. What you propose here is that particles are created that have supra-light velocity; this is expressly forbidden by relativity.
You are on the right track, however:-)
The theory is that, due to quantum effects, a matter/anti-matter particle pair can spontaneously be created near the event horizon. (This happens in ordinary space all the time, and is permitted by energy conservation, over short time scales).
If the pair is created at the right distance from the horizon, then it is possible that one particle will have sufficient energy to escape, while the other (travelling in the opposite direction) is swallowed by the hole.
It turns out (ie don't ask me to do the maths:-) that it is the particle with positive energy that escapes, and the one with negative energy that is swallowed. Thus, the net total energy of the hole is reduced, and due to energy-mass equivalnce, it's mass is reduced.
My only concern is with hitting the wrong person's machine. If I satisfied myself that I was going up against the real target, I'd do my best to make them wish that they'd picked a different machine to attack.
It's all too easy to see a hostile access attempt from a machine and smack them down, only to find that they'd been cracked two days previously and knew nothing about it.
I guess in the end, it all comes down to how sure you, yourself, have to be. Personally, I would be very, very careful not to attack the wrong target. That's really what I meant by being "a responsible netizen".
If you know for sure then go ahead, toast him. I'm just not sure that can be sure.
Cheers,
Tim
Disclaimer: This post is brought to you by several glasses of champagne:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Plasma has the potential to create huge amounts of damage.
Only to the vessel (ie box) that's trying to contain it, or possibly to someone who somehow manages to stick their arm into it, and even then only if it's a hot plasma.
All a plasma is is a cloud of partly or completely ionised particles; nothing more, nothing less. Some plasmas aren't even that hot (the ones in flourescent lighting tubes, for example).
Cheers,
Tim
I believe that the verbal user interface will become the dominant way that people deal with computers in the future
:-)
Imagine working in a room of 20odd programmers (I work in one, plus managers, admin staff, sysadmins, sales, and we're still hiring - 9 new people start on Monday...).
Still want a verbal interface to be the dominant interface to a computer? My office is noisy enough without people having to constantly speak to their PCs too...
I'm not even going to start on the problems with using such a method in public.
Cheers,
Tim
I forget the exact figure (it's been a while since I last studied any astrophysics...), but trust me, 1 million tons is a minute fraction of the total mass of the Moon.
:-)
While removing that much mass (or indeed, any mass) would make a difference to the Moon's gravitational field, the effects would be far too small to be measured, yet alone to have any (noticeable) effect.
Don't forget that during the past few million years, the Moon has been hit by more than its fair share of rock, and its still "up" there.
Cheers,
Tim
There's another factor, beyond just coding closer to the metal - the metal is different, too.
One of the reasons apparently lower-specced consoles can more than hold their own against even high-end PCs is that the architecture is designed from the ground up for running games code. PCs, by contrast, are designed to be general workhorses, and so excel at nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing PCs (I don't actually have a console myself), but for any given task, a machine designed specifically to perform that task is always going to beat a general purpose machine, all other things being equal.
Cheers,
Tim
Okay, yeah, implementing ActiveX on a platform other than Win32 would require implementing lots of other stuff - but this discussion is about DirectX.
On the other hand, I can also beleive that parts of that are tightly tied into Win32, too...
In fact, I refuse to believe that it is otherwise, unless someone can show me that it is - Microsoft are not known for giving the competetion any way in, let alone a relatively straightforward one.
Cheers,
Tim
[Disclaimer: I am not religious]
After all, "God" being a (the) supreme being, then everything must be in accordance with this beings schedule, no? Including the scientists work on genetic engineering?
That's an argument I've used in the past, but it does have one fatal flaw - the concept of free will.
We have been granted free will to behave as we see fit - and that includes doing things that "God" would not approve of.
I know it's a work of fiction, but Paradise Lost discusses the concept, and "God's" reasons for giving us our free will. (And is a good read in itself, IMHO)
Cheers,
Tim
That merely makes the copy traceable, it doesn't stop you from making it.
Of course, if the copies could be traced back to you it would make distributing them riskier, perhaps to the degree where almost no-one would take the risk. It would only be a matter of time before someone figured out how to remove the watermark from the copy though, then we'd all be back to square one.
Cheers,
Tim
As I said in reply to another comment, what's to stop people from digging out their old microphones and recording the music the old-fashioned way?
You can encrypt the signal right up to the point where it has to become compressions and rarefactions of air; at that point, nothing can stop it from being ripped to another medium.
If I can hear something (or see it), I can copy it, one way or another. I may well lose some quality, but then mp3s are lossy, and it doesn't seem to have hurt their popularity at all.
Cheers,
Tim
And for those of us who aren't quite so good at hacking hardware, you can always just use a microphone to record the sound the "old-fashioned" way.
Sure, you'll lose some quality, but faced with a choice between a format that they have no control over, or a slightly lower quality format that they control completely, I think I know which way most people will go...
Cheers,
Tim
Not when I clicked on it, it didn't - took me straight to www.operasoftware.com. Admittedly, I didn't hang around long enough to see if it meta-refreshed me away somewhere else (I'm at work, and too busy even for this :-) ), but the page certainly looked genuine enough...
Cheers,
Tim
From the CVS access page:
:-)
"Public access is provided by a machine supplied and hosted by SourceForge and VA Linux Systems."
So, they're hosted at sourceforge already; the other nice features probably won't be long in coming
Cheers,
Tim
On the subject of Stevens, I have "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment", and would thoroughly recomend it to anyone wanting to get into "serious" Unix-based programming.
It is comprehensive, detailed and well written with clear examples; quite simply the best computer-related text I've ever read. It is pricey, but well worth the money.
Cheers,
Tim
Yeah, by the time you saw the comment, it was at 5, Insightful.
However, if you'd clicked on the link to take you to the "full" comment details, you would have seen that of that +5 score, one point was "insightful", and the others were all "Funny".
Don't forget that the comment that goes with the score is only the most recent one - hence you will see, on occasion, comments with socres up around 2 or 3 that are marked as being "Flamebait".
I don't condone what the poster said, but please don't attack the moderators without knowing all the facts.
(In fact the scoring on the comment at the moment is: Flamebait=2, Troll=1, Insightful=1, Funny=4, Overrated=1, Total=9; hardly a glowing endorsement from the "community")
Cheers,
Tim
Must...resist...urge...to...moderate...up....
:-)
Cheers,
Tim
But what would you run that code on? They're not about to give away the hardware to any old developer...
If my memory serves me, the compiler is already being worked on (in fact, I'd be surprised if it wasn't included in this package). But a compiler is useless without the machine to test the code on. As we can't have one (yet), this is the next best thing.
Cheers,
Tim
This isn't "just" another window manager, this is a whole new graphics server.
This isn't intended to run under X, it is intended to replace X.
For more details, see this page.
Cheers,
Tim
If it's because of the price of CD's, split cost between 5 people and make copies.
Isn't that just a scaled-down version of what everyone using Napster is doing though? One perosn buys the CD, rips it to mp3s, and shares it with the (Napster using portion of the) world.
The only differences are scale, and (dis)organisation...
Cheers,
Tim
Driver's License = You don't own the vehicle.
;-) )
:-)
A good analogy, but I'm not convinced that that's the case (Disclaimer: I am a UK resident; YMMV
In the UK, you need a license to prove that you have passed the driving test, and so demonstrated the minimum level of skill and competence needed legally to be in control of a motorised vehicle on a public road.
You still own the car, and can do whatever you like with it (including resell it, hire it out, or crash it into a tree in your back yard). Admittedly, it must be registered; but that's to help combat crime (both of the car theft kind, and of the hit and run accident kind).
Oh, and don't worry about the subject; the content was fine
Cheers,
Tim
Okay, I'm not going to start a flame war over this, although that seems to be what you want.
:-) )
Your examples (apart from the R rated movies one) are all to do with limiting behaviour and actions that can endanger other people.
People aren't allowed to drive really fast because, no matter how good a driver you are, nor how good your car, you cannot be sure that it will not suffer some sort of mechanical failure. Say you're driving down the road at 100mph, and, for some reason (debris in the road, faulty tyre, whatever), your tyre blows out. Still think you'll be in complete control of your vehicle? I doubt it.
The airport example is completely facetious. The airport is private property; its owners have every right to say that you're not allowed to park your car anywhere they don't want you to park it. In the case of bought software, the software is my property, not that of the company that sold it to me.
You are right about the guns example, it would have been a much better one to use. However, as I live in the UK, it's pretty much a non-issue; very few people legally own guns here, so it tends not to occur to me.
Yes, you may well be getting the OEM version of the OS at a discounted price, but you are still paying for it. I don't know about the situation in the States, but here in the UK, it is almost impossible to find a PC retailer that will offer to sell you a machine without Windows. The "reinstall CD" option is bad, because that forces you to backup all your data should you ever need to reinstall the OS. If the reason that you need to reinstall is because it's trashed to the point that you can't even boot your machine, what are you supposed to do? Most people (in my experience) don't backup their data regularly, or have access to another machine to put the drive into to get at it (or the technical expertise required). Whether that's a failing of the users or not is an argument for another thread.
I don't really understand why you mention Office 2000, as I certainly didn't; and you critise my logic and arguments? (I'll ignore the implication that I've been using illegal registration codes and software, as being beneath contempt
It saddens me to see that you cannot believe that I really am just "lookin' out for all us poor suffering commercial software users". The fact that I, too, buy and use commercial software is immaterial; I do care about people other than myself. I am dismayed to see that you, apparently, do not.
Cheers,
Tim
I expect that this is merely the first step towards "rectifying" that.
We are moving towards the day when broad band access is common enough to make the prospect of selling software for download over the internet a reality.
It probably wouldn't be too hard to put some sort of mechanism in place whereby the install program can only be run on the machine on which it was downloaded.
Sure, there would almost certainly be ways to circumvent this (which would, of course, be illegal), but that's not the point. The point is that the average end user would be unable to do anything about it, and would be forced to buy a new copy of the software whenever they upgraded their machine, regardless of whether or not they wiped it from the first machine. Depending on how the "protection" was implemented, merely upgrading the wrong part of the machine may force a similar repurchase.
Paranoid, unworkable filghts of fantasy? Perhaps. But I bet the software companies would love it.
I'm not advocating some sort of right to freely distribute software; merely the right to use a product that I have bought in whatever way I choose, short of infringing some law. (ie distributing illegal copies of software, or using a gun to commit murder)
"One licence per machine" is fair enough; "one licence per install" would not be, but this is how I see the outcome of this being, if we're not careful.
To quote John E. Warnock from one of the linked articles, "You're going to have a piece of music that will only play on one Walkman. You're going to have a piece of software that will only work on one machine."
That would be just plain wrong.
Cheers,
Tim
Your arguement sets an extremely dangerous precedent. "So many people copy software that you all must suffer this to prevent it"
Reminds me of the comic 200AD, and in particular, the Dark Judges. On their world, the "Judges" (read: combined police officer, judge and, if they saw fit, executioner) realised that all crime was committed by the living, and so outlawed life.
Effectively, MS and others have decided that all piracy is committed by people that own full install CDs, and so are attempting to prevent such ownership.
Sure, a lot of people do pirate software. But an awful lot don't - why should they be made to suffer this, when they are guilty of no cirme?
This must be stopped before it gains acceptance.
Companies must be reminded that when we buy something, we own it, completely and utterly.
Copyright law already prevents me from lawfully copying software. What's the next step, license everything and ban all removable, recordable media?
Cheers,
Tim
Sendmail 8.10 supports smtp auth; click here for details.
Incidently, just because you can fake the headers, doesn't mean that you should, or that we're not allowed to complain and, if allowed to do so by law, prosecute you if you do. This is a form of fraud that we're talking about here; claiming to be someone that you're not, or to represent someone/something that you do not. That's illegal in most other media, so why should email be any different?
Cheers,
Tim
I'll concede the first point, as I'm not entirely sure, and have no Physics texts to hand (as I'm at work :-) )
:-)
(Although, now I think of it, the photon has momentum, and so (as the two are related), probably does have KE; I'm willing to be proved wrong, however)
The second point, however, I feel I must contest. An infinite red-shift is identical to an infinite increase in wavelength. This is, in turn, identical to an infinite reduction in energy (the longer the wavelength of the photon, the lower its energy - E = h/lambda IIRC).
As the photon has no rest mass, it is pure energy, and so with its energy reduced to zero, it has effectively "destroyed" itself in its efforts to escape the event horizon.
No energy means no photon; no photon means nothing escaped
(And before anyone starts shouting, no, you can't destroy energy; I'm guessing that the energy of the photon has gone to reduce the potential energy of the gravitational field)
Cheers,
Tim
Sorry, but that's just plain wrong. Any particle created within the event horizon must be created with sufficient kinetic energy to overcome the force of gravity and escape the potential well of the hole.
:-)
:-) that it is the particle with positive energy that escapes, and the one with negative energy that is swallowed. Thus, the net total energy of the hole is reduced, and due to energy-mass equivalnce, it's mass is reduced.
The reason that we cannot see black holes optically, is that light does not have sufficient kinetic energy to escape the gravitaitonal field at a distance outside the event horizon. What you propose here is that particles are created that have supra-light velocity; this is expressly forbidden by relativity.
You are on the right track, however
The theory is that, due to quantum effects, a matter/anti-matter particle pair can spontaneously be created near the event horizon. (This happens in ordinary space all the time, and is permitted by energy conservation, over short time scales).
If the pair is created at the right distance from the horizon, then it is possible that one particle will have sufficient energy to escape, while the other (travelling in the opposite direction) is swallowed by the hole.
It turns out (ie don't ask me to do the maths
Cheers,
Tim
My only concern is with hitting the wrong person's machine. If I satisfied myself that I was going up against the real target, I'd do my best to make them wish that they'd picked a different machine to attack.
:-)
It's all too easy to see a hostile access attempt from a machine and smack them down, only to find that they'd been cracked two days previously and knew nothing about it.
I guess in the end, it all comes down to how sure you, yourself, have to be. Personally, I would be very, very careful not to attack the wrong target. That's really what I meant by being "a responsible netizen".
If you know for sure then go ahead, toast him. I'm just not sure that can be sure.
Cheers,
Tim
Disclaimer: This post is brought to you by several glasses of champagne