Re:The above comment missed the point
on
Hacker Crackdown?
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· Score: 1
I would say that a scientist who works on nuclear weapons is very aware of the one and only purpose of his work. The fact that he does not
press the button hardly justifies a complete denial of responsibility, IMO. Neither baseball bats nor cars are designed with the intention of
killing people, as far as I am aware.
I would say that a scientist who works on nuclear weapons is very aware of the multitude of purposes to which the technology he is developing could potentially be put to. I am also sure that he is aware of the effects of some of those purposes -- developing the ability to harness nuclear power gives the ability to develop nuclear power plants, but also gives the ability to develop nuclear bombs. scientists must be aware of both potentials, and weigh them carefully.
in closing, i would like to say that regardless of what technology is developed, humans will remain the same; whether they misapply existing technology to kill each other or misapply developing technologies is almost irrelevant. i think that scientists probably consider this as well, and it is probably one reason that they choose to develop technologies anyway even when they know they have a high probability of being misapplied. radar... radar jammers... radar jammer jammers... radar jammer jammer jammers... it goes on infinitely, but at least as we develop better things we understand more of the properties of the universe that we live in, even if we completely fail to understand ourselves. (recommended reading: isaac asimov's 'foundation' series.)
eudas
Re:The above comment missed the point
on
Hacker Crackdown?
·
· Score: 1
my roommate and i still play subspace quite a bit. actually, i've been playing it since it was free (beta).:) (before they sold copies of it in stores and crippled the free version down to being able to use only the first 4 ships...) One of our favourite zones is the Trench Wars zone . You can find downloads of the game along with a good starting point for more info, maps, servers, and leagues at http://subspace.ds98.com. Just remember to replace the text in the 'find servers' box with something that works. (read the 'getting started' page.)
i had this one game of civ where i was on an island and kept to myself, totally terraforming my tiny island until it was all mined/irrigated/railroaded/etc, with about 3 or 4 cities on it. i had bronze legions. the computer races had nukes.;) so i loaded up the 'unlimited money' cheat, built tons of diplomats, and tried to land them on the shore. i landed, they killed me, i landed again, bought off some units, they killed everything again, i landed again... finally i established a beach-head and landed enough diplomats to subvert cities and steal technology, and got nukes myself... then i nuked all the enemy units wandering around along with most of their cities... caused global warming, pollution over most of the map... 3-4 nukes every round launching... one of the best games of civ i ever played.:)
this makes me think about when i was watching jim carrey portray andy kaufman in 'man in the moon' and kaufman did all kinds of shit just to fuck with people's minds like the vertical rolling on the tv show to make people think their tv set was messed up, or the deal with the wrestling women and talking trash about them, or tony clifton dumping water on the guy's head and harassing him (the guy was paid). maybe katz is doing the same thing, writing this shit just to see what kind of hilarious reaction he'll get from the readers, and is sitting up there at the slashdot compound laughing his ass off.
for some reason, alot of game designers feel the need to include 'god mode' crap in their games... some because they think it's funny, others because they used it to test the game and never bothered to code them out after they were done testing... but they ALWAYS get discovered, and they are always lame. i wish the game designers would remove all the cheats from release versions of their games, and do version-checking to make sure cheat and non-cheat versions are incompatible (for multiplayer games etc).
Microsoft has NEVER created an original product. Even if you go back as far as you can, to Bill Gates and Paul Allen coding BASIC for the Altair, what they did was port someone elses product to another machine - this was respectable, but here is where the Innovation(tm) ended. DOS was bought, and each new feature that was added to it was included to squeeze an add-on or competitor out of the market. Windows was clearly a work-alike of MacOS, which itself was a work-alike of Xerox PARC research. NT is really DEC Prism in disguise (Dave Cutler left DEC in disgust when the Prism project was killed, and took the OS design with him), and was supposed to be OS/2 until Gates' ego swelled a bit too much for Big Blue to handle. IE was another DOS-feature-levarage maneuver like EMS/XMS management (QuarterDeck's QUEMM386 died for that one) and DoubleSpace (Stacker anyone?), but this time aimed at Netscape... The only MS product whose history I am unclear on is their development tools, but I know for a fact that Borland did it first and better; and don't even start on Java...
You forgot to mention some Norton Utilities apps like Norton Disk Doctor (scandisk) and Norton Speedisk (defrag). There are a few others as well, but those are the two most notable examples that come to mind.
Brand name is king. That's the core issue in a lot of the current domain name quarrels. And it'll just be the same deal, no matter how many new tld's you create.
Agreed. Unless, of course, the TLD's were opened up totally and not 1-2 at a time as it looks like they will be. A chaotic environment would make brand-name protectionism of this sort virtually impossible; as long as TLD's are opened in a controlled manner then the entire point is moot... control of the TLD release schedule translates to control of brand names for corps... and control of profits for NSI and other registrars. control translates to money, therefore it will never be released willingly.
Or greedy. Or misguided. Or smart. Or one of a million other human attributes. They're people, with their own motivations. Maybe they just like working for the richest man in the world. Maybe they just work there because it's a nice paying job with good stock options, and they know the company will be there tomorrow. After all, do *you* define *yourself* by your company? I don't. And probably quite a few M$ employees don't either. There's no point in being a zealot.
Is there a law against this? If WalMart wants to sell pencils for $20, shouldn't it be allowed to?
If WalMart wants to sell pencils for $20, that is their right, but the existing situation is more akin to WalMart suing someone for telling a third party about WalMart's terrible deal on pencils.
it's also possible that he knew everything that his firm was doing for TW. it's *possible* that he's a pink fluffy bunny. doesn't necessarily make it so.
actually i was just thinking earlier about a virus that targets cisco ios to do something like get into a router, make it dump its configs (erase them), and shut itself down.
(note to the picky: no, i don't have a ccne. obviously.)
this would be much more interesting than a(nother) m$ box virus.
my aunt once got a credit card sent to her cat. i think they put its name on some form as a joke, and months later received some cc offer addressed to the cat. i don't know what they did with it.
yeah. then you could get someone with slight mental retardation to sue them under the same "americans with disabilities act" to make them simplify the language and shorten it to a reasonable length.
THEN you could find someone with short attention span...
you're off the hook IMO. the person who received the beer had options available to them to prevent the serious car wreck: 1) refusing the beer, 2) taking the beer but saving it for another time (when they would not be driving), 3) accepting the beer and drinking it but not driving until sober.
Slashdot Mirror
in closing, i would like to say that regardless of what technology is developed, humans will remain the same; whether they misapply existing technology to kill each other or misapply developing technologies is almost irrelevant. i think that scientists probably consider this as well, and it is probably one reason that they choose to develop technologies anyway even when they know they have a high probability of being misapplied. radar... radar jammers... radar jammer jammers... radar jammer jammer jammers... it goes on infinitely, but at least as we develop better things we understand more of the properties of the universe that we live in, even if we completely fail to understand ourselves. (recommended reading: isaac asimov's 'foundation' series.)
eudas
how do you know what an illegal order is?
eudas
fuck office... i'm talking games.
eudas
my roommate and i still play subspace quite a bit. actually, i've been playing it since it was free (beta). :) (before they sold copies of it in stores and crippled the free version down to being able to use only the first 4 ships...) One of our favourite zones is the Trench Wars zone . You can find downloads of the game along with a good starting point for more info, maps, servers, and leagues at http://subspace.ds98.com. Just remember to replace the text in the 'find servers' box with something that works. (read the 'getting started' page.)
eudas
i had this one game of civ where i was on an island and kept to myself, totally terraforming my tiny island until it was all mined/irrigated/railroaded/etc, with about 3 or 4 cities on it. i had bronze legions. the computer races had nukes. ;) so i loaded up the 'unlimited money' cheat, built tons of diplomats, and tried to land them on the shore. i landed, they killed me, i landed again, bought off some units, they killed everything again, i landed again... finally i established a beach-head and landed enough diplomats to subvert cities and steal technology, and got nukes myself... then i nuked all the enemy units wandering around along with most of their cities... caused global warming, pollution over most of the map... 3-4 nukes every round launching... one of the best games of civ i ever played. :)
eudas
mod this up pls.
this makes me think about when i was watching jim carrey portray andy kaufman in 'man in the moon' and kaufman did all kinds of shit just to fuck with people's minds like the vertical rolling on the tv show to make people think their tv set was messed up, or the deal with the wrestling women and talking trash about them, or tony clifton dumping water on the guy's head and harassing him (the guy was paid). maybe katz is doing the same thing, writing this shit just to see what kind of hilarious reaction he'll get from the readers, and is sitting up there at the slashdot compound laughing his ass off.
eudas
Micropayments are just another way for people to turn the Internet into a more common cash-cow media like selling commercials on TV and radio.
If you really want to get rid of banner ads, use an agent like Junkbuster (http://www.junkbuster.com/) or Webwasher (http://www.webwasher.com/).
eudas
the world's smallest violin plays on for the cystic fibrosis victims, believe me.
for some reason, alot of game designers feel the need to include 'god mode' crap in their games... some because they think it's funny, others because they used it to test the game and never bothered to code them out after they were done testing... but they ALWAYS get discovered, and they are always lame. i wish the game designers would remove all the cheats from release versions of their games, and do version-checking to make sure cheat and non-cheat versions are incompatible (for multiplayer games etc).
eudas
eudas
eudas
how about a poll on this? it could go something like this:
[poll] How many instances of the word 'microsoft' do you think appear on slashdot on a daily basis?
1: 2
2: 100
3: one MILLION dol... er, instances.
4: i can't count that high.
5: i'd need a beowulf cluster to compute that.
or maybe:
[poll] How many instances of the word 'microsoft' do you think there are in all of its archived posts?
(see above poll for potential answers.)
eudas
eudas
Is there a law against this? If WalMart wants to sell pencils for $20, shouldn't it be allowed to?
If WalMart wants to sell pencils for $20, that is their right, but the existing situation is more akin to WalMart suing someone for telling a third party about WalMart's terrible deal on pencils.
eudas
it's also possible that he knew everything that his firm was doing for TW. it's *possible* that he's a pink fluffy bunny. doesn't necessarily make it so.
actually i was just thinking earlier about a virus that targets cisco ios to do something like get into a router, make it dump its configs (erase them), and shut itself down.
(note to the picky: no, i don't have a ccne. obviously.)
this would be much more interesting than a(nother) m$ box virus.
eudas
rootshell.com used to do this, but i haven't seen their pages updated very much in a long long time.
eudas
Wouldn't you first have to define what it is to be 'american', before you can define 'un-american'?
eudas
i remember reading a quote once, it went something like this: "if you're not cheating, then you're not really trying to win." heh.
eudas
my aunt once got a credit card sent to her cat. i think they put its name on some form as a joke, and months later received some cc offer addressed to the cat. i don't know what they did with it.
eudas
yeah. then you could get someone with slight mental retardation to sue them under the same "americans with disabilities act" to make them simplify the language and shorten it to a reasonable length.
THEN you could find someone with short attention span...
eudas
jeez, that site asked me if i wanted to allow it to set a cookie like 20 times (literally!)... blah :/
eudas
Nike's website was redirected to the site of an anti-corporate globalization group called S-11.org , [...]
;)
Signal 11? What?
eudas
you're off the hook IMO. the person who received the beer had options available to them to prevent the serious car wreck: 1) refusing the beer, 2) taking the beer but saving it for another time (when they would not be driving), 3) accepting the beer and drinking it but not driving until sober.
eudas