That is true, but as most loads are generally either inductive or resistive, whatever minuscule amount of capacitance there is in the wire would actually help improve the power factor, not lower it.
0.01% of the game playing public is ever going to pick up an RPG. 0% will meet aliens
however, 90% will be in a domestic situation some point in their life where physical violence crosses their minds
And 100% of them will be in some situation some point in their life where physical violence crosses their minds. So by that logic we should be having tea parties instead of playing Halo.
The few people who think it's okay because it's in a video game shouldn't be playing video games. That goes for any of the killing, mass chaos, and generally bad behavior that just about any video game is going to include, including misogynistic behavior like this.
The rest of us can differentiate between video games and reality, and we don't need to have our games sanitized. Halo would suck if we all made friends and had tea parties.
You can for most users. The rest can be handled separately under a special set of restrictions which would thwart anyone trying to re-use the session from a different IP address than the original one.
The first thing you should do if a different IP address tries to use the same session ID is require them to re-enter their password (via HTTPS, obviously). If they succeed, flag them as a mobile user and require them to re-enter their password periodically, say, every 15 minutes, to ensure that an attacker couldn't just impersonate them indefinitely. You'd also want to require re-entering their password if they try to do certain actions, like changing the e-mail address or SMS alert number linked to their account or change the notification settings for withdrawals, etc.
Well, I certainly don't disagree with that latter part, although I'd take slight exception to the former - you've got your work cut out for you if you think you're going to keep teens after the age of puberty from having sex at some point.
Granted, if they're soliciting sex from people much older than themselves, it's pretty likely that there's a problem more serious than just your average horny teenager, as you suggested. In fact that's sort of what I've been saying all along.
It also lists address. Often there are lots of listings for the same last name, many of which don't have full first names, maybe just a first initial. However, if you find the "Bloggs, J" listed at the address which you know he lives at, you can be confident that the number is accurate. The probability would be vanishingly slim that you'd find a fake listing when looking for an actual person.
In case of a phone book, I would say "that IS the reference for the fact".
Then the reference they were looking for doesn't exist, because the phone book has one utility: you look up a name, and you find a number for that name. The reverse isn't guaranteed, nor is it guaranteed that every name will be listed, or that every name listed is accurate. As long as it isn't the name that you need to look up, it really isn't guaranteed at all. It'd be convenient, of course, for Feist to go ahead and assume these things.
However I'd agree that it makes it almost impossible to tell the facts from the fiction and, if the telco chose to go that direction, Feist's immediate response should be to remove all of the named fictitious listings (in the copyright suit they'd have to be named as the material being claimed for infringement) and fight the suit on the basis that they had no reasonable way of telling that the listings were not factual and therefore could be copyrighted.
ID started out with the claim that the theory of evolution alone can not explain what happens, so another "add on" is necessary.
Amusing, but no. Evolution started out with the claim that intelligent design cannot explain what happened, since "God" can't exist, so another "add on" is necessary to explain how things got started without him.
So it is not obvious that it is creative information, on the contrary, it's designed to look like it's factual information and part of the collection. I can imagine that they lose copyright protection for that reason.
So anyone who presents fiction in a manner so as to make it appear factual loses copyright? And, if someone believes it to be factual, they have carte blanche to copy it freely? I doubt it.
Someone trying to (legally) copy the factual information from the work, when sued for infringement on those phony entries, might even argue illegal entrapment and misleading by the original author.
Presumably it would be the responsibility of the one doing the copying to ensure that what they were copying was, in fact, factual... seeing how they'd need to verify the veracity of the information to avoid violating a copyright. And misleading? The phone book is not intended to be a listing of every number registered with its proper owner; some numbers are unlisted and wouldn't appear at all. The phone book is intended to be a one-way reference: you know the name, you look up their number. This is guaranteed: that if you look up a real, factual name, and that person is listed, you will get their most up-to-date number, insofar as the phone book publisher knows it to be true. In what way does that guarantee that fictional names might not be given with fictional numbers? They were using the phone book in a manner for which it was not intended, and its accuracy was not to be assumed.
It is a long-standing principle of United States copyright law that "information" is not copyrightable, O'Connor notes, but "collections" of information can be.
...
In regard to collections of facts, O'Connor states that copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not on the information itself. If Feist were to take the directory and rearrange them it would destroy the copyright owned in the data.
In other words, although the names and numbers are purely factual and cannot be copyrighted, and the arrangement of them is obvious (alphabetical), the formatting and presentation can still be copyrighted. I.e. margins, page header/footer, columns, and even the typeface used. Simply scanning the pages and printing an exact duplicate phone book would infringe on its copyright, whereas copying the information out of it did not.
I also wonder about the following:
Despite Rural's denial of a license to Feist, Feist copied some 4000 entries from Rural's directory. Because Rural had placed a small number of phony entries to detect copying, Feist was caught.
If fact may not be copyrighted, fiction certainly can - so would the phony entries not be considered "creative"? Why not? It seems to me that Feist infringed on Rural's copyright, not in the republication of the factual names but at least in the republication of the fictitious ones. But apparently either Rural's lawyers didn't think of that or the judge didn't think it mattered.
I thought violation of copyright didn't depend on whether you were trying to make money off the unauthorized use.
And even if facts can't be copyrighted, a specific arrangement of them can be. The phone book's pages are copyrighted, even if the names and numbers aren't. You can copy the information but you can't just scan the pages themselves and reprint them.
I don't think that ruling is correct and I expect it'll be overturned.
The test of a useful theory is that it makes predictions, not just attempts to explain everything that's happened so far. Otherwise, that is not a scientific theory, it's a history lesson. It is by its predictions that a theory is tested, not by its explanation of what we already know to be true. If it makes no useful predictions, it is not a useful theory, and if it makes predictions which are found to be false, the theory itself is false and/or needs reworking. Which, of course, you pointed out is part of the scientific process, and I agree.
All of the things that you mentioned are so well established at this point that no sane theory would try to contradict their truth. That's a bit like saying that the theory of gravity would be cast in serious doubt if I dropped an apple and it flew upward. Well, duh. And we all know it isn't going to happen, or at least we have enough scientific data to know exactly what conditions might cause that to happen without contradicting the law of gravity.
And, for what it's worth, none of the things that you mentioned which would falsify the theory of evolution are in the least bit contrary to the theory of intelligent design, either. Traits get passed on, living things adapt, and nature favors the strongest creatures.
And returning to that point, that theories adapt as part of the scientific process - well, when the theory of evolution adapts you say it's the scientific process at work, but when the theory of intelligent design adapts you say that its proponents are trying to weasel their way out of what you claim is their theory having been disproven. Is that not hypocritical?
Well... the other other alternative is to try to stop people and get help for them before they do something with potentially life-altering consequences, but fortunately we're too smart for that; instead, when we suspect that somebody might ever be capable of doing that we try to lure them into doing something that doesn't actually hurt a real child but for which we can still justifiably lock them up for a good long while.
Sort of like the correct approach to handling a jumper is to clear everyone off the sidewalk underneath him and goad him into hurrying up and jumping so we can clean up the mess and be done with the nastiness already.
Consent must be willingly given by a person who is legally capable of giving it.
Laws which say that someone can legally not give consent one day and can legally give it the next, with the only thing separating the two being the person's birthday, are stupid.
And yes, the same goes for laws about driving, voting, drinking, and smoking. But at least, usually in those cases, the consequences aren't completely life-ruining.
Where you might be having the hangup about sex with a 17 year old is the case in which the 18 year old boyfriend has sex with his 17 year old girlfriend. It should be noted that there are already statutory rape exceptions in many of the laws which exempt such acts from being statutory rape.
Yes, that's the hangup; and it also isn't. Because of course we've gotten it through our heads that borderline cases like that need an exception. So we drew another line. But no matter where you draw the line legally, there will be cases on either one side or the other of that line where it doesn't quite seem right, because on one side of the line you have to throw the book at someone or fear getting smeared for "going easy on crime", and worse, for "going easy on child molesters" (notwithstanding that young adults are not "children", in any legitimate sense).
An effort to be relatively non-inflammatory.
Trust me, you don't need to. Earlier you accused me of "advocacy for child molesters" and yet here we are still having a halfway-reasonable and sane disagreement. I think I can take it.
And I take it to mean "Some asshole will weasel out of getting in trouble for screwing a 13 year old by claiming she wanted it. Let's make sure he can't do that."
Why not do it by, oh, I dunno, making it illegal to screw 13-year-olds? Without calling it "rape"? Plenty of other things are illegal that aren't called "rape". Frankly I think that trivializes actual violent rape, and for that reason I don't like it.
Rape is generally defined as having sex with someone without their consent. It does not always have to be violent. Slipping a woman some roofies or getting a girl extremely drunk and then having sex with her is also rape, even if she doesn't try to fight you off.
But in this case there was consent, the law just said the consent was no good because the person wasn't old enough to give consent.
The law backs up that concept. If you are found guilty of murdering two people, you get punished for both crimes.
It's relative. I wouldn't stick my hand into the flame of a stove burner and just leave it there because it's colder than the surface of the sun. I'd call it hot, and I wouldn't leave my hand there long enough to get burned. I'd yank it out.
The original issue is, however, pretty black and white. If you're 40 and you're having sex with a 13 year old, you are doing the wrong thing, whether she wants it or not.
I don't disagree. But even in a case like this I'd still want the 40-year-old guy's punishment to take into some consideration whether or not it was violent. If it was violent, he was a danger to far more kids than if it was non-violent, because most 13-year-olds would have nothing to do with a guy like him.
The "front" of a shock wave does travel faster than the speed of sound. It is its expansion that travels at the speed of sound. If a speeding bullet creates a cone-shaped shock wave, that cone is moving forward at the same speed as the bullet - supersonic - although its diameter at any point is determined by the shock wave moving outward at the speed of sound.
To make any useful information from the shock wave of a bullet, it does seem to me that it would have to miss you, though... I don't see how it could detect a bullet before it had arrived, or passed you.
17 is getting into a potential gray area morally (though certainly not in law if we're still talking about a 40 year old guy) but fortunately for my argument we weren't talking about near-adults.
In this specific case? Yeah, maybe. In the law? No... no such distinction is really made. For the sake of this argument the fact that she was 13, rather than 17, should really be irrelevant.
If you want to tack on a battery charge for the violence element of the forced rape, that's fine
So even you admit that the crime of violent rape of the 13-year-old should be different, if only in the sense that you'd tack on an extra charge for the forcible aspect of it.
Having established at least that point of agreement, I'd argue that the crime of violence, particularly in such a private aspect of one's life and such a demeaning way, should have a much more severe punishment than the crime of having sex with someone who may not have fully realised what she was doing, but thought that she did.
Actually, yes, I do believe that the punishment should be the same for having sex with a 13 year old whether she consented or not. It's not like it's hard to avoid the punishment. Don't have sex with children, and you'll be fine.... the actual rape charge should carry the same consequences [as forced rape].
A 13 year old girl cannot consent to sex, even if you ask her nicely, and therefore whether you think she consented or not, she didn't consent, ergo it is still rape.
I find it noteworthy that you didn't call it rape except when you were trying to explain what is so bad about it.
What does "statutory" mean? The dictionary says it means "enacted, created, or regulated by statute". The law can't "create" rape, and it regulates rape like it regulates any other crime - it makes it illegal. So aren't all rape laws "statutory"? What does the term "statutory rape" even mean? What I take it to mean is "nobody would call this rape if we didn't make a law, so we're making a law to call it rape."
Do we have to call it "rape" before we can convince people that it's bad, and should be illegal?
If something is less wrong than something else then by definition it is more right, and "more OK" as I used it is, obviously, a synonym of "more right."
Then you're saying that it's more OK to kill one person than it is to kill two people, and it makes no sense to use the word OK to describe either of those. It's like, after your cellphone shorting out because it got damp in a rainstorm, then saying "well at least it's less wet now than it'd have been if I'd dropped it into the toilet".
Oh, and the insult I referred to was your suggestion that I "get uncomfortable" with nuanced thought.
It was meant to be rhetorical, and the answer "obviously not". I only meant to get you to engage a little more and stop making it out to be, as it seemed to me at least that you were making it out to be, entirely black and white. But I do apologise for suggesting that.
Does the malware have the ability to upgrade on command? I'd put that in if I were writing it. Could that ability be used to patch it to neutralize it, or send a real security patch down the wire?
Running unauthorized code on someone's computer without their permission is illegal, even if you're doing it for a "good" reason. If they could figure out how to hook it into a Windows Update, that might work, but Windows Update is specifically authorized by the user and random botnet backdoor isn't.
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That is true, but as most loads are generally either inductive or resistive, whatever minuscule amount of capacitance there is in the wire would actually help improve the power factor, not lower it.
Alt-Home is easier and quicker.
Every time alternating current changes direction, some energy is lost to overcome the capacitance in the wires.
I think you mean inductance.
0.01% of the game playing public is ever going to pick up an RPG. 0% will meet aliens
however, 90% will be in a domestic situation some point in their life where physical violence crosses their minds
And 100% of them will be in some situation some point in their life where physical violence crosses their minds. So by that logic we should be having tea parties instead of playing Halo.
The few people who think it's okay because it's in a video game shouldn't be playing video games. That goes for any of the killing, mass chaos, and generally bad behavior that just about any video game is going to include, including misogynistic behavior like this.
The rest of us can differentiate between video games and reality, and we don't need to have our games sanitized. Halo would suck if we all made friends and had tea parties.
You can for most users. The rest can be handled separately under a special set of restrictions which would thwart anyone trying to re-use the session from a different IP address than the original one.
The first thing you should do if a different IP address tries to use the same session ID is require them to re-enter their password (via HTTPS, obviously). If they succeed, flag them as a mobile user and require them to re-enter their password periodically, say, every 15 minutes, to ensure that an attacker couldn't just impersonate them indefinitely. You'd also want to require re-entering their password if they try to do certain actions, like changing the e-mail address or SMS alert number linked to their account or change the notification settings for withdrawals, etc.
No, a line is one dimensional (having length). A point is zero dimensional, having no size at all.
Well, I certainly don't disagree with that latter part, although I'd take slight exception to the former - you've got your work cut out for you if you think you're going to keep teens after the age of puberty from having sex at some point.
Granted, if they're soliciting sex from people much older than themselves, it's pretty likely that there's a problem more serious than just your average horny teenager, as you suggested. In fact that's sort of what I've been saying all along.
In 2-D space + time the point could have simply gone past him; I believe you were thinking of 1-D space + time when you wrote that.
1-D space + time... where it'd be pretty damn hard to miss the point. Unless, I suppose, it's pointed the wrong way.
It also lists address. Often there are lots of listings for the same last name, many of which don't have full first names, maybe just a first initial. However, if you find the "Bloggs, J" listed at the address which you know he lives at, you can be confident that the number is accurate. The probability would be vanishingly slim that you'd find a fake listing when looking for an actual person.
In case of a phone book, I would say "that IS the reference for the fact".
Then the reference they were looking for doesn't exist, because the phone book has one utility: you look up a name, and you find a number for that name. The reverse isn't guaranteed, nor is it guaranteed that every name will be listed, or that every name listed is accurate. As long as it isn't the name that you need to look up, it really isn't guaranteed at all. It'd be convenient, of course, for Feist to go ahead and assume these things.
However I'd agree that it makes it almost impossible to tell the facts from the fiction and, if the telco chose to go that direction, Feist's immediate response should be to remove all of the named fictitious listings (in the copyright suit they'd have to be named as the material being claimed for infringement) and fight the suit on the basis that they had no reasonable way of telling that the listings were not factual and therefore could be copyrighted.
ID started out with the claim that the theory of evolution alone can not explain what happens, so another "add on" is necessary.
Amusing, but no. Evolution started out with the claim that intelligent design cannot explain what happened, since "God" can't exist, so another "add on" is necessary to explain how things got started without him.
So it is not obvious that it is creative information, on the contrary, it's designed to look like it's factual information and part of the collection. I can imagine that they lose copyright protection for that reason.
So anyone who presents fiction in a manner so as to make it appear factual loses copyright? And, if someone believes it to be factual, they have carte blanche to copy it freely? I doubt it.
Someone trying to (legally) copy the factual information from the work, when sued for infringement on those phony entries, might even argue illegal entrapment and misleading by the original author.
Presumably it would be the responsibility of the one doing the copying to ensure that what they were copying was, in fact, factual... seeing how they'd need to verify the veracity of the information to avoid violating a copyright. And misleading? The phone book is not intended to be a listing of every number registered with its proper owner; some numbers are unlisted and wouldn't appear at all. The phone book is intended to be a one-way reference: you know the name, you look up their number. This is guaranteed: that if you look up a real, factual name, and that person is listed, you will get their most up-to-date number, insofar as the phone book publisher knows it to be true. In what way does that guarantee that fictional names might not be given with fictional numbers? They were using the phone book in a manner for which it was not intended, and its accuracy was not to be assumed.
See Feist v. Rural.
Yes, I'm familiar with it. Note the following:
It is a long-standing principle of United States copyright law that "information" is not copyrightable, O'Connor notes, but "collections" of information can be.
...
In regard to collections of facts, O'Connor states that copyright can only apply to the creative aspects of collection: the creative choice of what data to include or exclude, the order and style in which the information is presented, etc., but not on the information itself. If Feist were to take the directory and rearrange them it would destroy the copyright owned in the data.
In other words, although the names and numbers are purely factual and cannot be copyrighted, and the arrangement of them is obvious (alphabetical), the formatting and presentation can still be copyrighted. I.e. margins, page header/footer, columns, and even the typeface used. Simply scanning the pages and printing an exact duplicate phone book would infringe on its copyright, whereas copying the information out of it did not.
I also wonder about the following:
Despite Rural's denial of a license to Feist, Feist copied some 4000 entries from Rural's directory. Because Rural had placed a small number of phony entries to detect copying, Feist was caught.
If fact may not be copyrighted, fiction certainly can - so would the phony entries not be considered "creative"? Why not? It seems to me that Feist infringed on Rural's copyright, not in the republication of the factual names but at least in the republication of the fictitious ones. But apparently either Rural's lawyers didn't think of that or the judge didn't think it mattered.
I thought violation of copyright didn't depend on whether you were trying to make money off the unauthorized use.
And even if facts can't be copyrighted, a specific arrangement of them can be. The phone book's pages are copyrighted, even if the names and numbers aren't. You can copy the information but you can't just scan the pages themselves and reprint them.
I don't think that ruling is correct and I expect it'll be overturned.
The test of a useful theory is that it makes predictions, not just attempts to explain everything that's happened so far. Otherwise, that is not a scientific theory, it's a history lesson. It is by its predictions that a theory is tested, not by its explanation of what we already know to be true. If it makes no useful predictions, it is not a useful theory, and if it makes predictions which are found to be false, the theory itself is false and/or needs reworking. Which, of course, you pointed out is part of the scientific process, and I agree.
All of the things that you mentioned are so well established at this point that no sane theory would try to contradict their truth. That's a bit like saying that the theory of gravity would be cast in serious doubt if I dropped an apple and it flew upward. Well, duh. And we all know it isn't going to happen, or at least we have enough scientific data to know exactly what conditions might cause that to happen without contradicting the law of gravity.
And, for what it's worth, none of the things that you mentioned which would falsify the theory of evolution are in the least bit contrary to the theory of intelligent design, either. Traits get passed on, living things adapt, and nature favors the strongest creatures.
And returning to that point, that theories adapt as part of the scientific process - well, when the theory of evolution adapts you say it's the scientific process at work, but when the theory of intelligent design adapts you say that its proponents are trying to weasel their way out of what you claim is their theory having been disproven. Is that not hypocritical?
Well... the other other alternative is to try to stop people and get help for them before they do something with potentially life-altering consequences, but fortunately we're too smart for that; instead, when we suspect that somebody might ever be capable of doing that we try to lure them into doing something that doesn't actually hurt a real child but for which we can still justifiably lock them up for a good long while.
Sort of like the correct approach to handling a jumper is to clear everyone off the sidewalk underneath him and goad him into hurrying up and jumping so we can clean up the mess and be done with the nastiness already.
I hope he's at least making money off it.
and — for all the juicy details — the rationale behind the decision (PDF).
I take it there are pictures?
Consent must be willingly given by a person who is legally capable of giving it.
Laws which say that someone can legally not give consent one day and can legally give it the next, with the only thing separating the two being the person's birthday, are stupid.
And yes, the same goes for laws about driving, voting, drinking, and smoking. But at least, usually in those cases, the consequences aren't completely life-ruining.
Where you might be having the hangup about sex with a 17 year old is the case in which the 18 year old boyfriend has sex with his 17 year old girlfriend. It should be noted that there are already statutory rape exceptions in many of the laws which exempt such acts from being statutory rape.
Yes, that's the hangup; and it also isn't. Because of course we've gotten it through our heads that borderline cases like that need an exception. So we drew another line. But no matter where you draw the line legally, there will be cases on either one side or the other of that line where it doesn't quite seem right, because on one side of the line you have to throw the book at someone or fear getting smeared for "going easy on crime", and worse, for "going easy on child molesters" (notwithstanding that young adults are not "children", in any legitimate sense).
An effort to be relatively non-inflammatory.
Trust me, you don't need to. Earlier you accused me of "advocacy for child molesters" and yet here we are still having a halfway-reasonable and sane disagreement. I think I can take it.
And I take it to mean "Some asshole will weasel out of getting in trouble for screwing a 13 year old by claiming she wanted it. Let's make sure he can't do that."
Why not do it by, oh, I dunno, making it illegal to screw 13-year-olds? Without calling it "rape"? Plenty of other things are illegal that aren't called "rape". Frankly I think that trivializes actual violent rape, and for that reason I don't like it.
Rape is generally defined as having sex with someone without their consent. It does not always have to be violent. Slipping a woman some roofies or getting a girl extremely drunk and then having sex with her is also rape, even if she doesn't try to fight you off.
But in this case there was consent, the law just said the consent was no good because the person wasn't old enough to give consent.
The law backs up that concept. If you are found guilty of murdering two people, you get punished for both crimes.
It's relative. I wouldn't stick my hand into the flame of a stove burner and just leave it there because it's colder than the surface of the sun. I'd call it hot, and I wouldn't leave my hand there long enough to get burned. I'd yank it out.
The original issue is, however, pretty black and white. If you're 40 and you're having sex with a 13 year old, you are doing the wrong thing, whether she wants it or not.
I don't disagree. But even in a case like this I'd still want the 40-year-old guy's punishment to take into some consideration whether or not it was violent. If it was violent, he was a danger to far more kids than if it was non-violent, because most 13-year-olds would have nothing to do with a guy like him.
The "front" of a shock wave does travel faster than the speed of sound. It is its expansion that travels at the speed of sound. If a speeding bullet creates a cone-shaped shock wave, that cone is moving forward at the same speed as the bullet - supersonic - although its diameter at any point is determined by the shock wave moving outward at the speed of sound.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_wave
To make any useful information from the shock wave of a bullet, it does seem to me that it would have to miss you, though... I don't see how it could detect a bullet before it had arrived, or passed you.
17 is getting into a potential gray area morally (though certainly not in law if we're still talking about a 40 year old guy) but fortunately for my argument we weren't talking about near-adults.
In this specific case? Yeah, maybe. In the law? No... no such distinction is really made. For the sake of this argument the fact that she was 13, rather than 17, should really be irrelevant.
If you want to tack on a battery charge for the violence element of the forced rape, that's fine
So even you admit that the crime of violent rape of the 13-year-old should be different, if only in the sense that you'd tack on an extra charge for the forcible aspect of it.
Having established at least that point of agreement, I'd argue that the crime of violence, particularly in such a private aspect of one's life and such a demeaning way, should have a much more severe punishment than the crime of having sex with someone who may not have fully realised what she was doing, but thought that she did.
Actually, yes, I do believe that the punishment should be the same for having sex with a 13 year old whether she consented or not. It's not like it's hard to avoid the punishment. Don't have sex with children, and you'll be fine. ... the actual rape charge should carry the same consequences [as forced rape].
A 13 year old girl cannot consent to sex, even if you ask her nicely, and therefore whether you think she consented or not, she didn't consent, ergo it is still rape.
I find it noteworthy that you didn't call it rape except when you were trying to explain what is so bad about it.
What does "statutory" mean? The dictionary says it means "enacted, created, or regulated by statute". The law can't "create" rape, and it regulates rape like it regulates any other crime - it makes it illegal. So aren't all rape laws "statutory"? What does the term "statutory rape" even mean? What I take it to mean is "nobody would call this rape if we didn't make a law, so we're making a law to call it rape."
Do we have to call it "rape" before we can convince people that it's bad, and should be illegal?
If something is less wrong than something else then by definition it is more right, and "more OK" as I used it is, obviously, a synonym of "more right."
Then you're saying that it's more OK to kill one person than it is to kill two people, and it makes no sense to use the word OK to describe either of those. It's like, after your cellphone shorting out because it got damp in a rainstorm, then saying "well at least it's less wet now than it'd have been if I'd dropped it into the toilet".
Oh, and the insult I referred to was your suggestion that I "get uncomfortable" with nuanced thought.
It was meant to be rhetorical, and the answer "obviously not". I only meant to get you to engage a little more and stop making it out to be, as it seemed to me at least that you were making it out to be, entirely black and white. But I do apologise for suggesting that.
ASCII sexy question, get a slutty ANSI...
Does the malware have the ability to upgrade on command? I'd put that in if I were writing it. Could that ability be used to patch it to neutralize it, or send a real security patch down the wire?
Running unauthorized code on someone's computer without their permission is illegal, even if you're doing it for a "good" reason. If they could figure out how to hook it into a Windows Update, that might work, but Windows Update is specifically authorized by the user and random botnet backdoor isn't.