OTOH, there is that detail about Brokaw *SAYING* those things. Facts can be so inconvenient, and rebroadcasting what you said is hardly an excuse for a broadcast journalist to cry foul. It shouldn't even be considered inconvenient.
If it's copyright issues that are at stake, the court challenge should be over appropriate remuneration. What's 30 seconds of old news worth? Not very freakin' much, IMHO. The bulk of the value should have long since fallen into the public domain.
Dude, learn to quote parent or fix the subject line... for a moment, I thought boobs in media had been banned in German media. It's bad enough that games get borked/dubbed or banned, admittedly.
Am guessing you missed their 1998 reunion / interview with Robert Klein, where they ostensibly (A) had Graham Chapman's urn and (B) spilled and then frantically cleaned him up? This is part of it, but I recommend finding the whole interview.
Um, several teabaggers I work with do regularly claim the Constitution is perfect. I realize it's anecdotal, but the idea ISN'T unheld. It's not even uncommon.
Yeah, things'd be much better if the weak gruel we working-class plebes get out of washington was just eliminated completely. (/sarcasm)
--
Oh, lookie: Goldman Sachs made a billion dollars this quarter!
And our response needs to be a loud shout: "SEE! Capitalism is incapable of selfregulating."
We've lost pensions and the old social contract with our employers that if we worked hard, we'd always have a decent job. The corporate response to environmental protections is a roving exportation target for where to dump the dirty stuff and dirty work. The foxconn conditions are deplorable, as are conditions in southwest Afghanistan, coastal India, Niger, and anywhere else that both lacks economic protections and openness.
But I hardly think that the US's hellbent rush toward this is the end state.
Well put: a pure capitalism mechanism seems hell-bent on lowest cost at any cost (letting others pay for labor abuses, environmental damage, and gaming national workforces against each other in a race for the bottom). Which is precisely where unions and governmental protections (including international trade regulations) come into play.
Well put. Except for the moment I got jarred out of your essay by you claiming to torrent (created 2001) your first windows NT (replaced by win2k in 2000). I realize it's *POSSIBLE*, but that has to mean either you were grabbing lame warez or know how to retrieve files from the future or that mentioning other means than torrents would harsh up your whole piracy-n-torrents cadence thingy. The orthogonality of those options is what broke my train of thought... oh, look, a kitten hugging a bunny!
Cheers!
If you want to make sure the TSA leaves your digital goodies alone, label it 'Viruses for AV Testing". Bonus: Carry a disclaimer form releasing you of damages if they do plug it in.
Better yet, label one stick 'P0Rn' and stuff it full of malware, rootkits, or even some lame old nasty stuff made new and shiny with shakataganai. Minimal bonus points if it phones home to some hitcounter or webbug, so you can discretely see if it gets taken. Triple bonus points for buried stuff having phone-home code to sites interesting to the TSA (i.e., axis of evil, redneck militias, or truly heinous child porn). The goal here is to get an agent that slurps *FIRED* or into headlines.
Meanwhile, don't let them enjoy the other mem sticks: Buy a few different models that are light on the metal componentry and keep them on your person ( A couple trips through airport security will tell you which ones can make it through scanners or frisks). Use encryption for bigger stuff.
Tune in next week for "arc welding unauthorized accessors with faux-usb coils and cap circuits".
PS: never NEVER never burn 0day here. Rank and file airport TSA staff are somewhere **down** the cop-fu chart below renta-cops. 0day would be becoming a ninja to kick ass on the short bus.
Has this hysterical gunpoint thing ever happened? If so, I wager it'd look a lot like on a reality show like 'Cops', where someone realizes they're about to be caught with outstanding warrants, or driving without a license or drunk or something else, and goes nutso trying to escape the cops, crashing through cars and driving against traffic, until it ends with them crumpled up and cops pointing guns at every direction. Or they'll wig out on a cop while far from their car, get tackled or tasered, then brought before a judge.
-
Point being, society knows this sort of treatment happens to scofflaws. Now, it seems like Bread and Circuses, but I'm more of the mind that folks witness these bad examples, then get very noticeable moments where a life decision needs to be made. At each, they're allowed to back away from teh crazy before it comes down to chases and guns and tasers. Laws and a self-govern-or-suffer motive work together as societal grease, smoothing things out before we all find ourselves hoarding ammo and believing some foreign muckraker's propaganda or faux news.
Hubris comes before the fall. And apparently provincialism will be driving the carriage.
Having worked occasionally in SiliValley, the corporate culture there smells surprisingly similar to every other corporation I've worked in. Ditto many startups there. There's a bit more zing, a bit more individualism, and they're rarely as broken/dsyfunctional as the worst firms I've consulted for, but they're never uniformly better than decent companies elsewhere.
The 'secret sauce' that powers the valley can and will someday leave for a new hot spot (or simply fade away). When it does, you'll see firsthand that employees are generally decent, hardworking and quickly screwed by management eager to focus on whatever metric-du-jour keeps their attention. Unions aren't some sort of slacker utopia; despite what you've been told. Unions and guilds were what grew the american middle class, and kept us sharing the profits when we succeed together.
I'm not even going to touch #3 -- anyone that can godwin themselves while considering people to be either producers or parasites misses the part where tech workers' employable life is from 18 to 48... 3/7ths of a good lifespan. Don't believe me? Look at your office demographics: the national population has a rather substantial peak from 55 to 70. See 'em well represented at your firm? And I don't just mean in 1-of-6 quantities at management level. Where are they? Retired? Or unemployable because of the stereotype that old farts don't like new tech. I don't think they're all retired (and IMHO, I'll be engrossed with computers until I die, so they must be slackers to have quit/retired from the industry entirely). Otherwise, you're just overlooking all of them that have passed their sell-by date. Or your company's not interviewing them. Slackers? More like outcasts.
Take another look around. Are you looking forward to being worried about your job after your 45th birthday? You should be concerned. And not because you're a slacker. But because the next generation will stereotype you just like my coworkers have been stereotyping the older generation for decades.
Back to a geoeconomic scale, Silicon Valley will keep ripping along for a while, but I have no doubt I'll see it implode. And by implode, I mean like Detroit did. They and Pittsburg and Allentown used to think they were unassailable because they made important stuff, too. And the textile mills in SC, the insurance industry in CT, manufacturing and assembly and import/export in NY, SF, LA. Deflated economies inevitably come where disruptive tech hurts the most. This year, it's support staff for marketing and ad companies in metro areas: apparently India's gotten good enough at photoshop and video editing to where even specialty ad firms are outsourcing the work. Can you really tell me that someone's not going to inexpensively undercut the crap tech empires of Zynga, Facebook, or
Thus emeritus or 'advisory scientist' roles. I knew one that became lab/departmental machinist, and was delighted to shift to where he was teamed with a junior C&C hacker. While he had no aspirations of becoming a C&C programmer, he could instinctively tell the junior machinist things like: slow the mill down for a finer precision, do a preliminary cut here to check tolerances before doing the tightest work, lap/anodize/cut/coat/anneal instead of mill, and asking apt questions like: would material X work better?, etc. And he was still involved in lab activities, still had a place to hang his coat, still saw colleagues regularly, etc.
A few years later, I worked on a semiconductor fab expansion project. It had two old engineers on temporary staff. Both had returned to field engineering after retiring. They were happy to be busy and contributing, even if they were just field engineers with a rank next to mine: tracking projects and punchlists and helping coordinate subcontractor jobs. I'm sure they weren't making 3x my entry-level salary, and I'm equally sure it was less about seniority-level pay than about doing substantive work.
There are plenty of alternatives along the spectrum, including honorary slots, part-time jobs, and reduced pay and responsibility. Even the adjacent comment about an old guy saying 'which is this, java or vb'... I'll ignore the part where I regularly look at my own code and mutter 'Who the fuck wrote THIS and why?'. Sometimes, who the f*** cares if a coworker's showing signs from age -- At least try to find tasks appropriate for the worker and *cowboy up* and discuss their future salary with them to see if it'll work. You might be surprised at how balancing hours and salary and workload can keep expertise and still be cost-effective.
Or you can go on presuming that an old guy or gal still working after retirement age is only there for the money... jeez. If I had a choice between coding into my 80's and either just playing golf or greeting people at walmart, I know which one would keep me saner.
First, apples and oranges, unless CLGR was a cloud app with distributed data. Bulk data loss requiring outages and recovery from archive is rare and high-impact enough for big cloud companies (FB, Google, MSFT, Twitter) that they make the news. And there are few stories of data recoveries from tape or archive, right? So, the few that happen can be tested against a transactional list of deletion requests during recovery. This IS NOT like every town or province having a localized copy of a gun registry database, plus them each having personalized backup/recovery mechanisms.
But, even if there are similarities, both complaints about difficulty sound like an excuse by an agency uneager (or unfunded) resisting pressure to do so. As I mentioned in another comment, if we can pass-optimize compilers on 64k x86 boxes running at a few MHz, it's laziness to declare it "too hard" to even attempt to reasonably delete data from a complex of systems that intentionally spreads data around on many servers.
"Uneager or resisting pressure to do so" matches Facebook's motivation, BTW.
Luckily, we have a veritable *cloud* of servers that can be put to work, crawling and rechecking data steadily against a pool of 'deletions.'
If the data were changing massively nonstop (financial transaction data, for example), fine. But a few thousand servers ought to be able to crawl their data hierarchies killing any record-id's or links found in a deletion list.
One-sided T&C's are when we need governmental intervention. Libertarian-utopians notwithstanding, laws are often needed to balance powers. In this case, great-great-great-great-....parent article is right: "It ought to be illegal." Mere mortals can never get corps to change by any other means than force of law, and that only happens rarely.
Yeah, 64k systems in 1982 fit optimizing compilers that parallelize code generation tasks, even some complex and obscure ones (it's been so long I can't remember which years had feature-bullets for lower-#-of-passes compilers, where n gradually dropped toward 1 and then fell out of compiler marketing-speak)... but facebook, with an IPO and estimated economic power of billions can't take a cloud of data and rig up a crawler to kill any items with a 'delete' flag set that match a pool of hash or GUID values. Mmm-ri-iiight.
Normally, I'd agree with you. In a room of a dozen nerds, that'd be the fanboi. But in a room with 12 generic citizens, that standout could be the one nerd in the room.
In other words, maybe the first 11 jurors are like half the nitwits, er *committee* hearing SOPA in congress today -- zzzzzz-zzzzzzz 'bunch of tubes' zzzzzz-zzzzz 'intarwebz are for porn' zzzzz-zzzzz 'if the glove doesn't fit' zzzz-zzzzz. Meanwhile, one of our fellow slashdotters got jury duty and *understood* things, and came to a completely contradictory conclusion.
I'm not saying Microsoft deserved to win -- I personally doubt it based on it being MS in 1994 -- and I've paid almost no attention to the trial. I'm just a bit more clear on juries 'cuz of a locally-high-profile case I served as a juror for. Reviewing the news stories after that experience quickly taught me that there's a LOT going on in a long trial that gets filtered both ways: the world gets a news story that skips key details, and the jury occasionally gets sequestered from the courtroom when some pretty damn interesting info is disclosed (missing them entirely) or even gets instructions to not consider certain details in their deliberation.
Am usually right there with y'all in demanding a complete redo on IP law, but not here.
Take anything we do well in America. Trace it down to materials science or some other obscure technological detail.
Now, *GIVE* that info to another country. Whoosh, there go a billion dollars of competitive advantage, or whatever the equivalent engineering/prototyping cost is.
In the cases of media, biology and pharm, it's a cost that some corp won't recoup. Bad juju. But in the case of weapons, armor and nuclear reactor designs, it's a cost that keeps china from marching on another nation. It doesn't take a huge amount of paranoia to suspect that Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, India and Japan remain sovereign partly because China isn't capable of our level of weaponry, submarine reactor longevity, space-based intelligence, etc.
There's no easy answer, and I'm not buying the cyberwarfare jingoism rants, but taking cybersecurity more seriously is important.
Left field answer: Um, check for a pulse before you use that 'life' word.
My final answer: You can become good, but it should be nigh on impossible to be forgiven outright. Basically, Nobelesse Oblige seems a small price to pay for being a successful rapacious rat bastard. So, no-- systematic antisocial behavior never gets a free pass. Ever. Any mention of once-they-were-rich good deeds needs that second phrase that mentions how they (or dad or gramps) got their money, and it seems ethical to never completely let them off the hook. Anything less implies that forgiveness is cheaper than the crime itself.
Now, if a Gordon Gecko or a Microsoft (to go corp) tries to do everything in their power to make amends: (gives everything away and starts wearing a hair shirt and volunteering at soup kitchens anonymously, or similar Ma Theresa acts, etc), then they might earn that special slot where they're spoken of as someone whose good deeds far outweighed their misdeeds. Otherwise, anyone with a checkered past get exactly as much forgiveness as they earn: Some. Not much.
Tossback: So, if I godwin the question, is there a level of misdeed so egregious in your mind that the perpetrator can't be forgiven?
Huh, I thought it was because IBM has become pretty worthless on the hardware and invention front since they became primarily a consultancy.
(Power CPU's and stuff notwithstanding, I am kidding a little. But scalpel? REALLY? Anyone that can say that IBM wields proprietary aspects of their computer technology like a frickin' scalpel needs to reexamine the first 70 or 80 years of IBM's history).
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH, there is that detail about Brokaw *SAYING* those things. Facts can be so inconvenient, and rebroadcasting what you said is hardly an excuse for a broadcast journalist to cry foul. It shouldn't even be considered inconvenient. If it's copyright issues that are at stake, the court challenge should be over appropriate remuneration. What's 30 seconds of old news worth? Not very freakin' much, IMHO. The bulk of the value should have long since fallen into the public domain.
Dude, learn to quote parent or fix the subject line... for a moment, I thought boobs in media had been banned in German media. It's bad enough that games get borked/dubbed or banned, admittedly.
Liberty and freedom.... uh, Redundant much?
Am guessing you missed their 1998 reunion / interview with Robert Klein, where they ostensibly (A) had Graham Chapman's urn and (B) spilled and then frantically cleaned him up? This is part of it, but I recommend finding the whole interview.
Um, several teabaggers I work with do regularly claim the Constitution is perfect. I realize it's anecdotal, but the idea ISN'T unheld. It's not even uncommon.
--ow owwowowow.
Yeah, things'd be much better if the weak gruel we working-class plebes get out of washington was just eliminated completely. (/sarcasm) -- Oh, lookie: Goldman Sachs made a billion dollars this quarter!
And our response needs to be a loud shout: "SEE! Capitalism is incapable of selfregulating." We've lost pensions and the old social contract with our employers that if we worked hard, we'd always have a decent job. The corporate response to environmental protections is a roving exportation target for where to dump the dirty stuff and dirty work. The foxconn conditions are deplorable, as are conditions in southwest Afghanistan, coastal India, Niger, and anywhere else that both lacks economic protections and openness. But I hardly think that the US's hellbent rush toward this is the end state.
Well put: a pure capitalism mechanism seems hell-bent on lowest cost at any cost (letting others pay for labor abuses, environmental damage, and gaming national workforces against each other in a race for the bottom). Which is precisely where unions and governmental protections (including international trade regulations) come into play.
Well put. Except for the moment I got jarred out of your essay by you claiming to torrent (created 2001) your first windows NT (replaced by win2k in 2000). I realize it's *POSSIBLE*, but that has to mean either you were grabbing lame warez or know how to retrieve files from the future or that mentioning other means than torrents would harsh up your whole piracy-n-torrents cadence thingy. The orthogonality of those options is what broke my train of thought... oh, look, a kitten hugging a bunny! Cheers!
Better yet, label one stick 'P0Rn' and stuff it full of malware, rootkits, or even some lame old nasty stuff made new and shiny with shakataganai. Minimal bonus points if it phones home to some hitcounter or webbug, so you can discretely see if it gets taken. Triple bonus points for buried stuff having phone-home code to sites interesting to the TSA (i.e., axis of evil, redneck militias, or truly heinous child porn). The goal here is to get an agent that slurps *FIRED* or into headlines.
Meanwhile, don't let them enjoy the other mem sticks: Buy a few different models that are light on the metal componentry and keep them on your person ( A couple trips through airport security will tell you which ones can make it through scanners or frisks). Use encryption for bigger stuff.
Tune in next week for "arc welding unauthorized accessors with faux-usb coils and cap circuits".
PS: never NEVER never burn 0day here. Rank and file airport TSA staff are somewhere **down** the cop-fu chart below renta-cops. 0day would be becoming a ninja to kick ass on the short bus.
Oh, and for the record, agreeing as a society to fund what it takes so that people don't die in squalor is never evil.
-
Point being, society knows this sort of treatment happens to scofflaws. Now, it seems like Bread and Circuses, but I'm more of the mind that folks witness these bad examples, then get very noticeable moments where a life decision needs to be made. At each, they're allowed to back away from teh crazy before it comes down to chases and guns and tasers. Laws and a self-govern-or-suffer motive work together as societal grease, smoothing things out before we all find ourselves hoarding ammo and believing some foreign muckraker's propaganda or faux news.
Hubris comes before the fall. And apparently provincialism will be driving the carriage.
Having worked occasionally in SiliValley, the corporate culture there smells surprisingly similar to every other corporation I've worked in. Ditto many startups there. There's a bit more zing, a bit more individualism, and they're rarely as broken/dsyfunctional as the worst firms I've consulted for, but they're never uniformly better than decent companies elsewhere.
The 'secret sauce' that powers the valley can and will someday leave for a new hot spot (or simply fade away). When it does, you'll see firsthand that employees are generally decent, hardworking and quickly screwed by management eager to focus on whatever metric-du-jour keeps their attention. Unions aren't some sort of slacker utopia; despite what you've been told. Unions and guilds were what grew the american middle class, and kept us sharing the profits when we succeed together.
I'm not even going to touch #3 -- anyone that can godwin themselves while considering people to be either producers or parasites misses the part where tech workers' employable life is from 18 to 48... 3/7ths of a good lifespan. Don't believe me? Look at your office demographics: the national population has a rather substantial peak from 55 to 70. See 'em well represented at your firm? And I don't just mean in 1-of-6 quantities at management level. Where are they? Retired? Or unemployable because of the stereotype that old farts don't like new tech. I don't think they're all retired (and IMHO, I'll be engrossed with computers until I die, so they must be slackers to have quit/retired from the industry entirely). Otherwise, you're just overlooking all of them that have passed their sell-by date. Or your company's not interviewing them. Slackers? More like outcasts.
Take another look around. Are you looking forward to being worried about your job after your 45th birthday? You should be concerned. And not because you're a slacker. But because the next generation will stereotype you just like my coworkers have been stereotyping the older generation for decades.
Back to a geoeconomic scale, Silicon Valley will keep ripping along for a while, but I have no doubt I'll see it implode. And by implode, I mean like Detroit did. They and Pittsburg and Allentown used to think they were unassailable because they made important stuff, too. And the textile mills in SC, the insurance industry in CT, manufacturing and assembly and import/export in NY, SF, LA. Deflated economies inevitably come where disruptive tech hurts the most. This year, it's support staff for marketing and ad companies in metro areas: apparently India's gotten good enough at photoshop and video editing to where even specialty ad firms are outsourcing the work. Can you really tell me that someone's not going to inexpensively undercut the crap tech empires of Zynga, Facebook, or
Thus emeritus or 'advisory scientist' roles. I knew one that became lab/departmental machinist, and was delighted to shift to where he was teamed with a junior C&C hacker. While he had no aspirations of becoming a C&C programmer, he could instinctively tell the junior machinist things like: slow the mill down for a finer precision, do a preliminary cut here to check tolerances before doing the tightest work, lap/anodize/cut/coat/anneal instead of mill, and asking apt questions like: would material X work better?, etc. And he was still involved in lab activities, still had a place to hang his coat, still saw colleagues regularly, etc.
A few years later, I worked on a semiconductor fab expansion project. It had two old engineers on temporary staff. Both had returned to field engineering after retiring. They were happy to be busy and contributing, even if they were just field engineers with a rank next to mine: tracking projects and punchlists and helping coordinate subcontractor jobs. I'm sure they weren't making 3x my entry-level salary, and I'm equally sure it was less about seniority-level pay than about doing substantive work.
There are plenty of alternatives along the spectrum, including honorary slots, part-time jobs, and reduced pay and responsibility. Even the adjacent comment about an old guy saying 'which is this, java or vb'... I'll ignore the part where I regularly look at my own code and mutter 'Who the fuck wrote THIS and why?'. Sometimes, who the f*** cares if a coworker's showing signs from age -- At least try to find tasks appropriate for the worker and *cowboy up* and discuss their future salary with them to see if it'll work. You might be surprised at how balancing hours and salary and workload can keep expertise and still be cost-effective.
Or you can go on presuming that an old guy or gal still working after retirement age is only there for the money... jeez. If I had a choice between coding into my 80's and either just playing golf or greeting people at walmart, I know which one would keep me saner.
That button would be "Toss 'er in the brig!"
First, apples and oranges, unless CLGR was a cloud app with distributed data. Bulk data loss requiring outages and recovery from archive is rare and high-impact enough for big cloud companies (FB, Google, MSFT, Twitter) that they make the news. And there are few stories of data recoveries from tape or archive, right? So, the few that happen can be tested against a transactional list of deletion requests during recovery. This IS NOT like every town or province having a localized copy of a gun registry database, plus them each having personalized backup/recovery mechanisms.
But, even if there are similarities, both complaints about difficulty sound like an excuse by an agency uneager (or unfunded) resisting pressure to do so. As I mentioned in another comment, if we can pass-optimize compilers on 64k x86 boxes running at a few MHz, it's laziness to declare it "too hard" to even attempt to reasonably delete data from a complex of systems that intentionally spreads data around on many servers.
"Uneager or resisting pressure to do so" matches Facebook's motivation, BTW.
difficult?
Luckily, we have a veritable *cloud* of servers that can be put to work, crawling and rechecking data steadily against a pool of 'deletions.'
If the data were changing massively nonstop (financial transaction data, for example), fine. But a few thousand servers ought to be able to crawl their data hierarchies killing any record-id's or links found in a deletion list.
This.
One-sided T&C's are when we need governmental intervention. Libertarian-utopians notwithstanding, laws are often needed to balance powers. In this case, great-great-great-great-....parent article is right: "It ought to be illegal." Mere mortals can never get corps to change by any other means than force of law, and that only happens rarely.
Yeah, 64k systems in 1982 fit optimizing compilers that parallelize code generation tasks, even some complex and obscure ones (it's been so long I can't remember which years had feature-bullets for lower-#-of-passes compilers, where n gradually dropped toward 1 and then fell out of compiler marketing-speak)... but facebook, with an IPO and estimated economic power of billions can't take a cloud of data and rig up a crawler to kill any items with a 'delete' flag set that match a pool of hash or GUID values. Mmm-ri-iiight.
2 thoughts:
-- copyright law would disagree, unless you've got some odd speculation on how my pics become facebook's via work-for-hire or the likes.
-- while a PERSON is unlikely to force FB to change, GOVERNMENTS can. Presto, we're back to "It ought to be illegal..."
Normally, I'd agree with you. In a room of a dozen nerds, that'd be the fanboi. But in a room with 12 generic citizens, that standout could be the one nerd in the room.
In other words, maybe the first 11 jurors are like half the nitwits, er *committee* hearing SOPA in congress today -- zzzzzz-zzzzzzz 'bunch of tubes' zzzzzz-zzzzz 'intarwebz are for porn' zzzzz-zzzzz 'if the glove doesn't fit' zzzz-zzzzz. Meanwhile, one of our fellow slashdotters got jury duty and *understood* things, and came to a completely contradictory conclusion.
I'm not saying Microsoft deserved to win -- I personally doubt it based on it being MS in 1994 -- and I've paid almost no attention to the trial. I'm just a bit more clear on juries 'cuz of a locally-high-profile case I served as a juror for. Reviewing the news stories after that experience quickly taught me that there's a LOT going on in a long trial that gets filtered both ways: the world gets a news story that skips key details, and the jury occasionally gets sequestered from the courtroom when some pretty damn interesting info is disclosed (missing them entirely) or even gets instructions to not consider certain details in their deliberation.
Am usually right there with y'all in demanding a complete redo on IP law, but not here.
Take anything we do well in America. Trace it down to materials science or some other obscure technological detail.
Now, *GIVE* that info to another country. Whoosh, there go a billion dollars of competitive advantage, or whatever the equivalent engineering/prototyping cost is.
In the cases of media, biology and pharm, it's a cost that some corp won't recoup. Bad juju. But in the case of weapons, armor and nuclear reactor designs, it's a cost that keeps china from marching on another nation. It doesn't take a huge amount of paranoia to suspect that Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, India and Japan remain sovereign partly because China isn't capable of our level of weaponry, submarine reactor longevity, space-based intelligence, etc.
There's no easy answer, and I'm not buying the cyberwarfare jingoism rants, but taking cybersecurity more seriously is important.
Glib answer: Pretty much.
Left field answer: Um, check for a pulse before you use that 'life' word.
My final answer: You can become good, but it should be nigh on impossible to be forgiven outright. Basically, Nobelesse Oblige seems a small price to pay for being a successful rapacious rat bastard. So, no-- systematic antisocial behavior never gets a free pass. Ever. Any mention of once-they-were-rich good deeds needs that second phrase that mentions how they (or dad or gramps) got their money, and it seems ethical to never completely let them off the hook. Anything less implies that forgiveness is cheaper than the crime itself.
Now, if a Gordon Gecko or a Microsoft (to go corp) tries to do everything in their power to make amends: (gives everything away and starts wearing a hair shirt and volunteering at soup kitchens anonymously, or similar Ma Theresa acts, etc), then they might earn that special slot where they're spoken of as someone whose good deeds far outweighed their misdeeds. Otherwise, anyone with a checkered past get exactly as much forgiveness as they earn: Some. Not much.
Tossback: So, if I godwin the question, is there a level of misdeed so egregious in your mind that the perpetrator can't be forgiven?
Huh, I thought it was because IBM has become pretty worthless on the hardware and invention front since they became primarily a consultancy.
(Power CPU's and stuff notwithstanding, I am kidding a little. But scalpel? REALLY? Anyone that can say that IBM wields proprietary aspects of their computer technology like a frickin' scalpel needs to reexamine the first 70 or 80 years of IBM's history).