It depends on where the one bit went wrong - if it's in a system that has redundancy, the system could recover from the error. If it's in a piece of text, it could result in a spelling error. If it's in a kernel module, it could freeze the system. An application could crash, etc...
Yeah, but this can illustrate exactly the phenomenon I described. I've actually documented a few cases where a file was transferred from machine A to machine B, and one character differed by one bit in the result. When you see it in text, it could be a simple typo, as d->e (hex 64->65) or h->j (hex 68->6A), which look like ordinary fat-finger typing errors. But if the file is the binary of a kernel mod, the result could crash the system on the receiving end. So a simple 1-bit error could be totally inconsequential, or it could be a major disaster involving fatalities. The magnitude of the disaster has little relationship to the magnitude of the actual error.
It is difficult to quantize such a rule of thumb, though.
"Computers don't make mistakes. They do, however, execute yours VERY carefully."
That's a good way of phrasing it. But it does miss the fact that not all "computer errors" are due to software mistakes.
One example, of course, is the Pentium FDIV failure. That was a hardware failure, "programmed" into the CPU by Intel's experts in solid-state hardware design. There wasn't a whole lot that any software developer could do to defend against that failure.
Another, more subtle one, came up when I was a grad student back in the 1970s. At that time, most of the campus research computing was done on the big mainframe in the campus Computer Center. After discovering a number of (published;-) results that turned out to be wrong, some researchers investigated, and found that they were due to undetected overflows in the calculations. Yes, the hardware could and did test for overflows, and set a status bit when they occurred. Almost all this calculating was done in Fortran, and the Fortran compiler had a run-time flag that could turn the status-bit checking on or off. It defaulted to OFF. They did a bit of analysis, and concluded that about half the runs of Fortran programs on that machine produced output that included numbers that were incorrect due to undetected overflow.
So why didn't they make the overflow-detection flag default to ON? Well, they did a little survey of the users. They found that the overwhelming response was that, if enabling overflow checking made the program run slower, then overflow checking shouldn't be done. Somewhere around 90% of the people asked said this. They weren't mathematically ignorant people; they were the people using the Fortran compiler for the data in their professional publications.
This told us a lot about the way such things are done. Since I left academia and worked in what passes for the Real World, I've found that this is a nearly universal attitude. Faster and cheaper is always preferable to correct. This is still true even when we have computers in commercial aircraft and hospital operating rooms. And you can't call this sort of thing a "human error". People don't decide to disable overflow checking by accident; they do it knowing full well what the effect will be. When the computer fails in such cases, it wasn't executing a human's mistake; it was doing what the human wanted it to do.
I can't imagine the well known and documented story of U.S. exploding the gas pipeline could be put in such a backward way.
Oh, I dunno; I thought this definition was at least equally ignorant:
floating-point numbers (numbers too large to be represented as integers)
This pretty much tells us what we need to know about the author's depth of mathematical understanding. In general, there's a lot in TFA to make your average geek go "WTF?" and wonder if the rest is worth reading.
Another aspect to this is a common property of most "digital" computations. I've seen it expressed as "Digital errors have no order of magnitude". Another phrasing is "Getting one bit wrong is generally indistinguishable from randomizing all of memory". So when a digital calculation goes wrong, a tiny, inconsequential error is just about as likely as a total meltdown of the entire system.
Programmers tend to get familiar with this phenomenon very early in their career. They write a small chunk of code that does a simple calculation, and the result is orders of magnitude wrong. When they investigate, they discover it was caused by a one-character typo, perhaps an "off by one" error such as using '<' instead of '<=', or vice-versa. This quickly leads to what many "normal" people consider the major character failure of software geeks, the insistence that everything be exactly right, no matter what, and the willingness to spend long hours discussing insignificant minutiae as if they mattered. In their work, it's usually such insignificant minutiae that brings the whole house of cards tumbling down.
If you're unwilling to take the difference between a comma and a simicolon seriously, you have no future as a software developer. This is often why something goes badly wrong and we have events like those described in this story.
OTOH, it is interesting that, despite all the software disasters like the metric/imperial-units story, the software world has never insisted that programming languages include units as part of variables' values. It's not like this is anything difficult, and it has been done in a number of languages. But none of the common languages have such a feature. It is a bit bizarre that we can get into long discussions of complex, obscure concepts such as type checking or class inheritance, when our calculations are all susceptible to unchecked unit mismatches (without even a warning from the compiler or interpreter). There's a lot of poor logic when the topic is the relative importance of various sources of bogus calculations.
We don't use the iPhone and don't know anybody that does, but it needs to support flash for some reason.
My wife has an iPhone (which we frequently compare with my G1). She watches a fair number of videos on it, including youtube, and she hasn't expressed any problems with this. She has noticed the lack of flash ads in a lot of sites' pages, but she doesn't consider that a problem, either.
If she's any example of the typical Apple fanperson, Apple just might do well to continue to block flash. Maybe they should make this an option for Macs, too.
Ah,... you think it's appropriate for diplomats dealing with very difficult foreign governments to not be allowed to frankly discuss the situation with their co-workers, out of the public eye (and away from monitoring by the very government being discussed)?
Red Herring Alert!
Does anyone really think that anyone in their country's diplomatic corps isn't fully aware of what sort of talk goes on "in private" among their cohorts in other countries? C'mon; these leaks didn't have any effect at all on any diplomatic discussions anywhere. That's just a ruse by the politicians to try to discredit the wikileaks folks. And those of us who are at all familiar with the situation just laughed at it.
If anything, it's this sort of clumsy propaganda effort that discredits our diplomats. The diplomats in other countries have got to be chuckling when they read of such things coming out of the "Land of the Free".
Careful; you'll bring the wrath of the anti-abortion crowd down on us, and we'll have to godwin the conversation to kill it off.;-)
There is also the question of miscarriages, which do include the death of a living creature. And if it's a human fetus, well, it is human, whether or not it's a real "person". As is an unfertilized ovum -- or a sperm cell for that matter. The realities of biological systems sorta play havoc with our terminology, which was developed by a pre-scientific society and needs a serious upgrade to match our current knowledge.
One real benefit is that if you are a company developing kernel code and contribute it back you will get goodwill and you will enhance the competence of your employees.
Actually, I've long thought it strange that the business/industrial world has an objection to supporting things like an OS kernel, runtime libraries, etc. The obvious parallel comes to mind: Lost of companies farm out part of their operations to subcontractors. They routinely subcontract for cleaning, delivery, electrical services, for example, not to mention their phone, water and sewage systems. They don't seem to be taken aback by the fact that the companies that supply these services also subcontract to "the competition".
The idea of paying a separate company for software development and supports services is also hardly new. That is how IBM has made much of its money, after all. Paying a company like Red Hat doesn't strike me as very different from any of the above. It doesn't take much management genius to understand that paying a contracting firm for software support at the "system" level is a fairly good idea. That way, you can share the cost with all the other companies that hire the same software firm, and everyone can get the benefits from having the software organized by people who (hopefully;-) know what they're doing.
So why is this even a story? You'd think there would have been enough sensible businessmen all along for lots of Red Hats to prosper.
A related question is all the propaganda against "open" software. Systems such as water, sewage, electrical, etc. all have "open" designs, with everything published and the detailed specs easily available to anyone. Companies don't often buy fleet vehicles without shop manuals, which give the detailed specs for the innards of the vehicles. Why would people classify open software as "hippie" or "communist", when they don't say the same about shop manuals or electrical diagrams? You'd think that sensible managers who approve of open standards for these other things would also want software that follows published standards (e.g., POSIX), and whose specs (i.e., the source code) is easily available to everyone.
But for some unexplained reason, business people keep buying software systems with hidden, "proprietary" innards. They wouldn't do this with delivery vans or electrical wiring; why would they accept it with software? Exactly the same reasoning says that software should be open, standardized, and accessible to anyone with the technical training. And the same reasoning that supports specialized firms to do common tasks should also support specialized firms for software needs.
It may be yet another example of a theory that keeps popping up: Whenever a computer is introduced anywhere, all precedent is forgotten, and people have to relearn from scratch all the things that they knew from before there were computers. I wonder what it is about computers that causes this social amnesia and inability to see parallel situations?
That's called collusion and it is illegal in the US and EU.
Well, here in the US, such laws are considered "government regulation", and both the major political parties are now run by people who don't believe in enforcing such things. They do like to keep such things on the books, so that they can use the above argument, trusting that most of the population will fail to distinguish having a law and enforcing the law.
And, of course, there's the additional problem that there is generally no way for a customer to know how much data they're using, other than to wait for the bill. And this isn't very helpful, because there's no way that the typical customer can relate what's on their bill to what they were doing. Basically, the phone companies can make up any number they like for our data usage, and we have no way of ever disputing the numbers. The software (which is mostly controlled by the company) decides for itself how much data to send/receive, the phone company adds this up however they like, and the customer pays for it.
It's not surprising that customers might not be good at understanding such pricing.
And while we're on that topic, why is always considered a bad thing when wealth redistribution benefits the lower-middle income, but it's a good thing when it benefits the upper 2% (e.g. tax breaks for the wealthy)?
That's an easy one. When your representatives change the laws so as to give more money to the upper 2%, they respond by donating even more money to those representatives' next campaigns. And most of the population obviously approves of this, because they keep voting for those representatives.
There, see how easy it is when you follow the old advice to "Follow the money"?
Well, I remember back when people laughed at the idea of Ronald Reagan running for president. He was described as "unelectable". Yeah, right; and now we're seeing the same putdown of Sarah Palin.
What seems to have happened is that, after Reagan was elected president, the folks running the Republican party realized how wrong this claim had been. They realized that they could get away with running utter nutcases, and get >50% of the votes with the right media campaign. They also realized how useful it is to their campaign contributors to have a know-nothing president to rubber-stamp any bill that changed things for the benefit of the contributors.
She's not really any dumber than George W, and she could get the votes of the people who put him in office. The only real barrier to her becoming president is the residual belief that American voters won't elect a woman to the office. But we've heard this said about Catholics, and Kennedy disproved that. We've heard it said about blacks, and Obama disproved that. The real reason we've never had a female president is that the main political parties refuse to nominate one. Sarah may well be the one who disproves this old belief.
Ronald Reagan and George W Bush disproved any claim that most American voters want a smart president, and the Republicans have been listening. Sarah Palin looks a lot like a followup to their presidencies...
(I remember once wondering if we'd ever elected a left-handed president. It turns out that Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton were all left handed. You can learn a lot of useful stuff on the Internet.;-)
Because she is even more hilarious than when Tina Fey makes fun of her.
It reminds me of the old complaint from satirists that their job is made very difficult by the way that "real world" people keep doing things far more stupid and outrageous than any satirist would dare write.
Sure. In entertainment, the goal is to persuade you to give them your money on things that their sponsors want to sell you. In politics, the goal is to persuade you to give them your vote for the things that their sponsors want to impose on you by law.
Of course, the two have long been partners in the process that persuades you to vote for them so they can take your money by law and spend it on things that their sponsors want them to buy for you.
But there is a difference buried in there somewhere.
In an infinite set of numbers there does not have to be a minimum number. Suppose all the real numbers were uninteresting. What is the minimum real number?
This is an example of sloppy reporting. The parody proof that "all numbers are interesting" only applies to the so-called "natural numbers", i.e., the numbers used in counting. 1, 2, 3,.... If you leave out that word "natural", you miss the whole point of the proof.
It's yet another example where the humor depends on getting the wording exactly right. OTOH, someone screwing up a joke by not phrasing it quite right is a tradition source of meta-humor. But to do that right, you have to mis-phrase it in the right way.
One of the properties of the natural numbers is that any set of them does contain a least member, under the usual "less than" ordering. If your version of the parody misses this, you've missed the whole point of the joke.
When recruited to be an informant, I might ask "are you going to transmit my name along with everything I tell you?" If the answer is "Yes" I would tell the recruiters to fuck off.
Sure, they understand that. That's why they'll tell you "No", no matter what they intend to do.
"WikiLeaks Under Denial of Service Attack by wiredmikey (1824622)"
Or, as someone else already suggested, wikileaks is being DDOSed by lots of people who want to read the new documents. This is similar to being slashdotted, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on where the one bit went wrong - if it's in a system that has redundancy, the system could recover from the error. If it's in a piece of text, it could result in a spelling error. If it's in a kernel module, it could freeze the system. An application could crash, etc...
Yeah, but this can illustrate exactly the phenomenon I described. I've actually documented a few cases where a file was transferred from machine A to machine B, and one character differed by one bit in the result. When you see it in text, it could be a simple typo, as d->e (hex 64->65) or h->j (hex 68->6A), which look like ordinary fat-finger typing errors. But if the file is the binary of a kernel mod, the result could crash the system on the receiving end. So a simple 1-bit error could be totally inconsequential, or it could be a major disaster involving fatalities. The magnitude of the disaster has little relationship to the magnitude of the actual error.
It is difficult to quantize such a rule of thumb, though.
"Computers don't make mistakes. They do, however, execute yours VERY carefully."
That's a good way of phrasing it. But it does miss the fact that not all "computer errors" are due to software mistakes.
One example, of course, is the Pentium FDIV failure. That was a hardware failure, "programmed" into the CPU by Intel's experts in solid-state hardware design. There wasn't a whole lot that any software developer could do to defend against that failure.
Another, more subtle one, came up when I was a grad student back in the 1970s. At that time, most of the campus research computing was done on the big mainframe in the campus Computer Center. After discovering a number of (published ;-) results that turned out to be wrong, some researchers investigated, and found that they were due to undetected overflows in the calculations. Yes, the hardware could and did test for overflows, and set a status bit when they occurred. Almost all this calculating was done in Fortran, and the Fortran compiler had a run-time flag that could turn the status-bit checking on or off. It defaulted to OFF. They did a bit of analysis, and concluded that about half the runs of Fortran programs on that machine produced output that included numbers that were incorrect due to undetected overflow.
So why didn't they make the overflow-detection flag default to ON? Well, they did a little survey of the users. They found that the overwhelming response was that, if enabling overflow checking made the program run slower, then overflow checking shouldn't be done. Somewhere around 90% of the people asked said this. They weren't mathematically ignorant people; they were the people using the Fortran compiler for the data in their professional publications.
This told us a lot about the way such things are done. Since I left academia and worked in what passes for the Real World, I've found that this is a nearly universal attitude. Faster and cheaper is always preferable to correct. This is still true even when we have computers in commercial aircraft and hospital operating rooms. And you can't call this sort of thing a "human error". People don't decide to disable overflow checking by accident; they do it knowing full well what the effect will be. When the computer fails in such cases, it wasn't executing a human's mistake; it was doing what the human wanted it to do.
I can't imagine the well known and documented story of U.S. exploding the gas pipeline could be put in such a backward way.
Oh, I dunno; I thought this definition was at least equally ignorant:
floating-point numbers (numbers too large to be represented as integers)
This pretty much tells us what we need to know about the author's depth of mathematical understanding. In general, there's a lot in TFA to make your average geek go "WTF?" and wonder if the rest is worth reading.
Another aspect to this is a common property of most "digital" computations. I've seen it expressed as "Digital errors have no order of magnitude". Another phrasing is "Getting one bit wrong is generally indistinguishable from randomizing all of memory". So when a digital calculation goes wrong, a tiny, inconsequential error is just about as likely as a total meltdown of the entire system.
Programmers tend to get familiar with this phenomenon very early in their career. They write a small chunk of code that does a simple calculation, and the result is orders of magnitude wrong. When they investigate, they discover it was caused by a one-character typo, perhaps an "off by one" error such as using '<' instead of '<=', or vice-versa. This quickly leads to what many "normal" people consider the major character failure of software geeks, the insistence that everything be exactly right, no matter what, and the willingness to spend long hours discussing insignificant minutiae as if they mattered. In their work, it's usually such insignificant minutiae that brings the whole house of cards tumbling down.
If you're unwilling to take the difference between a comma and a simicolon seriously, you have no future as a software developer. This is often why something goes badly wrong and we have events like those described in this story.
OTOH, it is interesting that, despite all the software disasters like the metric/imperial-units story, the software world has never insisted that programming languages include units as part of variables' values. It's not like this is anything difficult, and it has been done in a number of languages. But none of the common languages have such a feature. It is a bit bizarre that we can get into long discussions of complex, obscure concepts such as type checking or class inheritance, when our calculations are all susceptible to unchecked unit mismatches (without even a warning from the compiler or interpreter). There's a lot of poor logic when the topic is the relative importance of various sources of bogus calculations.
In fact, I challenge you to name even one theory that isn't testable.
P = NP.
I keep wondering when I'll read the work "conjecture" in this discussion.
That term, along with "hypothesis", is often used in actual scientific discussions.
We don't use the iPhone and don't know anybody that does, but it needs to support flash for some reason.
My wife has an iPhone (which we frequently compare with my G1). She watches a fair number of videos on it, including youtube, and she hasn't expressed any problems with this. She has noticed the lack of flash ads in a lot of sites' pages, but she doesn't consider that a problem, either.
If she's any example of the typical Apple fanperson, Apple just might do well to continue to block flash. Maybe they should make this an option for Macs, too.
" 'words on paper can be made secure, electronic archives not.'"
Really? Really? You really said that and seriously meant it?
Oh, c'mon; securing words on paper is trivial. All it takes is a small fire. Do you know of any way to reconstruct the text from the ashes?
This provides really high security. It makes the text secure from decoding by anyone.
[Emboldening mine, of course, for emphasis.]
Ah, ... you think it's appropriate for diplomats dealing with very difficult foreign governments to not be allowed to frankly discuss the situation with their co-workers, out of the public eye (and away from monitoring by the very government being discussed)?
Red Herring Alert!
Does anyone really think that anyone in their country's diplomatic corps isn't fully aware of what sort of talk goes on "in private" among their cohorts in other countries? C'mon; these leaks didn't have any effect at all on any diplomatic discussions anywhere. That's just a ruse by the politicians to try to discredit the wikileaks folks. And those of us who are at all familiar with the situation just laughed at it.
If anything, it's this sort of clumsy propaganda effort that discredits our diplomats. The diplomats in other countries have got to be chuckling when they read of such things coming out of the "Land of the Free".
... those who are not born can't die ...
Careful; you'll bring the wrath of the anti-abortion crowd down on us, and we'll have to godwin the conversation to kill it off. ;-)
There is also the question of miscarriages, which do include the death of a living creature. And if it's a human fetus, well, it is human, whether or not it's a real "person". As is an unfertilized ovum -- or a sperm cell for that matter. The realities of biological systems sorta play havoc with our terminology, which was developed by a pre-scientific society and needs a serious upgrade to match our current knowledge.
The idea seems to be that there are just tons and tons of developers out there ...
It doesn't usually take very many software developers to make a ton.
One real benefit is that if you are a company developing kernel code and contribute it back you will get goodwill and you will enhance the competence of your employees.
Actually, I've long thought it strange that the business/industrial world has an objection to supporting things like an OS kernel, runtime libraries, etc. The obvious parallel comes to mind: Lost of companies farm out part of their operations to subcontractors. They routinely subcontract for cleaning, delivery, electrical services, for example, not to mention their phone, water and sewage systems. They don't seem to be taken aback by the fact that the companies that supply these services also subcontract to "the competition".
The idea of paying a separate company for software development and supports services is also hardly new. That is how IBM has made much of its money, after all. Paying a company like Red Hat doesn't strike me as very different from any of the above. It doesn't take much management genius to understand that paying a contracting firm for software support at the "system" level is a fairly good idea. That way, you can share the cost with all the other companies that hire the same software firm, and everyone can get the benefits from having the software organized by people who (hopefully ;-) know what they're doing.
So why is this even a story? You'd think there would have been enough sensible businessmen all along for lots of Red Hats to prosper.
A related question is all the propaganda against "open" software. Systems such as water, sewage, electrical, etc. all have "open" designs, with everything published and the detailed specs easily available to anyone. Companies don't often buy fleet vehicles without shop manuals, which give the detailed specs for the innards of the vehicles. Why would people classify open software as "hippie" or "communist", when they don't say the same about shop manuals or electrical diagrams? You'd think that sensible managers who approve of open standards for these other things would also want software that follows published standards (e.g., POSIX), and whose specs (i.e., the source code) is easily available to everyone.
But for some unexplained reason, business people keep buying software systems with hidden, "proprietary" innards. They wouldn't do this with delivery vans or electrical wiring; why would they accept it with software? Exactly the same reasoning says that software should be open, standardized, and accessible to anyone with the technical training. And the same reasoning that supports specialized firms to do common tasks should also support specialized firms for software needs.
It may be yet another example of a theory that keeps popping up: Whenever a computer is introduced anywhere, all precedent is forgotten, and people have to relearn from scratch all the things that they knew from before there were computers. I wonder what it is about computers that causes this social amnesia and inability to see parallel situations?
It is determined by supply and demand, what the market will bare, ...
I was thinking that it's only a matter of time before someone introduced porn into this discussion.
That's called collusion and it is illegal in the US and EU.
Well, here in the US, such laws are considered "government regulation", and both the major political parties are now run by people who don't believe in enforcing such things. They do like to keep such things on the books, so that they can use the above argument, trusting that most of the population will fail to distinguish having a law and enforcing the law.
And, of course, there's the additional problem that there is generally no way for a customer to know how much data they're using, other than to wait for the bill. And this isn't very helpful, because there's no way that the typical customer can relate what's on their bill to what they were doing. Basically, the phone companies can make up any number they like for our data usage, and we have no way of ever disputing the numbers. The software (which is mostly controlled by the company) decides for itself how much data to send/receive, the phone company adds this up however they like, and the customer pays for it.
It's not surprising that customers might not be good at understanding such pricing.
And while we're on that topic, why is always considered a bad thing when wealth redistribution benefits the lower-middle income, but it's a good thing when it benefits the upper 2% (e.g. tax breaks for the wealthy)?
That's an easy one. When your representatives change the laws so as to give more money to the upper 2%, they respond by donating even more money to those representatives' next campaigns. And most of the population obviously approves of this, because they keep voting for those representatives.
There, see how easy it is when you follow the old advice to "Follow the money"?
She is unelectable, ...
Well, I remember back when people laughed at the idea of Ronald Reagan running for president. He was described as "unelectable". Yeah, right; and now we're seeing the same putdown of Sarah Palin.
What seems to have happened is that, after Reagan was elected president, the folks running the Republican party realized how wrong this claim had been. They realized that they could get away with running utter nutcases, and get >50% of the votes with the right media campaign. They also realized how useful it is to their campaign contributors to have a know-nothing president to rubber-stamp any bill that changed things for the benefit of the contributors.
She's not really any dumber than George W, and she could get the votes of the people who put him in office. The only real barrier to her becoming president is the residual belief that American voters won't elect a woman to the office. But we've heard this said about Catholics, and Kennedy disproved that. We've heard it said about blacks, and Obama disproved that. The real reason we've never had a female president is that the main political parties refuse to nominate one. Sarah may well be the one who disproves this old belief.
Ronald Reagan and George W Bush disproved any claim that most American voters want a smart president, and the Republicans have been listening. Sarah Palin looks a lot like a followup to their presidencies ...
(I remember once wondering if we'd ever elected a left-handed president. It turns out that Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton were all left handed. You can learn a lot of useful stuff on the Internet. ;-)
Because she is even more hilarious than when Tina Fey makes fun of her.
It reminds me of the old complaint from satirists that their job is made very difficult by the way that "real world" people keep doing things far more stupid and outrageous than any satirist would dare write.
It's entertainment not politics.
There's a difference?
Sure. In entertainment, the goal is to persuade you to give them your money on things that their sponsors want to sell you. In politics, the goal is to persuade you to give them your vote for the things that their sponsors want to impose on you by law.
Of course, the two have long been partners in the process that persuades you to vote for them so they can take your money by law and spend it on things that their sponsors want them to buy for you.
But there is a difference buried in there somewhere.
Well, yeah; that's an important part of the joke. And it's obviously not true for non-mathematicians. ;-)
In an infinite set of numbers there does not have to be a minimum number. Suppose all the real numbers were uninteresting. What is the minimum real number?
This is an example of sloppy reporting. The parody proof that "all numbers are interesting" only applies to the so-called "natural numbers", i.e., the numbers used in counting. 1, 2, 3, .... If you leave out that word "natural", you miss the whole point of the proof.
It's yet another example where the humor depends on getting the wording exactly right. OTOH, someone screwing up a joke by not phrasing it quite right is a tradition source of meta-humor. But to do that right, you have to mis-phrase it in the right way.
One of the properties of the natural numbers is that any set of them does contain a least member, under the usual "less than" ordering. If your version of the parody misses this, you've missed the whole point of the joke.
The election that day in Belgium was quite important.
Ah, c'mon; we all know that Belgium is the most boring country on the planet. ;-)
When recruited to be an informant, I might ask "are you going to transmit my name along with everything I tell you?" If the answer is "Yes" I would tell the recruiters to fuck off.
Sure, they understand that. That's why they'll tell you "No", no matter what they intend to do.
Sigh, do we have to point out every single time that Wikileaks is _not_ an investigative organization, ...?
Yes, apparently we do. No surprise there.
I do sorta wonder when we'll hear of the first "mysterious death" of someone involved with wikileaks.
"WikiLeaks Under Denial of Service Attack by wiredmikey (1824622)"
Or, as someone else already suggested, wikileaks is being DDOSed by lots of people who want to read the new documents. This is similar to being slashdotted, of course.
Heh. As someone with a couple of math degrees, I laughed.
Of course, when a government spokesman says that something "will put countless lives at risk", what they mean is "We won't let you count them."
So "countless" is really just a mispelling of "uncounted".