so either you would make a very good defense lawyer, or your understanding of the situation is superior to mine
the way i understood the story, multiple levels of the administration made multiple requests on childs for access and he psychotically refused, for a long period of time, even as the press got wind of the story
then he grandstandingly renders access only to the mayor, in person. pffft
i mean, if i built a system for the pentagon and then insisted i would only give access to president obama in person, after repeated requests for access over multiple levels of pentagon hierarchy over a long period of time, that anyone lower than the very top man was merely a "worker bee", then you can safely call me psychotic
so either my understanding is wrong, or you're a smooth talker
childs had a god complex: "i am the only one who has the right to administer this network"
he built the network for san francisco. san francisco had every right to do whatever it wanted to do with the network they hired him to build. if san francisco wanted to hand out passwords to the network to hackers, san francisco has that right, and childs has no right to any say on the matter
the man was not protecting the security of the network, the man believed he and he alone had a right to decide what to do with the network. the man has boundary issues: he felt attached to the network like it was his child. he probably invested a lot of time and energy into it, but so what? there's such a thing as taking pride in your work... then there is psychotically remaining attached to your work and assuming you and you alone can forever more decide how your work is used
he was reimbursed for his work. end of story. his actions are completely indefensible. the man needs psychological help, you have no valid basis to defend the wackjob. lock childs up, he only deserves punishment and psychological treatment
and furthermore WHERE THE HELL DO YOU GET OFF COMPARING TERRY CHILDS TO A NINE YEAR OLD
it could be said that reagan's completely bullshit star wars program spooked the russians, and if it was publicly revealed how much money was being wasted on complete crap, the russians wouldn't have been so spooked
however, if you are playing this game of managing perception and deceit, you've entered the rarified, high paranoia stratosophere of smoke and mirrors where the other side might also equally conclude that a "public disclosure" that a program is a failure is a lie in order to hide real deadly capabilities. in other words, its all high anxiety, all the time, and no one really trusts what anyone says anyway, so disclosure or nondisclosure of a "failed" program doesn't effects perceptions by the enemy either way: they are going to get spooked or not depending upon their own confidence levels
for example: the security apparatus around nuclear power plants, that should not be exposed and anyone who does should be punished. that's what i was talking about
but something like bush and cheney's end runs around the constitution: yeah, that should be exposed
so i apologize, you are correct:
i should have qualified my comments better, as i was only really talking about the kind of state secrets like missile launch sequences, that should never be divulged publicly. but you are correct to take issue with my blanket comment, it was unqualified, plenty of "state secrets" need to be divulged
going public means they can't sweep the issue under the rug. public anger compels the system to actually fix the problem. this is the function of the press in a healthy society. i don't know why you think problems could be solved without public knowledge and outrage breathing down bureaucrats necks. without the public knowledge and outrage, no solution would be forthcoming, ever
with all the censor-happy news from australia, ireland, etc:
its just nice to know we are not the only country plagued by social conservative morons who wish to police our thoughts
social conservatives: you are a bunch of low iq hypocrites who don't understand human nature. this is unilaterally true no matter what religion or nationality you are. all human societies would improve were you to just fucking disappear somehow
social conservatives are the back end of the bell curve of human social intelligence and while i am a believer in freedom of expression and as a nonhypocrite i cannot support censoring you even though my complete lack of respect for you and high levels of disgust for social conservativism is off the charts, i can still express my withering hatred for social conservatism (since i live in a liberal western democracy that is not dominated by you retards): eat a bag of dicks and die you fucking twatstains
if he were exposing state secrets, let him rot in jail
but that's all sound and fury surrounding the real issue of what was actually disclosed, and why
the substance of his disclosures and what motivated him: wasted tax payer dollars on lame NSA projects
as far as i am concerned, for his actions, this guy is a hero. we need MORE government employees like this. and his timing is impeccable, government waste is pissing off the country like never before right now: perhaps the tax party can make him some sort of patron saint?
theoretically impossible and practically impossible
you wipe the system: you are now guaranteed a clean system and you spent orders of magnitude less time and effort than the scenario you propose (which doesn't guarantee anything)
microsoft doesn't refuse to patch rootkitted systems, microsoft is UNABLE to patch rootkitted system. NO ONE can patch a rootkitted system, of ANY OS. you need to wipe the system and reinstall
it is ok to be against microsoft, but you have to base your opinion on genuine problems. when you base your opinion on mindless propaganda, you are just another useless partisan in this world: loud, dumb, useless
free over the air signals was going to destroy the movie house. then it was the vcr, now its the internet
and all along, hollywood just keeps packing them in the cinema house
sure, the dvd market will disappear, but there's something about going to a movie house that is so much more appealing than watching iron man 2 on your 17 inch monitor by yourself in your basement. people like the social aspect. yes, i said social aspect: despite the crying babies and the cell phones, people laughing when you laugh, gasping when you gasp reinforces your primal homo sapien brain circuits and heightens your enjoyment. if you say you can do that with your 5.1 surround sound 60" lcd hd theatre system with your friends, i'm amazed you have such loyal friends that they drop everything, come rushing to your house and agree to see the movie you want to see at that moment in time
in other words, the cinema will always make money, lots of it, for hollywood, for a long time to come. even if they give all their content away on the same day as cinema releases, for free, people will still flock to the cinema, because it offers something you simply can't replicate at home. its almost the same psychological space as going to church: shared communal experience, heightening enjoyment
there's gotta be a sociological study somewhere, but i am in no fear of the cinema house dying
because that's what the usa would resemble without the services and regulations you disparage
"Just exactly how much waste, corruption, and antisocial behavior is acceptable?"
i don't know. maybe you should ask a haitian. they have far less of the government bureaucracy and regulations, and their lives are far more poor, and yet filled with much more waste and corruption and antisocial behavior. maybe if haiti had a government more like ours, they wouldn't need your charity
because people are constantly getting emails from people they never got email from before, and they WANT that functionality, for a million reasons, from registering for a site to getting a query from an old classmate to getting a reply from a stranger about a blog post
the whitelisting you describe is obviously not the solution
1. highly addictive but noninebriating (nicotine, etc) 2. nonaddictive but highly inebriating (lsd, etc) 3. mildly to moderately addictive and mildly to moderately inebriating (alcohol, marijuana etc)
these drugs should never be legal:
4. highly addictive AND highly inebriating
why? because drugs like this (heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, etc) means your normal thoughts are replaced by a zombielike monomania that puts you in a stupor in which you cannot hold a job and/ or maintain a relationship
then you become a ward of the state, and society has to take care of you. this is the point at which society has every right to stop you from using a drug: unlike all statements to the contrary, drug use is obviously NOT a personal choice that effects no one else: society have to take care of the homeless and foodless drug addicts. this gives us the additional right to (attempt) to control the distribution of substances that zombify, to not completely end the distribution, but at least keep it low grade
why? simply because exposure to some substances, like heroin/ meth/ coke, simply means you create more zombies. that is, unbridled distribution leads to more demand: use metastasizes. yes, some will alwyas bet the drugs they want, but apart from these hardcore types hellbent on personal destruction, there's a whole class of potential/ existing users who would not exist if they simply were never exposed to these drugs
yes: the drug war has plenty of negatives, like the creation of violence, mafia, untrustworthy supply, avoidant behavior by addicts, etc. and for a lot of drugs, these prohibition type effects argue for legalization. however, some few drugs are so viral (in that low grade social exposure can lead to addiction and zombiehood) that, even with all of the negative prohibition effects you and i understand, the spread of those highly addictive/ highly inebriating drugs is STILL worse in terms of destroyed lives than prohibition
constantly fighting it is just one of those maintenance functions of civilization
you don't declare a war on spam, win it, and then spam is forever gone. thats not the nature of the problem. its forever reborn as some "brilliant idea" in the mind of some asshole out there who has no problem abusing the commons for selfish gain. it requires constant eradication. additionally, you can't completely automate the process of spam destruction. spam is created by creative human beings. human beings always find away around any locked door. and therefore it will require the constant effort of creative human beings dedicated to police work to forever fight these other creative beings who have no decency. that's just the way it is. its stasis: good guys versus bad guys, forever
the same applies to hard core drug addicts, pedophilia, terrorism, etc: you don't declare war on terrorism, pedophilia, or hard core drugs, win it, and then those phenomena are gone forever. thats not the nature of those problems. they will always be low grade problems that always reassert themselves. unless you stop fighting them: in which case they metastasize into worse problems
as long as civilization exists, certain classes of utterly intolerable problems (problems that you cannot in any way reclassify as tolerable problems) will continually reassert themselves in every generation, and, for the sake of the health of society, require constant hard effort to simply keep them as low grade issues that don't expand into worse problems
would agree that, as addicts, their lives were degenerate. and that whatever they wrote is in spite of their drug use that was destroying their ability to write
drug use easily leads to addiction. addiction hollows out a formerly delightful human being into a monomanical zombie: "fix, fix, fix, fix..." then they usually wind up being unable to hold a job or have a relationship. then myself, society, we have to house and feed these drug addicts
since we are taking care of them, that therefore gives us every right to tell drug addicts to stop taking the substance that renders them unable to take care of themselves. and we also have the right to try to control the substances that create drug zombies. of course such efforts are messy and incomplete, but making the effort is far superior to allowing zombifying substances free reign over society, turning useful productive lives into degenerate dependents
in the distant past, and even today in some places, you go to the next valley over or the next island over, and they speak a totally different language and have totally different customs
however, imperial centers arose: rome, moscow, beijing, etc., and through military might normalized all these different areas into one cohesive national culture and religion
now, we live in an age of jet air travel and the internet
so extrapolate the process forward: all of muslimness, christianness, russianness, chineseness, indianness, americanness, etc... its all going to get melted together into just humanness
of course, that will take a LONG time. but such a world will be far superior and have far more real morality and justice than the one we live in now
in the meantime, myself, i will consider the global point of view the only intellectually and morally coherent point of view possible, on all issues. superior in all ways to a muslim/ christian/ russian/ chinese/ american/ etc. point of view others may have but is in reality only a fragment of the only one true universal human morality: humanism
Slashdot Mirror
his actions ARE defensible
so either you would make a very good defense lawyer, or your understanding of the situation is superior to mine
the way i understood the story, multiple levels of the administration made multiple requests on childs for access and he psychotically refused, for a long period of time, even as the press got wind of the story
then he grandstandingly renders access only to the mayor, in person. pffft
i mean, if i built a system for the pentagon and then insisted i would only give access to president obama in person, after repeated requests for access over multiple levels of pentagon hierarchy over a long period of time, that anyone lower than the very top man was merely a "worker bee", then you can safely call me psychotic
so either my understanding is wrong, or you're a smooth talker
terry childs went to the RIAA school of system administration
1. they are hard to get to
2. they are hard to get supplies to and build in
3. they flood
4. they have air quality issues
5. and they ARE cool... until you put a bunch of servers in them, and then they heat up, and STAY hot, and are harder to cool than on the surface
the idea of servers in caves sucks
childs had a god complex: "i am the only one who has the right to administer this network"
he built the network for san francisco. san francisco had every right to do whatever it wanted to do with the network they hired him to build. if san francisco wanted to hand out passwords to the network to hackers, san francisco has that right, and childs has no right to any say on the matter
the man was not protecting the security of the network, the man believed he and he alone had a right to decide what to do with the network. the man has boundary issues: he felt attached to the network like it was his child. he probably invested a lot of time and energy into it, but so what? there's such a thing as taking pride in your work... then there is psychotically remaining attached to your work and assuming you and you alone can forever more decide how your work is used
he was reimbursed for his work. end of story. his actions are completely indefensible. the man needs psychological help, you have no valid basis to defend the wackjob. lock childs up, he only deserves punishment and psychological treatment
and furthermore WHERE THE HELL DO YOU GET OFF COMPARING TERRY CHILDS TO A NINE YEAR OLD
yeah, again, i utterly fail in the comment qualification department
anyone who divulges a LACK OF security like this guy should get the congressional medal of honor
anyone who divulges the OPERATING DETAILS of a genuine security apparatus should get a cold cell
it could be said that reagan's completely bullshit star wars program spooked the russians, and if it was publicly revealed how much money was being wasted on complete crap, the russians wouldn't have been so spooked
however, if you are playing this game of managing perception and deceit, you've entered the rarified, high paranoia stratosophere of smoke and mirrors where the other side might also equally conclude that a "public disclosure" that a program is a failure is a lie in order to hide real deadly capabilities. in other words, its all high anxiety, all the time, and no one really trusts what anyone says anyway, so disclosure or nondisclosure of a "failed" program doesn't effects perceptions by the enemy either way: they are going to get spooked or not depending upon their own confidence levels
for example: the security apparatus around nuclear power plants, that should not be exposed and anyone who does should be punished. that's what i was talking about
but something like bush and cheney's end runs around the constitution: yeah, that should be exposed
so i apologize, you are correct:
i should have qualified my comments better, as i was only really talking about the kind of state secrets like missile launch sequences, that should never be divulged publicly. but you are correct to take issue with my blanket comment, it was unqualified, plenty of "state secrets" need to be divulged
from within the system
going public means they can't sweep the issue under the rug. public anger compels the system to actually fix the problem. this is the function of the press in a healthy society. i don't know why you think problems could be solved without public knowledge and outrage breathing down bureaucrats necks. without the public knowledge and outrage, no solution would be forthcoming, ever
exposing state secrets is a crime in china, russia, the usa, india, etc... as well it should be
do you have some sort of belief that exposing state secrets is a beneficial exercise?
with all the censor-happy news from australia, ireland, etc:
its just nice to know we are not the only country plagued by social conservative morons who wish to police our thoughts
social conservatives: you are a bunch of low iq hypocrites who don't understand human nature. this is unilaterally true no matter what religion or nationality you are. all human societies would improve were you to just fucking disappear somehow
social conservatives are the back end of the bell curve of human social intelligence and while i am a believer in freedom of expression and as a nonhypocrite i cannot support censoring you even though my complete lack of respect for you and high levels of disgust for social conservativism is off the charts, i can still express my withering hatred for social conservatism (since i live in a liberal western democracy that is not dominated by you retards): eat a bag of dicks and die you fucking twatstains
he was exposing government waste
if he were exposing state secrets, let him rot in jail
but that's all sound and fury surrounding the real issue of what was actually disclosed, and why
the substance of his disclosures and what motivated him: wasted tax payer dollars on lame NSA projects
as far as i am concerned, for his actions, this guy is a hero. we need MORE government employees like this. and his timing is impeccable, government waste is pissing off the country like never before right now: perhaps the tax party can make him some sort of patron saint?
harness these guys for toxic superfund site clean ups, oil spills, etc
sprinkle a little of this dioxin-b-gone on the brownfields, and voila!: strip mall and mcmansion ready building lots
but this is the first virus i ever actually rooted for
what a demented, hilarious scheme
theoretically impossible and practically impossible
you wipe the system: you are now guaranteed a clean system and you spent orders of magnitude less time and effort than the scenario you propose (which doesn't guarantee anything)
microsoft doesn't refuse to patch rootkitted systems, microsoft is UNABLE to patch rootkitted system. NO ONE can patch a rootkitted system, of ANY OS. you need to wipe the system and reinstall
it is ok to be against microsoft, but you have to base your opinion on genuine problems. when you base your opinion on mindless propaganda, you are just another useless partisan in this world: loud, dumb, useless
free over the air signals was going to destroy the movie house. then it was the vcr, now its the internet
and all along, hollywood just keeps packing them in the cinema house
sure, the dvd market will disappear, but there's something about going to a movie house that is so much more appealing than watching iron man 2 on your 17 inch monitor by yourself in your basement. people like the social aspect. yes, i said social aspect: despite the crying babies and the cell phones, people laughing when you laugh, gasping when you gasp reinforces your primal homo sapien brain circuits and heightens your enjoyment. if you say you can do that with your 5.1 surround sound 60" lcd hd theatre system with your friends, i'm amazed you have such loyal friends that they drop everything, come rushing to your house and agree to see the movie you want to see at that moment in time
in other words, the cinema will always make money, lots of it, for hollywood, for a long time to come. even if they give all their content away on the same day as cinema releases, for free, people will still flock to the cinema, because it offers something you simply can't replicate at home. its almost the same psychological space as going to church: shared communal experience, heightening enjoyment
there's gotta be a sociological study somewhere, but i am in no fear of the cinema house dying
because that's what the usa would resemble without the services and regulations you disparage
"Just exactly how much waste, corruption, and antisocial behavior is acceptable?"
i don't know. maybe you should ask a haitian. they have far less of the government bureaucracy and regulations, and their lives are far more poor, and yet filled with much more waste and corruption and antisocial behavior. maybe if haiti had a government more like ours, they wouldn't need your charity
because people are constantly getting emails from people they never got email from before, and they WANT that functionality, for a million reasons, from registering for a site to getting a query from an old classmate to getting a reply from a stranger about a blog post
the whitelisting you describe is obviously not the solution
recognizing that the drug war will be on forever does not mean we have to accept tactics that don't work
its supply and demand
demand should be rehabilitated, like a health or psychological problem, not criminalized
and supply should be hit hard, criminalized harshly
read the rest of my fucking comment past the first sentence, then respond. because i already address what you write
http://www.41pounds.org/
this site is a way to globally tell junk mailers to fuck off
onwards goes the eternal arms race
also hallucinogens like lsd, psilocybin, etc
basically, these drugs should be legal:
1. highly addictive but noninebriating (nicotine, etc)
2. nonaddictive but highly inebriating (lsd, etc)
3. mildly to moderately addictive and mildly to moderately inebriating (alcohol, marijuana etc)
these drugs should never be legal:
4. highly addictive AND highly inebriating
why? because drugs like this (heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, etc) means your normal thoughts are replaced by a zombielike monomania that puts you in a stupor in which you cannot hold a job and/ or maintain a relationship
then you become a ward of the state, and society has to take care of you. this is the point at which society has every right to stop you from using a drug: unlike all statements to the contrary, drug use is obviously NOT a personal choice that effects no one else: society have to take care of the homeless and foodless drug addicts. this gives us the additional right to (attempt) to control the distribution of substances that zombify, to not completely end the distribution, but at least keep it low grade
why? simply because exposure to some substances, like heroin/ meth/ coke, simply means you create more zombies. that is, unbridled distribution leads to more demand: use metastasizes. yes, some will alwyas bet the drugs they want, but apart from these hardcore types hellbent on personal destruction, there's a whole class of potential/ existing users who would not exist if they simply were never exposed to these drugs
yes: the drug war has plenty of negatives, like the creation of violence, mafia, untrustworthy supply, avoidant behavior by addicts, etc. and for a lot of drugs, these prohibition type effects argue for legalization. however, some few drugs are so viral (in that low grade social exposure can lead to addiction and zombiehood) that, even with all of the negative prohibition effects you and i understand, the spread of those highly addictive/ highly inebriating drugs is STILL worse in terms of destroyed lives than prohibition
constantly fighting it is just one of those maintenance functions of civilization
you don't declare a war on spam, win it, and then spam is forever gone. thats not the nature of the problem. its forever reborn as some "brilliant idea" in the mind of some asshole out there who has no problem abusing the commons for selfish gain. it requires constant eradication. additionally, you can't completely automate the process of spam destruction. spam is created by creative human beings. human beings always find away around any locked door. and therefore it will require the constant effort of creative human beings dedicated to police work to forever fight these other creative beings who have no decency. that's just the way it is. its stasis: good guys versus bad guys, forever
the same applies to hard core drug addicts, pedophilia, terrorism, etc: you don't declare war on terrorism, pedophilia, or hard core drugs, win it, and then those phenomena are gone forever. thats not the nature of those problems. they will always be low grade problems that always reassert themselves. unless you stop fighting them: in which case they metastasize into worse problems
as long as civilization exists, certain classes of utterly intolerable problems (problems that you cannot in any way reclassify as tolerable problems) will continually reassert themselves in every generation, and, for the sake of the health of society, require constant hard effort to simply keep them as low grade issues that don't expand into worse problems
would agree that, as addicts, their lives were degenerate. and that whatever they wrote is in spite of their drug use that was destroying their ability to write
drug use easily leads to addiction. addiction hollows out a formerly delightful human being into a monomanical zombie: "fix, fix, fix, fix..." then they usually wind up being unable to hold a job or have a relationship. then myself, society, we have to house and feed these drug addicts
since we are taking care of them, that therefore gives us every right to tell drug addicts to stop taking the substance that renders them unable to take care of themselves. and we also have the right to try to control the substances that create drug zombies. of course such efforts are messy and incomplete, but making the effort is far superior to allowing zombifying substances free reign over society, turning useful productive lives into degenerate dependents
in the distant past, and even today in some places, you go to the next valley over or the next island over, and they speak a totally different language and have totally different customs
however, imperial centers arose: rome, moscow, beijing, etc., and through military might normalized all these different areas into one cohesive national culture and religion
now, we live in an age of jet air travel and the internet
so extrapolate the process forward: all of muslimness, christianness, russianness, chineseness, indianness, americanness, etc... its all going to get melted together into just humanness
of course, that will take a LONG time. but such a world will be far superior and have far more real morality and justice than the one we live in now
in the meantime, myself, i will consider the global point of view the only intellectually and morally coherent point of view possible, on all issues. superior in all ways to a muslim/ christian/ russian/ chinese/ american/ etc. point of view others may have but is in reality only a fragment of the only one true universal human morality: humanism