It's a moot question really. I suppose it's like anything else. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.
If I wanted to read about it though, I'd want to read the insights of a social engineer who was successful -- not one who couldn't keep his stupid arse out of jail.
The Register has a foreword that his publishers supposedly 'censored' where Kevin whines on about how he didn't really do anything wrong, and how it was all Markoff and the FBI and others who railroaded him. Surely the term for that isn't censoring. That's *editing*.
If the foreword is to be believed though, its that Markoff who wants to write the book on social engineering. Making a legitimate fortune by railroading an innocent man and getting away with it -- that's my idea of a *real* social engineer -- not some whining ex-jailbird.
I'm not a code-hacker any more. I'm a law student. (Don't run away, I'm on your side.) People look at my laptop and see OpenOffice and ask what it is. "It's a free office suite that does everything MS Office does." They drool.
I don't know whether it's lawyers, or whether it's just the stage linux has finally reached but a funny thing happened last week.
My wife is a divorce lawyer and a technophobe. She uses a computer, but she loathes them and can never figure anything out.
In the past, if I had my dual-boot Win2k box running in Linux when she needed to do some work, she'd come in whining. "Dipipanone", she'd moan, "what's all that nasty crap on the screen. Make Windows come back, I need to use Word."
So, I wander into my office one evening last week, and there she is, working away.
"This is nice, isn't it?", she says, completely unprompted. "I really like this Word Processor. It's clear, straightforward, easy to use and fast."
Had I tried to evangelize with her, she'd have never listened because she *knew* that Linux sucked. She carried on working in Open Office and it looks like she actually prefers it to Office 2000.
Seems like there's a simple fix for all those posts
Hmm. If it were so simple, it seems to me that it would have happened by now. After all, I see legions of posts complaining about dupes, but still they keep on coming.
Have the ass-clowns they call "editors" earn their pay and not post duplicate articles.
And what do we do about the ass-clown readers who post duplicate comments?
Firstly, I was fully aware of your disowning statements. My rejection of the arguments you put forward wasn't an attack upon you for holding them, but was an attack on the arguments themselves. That you were the person who happened to raise them was just a convenience.
neither I nor, assumedly, you are competent to discuss the problem in its entirity
Your assumption is erroneous. While I wouldn't claim any particular expertise in this area (in the sense that I've never done original research or published anything), a postgraduate degree in Sociology and three years lecturing in Media Studies has given me some degree of familiarity with the debates on the issue.
Personally, I'm not sure where I stand on the topic
I thought you just said you believed that the arguments that you presented were absurd?
Frankly, I think your position is woefully confused. You felt compelled to outline these arguments (despite the fact that nobody could possibly be unaware of them given the regularity with which the media trots them out), while at the same time, offering up a disclaimer to distance yourself from such a position. Trying to protect your Karma, perhaps?;-)
The truth is that the data on this question is really unconvincing in either direction, and so any position that we take is made on the basis of our personal and political values, our experience of raising children, and our experience of what it was like to be a child ourselves. If you somehow believe that when you were a child, you lacked the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, then I can see why you might find such arguments persuasive. Alternatively, if you or your own children have a tendency to massive oversensitivity and so might be easily scared or upset by such exposure, again, I can see how it might influence you in that direction.
Unfortunately, I think that by and large, people take a position that is based upon fear. Over the last few decades, the USA in particular has developed a the view that it is necessary to protect children -- and teenagers -- from absolutely everything that might conceivably present even the slightest risk, and so mountains of lipservice is poured into the idea of protecting them, while in reality, very few people actually spend any significant time with their children and so are in a position to witness their reactions and responses to the world.
Responsible parenting, in my view, is being there to monitor and explain such phenomena to your children. The desire to ban it is just another cop out -- if kids don't have access to this stuff, it's just one less thing adults don't have to worry about.
Children are not able to fully understand and cope, on their own, with the violence evidences in such games.
Right. That's why you see them crying hysterically whenever they watch Tom & Jerry, or The Simpsons, or any other cartoon. They don't understand that animated violence is somehow different from real violence.
Oh, wait a minute. They don't cry at all, do they? They laugh like crazy -- just the same as adults do. Ah well...
Children growing up in an environment where such media violence is taken for granted often take real violence for granted in their life.
Ah. Well, we'd better close down the whole of western society immediately. Personally, I'm much happier for my children to play GTA3 than I am to hear them listen to George Bush condemning whole nations of people as being an Axis of Evil, as though this is somehow a justification for his dropping daisycutters on their sorry poverty-stricken asses.
Tell me, if *you* were somehow exposed to such a game, do you believe that you'd then start going out and raping and killing three year old children?
If not, then that suggests to me that there's a pretty strong argument to suggest that the game has no effect. However, if you think watching such a game *would* induce you to start going out and raping and killing three year old kids, I suspect you'd need a predisposition first. Normal people just don't do that stuff.
Read a few of the case studies of sadistic serial killers from the past sometime. They had no access to violent kiddy porn, so they developed an obsession with things like Nazi war atrocities instead.
I use Linux on a daily basis, I have it installed on all of my four machines, so I obviously *like* Linux, but X does blow goats.
Why? The speed of the goddamned thing. On anything slower than my 2 gig P4 with the Nvidia drivers and a Ti200, screen redraws take an era. It might be acceptable for running a distributed server/client system, but for a workstation I want fast, responsive screen redraws, and I shouldn't have to have the latest, fastest hardware to get that.
Then there's the relative instability, The lack of consistency between apps, etc.
X is simply good enough for the average person that browses the Web
Depends what you mean by 'good enough'. Does it work? Yes it does -- after a fashion. Would the 'average person' choose it willingly over one of the more mature commercial desktops? I wish it were so, but it simply isn't likely to be the case. Not unless that person has either a strong ideological commitment to using a Free OS and/or a very new, very fast machine anyway.
you fucking mac users need to get this through your heads A MAC IS NOT A FUCKING DESKTOP COMPUTER.
You can shout and stamp your feet as hard as you like. It doesn't add any more credibility or coherence to your argument.
get back to me when mac runs x86
So I take it my Mac is really a server then, is it? Get back to *me* when you find the place where it definitively states that in order to qualify as a desktop computer, a machine has to run Intel Inside.
The British Govt. wants to record, centrally, all the journeys made by everybody "for billing purposes"
Cite please? I live in the UK and I've never heard of such a proposal. You've obviously been reading the slashdot comments and not the links.
The only proposals I've heard have been to levy daily charges on highly congested areas, payable on entry -- a system somewhat similar to the tolls the US has on some of it's highways.
Re:Do not pass go, do not collect $200
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 1
What I like best about these sort of scams is that nobody would ever have even *heard* of this lame-ass hippie parody website if the dumb arrogant fucks at Dow hadn't felt so affronted that they had to attempt to censor it.
Haven't these captains of industry ever heard the old maxim about how the internet interprets censorship as damage and what happens then?
Re:I wonder if the framers of the constitution...
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 1
Parody is, of course, but this work was not a parody. It was fraud
Bullshit. Do you really believe that anyone would have been taken in and believed this website was really Dow's corporate website?
Go look up the word 'fraud' in a dictionary -- right after you're done learning about what constitutes a free society.
Doesn't anyone understand that we need to relinquish some of our liberties so that we can be secure in our homes?
Absolutely. So you won't mind if I come around to your house and feel up your wife, will you? After all, it's quite possible that she's concealing dangerous contraband somewhere about her person, and so I'd be failing in my patriotic duty if I didn't come around and give her a thorough strip search and internal examination just to be on the safe side.
Thanks for being so understanding about the need for this though.
Agreed, its the same in NY. I hate these people whose logic is so ass-backward. Just because they sling trash for a living doesn't mean they make little money.
Or that they don't have any status. Last time I was in New York, I was wandering around downtown and I noticed a sign on an admin building.
Apparently, the cops are New York's Finest, the firemen are New York's Bravest and the garbagemen are New York's Strongest. Given how much shit they must have to haul in Manhattan, I thought that was rather cool.
Since all three of Alan's claims are false, and he knows it, this means that Alan has defrauded Joe.
Not exactly. I'm not trying to defend Alan here, but you're really stretching it to call what he's doing a fraud.
Compare him, for a moment, to a zillion web design houses. They would also market their services on similar grounds, ie setting up a website is effective (in the sense that it will increase their sales and is an effective way to advertise to millions.) And everyone is doing it anyway so why should they miss out on this great business opportunity?
Those claims are equally dubious when it comes to establishing a business website, but nobody would really think for a minute that the seller perpetrated a fraud. Shit, the whole of the dot.com nineties were based upon similarly dubious statements but nobody ever was prosecuted for that.
Jeez, whenever I'm in the USA and watch your informercials, the bulk of the claims made for the products involved seem just as doubtful, but we operate on the principle of caveat emptor -- the buyer has some duty to inform themselves as to the validity and applicability of such claims to their business.
Selling spam services may be antisocial and the people who do it are lower than pimps in my book, but I just can't see how it could reasonably be regarded as fraud.
One should think people do not really want nuclear contamination in their *own* country, after all.
If people really did put the protection of the environment above their own personal short-term goals, then George W. Bush would never have been elected to office -- either in Texas or to the presidency.
Nuclear contamination, hole in the ozone layer, deforestation, etc. None of it matters a shit if it's going to interfere with our ability to drive great big gas-guzzling SUV's.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't understand much about free markets or free societies, do you?
I certainly don't. Do you suppose you could point me at one, so I can be better informed?
Oh, wait? You weren't thinking of the USA were you?
Bwahahahahahahah!
So does social engineering really work?
It's a moot question really. I suppose it's like anything else. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.
If I wanted to read about it though, I'd want to read the insights of a social engineer who was successful -- not one who couldn't keep his stupid arse out of jail.
The Register has a foreword that his publishers supposedly 'censored' where Kevin whines on about how he didn't really do anything wrong, and how it was all Markoff and the FBI and others who railroaded him. Surely the term for that isn't censoring. That's *editing*.
If the foreword is to be believed though, its that Markoff who wants to write the book on social engineering. Making a legitimate fortune by railroading an innocent man and getting away with it -- that's my idea of a *real* social engineer -- not some whining ex-jailbird.
I'm not a code-hacker any more. I'm a law student. (Don't run away, I'm on your side.) People look at my laptop and see OpenOffice and ask what it is. "It's a free office suite that does everything MS Office does." They drool.
I don't know whether it's lawyers, or whether it's just the stage linux has finally reached but a funny thing happened last week.
My wife is a divorce lawyer and a technophobe. She uses a computer, but she loathes them and can never figure anything out.
In the past, if I had my dual-boot Win2k box running in Linux when she needed to do some work, she'd come in whining. "Dipipanone", she'd moan, "what's all that nasty crap on the screen. Make Windows come back, I need to use Word."
So, I wander into my office one evening last week, and there she is, working away.
"This is nice, isn't it?", she says, completely unprompted. "I really like this Word Processor. It's clear, straightforward, easy to use and fast."
Had I tried to evangelize with her, she'd have never listened because she *knew* that Linux sucked. She carried on working in Open Office and it looks like she actually prefers it to Office 2000.
Chalk one up to Linux.
Seems like there's a simple fix for all those posts
Hmm. If it were so simple, it seems to me that it would have happened by now. After all, I see legions of posts complaining about dupes, but still they keep on coming.
Have the ass-clowns they call "editors" earn their pay and not post duplicate articles.
And what do we do about the ass-clown readers who post duplicate comments?
Mod them down as redundant?
Lets see, 26 comments... Hmmm...
My guess is that the Slashdot Charisma Sweatshop should be Slashdotted right around now.
Do we really need all these duplicate posts, telling us that the article is a dupe?
Bad enough that it's a dupe in the first place without having to read fifty posts telling us so over and over again.
Suppose a wealthy rapist rapes a woman and as punishment, he has to pay some amount of money. He then goes and continue raping as he pleases.
Now that gives me an idea as to what should be a fair and equitable solution to this problem.
PROTECT OUR TENDER WOMANHOOD FROM DISGUSTING EXHIBITIONISTS!
CASTRATE THE DANCING MONKEYBOY TODAY!
As a professional programmer, I refuse to let someone else's politics dictate how I feed my family.
What a coincidence! As a professional crack dealer, I feel exactly the same way.
Firstly, I was fully aware of your disowning statements. My rejection of the arguments you put forward wasn't an attack upon you for holding them, but was an attack on the arguments themselves. That you were the person who happened to raise them was just a convenience.
;-)
neither I nor, assumedly, you are competent to discuss the problem in its entirity
Your assumption is erroneous. While I wouldn't claim any particular expertise in this area (in the sense that I've never done original research or published anything), a postgraduate degree in Sociology and three years lecturing in Media Studies has given me some degree of familiarity with the debates on the issue.
Personally, I'm not sure where I stand on the topic
I thought you just said you believed that the arguments that you presented were absurd?
Frankly, I think your position is woefully confused. You felt compelled to outline these arguments (despite the fact that nobody could possibly be unaware of them given the regularity with which the media trots them out), while at the same time, offering up a disclaimer to distance yourself from such a position. Trying to protect your Karma, perhaps?
The truth is that the data on this question is really unconvincing in either direction, and so any position that we take is made on the basis of our personal and political values, our experience of raising children, and our experience of what it was like to be a child ourselves. If you somehow believe that when you were a child, you lacked the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality, then I can see why you might find such arguments persuasive. Alternatively, if you or your own children have a tendency to massive oversensitivity and so might be easily scared or upset by such exposure, again, I can see how it might influence you in that direction.
Unfortunately, I think that by and large, people take a position that is based upon fear. Over the last few decades, the USA in particular has developed a the view that it is necessary to protect children -- and teenagers -- from absolutely everything that might conceivably present even the slightest risk, and so mountains of lipservice is poured into the idea of protecting them, while in reality, very few people actually spend any significant time with their children and so are in a position to witness their reactions and responses to the world.
Responsible parenting, in my view, is being there to monitor and explain such phenomena to your children. The desire to ban it is just another cop out -- if kids don't have access to this stuff, it's just one less thing adults don't have to worry about.
Children are not able to fully understand and cope, on their own, with the violence evidences in such games.
Right. That's why you see them crying hysterically whenever they watch Tom & Jerry, or The Simpsons, or any other cartoon. They don't understand that animated violence is somehow different from real violence.
Oh, wait a minute. They don't cry at all, do they? They laugh like crazy -- just the same as adults do. Ah well...
Children growing up in an environment where such media violence is taken for granted often take real violence for granted in their life.
Ah. Well, we'd better close down the whole of western society immediately. Personally, I'm much happier for my children to play GTA3 than I am to hear them listen to George Bush condemning whole nations of people as being an Axis of Evil, as though this is somehow a justification for his dropping daisycutters on their sorry poverty-stricken asses.
Tell me, if *you* were somehow exposed to such a game, do you believe that you'd then start going out and raping and killing three year old children?
If not, then that suggests to me that there's a pretty strong argument to suggest that the game has no effect. However, if you think watching such a game *would* induce you to start going out and raping and killing three year old kids, I suspect you'd need a predisposition first. Normal people just don't do that stuff.
Read a few of the case studies of sadistic serial killers from the past sometime. They had no access to violent kiddy porn, so they developed an obsession with things like Nazi war atrocities instead.
I use Linux on a daily basis, I have it installed on all of my four machines, so I obviously *like* Linux, but X does blow goats.
Why? The speed of the goddamned thing. On anything slower than my 2 gig P4 with the Nvidia drivers and a Ti200, screen redraws take an era. It might be acceptable for running a distributed server/client system, but for a workstation I want fast, responsive screen redraws, and I shouldn't have to have the latest, fastest hardware to get that.
Then there's the relative instability, The lack of consistency between apps, etc.
X is simply good enough for the average person that browses the Web
Depends what you mean by 'good enough'. Does it work? Yes it does -- after a fashion. Would the 'average person' choose it willingly over one of the more mature commercial desktops? I wish it were so, but it simply isn't likely to be the case. Not unless that person has either a strong ideological commitment to using a Free OS and/or a very new, very fast machine anyway.
you fucking mac users need to get this through your heads A MAC IS NOT A FUCKING DESKTOP COMPUTER.
You can shout and stamp your feet as hard as you like. It doesn't add any more credibility or coherence to your argument.
get back to me when mac runs x86
So I take it my Mac is really a server then, is it? Get back to *me* when you find the place where it definitively states that in order to qualify as a desktop computer, a machine has to run Intel Inside.
Dimwit.
Any info look interesting to you?
Nah. That stuff is tedious as all hell. I should know, I wrote it.
Dime'll get you twenty.
Twenty what? Years in jail?
Slashdot sells out
Yet another example of why Salon is failing to make any money after the dot.com bubble has burst.
If they actually bothered to readSlashdot, they would know that this had already occurred several years ago.
Just how much more *out* do they suppose there is left to sell?
iMac's that change color based on your mood?
Mine has just turned brown -- a perfect analogue for the way that I feel today.
Sorry to bother you, but what does "PHB" mean?
/.
He's the person who is in charge of all the PFY's who post to
The British Govt. wants to record, centrally, all the journeys made by everybody "for billing purposes"
Cite please? I live in the UK and I've never heard of such a proposal. You've obviously been reading the slashdot comments and not the links.
The only proposals I've heard have been to levy daily charges on highly congested areas, payable on entry -- a system somewhat similar to the tolls the US has on some of it's highways.
What I like best about these sort of scams is that nobody would ever have even *heard* of this lame-ass hippie parody website if the dumb arrogant fucks at Dow hadn't felt so affronted that they had to attempt to censor it.
Haven't these captains of industry ever heard the old maxim about how the internet interprets censorship as damage and what happens then?
Parody is, of course, but this work was not a parody. It was fraud
Bullshit. Do you really believe that anyone would have been taken in and believed this website was really Dow's corporate website?
Go look up the word 'fraud' in a dictionary -- right after you're done learning about what constitutes a free society.
a sysadmin has to be ethical.
I imagine that's why the System Administrators Guild has a SysAdmin Code of Ethics.
Hmm. I wonder if BOFH's also have their own code of ethics too?
Doesn't anyone understand that we need to relinquish some of our liberties so that we can be secure in our homes?
Absolutely. So you won't mind if I come around to your house and feel up your wife, will you? After all, it's quite possible that she's concealing dangerous contraband somewhere about her person, and so I'd be failing in my patriotic duty if I didn't come around and give her a thorough strip search and internal examination just to be on the safe side.
Thanks for being so understanding about the need for this though.
Agreed, its the same in NY. I hate these people whose logic is so ass-backward. Just because they sling trash for a living doesn't mean they make little money.
Or that they don't have any status. Last time I was in New York, I was wandering around downtown and I noticed a sign on an admin building.
Apparently, the cops are New York's Finest, the firemen are New York's Bravest and the garbagemen are New York's Strongest. Given how much shit they must have to haul in Manhattan, I thought that was rather cool.
Since all three of Alan's claims are false, and he knows it, this means that Alan has defrauded Joe.
Not exactly. I'm not trying to defend Alan here, but you're really stretching it to call what he's doing a fraud.
Compare him, for a moment, to a zillion web design houses. They would also market their services on similar grounds, ie setting up a website is effective (in the sense that it will increase their sales and is an effective way to advertise to millions.) And everyone is doing it anyway so why should they miss out on this great business opportunity?
Those claims are equally dubious when it comes to establishing a business website, but nobody would really think for a minute that the seller perpetrated a fraud. Shit, the whole of the dot.com nineties were based upon similarly dubious statements but nobody ever was prosecuted for that.
Jeez, whenever I'm in the USA and watch your informercials, the bulk of the claims made for the products involved seem just as doubtful, but we operate on the principle of caveat emptor -- the buyer has some duty to inform themselves as to the validity and applicability of such claims to their business.
Selling spam services may be antisocial and the people who do it are lower than pimps in my book, but I just can't see how it could reasonably be regarded as fraud.
One should think people do not really want nuclear contamination in their *own* country, after all.
If people really did put the protection of the environment above their own personal short-term goals, then George W. Bush would never have been elected to office -- either in Texas or to the presidency.
Nuclear contamination, hole in the ozone layer, deforestation, etc. None of it matters a shit if it's going to interfere with our ability to drive great big gas-guzzling SUV's.