Why would they need to install them on civilian PC's? The US Gov't, unlike a lot of botnet creators, has a hell of a lot of funding. They could just buy a bunch of computers specifically for the task.
Or, they could just take every computer that is upgraded/rotated out of a federal government facility and set it aside for this job.
Or the US Gov't could just add a program to all of their active computers that relinquishes their idle time to the botnet. Sort of a militant version of Folding@home. (Civilians could even opt into this one.)
Or they could do all of the above. They wouldn't need to touch a civilian PC to get a formidable botnet.
I totally agree with this. The original poster should keep in mind that there are plenty of things in those accounts and on that computer that could potentially be damaging or embarrassing to the next of kin. Suicides tend to have more abnormal behavior before their deaths. So, the potential for this is likely to be higher than say an accident victim or a soldier killed in combat.
Which raises the question: How much information is the OP willing to divulge to the family? By agreeing to access these account, the OP agrees to be a intermediary of some sort to the data. Whether that's handing over the keys or finding specific letters to the family.
I completely agree. I would add on to this by saying that those applications that have gone beyond the rapid development phase and into a more mature product model will be areas where OSS will compete strongly with proprietary software.
Applications where the core components are understood and it's uses are well outlined do extremely well as open sources software. Look at Apache, VNC, VLC, and MySQL for some examples of this.
This is partly because proprietary software companies see more return on investment from looking for the next big thing instead of investing in older software to refine and perfect it. Where as, the OSS community will continue to tweak and refine for no other reason than to make the software more comfortable and fault tolerant.
Additionally, the more a software problem is looked at and dissected the more it becomes apparent what the better approaches to a solution are. (Sometimes there is even a clear cut best solution.) Once these solutions are implemented there is little reason to have a competing piece of software. The differences in performance would be negligible. Examples of this are some software libraries and applications like LAME.
Add into all of this the fact that most OSS software is free as in beer. It's my opinion that all older software and/or mature application models will be replaced with OSS eventually. With the exceptions of those programs that are provided free of cost and are updated regularly by proprietary companies.
So the answer to global warming is that we should just not try to address it because we might actually fix it?
If for some reason it negates and reverses global warming and then swings back the other way into global cooling then that's fine. We have experience with fixing that particular problem.
You'd have to run as super user to install apps under Ubuntu. So, if the kids can figure out the password for that, you're correct, they could trash it quite easily.
But assuming the school technology administrator is not a total retard, guessing that password should be quite difficult.
But aside from that, some of the applications that kids would want to put on there just wouldn't be available for a Linux distro. And a lot of the malware that follows in with those programs wouldn't make it on their either.
Even if they get root access, the applications that you get through apt or synaptic are free of viruses, adware, malware, etc.
IANAL, but if the account was used for money laundering or other nefarious actions *and* you willingly sold it, then being charged with accessory to those crimes might be possible.
I'm personally all for a class like this. I think it's an excellent idea. I'm involved with the education system through family members. The things I'm finding out seem to indicate that parents lack the above skills. So, it's getting less and less likely that they'll pass them down to their children.
The poorer the neighborhood that you go to, the more likely that information is not passed on.
And while this knowledge seems basic, it's pretty empowering stuff. Just the ability to balance budgets and cook your own food will save you tons of money over your lifetime.
Also, I think that this sort of class would be neat to teach with an economic backbone. Maybe give the kids credits at the end of every week. They can use those to get out of certain non-critical tasks. So that they can see what difference planning a meal has over just tossing the credits away to the local fast food joint. It might even be fun if the teacher attempted scams on the kids from time to time just to keep them on their toes and to teach them to look out for things like that. Or penalize credits for making "legal" or economic mistakes. The ideas are endless and I think it could be made to be very fun.
In The Matrix, there is a minimal amount of blue. The directors thought blue was a happy color and since the Matrix is not supposed to be a happy place they tried a number of tricks to eliminate or minimize it.
This would also explain why I nearly slept through the third one.
I don't know if the growth has anything to do with being viral. Growth of software in general is probably exponential.
Another thought is that there is a lot of code out there to build on. So, a lot of new projects are probably modifying and forking existing code. Or just building on top of them. When you have the power to do that you can specify how you like things. For example: How many flavors of Linux are there compared to varieties of Windows? Compare that to the number of users in each camp.
This is pretty similar to other religious claims, I think. It covers all the basic tickboxes: "you are more important than non-believers", "you get everlasting life" and "you get to be like God".
Many churches screw this up, but Christianity is supposed be like the following:
> "you are more important than non-believers"
Change that to "You have different rules you have to follow than non-believers." Some churches go on to get this to mean that they are coming from a position of superiority. But this is, according to The Bible, incorrect.
> "you get everlasting life"
This I can't argue with. Though, various denominations interpret the conditions of getting this differently. Many say you get this free of charge. That is, you're exempt from hour zero. Other say you just have to admit that you're a screw up some times and just make an attempt to follow the rules of the faith. Others go a bit farther and say you have to be good at following the rules. This latter one is usually a hallmark of a bad church.
> "you get to be like God"
I don't think any where in the Bible it says you get to be like God in the sense that you get to have his powers and omniscience. "You get to be with God" is in there. "You should be strive to be Godly (in actions)" is certainly there. "God will be with you," is certainly there as well.
Actually thinking about, most religions don't go so far as to say the last one. In most religions the reward for faith is the everlasting life bit. Very few say that in this life you will get Godlike powers. Now, various religions have perks in the afterlife that are considered quite nice. Unaging, the company of virgins, being in the company of God, living in a paradise, relief from fear and worry, or even a trip back to the land of the living in a better body all exist in the list. But, "you get to be like God?" No, I don't see that.
If a person loves programming and has the skills and devotion to become a "superstar" at it (could someone define superstar distinctly). Then I would think they would want to continue doing it. I think that promoting them away from that would be both bad for the company and bad for the superstar.
Most programmers that like their work would much rather gather more respect and more income than a higher rung on the corporate ladder. I can't imagine this would be different for superstars. I think that companies would be much better off giving them a voice and listening to them than promoting them.
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Bad analogy. Your first example is a matter of criminal law and your second example is a matter of civil law (product liability).
I know my analogy is bad. It's bad because there is no apples to apples law comparisons for individual crimes and corporate crimes even if the outcomes of both crimes are the same. Which was my point.
The other point I was trying to make is that the punishment rarely makes any lasting impression to the company. Sure Mattel took a dive, but check out the stock today. It's on the incline. Though to be fair, lousy Barbie sales in 2006 sent the stock much lower in January 2006 than the lead paint did in January 2008. Last I checked, making Barbies isn't a crime.
But according to the systems of currency we have for good and bad behaviors, lousy Barbie sales and lead paint in the toys are about the same level of badness for the company. With Barbies FTW. So, the next time the company is presented with the choice, sell more barbies or not poison children, which do they have the most incentive for?
Re:The difference between IT and other professions
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 1
I think an ethical IT standard might be difficult. The field of IT when looked at by the layman seems to be one lump of knowledge collectively referred to as just "computer stuff." And it's obviously not. You have everything from system maintenance, security, to programmers, program analysts to researchers, academics. Each group with different goals and areas of work.
The most difficult part, I seem to find is the nature of the job. I do a good bit of programming. So, when it comes to manipulating data, I tend to have an outlook that all files on the computer are groupings of 1's and 0's and should be handled accordingly. I don't get passionate about not copying certain files because they have the.mp3 extension. Nor do I make rules in my programs that would limit this functionality in the cases that I'm copying files. To me, it's ethically wrong to try to enforce that limitation on the end user through software. To the RIAA, it's ethically wrong for me not to.
Additionally, In my profession I'm often forced to think outside the box. I tend to think that the term "thinking outside the box" means un-limiting oneself, ie. ignoring rules and/or standard conventions. As a programmer, what I can get the computer to do is only limited by my knowledge of the programming language and whether it's mathematically possible. So, where do I set my boundaries? If I set my boundaries to be too restrictive, I make myself a bad programmer. But, I don't think it's personally healthy to set my boundaries too loose.
Incidentally, I recently took a career test. The test ranked a number of things. My lowest scoring area however was my Morality. One of my highest was Understanding and Empathy.
Re:You need to clarify your question
on
Ethics In IT
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
. But to big business, I have been shocked at times at how the law is treated at times more like for example, the rules in Formula 1 racing cars, where they can twist and exploit the definitions of the law to suit themselves and how the government plays the same games back at them.
I think the reason that big business tends to view laws as more flexible than the average person does is because of the penalty of those laws on big business in relation to the rewards.
For example:
If I as an individual, go out and set fire to somebody's car, I'm likely to spend a good deal of time in jail. I would possibly lose years off of my life and get a criminal record that would hurt the ability to provide for myself in the future. Knowing that trade off would deter me.
If a big businesses made a car that burst into flames then their likely punishment will all be in dollars and cents. So, any deterrent to them would be to not lose money. But sometimes, it's more profitable to make an unsafe car than it is to make a safe one. If that causes a violation of the law for them, then so be it. Even after the punishment is dealt out, they can come out better than before. As long as they can avoid the public action and boycotting that happened to Firestone, then there really isn't any punishment.
I think there needs to be a better punishment system for big business. Perhaps prosecution of CEO's, or forced closing (short term or permanent), maybe a fine to the shareholders.... I don't know.
Oops! No, it wasn't obvious to me. Sometimes, it's hard to tell comedic intent from "It's not fair!" whining. Especially without the sarcastic tone of voice.
Actually, I would argue that teasing this tiger was, in the end, worse than merely teasing an animal. His actions did result in it's death; A destruction of an endangered species.
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Why would they need to install them on civilian PC's? The US Gov't, unlike a lot of botnet creators, has a hell of a lot of funding. They could just buy a bunch of computers specifically for the task.
Or, they could just take every computer that is upgraded/rotated out of a federal government facility and set it aside for this job.
Or the US Gov't could just add a program to all of their active computers that relinquishes their idle time to the botnet. Sort of a militant version of Folding@home. (Civilians could even opt into this one.)
Or they could do all of the above. They wouldn't need to touch a civilian PC to get a formidable botnet.
Thanks for the visual. A traffic jam of jockey's on dodos made my day.
I totally agree with this. The original poster should keep in mind that there are plenty of things in those accounts and on that computer that could potentially be damaging or embarrassing to the next of kin. Suicides tend to have more abnormal behavior before their deaths. So, the potential for this is likely to be higher than say an accident victim or a soldier killed in combat.
Which raises the question: How much information is the OP willing to divulge to the family? By agreeing to access these account, the OP agrees to be a intermediary of some sort to the data. Whether that's handing over the keys or finding specific letters to the family.
And that's a huge responsibility.
All I learned was that you always, always check the bodies.
I completely agree. I would add on to this by saying that those applications that have gone beyond the rapid development phase and into a more mature product model will be areas where OSS will compete strongly with proprietary software.
Applications where the core components are understood and it's uses are well outlined do extremely well as open sources software. Look at Apache, VNC, VLC, and MySQL for some examples of this.
This is partly because proprietary software companies see more return on investment from looking for the next big thing instead of investing in older software to refine and perfect it. Where as, the OSS community will continue to tweak and refine for no other reason than to make the software more comfortable and fault tolerant.
Additionally, the more a software problem is looked at and dissected the more it becomes apparent what the better approaches to a solution are. (Sometimes there is even a clear cut best solution.) Once these solutions are implemented there is little reason to have a competing piece of software. The differences in performance would be negligible. Examples of this are some software libraries and applications like LAME.
Add into all of this the fact that most OSS software is free as in beer. It's my opinion that all older software and/or mature application models will be replaced with OSS eventually. With the exceptions of those programs that are provided free of cost and are updated regularly by proprietary companies.
So the answer to global warming is that we should just not try to address it because we might actually fix it?
If for some reason it negates and reverses global warming and then swings back the other way into global cooling then that's fine. We have experience with fixing that particular problem.
You'd have to run as super user to install apps under Ubuntu. So, if the kids can figure out the password for that, you're correct, they could trash it quite easily.
But assuming the school technology administrator is not a total retard, guessing that password should be quite difficult.
But aside from that, some of the applications that kids would want to put on there just wouldn't be available for a Linux distro. And a lot of the malware that follows in with those programs wouldn't make it on their either.
Even if they get root access, the applications that you get through apt or synaptic are free of viruses, adware, malware, etc.
Congratulations, your account is worth more to somebody than the rest of ours.
IANAL, but if the account was used for money laundering or other nefarious actions *and* you willingly sold it, then being charged with accessory to those crimes might be possible.
I'm personally all for a class like this. I think it's an excellent idea. I'm involved with the education system through family members. The things I'm finding out seem to indicate that parents lack the above skills. So, it's getting less and less likely that they'll pass them down to their children.
The poorer the neighborhood that you go to, the more likely that information is not passed on.
And while this knowledge seems basic, it's pretty empowering stuff. Just the ability to balance budgets and cook your own food will save you tons of money over your lifetime.
Also, I think that this sort of class would be neat to teach with an economic backbone. Maybe give the kids credits at the end of every week. They can use those to get out of certain non-critical tasks. So that they can see what difference planning a meal has over just tossing the credits away to the local fast food joint. It might even be fun if the teacher attempted scams on the kids from time to time just to keep them on their toes and to teach them to look out for things like that. Or penalize credits for making "legal" or economic mistakes. The ideas are endless and I think it could be made to be very fun.
I actually have a pair of foam nunchucks in my office (couldn't bring the real ones in.) I pick them up when I'm trying to solve a difficult problem.
There's something about physical activity that just sort of relaxes the brain into a solution.
Depends. It really depends on the specifics.
In The Matrix, there is a minimal amount of blue. The directors thought blue was a happy color and since the Matrix is not supposed to be a happy place they tried a number of tricks to eliminate or minimize it.
This would also explain why I nearly slept through the third one.
Don't forget that it's illegal to mail human remains. The funny things I could have done with that...
I don't know if the growth has anything to do with being viral. Growth of software in general is probably exponential.
Another thought is that there is a lot of code out there to build on. So, a lot of new projects are probably modifying and forking existing code. Or just building on top of them. When you have the power to do that you can specify how you like things. For example: How many flavors of Linux are there compared to varieties of Windows? Compare that to the number of users in each camp.
Many churches screw this up, but Christianity is supposed be like the following:
> "you are more important than non-believers"
Change that to "You have different rules you have to follow than non-believers." Some churches go on to get this to mean that they are coming from a position of superiority. But this is, according to The Bible, incorrect.
> "you get everlasting life"
This I can't argue with. Though, various denominations interpret the conditions of getting this differently. Many say you get this free of charge. That is, you're exempt from hour zero. Other say you just have to admit that you're a screw up some times and just make an attempt to follow the rules of the faith. Others go a bit farther and say you have to be good at following the rules. This latter one is usually a hallmark of a bad church.
> "you get to be like God"
I don't think any where in the Bible it says you get to be like God in the sense that you get to have his powers and omniscience. "You get to be with God" is in there. "You should be strive to be Godly (in actions)" is certainly there. "God will be with you," is certainly there as well.
Actually thinking about, most religions don't go so far as to say the last one. In most religions the reward for faith is the everlasting life bit. Very few say that in this life you will get Godlike powers. Now, various religions have perks in the afterlife that are considered quite nice. Unaging, the company of virgins, being in the company of God, living in a paradise, relief from fear and worry, or even a trip back to the land of the living in a better body all exist in the list. But, "you get to be like God?" No, I don't see that.
I'd have to agree with you.
If a person loves programming and has the skills and devotion to become a "superstar" at it (could someone define superstar distinctly). Then I would think they would want to continue doing it. I think that promoting them away from that would be both bad for the company and bad for the superstar.
Most programmers that like their work would much rather gather more respect and more income than a higher rung on the corporate ladder. I can't imagine this would be different for superstars. I think that companies would be much better off giving them a voice and listening to them than promoting them.
The other point I was trying to make is that the punishment rarely makes any lasting impression to the company. Sure Mattel took a dive, but check out the stock today. It's on the incline. Though to be fair, lousy Barbie sales in 2006 sent the stock much lower in January 2006 than the lead paint did in January 2008. Last I checked, making Barbies isn't a crime.
But according to the systems of currency we have for good and bad behaviors, lousy Barbie sales and lead paint in the toys are about the same level of badness for the company. With Barbies FTW. So, the next time the company is presented with the choice, sell more barbies or not poison children, which do they have the most incentive for?
I think an ethical IT standard might be difficult. The field of IT when looked at by the layman seems to be one lump of knowledge collectively referred to as just "computer stuff." And it's obviously not. You have everything from system maintenance, security, to programmers, program analysts to researchers, academics. Each group with different goals and areas of work.
.mp3 extension. Nor do I make rules in my programs that would limit this functionality in the cases that I'm copying files. To me, it's ethically wrong to try to enforce that limitation on the end user through software. To the RIAA, it's ethically wrong for me not to.
The most difficult part, I seem to find is the nature of the job. I do a good bit of programming. So, when it comes to manipulating data, I tend to have an outlook that all files on the computer are groupings of 1's and 0's and should be handled accordingly. I don't get passionate about not copying certain files because they have the
Additionally, In my profession I'm often forced to think outside the box. I tend to think that the term "thinking outside the box" means un-limiting oneself, ie. ignoring rules and/or standard conventions. As a programmer, what I can get the computer to do is only limited by my knowledge of the programming language and whether it's mathematically possible. So, where do I set my boundaries? If I set my boundaries to be too restrictive, I make myself a bad programmer. But, I don't think it's personally healthy to set my boundaries too loose.
Incidentally, I recently took a career test. The test ranked a number of things. My lowest scoring area however was my Morality. One of my highest was Understanding and Empathy.
For example:
If I as an individual, go out and set fire to somebody's car, I'm likely to spend a good deal of time in jail. I would possibly lose years off of my life and get a criminal record that would hurt the ability to provide for myself in the future. Knowing that trade off would deter me.
If a big businesses made a car that burst into flames then their likely punishment will all be in dollars and cents. So, any deterrent to them would be to not lose money. But sometimes, it's more profitable to make an unsafe car than it is to make a safe one. If that causes a violation of the law for them, then so be it. Even after the punishment is dealt out, they can come out better than before. As long as they can avoid the public action and boycotting that happened to Firestone, then there really isn't any punishment.
I think there needs to be a better punishment system for big business. Perhaps prosecution of CEO's, or forced closing (short term or permanent), maybe a fine to the shareholders.... I don't know.
Oops! No, it wasn't obvious to me. Sometimes, it's hard to tell comedic intent from "It's not fair!" whining. Especially without the sarcastic tone of voice.
No offense meant.
There is legitimate reasons for some of the negative moderations available in slashdot. However, they are often misused.
If you want to combat this practice, meta-moderate.
There is Mechaphilia; attraction to machines.
It might be classified as a sub-variant of that.
Or would Aeromechaphilia be a better word?
Actually, I would argue that teasing this tiger was, in the end, worse than merely teasing an animal. His actions did result in it's death; A destruction of an endangered species.
Everything else, I can agree with you on.