No, it's not the same thing at all. The reason is simple: fully conscious and autonomous human agents are intervening causes, ethically speaking.
These students used non-cognitive systems (the URL parsing system) to illegally acquire information. Your [hypothetical] student used a cognitive system (the person) to illegally acquire information. The difference is that in the former, the student is the only moral agent acting, while in the latter there are two.
What this means is that the second one is notably less morally culpable. Solicitation of another to commit a morally wrong action cannot possibly be as wrong as the actual commission of that wrong, since to suggest otherwise would mean that one who encourages a wrong action is at least as culpable (which seems counterintuitive).
In other words, the presence of an intervening cause in the form of an intermediary moral agent must reduce the moral wrongness of whatever the student did.
"Of course I'm no english language professor, but isn't it common use that defines a language?"
Depends what language you're talking about. Some languages - like formal Spanish - are actually defined by a committee. Other languages - like American English - are largely codified in dictionaries but have no central defining body.
There is a tendancy within American and European English to limit "correct" English to what is currently in dictionaries (and corresponding grammatical texts), but that has one obvious issue: during the yearlong gap between editions, words/usages will appear that will by definition be incorrect that year but will (the next year) retroactively be deemed correct. How should those be handled?
In the data/datum case, I'd say that since almost no Americans (or Europeans, for that matter) are aware of the word "datum", no one would reasonably fault you for using data as both plural/singular.
"** i.e. typing a URL into a browser with the hope of finding out information ABOUT YOURSELF - information that, in theory, BELONGS TO YOU. Reminds me of hospital administrators who try to ban patients from reading THEIR OWN CHARTS, as if the medical records belonged to the hospital, rather than to THE PATIENTS THEMSELVES."
Here's the thing: not all information about you belongs to you. Think abouut it like this: suppose I know you, and I form an opinion about you. Does my opinion about you belong to you? Do you have some right to demand that I inform you of my opinion? Of course not. These decisions by admissions committees are the same thing: they are opinions about the applicant formed by a private group of individuals. While you certainly have the right to be informed of that opinion within the schedule of the application process, you have no right to demand access to the opinion prior to the contracted release date. What these people did was break into a system to extract private information about them that didn't belong to them.
The analogy to the medical records is specious at best, and arguably a straw-man (since the anlogy fails so much that it may be viewed as an intentional effort on your part to deflect proper attention).
"sure, it isn't nice, and sure, in certain ways it can be seen as a privacy infrigment, but is it enough to completely ignore the reasons you initially accepted them ?"
Yes, dear god yes it is. This is a serious ethical issue: these people felt there was nothing wrong with knowingly violating security measures. Someone who has no problem violating another person's privacy or a system's security methods is - as far as I'm concerned - entirely unwelcome in any insitution I'm involved with. If I were on one of the relevant boards at these schools, I'd have dismissed their applications out of hand.
Think about it this way: if they'd been arrested for a drug bust, they'd have been excluded also, despite their previously valid acceptances. The difference is only the specific misdeed; there's no question that some misdeeds nullify the entire application.
While I don't disagree with you that the sysadmin should be punished (I certainly, were I his boss, would be docking him some pay), I think the two issues are seperate.
You have one bad thing: the sysadmin failing in his duties. The only response to this is to punish the sysadmin.
You have a second bad thing: students knowingly circumventing security to gain information. The fact is that it doesn't matter whether it was easy or hard to do this, whether they had to hack it themselves or whether they were just told how. All that matters is that they knowingly broke the rules, insofar as their punishment is concerned.
More importantly than a Roman Catholic, he was an incredible historian. But you're projecting entirely.
It's just retarded to insist that an author is WRONG about his own work. If Tolkien said it isn't an allegory, it CANNOT BE an allegory. It may evoke certain historical facts, but allegories must be intentional, just like sarcasm.
No. You're wrong. Period. Tolkien was EXTREMELY explicit (in, among other things, his collected letters) that the entireity of the Lord of the Rings story (including the larger Silmarillion-epic) had precisely no allegorical structure. Repeatedly he was asked whether it was a metaphor for one thing or another (be it WW2, nuclear war, religious crusading, etc.) and each time he shot the idea down.
No, you have 210 degrees if you look all the way to either side, alternatingly. I quite specifically stated that it was only when looking straight ahead. You're just mistaken.
"You might get it to work if you implanted them in an infant, but that would be kind of rough having to buy new eyes frequently during periods of rapid growth."
No, you'd never have to buy new ones: newborns arrive with eyeballs the same size as an adult. That's why children seem to have such large eyes: their skull is smaller than an adult, but they have the same size eyes. The only large-scale change to your eyes over the years is a slight shift in flexibility of different tissues (resulting in various vision issues), excluding serious degenerative issues.
No, some of the blind spots are due to the location of the fovea. You have a HUGE "blindspot" however that corresponds to the roughly 200 degrees that amount to the back of your head (its more than 180 because you actually cant see directly to the left or right while looking straight ahead).
"Of course it is, and the question becomes if evolution has made 12 yearolds[sic] sexual beings at the age of 12, why is the age of concent[sic] 18?"
Let's look at why that argument makes no sense:
If evolution has made humans capable of killing each other, why are there laws against killing?
If evolution has made humans liars at any age, why are there laws against lying in some situations?
I could go on. The point is this: human laws exist to curb human nature. I forget the philosopher who said it, but laws are only for criminals. If we could trust everyone to behave in mutually altruistic was (assuming somehow that everyone agreed on what that meant), we wouldn't need laws. Laws exist to exert normative force on those who would otherwise transgress.
What this comes down to is that we have laws restricting the age of consent so as to prevent the abuse of children by adults. The state has a valid interest in preventing emotionally immature children from being taken-advantage-of by malicious adults.
Once again kiddies: it is SOLID case-law that shrink-wrap agreements, EULA's and ToS agreements ARE LEGALLY ENFORCEABLE. Period. There are no cases saying otherwise, and there are several affirming this.
This is a US company, and he had to sign a contract with them to get an Apple account (which is required to purchase a song, even through his software). He therefore transacted in American territory. He's a criminal. We shouldn't be praising him: we should be criticising him for BREAKING THE LAW!
Whoops, you're right. I did in fact mean Daniel. That'll teach me to post without looking it up first.
I didn't mean to insult ancient Hebrews, but rather to point out that such inaccuracies indicate that - if nothing else - the religious texts were written by men. Even if you beleive they were religiously inspired, there are inaccuracies present which demand that you not interpret those texts literally.
I presume by hybrid species he's referring to things like a mule. Mules result when horses and donkeys breed. Mules are infertile (and thus aren't technically a species, since species refers to a group that can reproduce amongst themselves and themselves only). They can be created though because donkeys and horses are extremely closely related.
I can't remember a good "earth is flat" quote, but God stops the sun in the sky for Daniel. He doesn't stop the earth, he stops the SUN. This means the bible-writer believed the sun orbited the earth. If an omniscient god was telling you what happened, wouldn't he let you know that it was the other way around?
Marketing has always been (and always will be, and always should be) "scummy". By definition, it is the practice of making people want things that they don't yet want. It is convincing someone that despite not needing your product before, they need it now.
What do you want them to do? Seriously, what should they do? Just blandly (and uninterestedly) present the bare facts and let you decide for yourself?
When they say 'no online record', they're likely referring to the fact that neither Westlaw nor Lexis - the two companies employed by every legal organization in the country - have any record of such a lawsuit in their files (which are available online to those of us who have accounts).
No, those aren't the only options. In fact there's a third option, precisely the one described by Ron Moore in his blog:
The ship remains stationary, but somehow manages to bend space around it. He used [now common] analogy of a ship in space being like a small object sitting on a peice of flat paper. If you fold the paper, everything 'on' the paper doesn't notice any difference, but once its folded properly the ship can punch a small [worm]hole so that it can move through the interstitial area between the [now closer] points on the paper. The ship simply ceases to be at one point, and appears at the next without any change in velocity.
Such a system, if possible, wouldn't involve any intertial issues.
I don't know about you, but I've never once had a CC stolen/lost. I don't know -anyone- who has had 10 CCs stolen/lost, much less 10 cc's stolen sequentially (which is a better analogy, since one print id's all of your CCs here).
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No, it's not the same thing at all. The reason is simple: fully conscious and autonomous human agents are intervening causes, ethically speaking.
These students used non-cognitive systems (the URL parsing system) to illegally acquire information. Your [hypothetical] student used a cognitive system (the person) to illegally acquire information. The difference is that in the former, the student is the only moral agent acting, while in the latter there are two.
What this means is that the second one is notably less morally culpable. Solicitation of another to commit a morally wrong action cannot possibly be as wrong as the actual commission of that wrong, since to suggest otherwise would mean that one who encourages a wrong action is at least as culpable (which seems counterintuitive).
In other words, the presence of an intervening cause in the form of an intermediary moral agent must reduce the moral wrongness of whatever the student did.
"Of course I'm no english language professor, but isn't it common use that defines a language?"
Depends what language you're talking about. Some languages - like formal Spanish - are actually defined by a committee. Other languages - like American English - are largely codified in dictionaries but have no central defining body.
There is a tendancy within American and European English to limit "correct" English to what is currently in dictionaries (and corresponding grammatical texts), but that has one obvious issue: during the yearlong gap between editions, words/usages will appear that will by definition be incorrect that year but will (the next year) retroactively be deemed correct. How should those be handled?
In the data/datum case, I'd say that since almost no Americans (or Europeans, for that matter) are aware of the word "datum", no one would reasonably fault you for using data as both plural/singular.
"** i.e. typing a URL into a browser with the hope of finding out information ABOUT YOURSELF - information that, in theory, BELONGS TO YOU. Reminds me of hospital administrators who try to ban patients from reading THEIR OWN CHARTS, as if the medical records belonged to the hospital, rather than to THE PATIENTS THEMSELVES."
Here's the thing: not all information about you belongs to you. Think abouut it like this: suppose I know you, and I form an opinion about you. Does my opinion about you belong to you? Do you have some right to demand that I inform you of my opinion? Of course not. These decisions by admissions committees are the same thing: they are opinions about the applicant formed by a private group of individuals. While you certainly have the right to be informed of that opinion within the schedule of the application process, you have no right to demand access to the opinion prior to the contracted release date. What these people did was break into a system to extract private information about them that didn't belong to them.
The analogy to the medical records is specious at best, and arguably a straw-man (since the anlogy fails so much that it may be viewed as an intentional effort on your part to deflect proper attention).
"sure, it isn't nice, and sure, in certain ways it can be seen as a privacy infrigment, but is it enough to completely ignore the reasons you initially accepted them ?"
Yes, dear god yes it is. This is a serious ethical issue: these people felt there was nothing wrong with knowingly violating security measures. Someone who has no problem violating another person's privacy or a system's security methods is - as far as I'm concerned - entirely unwelcome in any insitution I'm involved with. If I were on one of the relevant boards at these schools, I'd have dismissed their applications out of hand.
Think about it this way: if they'd been arrested for a drug bust, they'd have been excluded also, despite their previously valid acceptances. The difference is only the specific misdeed; there's no question that some misdeeds nullify the entire application.
While I don't disagree with you that the sysadmin should be punished (I certainly, were I his boss, would be docking him some pay), I think the two issues are seperate.
You have one bad thing: the sysadmin failing in his duties. The only response to this is to punish the sysadmin.
You have a second bad thing: students knowingly circumventing security to gain information. The fact is that it doesn't matter whether it was easy or hard to do this, whether they had to hack it themselves or whether they were just told how. All that matters is that they knowingly broke the rules, insofar as their punishment is concerned.
More importantly than a Roman Catholic, he was an incredible historian. But you're projecting entirely.
It's just retarded to insist that an author is WRONG about his own work. If Tolkien said it isn't an allegory, it CANNOT BE an allegory. It may evoke certain historical facts, but allegories must be intentional, just like sarcasm.
No. You're wrong. Period. Tolkien was EXTREMELY explicit (in, among other things, his collected letters) that the entireity of the Lord of the Rings story (including the larger Silmarillion-epic) had precisely no allegorical structure. Repeatedly he was asked whether it was a metaphor for one thing or another (be it WW2, nuclear war, religious crusading, etc.) and each time he shot the idea down.
No, you have 210 degrees if you look all the way to either side, alternatingly. I quite specifically stated that it was only when looking straight ahead. You're just mistaken.
"You might get it to work if you implanted them in an infant, but that would be kind of rough having to buy new eyes frequently during periods of rapid growth."
No, you'd never have to buy new ones: newborns arrive with eyeballs the same size as an adult. That's why children seem to have such large eyes: their skull is smaller than an adult, but they have the same size eyes. The only large-scale change to your eyes over the years is a slight shift in flexibility of different tissues (resulting in various vision issues), excluding serious degenerative issues.
No, some of the blind spots are due to the location of the fovea. You have a HUGE "blindspot" however that corresponds to the roughly 200 degrees that amount to the back of your head (its more than 180 because you actually cant see directly to the left or right while looking straight ahead).
"Of course it is, and the question becomes if evolution has made 12 yearolds[sic] sexual beings at the age of 12, why is the age of concent[sic] 18?"
Let's look at why that argument makes no sense:
If evolution has made humans capable of killing each other, why are there laws against killing?
If evolution has made humans liars at any age, why are there laws against lying in some situations?
I could go on. The point is this: human laws exist to curb human nature. I forget the philosopher who said it, but laws are only for criminals. If we could trust everyone to behave in mutually altruistic was (assuming somehow that everyone agreed on what that meant), we wouldn't need laws. Laws exist to exert normative force on those who would otherwise transgress.
What this comes down to is that we have laws restricting the age of consent so as to prevent the abuse of children by adults. The state has a valid interest in preventing emotionally immature children from being taken-advantage-of by malicious adults.
No, Reeves, as in Johnny in the titular movie. You just didn't notice that the parent was talking about a different movie (look at the subject line).
Especially since the plural of virus is viruses, according to most computer lexicons...=P
Once again kiddies: it is SOLID case-law that shrink-wrap agreements, EULA's and ToS agreements ARE LEGALLY ENFORCEABLE. Period. There are no cases saying otherwise, and there are several affirming this. This is a US company, and he had to sign a contract with them to get an Apple account (which is required to purchase a song, even through his software). He therefore transacted in American territory. He's a criminal. We shouldn't be praising him: we should be criticising him for BREAKING THE LAW!
Whoops, you're right. I did in fact mean Daniel. That'll teach me to post without looking it up first.
I didn't mean to insult ancient Hebrews, but rather to point out that such inaccuracies indicate that - if nothing else - the religious texts were written by men. Even if you beleive they were religiously inspired, there are inaccuracies present which demand that you not interpret those texts literally.
I presume by hybrid species he's referring to things like a mule. Mules result when horses and donkeys breed. Mules are infertile (and thus aren't technically a species, since species refers to a group that can reproduce amongst themselves and themselves only). They can be created though because donkeys and horses are extremely closely related.
I can't remember a good "earth is flat" quote, but God stops the sun in the sky for Daniel. He doesn't stop the earth, he stops the SUN. This means the bible-writer believed the sun orbited the earth. If an omniscient god was telling you what happened, wouldn't he let you know that it was the other way around?
Marketing has always been (and always will be, and always should be) "scummy". By definition, it is the practice of making people want things that they don't yet want. It is convincing someone that despite not needing your product before, they need it now.
What do you want them to do? Seriously, what should they do? Just blandly (and uninterestedly) present the bare facts and let you decide for yourself?
When they say 'no online record', they're likely referring to the fact that neither Westlaw nor Lexis - the two companies employed by every legal organization in the country - have any record of such a lawsuit in their files (which are available online to those of us who have accounts).
And you, apparently, have never appreciated being in one.
People like Yanni?
No, those aren't the only options. In fact there's a third option, precisely the one described by Ron Moore in his blog:
The ship remains stationary, but somehow manages to bend space around it. He used [now common] analogy of a ship in space being like a small object sitting on a peice of flat paper. If you fold the paper, everything 'on' the paper doesn't notice any difference, but once its folded properly the ship can punch a small [worm]hole so that it can move through the interstitial area between the [now closer] points on the paper. The ship simply ceases to be at one point, and appears at the next without any change in velocity.
Such a system, if possible, wouldn't involve any intertial issues.
Arguably they increased the mass of Jupiter. Frankly, I don't want to see the scale you'd need to weigh jupiter on the surface of the earth.
No. He goes "What are these doing up here?" Its /., the land of the nitpick.
I don't know about you, but I've never once had a CC stolen/lost. I don't know -anyone- who has had 10 CCs stolen/lost, much less 10 cc's stolen sequentially (which is a better analogy, since one print id's all of your CCs here).