Lets remind ourselves what the word actually means. Merriam Webster defines it as the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion, and the pertinent definition of terror it gives is violence (as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands [insurrection and revolutionary terror]
Computer viruses are of course nowhere near this. But since there will now be special rules for "terrorism", it is not surprising to see everyone scrambling to get classified as a terrorist victim. We've seen it before with people trying to get classified as disaster victims, minority members, or any other form of state sanctioned victimhood. It's just how people are.
The pressure will be to get every form of non trivial crime defined as terrorism, and morally equal to killing 7000 people with hijacked airplanes.
If you set up a computer to be a Tivo replacement, you are still spending money on it. The computer very likely costs more than a Tivo. You have to realize that while it is recording, it's essentially useless for doing anything else on. And a Tivo always records, so you getthe live buffer.
And you'll end up with a much less useful software and fewer features. I know they seem like sillt luxuries untill you've tried them, but they become indispensible very soon.
That's a good feature, and OS 9 is pretty pathetic in the handling of file types, even if it has the right data in the file system. But the problem is that the knowledge of what's in the file has to be in the users head, when the computer could easily keep track of it.
If it's your own files that you've worked with recently, that pretty OK. But if you're dealing with other peoples files or stuff you did years ago, you'll have to resort to a lot of trial an derror.
You're certainly right that managing big software projects is hard. But the original poster is also right that there is a very lazy attitude in the business. I blame the job market, where there has been such a shortage of engineers that anyone who has seen a computer on a postcard has been able to get a job as a developer, do shoddy work, and not only keep his job but get raises and management responsibility.
I hope the current slump in the industry will weed out most of the bums. I'll gladly take a pay cut if I get to work with serious professionals who care about doing good work.
Street cred: 15 years of professional programming. I produce about 1 bug a year, and I don't think I'm any super genius. I just try hard.
Saying that "violence is our only option" is both right and wrong. Right because there has to be a violent response. Wrong because there are a great number of different violent options.
Carpet bombing Kabul is one violent option that would fill the world with disgust. But it's not the only violent option.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the cautious and sensible US reaction so far. Today's attacks seem to have been at serious military targets, with little potential for civilian casualities.
A minimum of thought shows that this makes no sense. The protestor is against harming innocent people, as he states in step 4. But hitting back at the puncher would not be harming an innocent, so the whole thing is just completely stupid and pointless.
A legal process should be about determining the truth of what actually was done, and whether it broke any laws.
In a reliable legal system you should be able to hold the same trial 10 times, with competent lawyers representing both sides, and get the same verdict 10 times.
Clearly the US legal system is not that kind of a system.
It seems to me that there is a problem with high tech in a precedent based judical system. Common law seems to be based on the assumption that things pretty much stay the same.
The first case to be determined regarding some new and revolutionizing tech development is bound to be heard by judges and lawyers who aren't familiar with it, probbaly somewhat scared and confused by it, and when the full consequences of it is not understood. That sounds like the wirst possible time and way to determine how to handle it in all future.
What happened to the law that cars could only drive 5 mph and have a guy with a red flag walking in front of it?
One of Ashcrofts first orders was to let the INS hold people indefinitely, with no charge. There is a few hundreds rotting away as we speak. And this is no martial law. It will not be lifted when the enemy is defeated. Of course, terrorism can never be fully defeated, but that's yet another story.
Mountains usually have snow and ice on them, so you'd get a million reflections. Not to mention this would kill off all animal and civilian life. Or that this laser would signal very clearly where you are to anyone with hostile intentions.
The last people to starve in a famine are the ones with guns. You could starve out the Talibans, but only after the other 24 million Afghanis died first.
That would be a genocide 4 times as big as the Holocaust. I don't think it would stop people from hating the US.
... but with the people there are in the world today...
There are people like that in government too. They will not hesitate to use the data on you to destroy you, if and when it suits their purposes. Learn from history. For example, study how FBI and J Edgar Hoover abused much lesser powers.
We must do something.
X is something.
Therefore we must do X.
This can be used as an argument for any X. The scary part is that it is used and that a lot of people actually buy it!
I wish I could come up with something real funny about an arrogant Mensa member who can't spell, but nothing that's funnier than the naked fact comes to mind...
Crisis and Leviathan is a book by Robert Higgs that looks at how government power grows during crises, and does not shrink back nearly as much when the crise is over.
I'll take the liberty of quoting an Amazon reader review:
Reviewer: Donald J. Boudreaux from Irvington-on-Hudson, NY:
Robert Higgs is a first-rate economist and economic historian who sets out a provocative thesis -- namely, that governments exploit crises (real and fabricated) as excuses to grow and to strip people of their wealth and liberties. Higgs skillfully and carefully tests this thesis against history. The thesis stands. Governments do indeed exploit crises as opportunities to confiscate ever-greater powers. After each crisis, the amount of power recently added to government's stock might shrink somewhat, but very seldom back to what it was prior to the crisis. This is one of the most important and compelling books published during the 1980s.
You didn't have to do anything as blatant as what you describe to be killed.
In Nazi germany 6 million were killed for just having the wrong parents.
I Stalinist Russia the security forces, like every one else, had production targets and has to produce a certain number of executions or face the consequences. Anyone who was within convenient reach could and did get killed.
So the citizens of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union who had no freedom were the most secure people in history? Somehow the dozens of millions of them that were murdered by their own government seem to contradict that
J Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for 48 years, and became the most powerful man in US history (including all the presidents) by spying on it's citizens and using that information.
I think this shows that the dangers are very real and that the government can not be trusted to only use spying powers for good. They'll use it however they please.
Of course, spying technology has advanced immensly since then.
The stated objective for this war is to eradicate terrorism. Not only to catch the people responsible for the attack, but to actually eradicate any terrorism. Bush representatives keep saying that he war will not be over until that is achieved.
It's obvious that such a goal can not possibly be acheived. We're not even talking about the in itself impossible task of catching everyone who has commited terror, but the claimed objective is to somehow stop any terror attacks to even occur, ever.
So what does this mean? Are we entering a state of permanent war until something that will never happen happens?
An other very clear problem with all this is that "terrorism" is a vague and undefined term. One persons terrorist is anothers freedom fighter. There really are no clear lines. So the objective is undefined and arbitrary.
Just based on these two issues alone, I think this may end very badly.
But don't forget that if face recognition software was used, the terrorists would know that, and would have worked around it. Either by not using people who were wanted, or by routine plastic surgery.
Just as an example, estimates differ, but 400-2000 innocent civilians were killed when the US invaded Panama to arrest a suspected drug smuggler some years back.
Beside the obviously illegal invasion of a soverign country and the breach of jurisdiction, Panama now has more drug traffic than ever.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets remind ourselves what the word actually means. Merriam Webster defines it as the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion , and the pertinent definition of terror it gives is violence (as bombing) committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands [insurrection and revolutionary terror]
Computer viruses are of course nowhere near this. But since there will now be special rules for "terrorism", it is not surprising to see everyone scrambling to get classified as a terrorist victim. We've seen it before with people trying to get classified as disaster victims, minority members, or any other form of state sanctioned victimhood. It's just how people are.
The pressure will be to get every form of non trivial crime defined as terrorism, and morally equal to killing 7000 people with hijacked airplanes.
If you set up a computer to be a Tivo replacement, you are still spending money on it. The computer very likely costs more than a Tivo. You have to realize that while it is recording, it's essentially useless for doing anything else on. And a Tivo always records, so you getthe live buffer.
And you'll end up with a much less useful software and fewer features. I know they seem like sillt luxuries untill you've tried them, but they become indispensible very soon.
That's a good feature, and OS 9 is pretty pathetic in the handling of file types, even if it has the right data in the file system. But the problem is that the knowledge of what's in the file has to be in the users head, when the computer could easily keep track of it.
If it's your own files that you've worked with recently, that pretty OK. But if you're dealing with other peoples files or stuff you did years ago, you'll have to resort to a lot of trial an derror.
You're certainly right that managing big software projects is hard. But the original poster is also right that there is a very lazy attitude in the business. I blame the job market, where there has been such a shortage of engineers that anyone who has seen a computer on a postcard has been able to get a job as a developer, do shoddy work, and not only keep his job but get raises and management responsibility.
I hope the current slump in the industry will weed out most of the bums. I'll gladly take a pay cut if I get to work with serious professionals who care about doing good work.
Street cred: 15 years of professional programming. I produce about 1 bug a year, and I don't think I'm any super genius. I just try hard.
Saying that "violence is our only option" is both right and wrong. Right because there has to be a violent response. Wrong because there are a great number of different violent options.
Carpet bombing Kabul is one violent option that would fill the world with disgust. But it's not the only violent option.
I've been pleasantly surprised by the cautious and sensible US reaction so far. Today's attacks seem to have been at serious military targets, with little potential for civilian casualities.
A minimum of thought shows that this makes no sense. The protestor is against harming innocent people, as he states in step 4. But hitting back at the puncher would not be harming an innocent, so the whole thing is just completely stupid and pointless.
Well, I've read far more about Buffy than is healthy, and I've never heard of an Onion connection. What the #&^%#$& are you talking about?
A legal process should be about determining the truth of what actually was done, and whether it broke any laws.
In a reliable legal system you should be able to hold the same trial 10 times, with competent lawyers representing both sides, and get the same verdict 10 times.
Clearly the US legal system is not that kind of a system.
It seems to me that there is a problem with high tech in a precedent based judical system. Common law seems to be based on the assumption that things pretty much stay the same.
The first case to be determined regarding some new and revolutionizing tech development is bound to be heard by judges and lawyers who aren't familiar with it, probbaly somewhat scared and confused by it, and when the full consequences of it is not understood. That sounds like the wirst possible time and way to determine how to handle it in all future.
What happened to the law that cars could only drive 5 mph and have a guy with a red flag walking in front of it?
One of Ashcrofts first orders was to let the INS hold people indefinitely, with no charge. There is a few hundreds rotting away as we speak. And this is no martial law. It will not be lifted when the enemy is defeated. Of course, terrorism can never be fully defeated, but that's yet another story.
Yeah, but this was probably before sales tax was introduced in the US.
Taxes grew grew by 1000-2000% during the 20th censtury. At least that won't happen this century...
But this law specifically makes giving hacking advice illegal, and classes it as terrorism. I don't think there is a similar law for murder.
Mountains usually have snow and ice on them, so you'd get a million reflections. Not to mention this would kill off all animal and civilian life. Or that this laser would signal very clearly where you are to anyone with hostile intentions.
The last people to starve in a famine are the ones with guns. You could starve out the Talibans, but only after the other 24 million Afghanis died first.
That would be a genocide 4 times as big as the Holocaust. I don't think it would stop people from hating the US.
... but with the people there are in the world today...
There are people like that in government too. They will not hesitate to use the data on you to destroy you, if and when it suits their purposes. Learn from history. For example, study how FBI and J Edgar Hoover abused much lesser powers.
This is a well known logical fallacy.
We must do something.
X is something.
Therefore we must do X.
This can be used as an argument for any X. The scary part is that it is used and that a lot of people actually buy it!
I wish I could come up with something real funny about an arrogant Mensa member who can't spell, but nothing that's funnier than the naked fact comes to mind...
Then again, killing thousands of innocent people is even more against islam than pr0n, so don't be too sure of anything about these guys.
If you read the article, you'll find it was a regular poll, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates on Sept. 13 and 14.
Crisis and Leviathan is a book by Robert Higgs that looks at how government power grows during crises, and does not shrink back nearly as much when the crise is over.
I'll take the liberty of quoting an Amazon reader review:
Reviewer: Donald J. Boudreaux from Irvington-on-Hudson, NY:
Robert Higgs is a first-rate economist and economic historian who sets out a provocative thesis -- namely, that governments exploit crises (real and fabricated) as excuses to grow and to strip people of their wealth and liberties. Higgs skillfully and carefully tests this thesis against history. The thesis stands. Governments do indeed exploit crises as opportunities to confiscate ever-greater powers. After each crisis, the amount of power recently added to government's stock might shrink somewhat, but very seldom back to what it was prior to the crisis. This is one of the most important and compelling books published during the 1980s.
You didn't have to do anything as blatant as what you describe to be killed.
In Nazi germany 6 million were killed for just having the wrong parents.
I Stalinist Russia the security forces, like every one else, had production targets and has to produce a certain number of executions or face the consequences. Anyone who was within convenient reach could and did get killed.
So the citizens of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union who had no freedom were the most secure people in history? Somehow the dozens of millions of them that were murdered by their own government seem to contradict that
J Edgar Hoover ran the FBI for 48 years, and became the most powerful man in US history (including all the presidents) by spying on it's citizens and using that information.
I think this shows that the dangers are very real and that the government can not be trusted to only use spying powers for good. They'll use it however they please.
Of course, spying technology has advanced immensly since then.
The stated objective for this war is to eradicate terrorism. Not only to catch the people responsible for the attack, but to actually eradicate any terrorism. Bush representatives keep saying that he war will not be over until that is achieved.
It's obvious that such a goal can not possibly be acheived. We're not even talking about the in itself impossible task of catching everyone who has commited terror, but the claimed objective is to somehow stop any terror attacks to even occur, ever.
So what does this mean? Are we entering a state of permanent war until something that will never happen happens?
An other very clear problem with all this is that "terrorism" is a vague and undefined term. One persons terrorist is anothers freedom fighter. There really are no clear lines. So the objective is undefined and arbitrary.
Just based on these two issues alone, I think this may end very badly.
But don't forget that if face recognition software was used, the terrorists would know that, and would have worked around it. Either by not using people who were wanted, or by routine plastic surgery.
Just as an example, estimates differ, but 400-2000 innocent civilians were killed when the US invaded Panama to arrest a suspected drug smuggler some years back.
Beside the obviously illegal invasion of a soverign country and the breach of jurisdiction, Panama now has more drug traffic than ever.