Huh? Have you ever fired a gun? Try aiming it at the sun sometimes, and see if you hit.
Common sense says the sun is almost impossible to hit... however, this doesn't really matter.
Shooting nuclear waste into the sun is just one specific variation of the "launch it into space" disposal method. Firing a big clump of waste on a well-documented 10,000 year orbit is just as good for the practical purpose of removing it as a hazard on earth.
the sun's gravitation will suck it in
When was the last time you remember the sun sucking ANYTHING in? Probably never. In all likelyhood, all non-stellar matter that you've ever seen is orbiting around the sun, not falling into it.
Yeah, those 300,00 dead in the nuclear attacks on Japan certainly look horrible compared to the millions of air pollution deaths.
His comment was even worse than you say. Comparing accidental pollution deaths to intentional killing is just wrong.
May as well talk about all the victims of WWII who were killed thanks to petroluem-fueled vehicles. (The entire "blitzkreig" strategy that enabled Nazis to overrun Europe was based on rapid mobility enabled by the recently perfected petroleum trucks + tanks)
Only "easy" in the same way that it's easy for an obese American to lose weight- she simply eats less. But yet... although they claim to wish to be thinner, they can't seem to do it.
Mandating even half-assed fuel efficiency standards could improve air quality, reduce your reliance on foreign fuels and help your balance of trade.
All courses like that, though, are forms of "governmental interference in free markets / personal freedom", and thus will be difficult to popularize. That's always the case when internalizing external costs.
Fuel efficiency, for example, means sacrificing your own near-term personal safety (or travel speed) to improve conditions for yet-unborne strangers around the world. And it's just hard to convince someone to favor another's welfare over her own.
Maybe so. I certainly couldn't detect a point in there- he just likes to bash on nuclear power, and the article was a fine target.
and that Lovelock offers no practical solution to actually make any of this happen
Wha? Sterling is the one who has no inkling of a concrete solution. Lovelock at least gives a partial solution- Bruce does nothing but attempt to knock it down with invalid objections.
Sterling: Do you have the clout to give us one of those
Of course no one human has the "clout" to accomplish anything like realigning the international economic/industrial system. Lovelock isn't Superman. All any individual can do is share his views and try to convince others of the same.
Lovelock believes that nuclear power is the only energy source that can come close to replacing petrofuel, and he's honestly saying so. But Sterling comes along and yells "No! Nukes bad Nukes BAD!"- how does that help anything?
And then, at the end of the piece:... what we need is genuine industrial policy agreed on by the powers-that be. A new Kyoto, genuine international agreement with coherent steps to deal with the menace.
So what he essentially says is "We need somebody to solve this problem". Uh, duh... can you say "Content-free platitude"? Of course we need a solution, and somebody will have to figure it out. That doesn't mean that anyone who isn't the president of an industrialized state is forbidden to talk about it.
The only way we'll get a "genuine international agreement" is if the people of earth start to care about solving it- and while Lovelock has tried to advance the debate, Sterling is the one knocking him down with a pessimistic attitude: "You can't do everything, so why do anything?"
"Oh! Bruce Sterling, on the internet. A cyberpunk author (that's nerdy!) and responding to a previously covered Slashdot topic. This'll make a good story for sure."
Bruce Sterling's "response" adds no substance to the debate. His rejoiners come in two forms:
No, you're wrong.
No, you're wrong, and here's a joke.
Bruce never even touches Lovlock's central thesis: that at current rates of usage and current estimation of reserves, oil will stop meeting our energy needs within just a few decades, and atomic fission is the only replacement we know can take it's place.
If Sterling's comments are taken at face value, then he wants to see a return to 1700s-style labor-intensive agriculture.
You'll seriously get a higher quality of discussion just re-reading last week's Slashdot, rather than looking for any insight in that blob^Hg.
Maybe you miss that the term "McCarthyism" is a negative one.
I thought so too, for a while. But it turns out that popular authors like Ann Coulter have rehabilitated McCarthy's image. They have now "proved" he was a good guy.
maybe you don't realize that this period ended somewhere in the mid-to-late 50's.
One of the longest-surviving relics of that period is the "Pledge of Allegiance", which McCarthyites in Congress modified to violate the 1st Amendment.
Encrypt the email in an attachment to them if it matters so much to you, and you trust THEM to not scan it or do other subversive things to it.
I wish that were true. But the principle of "wiretap" laws common across the USA is that senders of a message are not required to trust the recipients. If someone willingly makes a phone call and provides you some information, and you record it to your computer without her knowledge, you're now a felon.
This new California law is somewhat following that same pattern- giving email the same "protection" as telephone.
As long as they attribute it (which in some cases would probably make this slip of judgement worse), then there's no legal issue with this that I am aware of.
100% wrong. They have committed copyright infringement, an offense for which the Federal DOJ can now prosecute directly.
The matter of attribution is much less important legally. Non-attribution is usually plagiarism, which is not a crime but can get you banished from academic and publishing industries. Plagiarism is only a crime if it supports some other fraud.
The *ONLY* way you can ever say that a thing is nonexistant, is as a default starting hypothesis.
Hello there! I've just installed a deadly shark-mounted laser-beam in your bathtub. Now don't try and tell me it doesn't exist...
There is *NO WAY* you could prove that.
To say otherwise is to believe in leprechauns and santa claus
Wrong. Leprechauns and Santa Claus are in different categories. Santa Claus is scientifically disprovable. There are certain traits attached to Santa-Claus-ness that we can test for: primarily the annual appearance of unexplanable gifts.
Failing to locate such evidence constitutes solid proof that either Santa Claus doesn't exist, or that our definition of Santa Claus is wrong (which is the same as non-existence).
Leprechauns, however, are by definition willing and (supernaturally) able to conceal their existence. They can only be "disproved" by following Occam's Razor, as you suggest.
They do not. "Crippling" DRM would be provided in the hardware, and it would control your ability to manipulate all kinds of data- not just games.
But so long as PC gamers can find a no-cd patch by 5 minutes of reading #crakz, the platform doesn't have meaningful DRM.
ensuring that no-one's cheating in LAN games
On a LAN, you should be close enough to the other players to prevent cheating by simple social pressure.
I've still got my non-DRM'd PCs anyway.
Microsoft would like it if those dangerous, terrorist tools are eliminated in the future. If the XBox-PC hybrid takes off, then they can eat away at the non-DRM PC market through a variety of corrosive techniques.
if they do that, it's not the internet any more. And if they call themselves "internet providers," they're lying.
Not really. The "internet" is technically defined in IETF RFCs for IP, UDP, and TCP. Anything which implements those standards is "internet"- if they intentionally break one of those standards, you can argue that it's fraud for them to claim to be an ISP.
However, the standards don't forbid slower passage for certain kinds of packets- but they do require that all packets be delivered eventually if possible.
Therefore, most all "ISPs" are lying when they claim to give "internet access", because nearly all of them block traffic to certain port numbers. But pushing certain packets to the back of the queue doesn't make them any worse in terms of overall compliance.
Uh, maybe because AOL owns ~25% of US home internet users? AOL is still a big gatekeeper for the internet. They have the power to force broad software changes, regardless of the relative quality of the particular software in question.
Few users are sufficiently motivated or knowledgable to install Firefox on their own, but they'll have no choice but to sit through a 15 minute "Updating your AOL software" progress-bar.
When AOL flips a switch to change their default browser from IE to something else, they'll suck down IE's dominance by 10% on the very first day. It won't kill IE, but it'll increase the pressure for website authors to write to W3C standards instead of Microsoft conventions. That can only be a good thing.
if you've ever installed Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, Fedora... or most desktop-oriented distributions, really... you'll know that a ---- video/audio players ---- and various other useful applications are installed by default.
Wrong. The lack of pre-installed video-players is getting to be one of the major complaints about new Linux installs.
And RedHat/Fedora doesn't even include an MP3 audio player! (For reasons which they think are pretty important, but that few desktop users understand)
Isn't in their interest to get the client out to as many people as possible?
Apparently not- or, as a greedy company, they would've done so.
This could mean one of several things: (1) Macromedia plans for Flash players to become a profit-center in the future, maybe by licensing players to mobile-phone companies or something
(2) Macromedia profits from selling Flash-authoring tools, but those tools would be easily replaced by Open Source versions if there was a good Open Source flash player to work from.
(3) Macromedia is afraid that an Open Source flashplayer would lead to someone distributing a modified version, effectively forking the file-format and confusing web-browsers who can no longer view all flash-based content the same way.
The poster is arguing from the faulty logic that runs counter to both OSS and the facts of the Internet's history.
I can hardly find any logic behind your post, faulty or not. (Are you arguing from the Pollyanna theory, or what?)
That's a whole lot of text you gave; all of it wrong or irrelevant. I won't bother to quote each line and say which is which- I'll just point out the most blatantly bad parts.
The early internet was open and standards compliant.
Yes, and it was completely vulnerable. FTP and telnet passwords floating around in the clear. Then, when pranksters like RTM released worms which abused those vulnerabilities, people started to care about security. And what was my point again?
Nothing was private.
That sentence seems key to a lot of your later invocation of the word "privacy". But it's also the most irrelevant part of your post. Are you putting forth an alternative approach to computer security: remove the right to privacy from every human on earth? That's an interesting idea, and could work... but there obviously would be strong philosophical and practical objections. It turns out that quite a few people dislike the idea of global police states!
With or without 'virus writers' and their ilk, the proactive people will continue to survive and excel. The reactive people would die by natural selection without the need for the 'virus writers.'
This viewpoint contradicts facts on the ground. Are you claiming that Microsoft is already dead? Or do you instead claim that the Outlook fixes they made over the past 4 years were not in reaction to worms?
Hackers are good, proactive explorers that usually help the system. Crakers are the people we would like to see put behind bars. They neigther help nor seek to improve software. Crackers want your software to be buggy and develop more holes over time.
This irrelevant argument is about the definition of words. You are attempting to propagate definitions in conflict with original meaning- presumably because it makes you feel better, since you like to think of self-identified "hackers" in a positive light.
Fact: The first "Computer Hacker" was an MIT student who climbed through a window to feed punchcards without permission. "Hacker" has always implied using something you weren't supposed to. Fact: The first "cracker" was a man who broke into wallsafes. Fact: Today, computer-related "crackers" are people who either penetrate passwords, or edit copy-protection out of software. They are a small subset of all hackers. Someone who runs a DDOS or releases a virus is not a cracker, because he has not gotten access to any otherwise "secured" data. Mafiaboy was not a cracker.
You cannot plan and execute theft or damage in public (doesn't stop the stupid from trying, but hey.) You need a private place to ensure surprise.
Hey, if you want to eliminate the possibility of anybody having a "private place", then more power to you. (I actually support the idea of a zero-privacy society in the abstract, but recognize it as absurd eutopianism)
Will you be making these same arguments when Virus writers are making real biological viruses that kill millions of people instead of computer viruses that lose millions of dollars?
Seeing as the targets of those viruses are not completely artificial, no. Computer software CAN be made immune to worms. Human beings CANNOT.
I know that making software immune to all potential exploits is theoretically impossible, as it would depend on too much perfection from imperfect humans. But for any particular worm/virus/exploit, software can be changed to resist it completely.
In the computer world there is no equivalent to a killer like HIV surviving in the wild for years or decades, because any worm/virus which was that much of a threat would be explicitly coded against in the next release of all host platforms.
In a year or two, all vulnerable software on the internet can be replaced or patched. We can't patch humans against viral vulnerabilites, so the computer-virus:biological-virus analogy goes nowhere.
Script kiddies, hackers and crackers being able to make biological viruses is not that far off.
Wrong. Although it might someday become easy to build a new genetically-engineered virus, kiddies/hackers/crackers will be no more capable or predisposed to it that than anyone else.
The most likely author of an artificial virus would be a professional bio-engineer with sympathies to a terrorist ideology.
The subject of how to prevent this is an interesting one, but divergent from the prevention of computer worms. In the end, we will probably wind up heavily restricting the distribution of bio-engineering equipment, and carefully investigating+controlling anyone authorized to use it. This will slow down the rate of biotechnology progress, but I think the public will find safety worth that cost.
It's not plausible to restrict access to computer-programming tools to a similar extent. We'll never be able to stop Islamic Fundamentalists zealots from installing MS VB on laptops in their hidden mountain fortress.
Their composite bows become ineffective in the damp, the longbow comes into its own.
That's somewhat an anachronism. At the time of the Mongol invasion (1200s), the longbow was still limited to the English Isles (it was a Welsh invention). It wasn't until the middle of the 1300s that the longbow was introduced to mainland Europe by English soldiers invading France.
(Not as if the Mongols could've gotten as far as France anyhow... there were other obstacles before them... and even in best conditions, it'd be a decade-long ride)
and ride around the Himalayas to spread from China all the way to Persia.
Ride AROUND, not OVER. Much easier, and therefore irrelevant.
For a book that explores why Western Europeans ended up being so successful, I would highly recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
Why do you mention that book, if you're in the middle of denying it's premise? The whole point of GGS is that geography is the most important factor in history.
I mean, that bit about Europe suceeding because it's less flat than China is directly from GGS (chapter 16, if you want to play along at home).
Here's what Jared Diamond wrote:
China's... broad east-west expanse and relatively gentle terrain... facilitated north-south exchanges. All these geographic factors contributed to the early cultural and political unification of China, whereas western Europe, with a similar area but a more rugged terrain... has resisted cultural and political unification to this day. (page 331)
No it doesn't. An EULA is a licence for you, the end user, which tells you what you can do once you've got the software.
So remember- if you own multiple computers, download to ALL of them before you install it on ANY of them- because once you agree to the EULA, you're no longer allow to transfer it!
Insurance companies are in no way totally funded by what you pay for an insurance premium. Not even close, in the vast majority of cases.
The fact that businesses can be part of conglomerates including unrelated enterprises is meaningless.
Insurance as a business activity (not as a company) will not survive unless totally funded by premiums. Otherwise, we couldn't even call it a "business"- it'd be charity.
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by cracking water... with nuclear plants.
Oh? Why not just build a nice long (20 km) electromagnetic ramp, and fire the waste off railgun-style?
says that if I shoot something at the sun
Huh? Have you ever fired a gun? Try aiming it at the sun sometimes, and see if you hit.
Common sense says the sun is almost impossible to hit... however, this doesn't really matter.
Shooting nuclear waste into the sun is just one specific variation of the "launch it into space" disposal method. Firing a big clump of waste on a well-documented 10,000 year orbit is just as good for the practical purpose of removing it as a hazard on earth.
the sun's gravitation will suck it in
When was the last time you remember the sun sucking ANYTHING in? Probably never. In all likelyhood, all non-stellar matter that you've ever seen is orbiting around the sun, not falling into it.
Yeah, those 300,00 dead in the nuclear attacks on Japan certainly look horrible compared to the millions of air pollution deaths.
His comment was even worse than you say. Comparing accidental pollution deaths to intentional killing is just wrong.
May as well talk about all the victims of WWII who were killed thanks to petroluem-fueled vehicles. (The entire "blitzkreig" strategy that enabled Nazis to overrun Europe was based on rapid mobility enabled by the recently perfected petroleum trucks + tanks)
There are a lot of easy ways to save energy.
Only "easy" in the same way that it's easy for an obese American to lose weight- she simply eats less. But yet... although they claim to wish to be thinner, they can't seem to do it.
Mandating even half-assed fuel efficiency standards could improve air quality, reduce your reliance on foreign fuels and help your balance of trade.
All courses like that, though, are forms of "governmental interference in free markets / personal freedom", and thus will be difficult to popularize. That's always the case when internalizing external costs.
Fuel efficiency, for example, means sacrificing your own near-term personal safety (or travel speed) to improve conditions for yet-unborne strangers around the world. And it's just hard to convince someone to favor another's welfare over her own.
I think this comment misses Bruce's point.
... what we need is genuine industrial policy agreed on by the powers-that be. A new Kyoto, genuine international agreement with coherent steps to deal with the menace.
Maybe so. I certainly couldn't detect a point in there- he just likes to bash on nuclear power, and the article was a fine target.
and that Lovelock offers no practical solution to actually make any of this happen
Wha? Sterling is the one who has no inkling of a concrete solution. Lovelock at least gives a partial solution- Bruce does nothing but attempt to knock it down with invalid objections.
Sterling: Do you have the clout to give us one of those
Of course no one human has the "clout" to accomplish anything like realigning the international economic/industrial system. Lovelock isn't Superman. All any individual can do is share his views and try to convince others of the same.
Lovelock believes that nuclear power is the only energy source that can come close to replacing petrofuel, and he's honestly saying so. But Sterling comes along and yells "No! Nukes bad Nukes BAD!"- how does that help anything?
And then, at the end of the piece:
So what he essentially says is "We need somebody to solve this problem". Uh, duh... can you say "Content-free platitude"? Of course we need a solution, and somebody will have to figure it out. That doesn't mean that anyone who isn't the president of an industrialized state is forbidden to talk about it.
The only way we'll get a "genuine international agreement" is if the people of earth start to care about solving it- and while Lovelock has tried to advance the debate, Sterling is the one knocking him down with a pessimistic attitude: "You can't do everything, so why do anything?"
What the hell was timothy thinking?
"Oh! Bruce Sterling, on the internet. A cyberpunk author (that's nerdy!) and responding to a previously covered Slashdot topic. This'll make a good story for sure."
Bruce never even touches Lovlock's central thesis: that at current rates of usage and current estimation of reserves, oil will stop meeting our energy needs within just a few decades, and atomic fission is the only replacement we know can take it's place.
If Sterling's comments are taken at face value, then he wants to see a return to 1700s-style labor-intensive agriculture.
You'll seriously get a higher quality of discussion just re-reading last week's Slashdot, rather than looking for any insight in that blob^Hg.
Maybe you miss that the term "McCarthyism" is a negative one.
I thought so too, for a while. But it turns out that popular authors like Ann Coulter have rehabilitated McCarthy's image. They have now "proved" he was a good guy.
maybe you don't realize that this period ended somewhere in the mid-to-late 50's.
One of the longest-surviving relics of that period is the "Pledge of Allegiance", which McCarthyites in Congress modified to violate the 1st Amendment.
I'm sure the files are still out there.
Wrong. Perens decided it was pointless to keep the files up after the USA government started providing its own free downloads.
But anyway, the data he had was just TIGER, which Chilltower has already decided are too hard to use.
Whatever this guy did, it doesn't show up in Mozilla.
Perfectly visible in Mozilla 1.6, or Firefox 0.8
Encrypt the email in an attachment to them if it matters so much to you, and you trust THEM to not scan it or do other subversive things to it.
I wish that were true. But the principle of "wiretap" laws common across the USA is that senders of a message are not required to trust the recipients. If someone willingly makes a phone call and provides you some information, and you record it to your computer without her knowledge, you're now a felon.
This new California law is somewhat following that same pattern- giving email the same "protection" as telephone.
As long as they attribute it (which in some cases would probably make this slip of judgement worse), then there's no legal issue with this that I am aware of.
100% wrong. They have committed copyright infringement, an offense for which the Federal DOJ can now prosecute directly.
The matter of attribution is much less important legally. Non-attribution is usually plagiarism, which is not a crime but can get you banished from academic and publishing industries. Plagiarism is only a crime if it supports some other fraud.
The *ONLY* way you can ever say that a thing is nonexistant, is as a default starting hypothesis.
Hello there! I've just installed a deadly shark-mounted laser-beam in your bathtub. Now don't try and tell me it doesn't exist...
There is *NO WAY* you could prove that.
To say otherwise is to believe in leprechauns and santa claus
Wrong. Leprechauns and Santa Claus are in different categories. Santa Claus is scientifically disprovable. There are certain traits attached to Santa-Claus-ness that we can test for: primarily the annual appearance of unexplanable gifts.
Failing to locate such evidence constitutes solid proof that either Santa Claus doesn't exist, or that our definition of Santa Claus is wrong (which is the same as non-existence).
Leprechauns, however, are by definition willing and (supernaturally) able to conceal their existence. They can only be "disproved" by following Occam's Razor, as you suggest.
PC gamers already have crippling DRM.
They do not. "Crippling" DRM would be provided in the hardware, and it would control your ability to manipulate all kinds of data- not just games.
But so long as PC gamers can find a no-cd patch by 5 minutes of reading #crakz, the platform doesn't have meaningful DRM.
ensuring that no-one's cheating in LAN games
On a LAN, you should be close enough to the other players to prevent cheating by simple social pressure.
I've still got my non-DRM'd PCs anyway.
Microsoft would like it if those dangerous, terrorist tools are eliminated in the future. If the XBox-PC hybrid takes off, then they can eat away at the non-DRM PC market through a variety of corrosive techniques.
if they do that, it's not the internet any more. And if they call themselves "internet providers," they're lying.
Not really. The "internet" is technically defined in IETF RFCs for IP, UDP, and TCP. Anything which implements those standards is "internet"- if they intentionally break one of those standards, you can argue that it's fraud for them to claim to be an ISP.
However, the standards don't forbid slower passage for certain kinds of packets- but they do require that all packets be delivered eventually if possible.
Therefore, most all "ISPs" are lying when they claim to give "internet access", because nearly all of them block traffic to certain port numbers. But pushing certain packets to the back of the queue doesn't make them any worse in terms of overall compliance.
I'm glad AOL is doing this, but why bother?
Uh, maybe because AOL owns ~25% of US home internet users? AOL is still a big gatekeeper for the internet. They have the power to force broad software changes, regardless of the relative quality of the particular software in question.
Few users are sufficiently motivated or knowledgable to install Firefox on their own, but they'll have no choice but to sit through a 15 minute "Updating your AOL software" progress-bar.
When AOL flips a switch to change their default browser from IE to something else, they'll suck down IE's dominance by 10% on the very first day. It won't kill IE, but it'll increase the pressure for website authors to write to W3C standards instead of Microsoft conventions. That can only be a good thing.
(you can't remove Explorer, but there is an option to hide the toolbar icon and desktop shortcuts.)
You have the Clinton Department of Justice to thank for that freedom...
if you've ever installed Red Hat, Mandrake, Suse, Fedora... or most desktop-oriented distributions, really... you'll know that a ---- video/audio players ---- and various other useful applications are installed by default.
Wrong. The lack of pre-installed video-players is getting to be one of the major complaints about new Linux installs.
And RedHat/Fedora doesn't even include an MP3 audio player! (For reasons which they think are pretty important, but that few desktop users understand)
Isn't in their interest to get the client out to as many people as possible?
Apparently not- or, as a greedy company, they would've done so.
This could mean one of several things:
(1) Macromedia plans for Flash players to become a profit-center in the future, maybe by licensing players to mobile-phone companies or something
(2) Macromedia profits from selling Flash-authoring tools, but those tools would be easily replaced by Open Source versions if there was a good Open Source flash player to work from.
(3) Macromedia is afraid that an Open Source flashplayer would lead to someone distributing a modified version, effectively forking the file-format and confusing web-browsers who can no longer view all flash-based content the same way.
The poster is arguing from the faulty logic that runs counter to both OSS and the facts of the Internet's history.
I can hardly find any logic behind your post, faulty or not. (Are you arguing from the Pollyanna theory, or what?)
That's a whole lot of text you gave; all of it wrong or irrelevant. I won't bother to quote each line and say which is which- I'll just point out the most blatantly bad parts.
The early internet was open and standards compliant.
Yes, and it was completely vulnerable. FTP and telnet passwords floating around in the clear. Then, when pranksters like RTM released worms which abused those vulnerabilities, people started to care about security. And what was my point again?
Nothing was private.
That sentence seems key to a lot of your later invocation of the word "privacy". But it's also the most irrelevant part of your post. Are you putting forth an alternative approach to computer security: remove the right to privacy from every human on earth? That's an interesting idea, and could work... but there obviously would be strong philosophical and practical objections. It turns out that quite a few people dislike the idea of global police states!
With or without 'virus writers' and their ilk, the proactive people will continue to survive and excel. The reactive people would die by natural selection without the need for the 'virus writers.'
This viewpoint contradicts facts on the ground. Are you claiming that Microsoft is already dead? Or do you instead claim that the Outlook fixes they made over the past 4 years were not in reaction to worms?
Hackers are good, proactive explorers that usually help the system. Crakers are the people we would like to see put behind bars. They neigther help nor seek to improve software. Crackers want your software to be buggy and develop more holes over time.
This irrelevant argument is about the definition of words. You are attempting to propagate definitions in conflict with original meaning- presumably because it makes you feel better, since you like to think of self-identified "hackers" in a positive light.
Fact: The first "Computer Hacker" was an MIT student who climbed through a window to feed punchcards without permission. "Hacker" has always implied using something you weren't supposed to.
Fact: The first "cracker" was a man who broke into wallsafes.
Fact: Today, computer-related "crackers" are people who either penetrate passwords, or edit copy-protection out of software. They are a small subset of all hackers. Someone who runs a DDOS or releases a virus is not a cracker, because he has not gotten access to any otherwise "secured" data. Mafiaboy was not a cracker.
You cannot plan and execute theft or damage in public (doesn't stop the stupid from trying, but hey.) You need a private place to ensure surprise.
Hey, if you want to eliminate the possibility of anybody having a "private place", then more power to you. (I actually support the idea of a zero-privacy society in the abstract, but recognize it as absurd eutopianism)
Will you be making these same arguments when Virus writers are making real biological viruses that kill millions of people instead of computer viruses that lose millions of dollars?
Seeing as the targets of those viruses are not completely artificial, no. Computer software CAN be made immune to worms. Human beings CANNOT.
I know that making software immune to all potential exploits is theoretically impossible, as it would depend on too much perfection from imperfect humans. But for any particular worm/virus/exploit, software can be changed to resist it completely.
In the computer world there is no equivalent to a killer like HIV surviving in the wild for years or decades, because any worm/virus which was that much of a threat would be explicitly coded against in the next release of all host platforms.
In a year or two, all vulnerable software on the internet can be replaced or patched. We can't patch humans against viral vulnerabilites, so the computer-virus:biological-virus analogy goes nowhere.
Script kiddies, hackers and crackers being able to make biological viruses is not that far off.
Wrong. Although it might someday become easy to build a new genetically-engineered virus, kiddies/hackers/crackers will be no more capable or predisposed to it that than anyone else.
The most likely author of an artificial virus would be a professional bio-engineer with sympathies to a terrorist ideology.
The subject of how to prevent this is an interesting one, but divergent from the prevention of computer worms. In the end, we will probably wind up heavily restricting the distribution of bio-engineering equipment, and carefully investigating+controlling anyone authorized to use it. This will slow down the rate of biotechnology progress, but I think the public will find safety worth that cost.
It's not plausible to restrict access to computer-programming tools to a similar extent. We'll never be able to stop Islamic Fundamentalists zealots from installing MS VB on laptops in their hidden mountain fortress.
Their composite bows become ineffective in the damp, the longbow comes into its own.
That's somewhat an anachronism. At the time of the Mongol invasion (1200s), the longbow was still limited to the English Isles (it was a Welsh invention). It wasn't until the middle of the 1300s that the longbow was introduced to mainland Europe by English soldiers invading France.
(Not as if the Mongols could've gotten as far as France anyhow... there were other obstacles before them... and even in best conditions, it'd be a decade-long ride)
Ride AROUND, not OVER. Much easier, and therefore irrelevant.
For a book that explores why Western Europeans ended up being so successful, I would highly recommend Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond.
Why do you mention that book, if you're in the middle of denying it's premise? The whole point of GGS is that geography is the most important factor in history.
I mean, that bit about Europe suceeding because it's less flat than China is directly from GGS (chapter 16, if you want to play along at home).
Here's what Jared Diamond wrote:
AND, IIRC, the US Navy is moving to PPC/Linux.
But you recall wrong. The Navy is moving to Microsoft Windows. The NMCI is all Microsoft.
No it doesn't. An EULA is a licence for you, the end user, which tells you what you can do once you've got the software.
So remember- if you own multiple computers, download to ALL of them before you install it on ANY of them- because once you agree to the EULA, you're no longer allow to transfer it!
Insurance companies are in no way totally funded by what you pay for an insurance premium. Not even close, in the vast majority of cases.
The fact that businesses can be part of conglomerates including unrelated enterprises is meaningless.
Insurance as a business activity (not as a company) will not survive unless totally funded by premiums. Otherwise, we couldn't even call it a "business"- it'd be charity.