I don't think he's really asking questions that haven't been asked before in other mediums.
In fact, a lot of the potential problems he alludes to seem to stem from human fears about things humans can or have done to each other in the past. I think that what we really need to be concerned about is creating a new form of "life" that is too much like us without the knowledge we've gained so far.
Think about it. We build this system that can do the thinking of 5000 human years in a day, but he doesn't have the KNOWLEDGE to necessarily back it up. What then? We've got a brand new self-interested lifeform that just evolved 1.5 million years in thirty seconds. I mean, Mr. Roboto may come to the logical conclusion that xyz group needs to be euthanized because it's interfering with abc group without, it would appear, any benefit. For example, if you have all these people in southeast asia who might get dangerously ill and spread disease to otherwise healthy people, isn't the most logical conclusion to either quarantine them and let them die, or to euthanize them so they don't suffer.
Well.. sort of, but that doesn't go well with human motivations and desires, something the robot may not have taken into consideration because it lacks the knowledge of human history that's shaped us to this point and caused us to come to the conclusion that it's best to HELP them, not rid the world of them.
I think machines ought to be barred from rapid critical human thinking until we have stepped through the process with them. The problem might become that the computer can outthink humans by so many orders of magnitude that we can't error check the process in development because there's too much data coming out for humans to walk through.
All that said, perhaps the future lies in alleviating some of the bottle necks to human thinking and expanding our capabilities in new ways by merging with machines. In that way, the human can throttle the computer, and the computer can tap the human's experiences and knowledge in order to come up with a wider range of "logical" conclusions than might otherwise be possible within the limited scope of programming directives.
So, basically, what you're getting at here, is that you're not quite clued in enough to what goes on in these things to realize that the best person to tell you how to fix a system is the guy who methodically broke it?
"Mitnick fanboy" or not, if you think you can keep tight enough control of the "bad guy" to make them do your bidding, it would be pretty dumb to lock them up in jail and waste a resource just so that somebody else can come along and smack you down again. I'd rather see a cracker with skill sent to fix the problem they exploited than jailed (mind you, I don't think they ought to be paid to do it, of course). You'd have to be a complete idiot to overlook the opportunity to get someone in there who can harden your system because, otherwise, you're just risking leaving yourself open to someone else who might actually be dangerous.
This crap about making examples of crackers who don't actually steal/break anything is just a bunch of horseshit from lazy adminstrators who didn't do something right in the first place. God forbid the fatass has to set down the bag of cheetohs and the 64 ounce drink and waddle over to the server racks to actually do some goddamn work.
That's right, the problem isn't that someone exploited an error in YOUR work! The problem is that we don't punish these damn kids enough for taking advantage of your slip ups!
Whatever. "Victim" society at its finest. It's all one person's fault and only one person ought to take the fall, it's not a more complicated shade of grey.
A lot of them don't work on a FIFO basis. People who have already entered their customer information and are known to the system may well be ranked based on their perceived value to the company (e.g. "how much money are you giving us") so that people who make them more money wait a shorter period of time. This is especially true of businesses where you may have an ongoing relationship with them such as direct marketing and catalog order companies.
In addition, a lot of call centers are called "cost centers" by PHBs because, well, they cost money and don't bring in any perceivable income. In these cases, the company may have a steady enough line of new customers that it's not worth their time and money to try and satisfy you unless you're a good little consumer and you're giving them enough money to pay attention. When that happens, it may well be in the company's best interest to get you to hang up in frustration. In fact, in some cases, it may well be that they just don't care if you stop doing business and by cutting your ties to them you may actually be doing them a favor and saving them money.
Welcome to the capitalist utopia. Welcome to what happens when capitalism finally has the means to thrive. This is the system that's so great and "drives" the free world, and this is the least of your worries in relation to it.
And, as always, my question is this: how is it that this is related to my rights online when I call up a remote location, with no idea what's on the other end, and my call is recorded when I speak INTO THE PHONE *after* I'm told it might be recorded?
Is there a problem? Is the phone being tapped causing it to malfunction on the original caller's end in such a way that it picks up sounds that should reasonably be expected NOT to enter the phone circuit otherwise? No.
No, this is another example of where some idiot somehwere might have gotten pissy because he's so lacking in the basic knowledge required to operate a telephone that he somehow thought that if he's standing there yelling at his wife to get him a beer and not give him any lip, that somehow his voice was not going to go into the uncovered receiver on his phone and be picked up by whatever happens to be on the other end.
Then, michael, being a socialist prick and probably the biggest slashdot troll in history, saw an excuse to plop "big brother" down on the front page of the venerable "news for tards" site that is Slashdot, label it "Your Rights Online" and watch the ensuing flamefest as people bite.
MTV generation indeed. A generation I'm part of and disgusted by, in large part.
Part of the problem, of course, is that NASA takes 80 billion photos of large, interstellar objects like massive galaxies, none of which actually show the large object as it actually appears (or, in most cases, DOESN'T appear). Then, they combine all their infrared and this radiation that radiation images into one big, purty, inaccurate public "photo" that makes everyone go "ooooh ahhhh" when, in fact, the object actually looks nothing like the photo the press was given.
Then, when people see the real pictures they go "what the hell is this pixelated blob? If this planet is so big and so close [relative to the aforementioned large object] why can't I see little green men waving to me on it?"
Postscript doesn't have any mechanism for handling TCP/IP sockets, so the server runs in inetd. I guess if you could get inetd to run on your printer, which is theoretically possible I suppose, you could turn a printer into a (really slow) webserver.
Because more intelligent people attempt to affect a change in a system they perceive to be negative, they don't pack up the tent and ship out like a bunch of chickenshits who are too afraid to speak up.
And before you take me to task over the way I'm going about it, note that I got YOU involved, now didn't I?
There's a threshold to just how much crap people will put up with it. Mine and some fellow geeks may have lower thresholds, but eventually the public threshold will be met as well and the companies that keep pulling these silly stunts will get a thrashing in the form of competition that treats customers like customers, not like crooks.
And formatting your hard drive, a process which destroys and rebuilds or replaces a filesystem, is going to eliminate sensitive DATA on your drive..... how?
Best I can discover, he's just some guy who writes blog entries. I can't find any information on what this gentleman actually does for a living, nor can I find any information suggesting that he ever actually HAS done anything for a living.
His various bios on the various blogs he writes in all list him as a "journalist" but give no clue as to who employs him, or what his technical background is.
My question is this: what is it that Nathan Weinberg knows or does that should make me believe what he has to say about Microsoft's new product?
Slashdot Mirror
methodically broke it
If you're going to respond to posts, read them first.
I don't think he's really asking questions that haven't been asked before in other mediums.
In fact, a lot of the potential problems he alludes to seem to stem from human fears about things humans can or have done to each other in the past. I think that what we really need to be concerned about is creating a new form of "life" that is too much like us without the knowledge we've gained so far.
Think about it. We build this system that can do the thinking of 5000 human years in a day, but he doesn't have the KNOWLEDGE to necessarily back it up. What then? We've got a brand new self-interested lifeform that just evolved 1.5 million years in thirty seconds. I mean, Mr. Roboto may come to the logical conclusion that xyz group needs to be euthanized because it's interfering with abc group without, it would appear, any benefit. For example, if you have all these people in southeast asia who might get dangerously ill and spread disease to otherwise healthy people, isn't the most logical conclusion to either quarantine them and let them die, or to euthanize them so they don't suffer.
Well.. sort of, but that doesn't go well with human motivations and desires, something the robot may not have taken into consideration because it lacks the knowledge of human history that's shaped us to this point and caused us to come to the conclusion that it's best to HELP them, not rid the world of them.
I think machines ought to be barred from rapid critical human thinking until we have stepped through the process with them. The problem might become that the computer can outthink humans by so many orders of magnitude that we can't error check the process in development because there's too much data coming out for humans to walk through.
All that said, perhaps the future lies in alleviating some of the bottle necks to human thinking and expanding our capabilities in new ways by merging with machines. In that way, the human can throttle the computer, and the computer can tap the human's experiences and knowledge in order to come up with a wider range of "logical" conclusions than might otherwise be possible within the limited scope of programming directives.
Blah blah blah.
So, basically, what you're getting at here, is that you're not quite clued in enough to what goes on in these things to realize that the best person to tell you how to fix a system is the guy who methodically broke it?
"Mitnick fanboy" or not, if you think you can keep tight enough control of the "bad guy" to make them do your bidding, it would be pretty dumb to lock them up in jail and waste a resource just so that somebody else can come along and smack you down again. I'd rather see a cracker with skill sent to fix the problem they exploited than jailed (mind you, I don't think they ought to be paid to do it, of course). You'd have to be a complete idiot to overlook the opportunity to get someone in there who can harden your system because, otherwise, you're just risking leaving yourself open to someone else who might actually be dangerous.
This crap about making examples of crackers who don't actually steal/break anything is just a bunch of horseshit from lazy adminstrators who didn't do something right in the first place. God forbid the fatass has to set down the bag of cheetohs and the 64 ounce drink and waddle over to the server racks to actually do some goddamn work.
That's right, the problem isn't that someone exploited an error in YOUR work! The problem is that we don't punish these damn kids enough for taking advantage of your slip ups!
Whatever. "Victim" society at its finest. It's all one person's fault and only one person ought to take the fall, it's not a more complicated shade of grey.
A lot of them don't work on a FIFO basis. People who have already entered their customer information and are known to the system may well be ranked based on their perceived value to the company (e.g. "how much money are you giving us") so that people who make them more money wait a shorter period of time. This is especially true of businesses where you may have an ongoing relationship with them such as direct marketing and catalog order companies.
In addition, a lot of call centers are called "cost centers" by PHBs because, well, they cost money and don't bring in any perceivable income. In these cases, the company may have a steady enough line of new customers that it's not worth their time and money to try and satisfy you unless you're a good little consumer and you're giving them enough money to pay attention. When that happens, it may well be in the company's best interest to get you to hang up in frustration. In fact, in some cases, it may well be that they just don't care if you stop doing business and by cutting your ties to them you may actually be doing them a favor and saving them money.
Welcome to the capitalist utopia. Welcome to what happens when capitalism finally has the means to thrive. This is the system that's so great and "drives" the free world, and this is the least of your worries in relation to it.
It must be hard for you to know what you think about things at any point in time then, huh?
No, Duke Nukem Forever will still be....
Fuck, how do I type the mobius strip character on this stupid keyboard?
Sir, I wasn't just reading it... I am a SUBSCRIBER!
And, as always, my question is this: how is it that this is related to my rights online when I call up a remote location, with no idea what's on the other end, and my call is recorded when I speak INTO THE PHONE *after* I'm told it might be recorded?
Is there a problem? Is the phone being tapped causing it to malfunction on the original caller's end in such a way that it picks up sounds that should reasonably be expected NOT to enter the phone circuit otherwise? No.
No, this is another example of where some idiot somehwere might have gotten pissy because he's so lacking in the basic knowledge required to operate a telephone that he somehow thought that if he's standing there yelling at his wife to get him a beer and not give him any lip, that somehow his voice was not going to go into the uncovered receiver on his phone and be picked up by whatever happens to be on the other end.
Then, michael, being a socialist prick and probably the biggest slashdot troll in history, saw an excuse to plop "big brother" down on the front page of the venerable "news for tards" site that is Slashdot, label it "Your Rights Online" and watch the ensuing flamefest as people bite.
IHBT by Michael Sims.
IHL.
I will HAND.
MTV generation indeed. A generation I'm part of and disgusted by, in large part.
Part of the problem, of course, is that NASA takes 80 billion photos of large, interstellar objects like massive galaxies, none of which actually show the large object as it actually appears (or, in most cases, DOESN'T appear). Then, they combine all their infrared and this radiation that radiation images into one big, purty, inaccurate public "photo" that makes everyone go "ooooh ahhhh" when, in fact, the object actually looks nothing like the photo the press was given.
Then, when people see the real pictures they go "what the hell is this pixelated blob? If this planet is so big and so close [relative to the aforementioned large object] why can't I see little green men waving to me on it?"
I actually wouldn't mind seeing that..... maybe netcraft could get on that for us....
503 POST UNAVAILABLE
Sir, kindly note that I was a relatively fluent reader in Kindygardon. Which means, I think you just insulted yourself.
I will be writing a personal letter, direct to the president of the United States, asking that your sick, backwards, pedocountry be nuked immediately.
The CIA will be hacking your IP address shortly. The first detachment of marines will land shortly after that.
I know what this iiiimage iiiiis.
Reading trolltalk has it's advantages after all.
BTW, your link has been reported to the FBI. Enjoy your hot, asspounding federal action you sick, business-owning fuck!
It can be exploited by any user or process that can compile and load executables on the machine.
You misspelled "I'm a product of inbreeding".
Postscript doesn't have any mechanism for handling TCP/IP sockets, so the server runs in inetd. I guess if you could get inetd to run on your printer, which is theoretically possible I suppose, you could turn a printer into a (really slow) webserver.
The postscript web server is called 'ps-httpd'.
That doesn't really qualify as success in getting /. changed the way you want it.
That's what you think. Who the hell said anything about IMPROVING it?
Because more intelligent people attempt to affect a change in a system they perceive to be negative, they don't pack up the tent and ship out like a bunch of chickenshits who are too afraid to speak up.
And before you take me to task over the way I'm going about it, note that I got YOU involved, now didn't I?
You did it! (it is trolling liberals).
I did it! (it is being trolled by you).
Damn....
It's not like I can't just stop watching DVDs.
There's a threshold to just how much crap people will put up with it. Mine and some fellow geeks may have lower thresholds, but eventually the public threshold will be met as well and the companies that keep pulling these silly stunts will get a thrashing in the form of competition that treats customers like customers, not like crooks.
And formatting your hard drive, a process which destroys and rebuilds or replaces a filesystem, is going to eliminate sensitive DATA on your drive..... how?
Best I can discover, he's just some guy who writes blog entries. I can't find any information on what this gentleman actually does for a living, nor can I find any information suggesting that he ever actually HAS done anything for a living.
His various bios on the various blogs he writes in all list him as a "journalist" but give no clue as to who employs him, or what his technical background is.
My question is this: what is it that Nathan Weinberg knows or does that should make me believe what he has to say about Microsoft's new product?