They really are - MSNBC reports "this dude said A". And that's it.
The Daily Show reports "this dude said A today, but last month he was saying not A! Further, his entire political position is premised on not A! So when he says A today, he's full of shit".
And that's the sort of analysis we want to hear. The fact that it's also hilarious is a bonus.
A journalist is unbiased and researches many aspects of a story, not just the one that suits his agenda. And posting documents with no analysis isn't a story, it's a data dump that any 12 year old with access to the Internet could do if they got the data.
I believe you are mistaken. Journalists have agendas just like all other people on the planet; Assange is at least not pretending to be uninterested.
This whole "journalists should be unbiased" bullshit is something the mainstream media came up with in order to not have to do anything but report soundbites from both sides of the story, as if they were somehow equal.
Further, it's not Assange's duty to provide positive PR for the US Government. They should really be doing that job themselves, and honestly it seems like that's just one more thing they're failing to do.
If he wants to set up an organization whose goal is to smear the USG, then that's his choice. It's not his fault that doing so is incredibly easy.
Doctors can't restore their patients from backup. They have to get it right the first time, or someone dies; they can't even test things out properly, or else someone might die (even if it's just a dog or some other animal model). A trainee sysadmin dicking around with a Linux box... not so much.
In Ricki's case, he didn't understand how NTFS permissions on a folder combine with share level permissions when you're accessing over the network. He was very young, had only been in the industry a year or two, and very motivated. I liked him. We took ten minutes to cover the topic, and I can guarantee he never made that mistake again.
So how do they interact? I still haven't managed to figure that out completely, though I will admit I haven't actually taken any sort of structured course on Windows.
I mean, there's like four different places you can set the permissions (in the "share this folder" dialog, in the shared folder itself, on the actual filesystem, at the root of the shared folder on the network (which is different because for some reason changing the permissions there overwrite all the other permissions, and Windows even warns you about that)) - how does Windows decide how to combine them?
Consumer computers are coming with 300 GB drives now.
Who the hell is going to use that? I mean, we Slashdot geeks do because we download disk images and rip DVDs and all sorts of things like that, but Joe Average who uses his computer to stream Netflix, browse the web and write e-mails will never use up even 100 GB of disk space. Even if he's got a digital camera, that's quite a lot of home movies.
Further, on a modern consumer computer, the hard drive is responsible for a significant fraction of the total power usage; if consumer computer retailers can drive down total power usage significantly, they'll have to spend a lot less on power supplies which is the sort of thing that results in bulk savings.
I bet you that Dell is going to start offering ~64 GB SSD drives on their consumer computers within the next two years, assuming they don't go belly-up after this Intel thing. They'll push it as "costs a lot less to run! Save money over three years!".
I would imagine that it goes even further than that - the eternally spinning top is a symbol of the dream, and who sees it last? We do.
It's supposed to plant in our minds the idea that we are currently dreaming, much in the same way that Cobb planted the idea in Mal's mind by spinning the top in the safe. We are then given a kick (the movie ends quite abruptly, and is mirrored by people who get kicked out of dreams), and sent out into "reality", with the seed of that idea germinating in our minds - incepted there by the movie itself.
Man, this almost makes me wish I could take another film studies class.
I imagine that if someone went into your dreams and stole the knowledge of your totem, you would be aware of them having done so unless they were really really skilled at it. It would equivalent to sneaking into a master thief's house and stealing something from under his pillow without him finding out.
Meh, there's a glaring plot-hole you could drive a truck through.
When the car is falling, everything in the second layer goes weightless, because everything in the first layer is weightless.
Why do they still have gravity in the third layer? Everything should have gone weightless there too.
Makes no sense.
However, it did let us watch what might be the world's best variable-gravity fight - I absolutely loved how Arthur ended the fight with a sleeper hold, which will actually work in zero-g where punches probably won't.
(also when they're talking about "20 minutes here will give us two hours there will give us...", the math just doesn't work).
Eh? I thought the obvious ending was that his wife was right, and they were still in a dream even after getting run over by a train. Her projection even points it out, that he's being chased by a faceless international corporation (aka someone else's projections are hunting him down).
Further, as is common with most movies, everything begins in medias res, or in the middle of things - we don't have any idea what he was doing before the movie started (or before the prequel comic, if you read that), everything just gets going. Several times in the movie they point out that one of the ways you can tell you're in a dream is that you don't know how you got to the present state, you just assume there's a reason and go with the flow. We just don't notice it in reference to the movie itself because that's how movies work, but really think about it - what was Cobb doing before going into Saito's head? What was he doing before the Kobol heist in the comic? Everything just kinda started.
What of the other characters? Well, we see quite frequently that Cobb is capable of projecting his own subconscious into other people's dreams (Mal, the train). All we need to do is apply that to them. He's projecting the main characters of the movie into the dream, in order to provide his own backup. Isn't it just convenient that all the people he needs exist and are free, or can be convinced to join in? We as viewers of a movie don't think twice about that, because that's included in the basic structure of a heist movie; you have to gather the best experts in the field, after all. However, in real life, someone as talented as Eames probably wouldn't just be sitting around in Africa doing nothing, he'd have his own agenda.
On further inspection, it's pretty clear that the various characters can also be described in terms of Cobb. Arthur and Eames are just blatantly obvious: Arthur is Cobb's cold logic, capable of perplexing logical twists, quiet and methodological, rule-bound but those rules can be incredibly complex (see his explanation of the infinite staircase and his use of it in combat, for instance, or his rocket propelled elevator idea). Eames, on the other hand, is wild inspiration and crazy dreams, with his leaps of illogic (he's the only character who expresses any interest in knowing what Fisher finds in the chamber, for instance). For example, when the idea of inception was presented to Arthur, he immediately said "no, it's not possible" - he clearly knows it can be done, but what he's saying is we can't do it. Eames immediately says "Oh yeah, totally doable", because his ego knows no bounds.
Ariadne (the architect lady) is a little more subtle. Notice how she is insistent on the fact that the "top" level of the movie is the real world? Well, if she is a projection like Mal, then she's a manifestation of Cobb's belief that the "top" level is the topmost level of the dreams, whereas the Mal projection is a manifestation of Cobb's belief that the "top" level is not the topmost level. They fight, Ariadne wins.
The Indian chemist guy I have no idea, he's just kinda there. In terms of a heist movie he's the scaredy cat comic relief character, but he's very subdued and pretty much just a bland generic projection.
Further, in theory Cobb's top doesn't stop spinning if he's in a dream. Watch closely - he never leaves the top alone long enough to know if it's real or not. He always stops it partway, or it falls off the sink, or something; he never just sits and watches it spin until it stops. Of course, mimicking the weight and feel of the top would require someone else had touched to totem before, but that's not hard - we don't know what's happened in a theoretical "higher" level, and in fact because it's Mal's totem she would know it intimately as well.
There's lots more I'm sure, but I've only seen the movie once. However, I think in the final analysis you will find quite a few hints that the movie is intended to bring you to the conclusion that Cobb is in fact still dreaming, and that the layer that is the "top" in the movie is not the "top" in reality.
How about we do like the Clinton DOJ proposed when Microsoft was found guilty of being a monopoly, and split it up into four parts? (IIRC they proposed three, but Microsoft has since added the XBox)
We'd have the Windows Operating System company, the Microsoft Office company, the Internet Explorer company, and the XBox Gaming company.
Microsoft is just too big. It seriously needs to be cut down to size, and if the MSFT executives aren't going to do that on their own then maybe we should re-start the antitrust case against them that the Bush DOJ quietly dropped.
We have a hard time pointing out when the trickling sand in the bottom of an hour glass evolves from a pile into a heap, but that's not the sand's fault - we just don't have a good enough definition of "pile" and "heap", and honestly the sand doesn't care either way about that.
The same thing for speciation (which is what you're talking about, not evolution in general) - it doesn't actually exist, it's just some label we've applied to various animals. It's not evolution's fault that we can't define a "species" well enough to tell when a group of animals switches from one to the other - it's a poorly defined concept we made up.
Creationism should not be taught in a SCIENCE class because it is not science. There is no way to falsify any of its claims.
Not true! Intelligent Design creationism has made exactly one claim, as far as I know: certain biological structures are "irreducibly complex", and therefore cannot have evolved for some reason.
This is false. For every structure thrown up as "irreducibly complex" (ranging from the eye to the immune system to flagella), scientists have shown a reasonable pathway through which evolution could have constructed the "irreducibly complex" structure, and frequently examples of the intermediate steps can be found in nature.
Of course, all it takes is one truly novel and unprecedented structure to randomly show up in an organism to make scientists take another look at the basis of evolution - but such a thing has not been described, and honestly probably never will be. If ID creationists can't find one with all the money and funding they have, it probably doesn't exist.
Therefore, I totally agree that ID should be taught in schools as an example of how scientific theories can fail, alongside the luminiferous aether and the "plum pudding" model of the atom.
Hardline Creationism, on the other hand, has not made any actual claims besides "God created the world 6000 years ago", which isn't really a "claim" so much as "gibberish", just like the Flat Eathers (but at least the Flat Earthers mostly realize they're just trolling).
Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike ripped the use of Java and C++ during his keynote at OSCON, saying that these 'industrial programming languages' are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments.... Pike also spoke out against the performance of interpreted languages and dynamic typing.... "Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of statically typed languages with the convenience and fun of dynamically typed interpretative languages," [Pike] said
Shorter Rob Pike: all those other languages suck, but the one I invented rocks. It's elegant and simple just like Lisp was back in the sixties!
I'm reminded of this blog post I read, where the author described it as "The Hurricane Lantern Effect". You look at someone else performing a task, and you think "geez, what an idiot! I can do it better in ten different ways!".
Then they hand the task off to you, and you slowly realize that each of your ten improvements isn't actually any better.
I bet you that if it's still around in ten years, someone else will decry Go 10.0 as being a "bureaucratic programming language".
Well that's the other thing - it costs almost $0 for Amazon (or anyone with any sort of real IT infrastructure) to publish an eBook. They don't have to gear up a print run, they don't have to haggle for commercial shelf space, they don't even have to pay shipping - all they do is put a 1 MB file in their multi-petabyte storage cloud, make a page based on that one template they've been using since 2000, and set the price. Every cent they get after doing that is almost pure profit.
At that point, Amazon would be stupid to not publish every eBook they can get their hands on.
No you fool, there's only one side to the Laffer curve - the "too much taxation" part. You also have to include the "no representation" axis, even though it's mostly imaginary nowadays.
I know! it's almost like Slashdot is made up of thousands of individual people all of whom have their own opinions and voices - and not just one giant all-consuming hive mind as was previously believed! Who'da thunk it?
That's exactly what Shirt.Woot does on the weekends - anyone with a (free) Woot account can submit a design, anyone who's bought something from Woot before can say "I'd buy that!". The top three are materialized into actual shirts. Some of the people who submit designs are professional graphical artists, but quite a few people are just interested amateurs.
And frequently, they're far better than anything I've ever seen on any other t-shirt site (and it's only $10, which is pretty good for a designer shirt). I mean, just look at this shirt! It's amazing to think that he made that with only something like five or six colors, too (which is another one of the requirements, due to the limitations of cheap silkscreening).
Who gives a shit? My cheapass "free" workflow for OCR-ing PDF documents on Windows was basically what's described here. With this, all I need is to run a virtual server on my computer! That's significantly better.
This sort of thing actually backfired on them a while ago - when I interned at Microsoft, we all got a free old-generation Zune. A year later, an entire generation of Microsoft interns got a free present: all our Zunes crashed. Just think about how horrible that was for PR: that entire crop of interns, who in theory are the future of the technology industry, got a first-hand look at how shitty Microsoft's products can be.
What people are worried about is that he is going to have the book thrown at him not because of the merits of what his actions deserve, but because he caused a national embarrassment and those who prosecuted him want to use him as an example, a deterrence to others.
And then they wonder why we don't have enough "cyberwarriors" to properly secure our networks.
What's really scary is that I've never actually seen a parody of an extreme American-style Left position that I had a hard time distinguishing from satire.
On the other hand, I seem to frequently batshit crazy stuff coming from the American Right that I have a hard time believing aren't parodies, like that "get your filthy government hands off my Medicare" guy or the politician who yelled out "You lie!" at the President.
Has our political system really devolved into a right wing and H.R. Geiger's parody of a right wing?
I agree completely. However, this student was suspended for creating a way around that piece of crap known as CCA, which is not illegal in any way though it may be against university policy. This student was arrested and faced 10 years in jail for offering to modify the hardware his friends owned for money (yes the modification was illegal, but that in no way means it was unethical or wrong). This student was charged with a couple of felonies for finding and reporting an unsecured file on the school network that included several pieces of private information, which is not illegal.
It's not about the laws; it's about this attitude some people have that computers are witchcraft (which is what I was alluding to in my post), and anyone who has any power over the computer that they don't understand should be shut down as hard as possible. We should nurture curiosity and exploration in all their forms, not ban them - even if it means accepting responsibility for not know what the hell you're doing with computers.
Maybe it's because we call anyone with even the smallest amount of computer knowledge a witch^H hacker, and burn them at the stake^H^H^H^H^H^H put them in jail (or detention, for the juveniles) while banning them from using computers?
It's pretty simple, guys. If you ban model rockets, you won't get a generation of rocket scientists. If you ban chemistry kits, you won't get a generation of chemical engineers. If you ban playing around with computer systems, you won't get a generation of hackers.
Slashdot Mirror
You're a far better man than I.
I would have said something about it freaking out due to a red ring of death.
They really are - MSNBC reports "this dude said A". And that's it.
The Daily Show reports "this dude said A today, but last month he was saying not A! Further, his entire political position is premised on not A! So when he says A today, he's full of shit".
And that's the sort of analysis we want to hear. The fact that it's also hilarious is a bonus.
I believe you are mistaken. Journalists have agendas just like all other people on the planet; Assange is at least not pretending to be uninterested.
This whole "journalists should be unbiased" bullshit is something the mainstream media came up with in order to not have to do anything but report soundbites from both sides of the story, as if they were somehow equal.
Further, it's not Assange's duty to provide positive PR for the US Government. They should really be doing that job themselves, and honestly it seems like that's just one more thing they're failing to do.
If he wants to set up an organization whose goal is to smear the USG, then that's his choice. It's not his fault that doing so is incredibly easy.
Doctors can't restore their patients from backup. They have to get it right the first time, or someone dies; they can't even test things out properly, or else someone might die (even if it's just a dog or some other animal model). A trainee sysadmin dicking around with a Linux box... not so much.
So how do they interact? I still haven't managed to figure that out completely, though I will admit I haven't actually taken any sort of structured course on Windows.
I mean, there's like four different places you can set the permissions (in the "share this folder" dialog, in the shared folder itself, on the actual filesystem, at the root of the shared folder on the network (which is different because for some reason changing the permissions there overwrite all the other permissions, and Windows even warns you about that)) - how does Windows decide how to combine them?
Yup exactly.
Consumer computers are coming with 300 GB drives now.
Who the hell is going to use that? I mean, we Slashdot geeks do because we download disk images and rip DVDs and all sorts of things like that, but Joe Average who uses his computer to stream Netflix, browse the web and write e-mails will never use up even 100 GB of disk space. Even if he's got a digital camera, that's quite a lot of home movies.
Further, on a modern consumer computer, the hard drive is responsible for a significant fraction of the total power usage; if consumer computer retailers can drive down total power usage significantly, they'll have to spend a lot less on power supplies which is the sort of thing that results in bulk savings.
I bet you that Dell is going to start offering ~64 GB SSD drives on their consumer computers within the next two years, assuming they don't go belly-up after this Intel thing. They'll push it as "costs a lot less to run! Save money over three years!".
I would imagine that it goes even further than that - the eternally spinning top is a symbol of the dream, and who sees it last? We do.
It's supposed to plant in our minds the idea that we are currently dreaming, much in the same way that Cobb planted the idea in Mal's mind by spinning the top in the safe. We are then given a kick (the movie ends quite abruptly, and is mirrored by people who get kicked out of dreams), and sent out into "reality", with the seed of that idea germinating in our minds - incepted there by the movie itself.
Man, this almost makes me wish I could take another film studies class.
(Shutter Island was still way better)
I imagine that if someone went into your dreams and stole the knowledge of your totem, you would be aware of them having done so unless they were really really skilled at it. It would equivalent to sneaking into a master thief's house and stealing something from under his pillow without him finding out.
Meh, there's a glaring plot-hole you could drive a truck through.
When the car is falling, everything in the second layer goes weightless, because everything in the first layer is weightless.
Why do they still have gravity in the third layer? Everything should have gone weightless there too.
Makes no sense.
However, it did let us watch what might be the world's best variable-gravity fight - I absolutely loved how Arthur ended the fight with a sleeper hold, which will actually work in zero-g where punches probably won't.
(also when they're talking about "20 minutes here will give us two hours there will give us...", the math just doesn't work).
Eh? I thought the obvious ending was that his wife was right, and they were still in a dream even after getting run over by a train. Her projection even points it out, that he's being chased by a faceless international corporation (aka someone else's projections are hunting him down).
Further, as is common with most movies, everything begins in medias res, or in the middle of things - we don't have any idea what he was doing before the movie started (or before the prequel comic, if you read that), everything just gets going. Several times in the movie they point out that one of the ways you can tell you're in a dream is that you don't know how you got to the present state, you just assume there's a reason and go with the flow. We just don't notice it in reference to the movie itself because that's how movies work, but really think about it - what was Cobb doing before going into Saito's head? What was he doing before the Kobol heist in the comic? Everything just kinda started.
What of the other characters? Well, we see quite frequently that Cobb is capable of projecting his own subconscious into other people's dreams (Mal, the train). All we need to do is apply that to them. He's projecting the main characters of the movie into the dream, in order to provide his own backup. Isn't it just convenient that all the people he needs exist and are free, or can be convinced to join in? We as viewers of a movie don't think twice about that, because that's included in the basic structure of a heist movie; you have to gather the best experts in the field, after all. However, in real life, someone as talented as Eames probably wouldn't just be sitting around in Africa doing nothing, he'd have his own agenda.
On further inspection, it's pretty clear that the various characters can also be described in terms of Cobb. Arthur and Eames are just blatantly obvious: Arthur is Cobb's cold logic, capable of perplexing logical twists, quiet and methodological, rule-bound but those rules can be incredibly complex (see his explanation of the infinite staircase and his use of it in combat, for instance, or his rocket propelled elevator idea). Eames, on the other hand, is wild inspiration and crazy dreams, with his leaps of illogic (he's the only character who expresses any interest in knowing what Fisher finds in the chamber, for instance). For example, when the idea of inception was presented to Arthur, he immediately said "no, it's not possible" - he clearly knows it can be done, but what he's saying is we can't do it. Eames immediately says "Oh yeah, totally doable", because his ego knows no bounds.
Ariadne (the architect lady) is a little more subtle. Notice how she is insistent on the fact that the "top" level of the movie is the real world? Well, if she is a projection like Mal, then she's a manifestation of Cobb's belief that the "top" level is the topmost level of the dreams, whereas the Mal projection is a manifestation of Cobb's belief that the "top" level is not the topmost level. They fight, Ariadne wins.
The Indian chemist guy I have no idea, he's just kinda there. In terms of a heist movie he's the scaredy cat comic relief character, but he's very subdued and pretty much just a bland generic projection.
Further, in theory Cobb's top doesn't stop spinning if he's in a dream. Watch closely - he never leaves the top alone long enough to know if it's real or not. He always stops it partway, or it falls off the sink, or something; he never just sits and watches it spin until it stops. Of course, mimicking the weight and feel of the top would require someone else had touched to totem before, but that's not hard - we don't know what's happened in a theoretical "higher" level, and in fact because it's Mal's totem she would know it intimately as well.
There's lots more I'm sure, but I've only seen the movie once. However, I think in the final analysis you will find quite a few hints that the movie is intended to bring you to the conclusion that Cobb is in fact still dreaming, and that the layer that is the "top" in the movie is not the "top" in reality.
How about we do like the Clinton DOJ proposed when Microsoft was found guilty of being a monopoly, and split it up into four parts? (IIRC they proposed three, but Microsoft has since added the XBox)
We'd have the Windows Operating System company, the Microsoft Office company, the Internet Explorer company, and the XBox Gaming company.
Microsoft is just too big. It seriously needs to be cut down to size, and if the MSFT executives aren't going to do that on their own then maybe we should re-start the antitrust case against them that the Bush DOJ quietly dropped.
We have a hard time pointing out when the trickling sand in the bottom of an hour glass evolves from a pile into a heap, but that's not the sand's fault - we just don't have a good enough definition of "pile" and "heap", and honestly the sand doesn't care either way about that.
The same thing for speciation (which is what you're talking about, not evolution in general) - it doesn't actually exist, it's just some label we've applied to various animals. It's not evolution's fault that we can't define a "species" well enough to tell when a group of animals switches from one to the other - it's a poorly defined concept we made up.
Not true! Intelligent Design creationism has made exactly one claim, as far as I know: certain biological structures are "irreducibly complex", and therefore cannot have evolved for some reason.
This is false. For every structure thrown up as "irreducibly complex" (ranging from the eye to the immune system to flagella), scientists have shown a reasonable pathway through which evolution could have constructed the "irreducibly complex" structure, and frequently examples of the intermediate steps can be found in nature.
Of course, all it takes is one truly novel and unprecedented structure to randomly show up in an organism to make scientists take another look at the basis of evolution - but such a thing has not been described, and honestly probably never will be. If ID creationists can't find one with all the money and funding they have, it probably doesn't exist.
Therefore, I totally agree that ID should be taught in schools as an example of how scientific theories can fail, alongside the luminiferous aether and the "plum pudding" model of the atom.
Hardline Creationism, on the other hand, has not made any actual claims besides "God created the world 6000 years ago", which isn't really a "claim" so much as "gibberish", just like the Flat Eathers (but at least the Flat Earthers mostly realize they're just trolling).
One of these things is not like the other ones, one of these things is not the same.
Shorter Rob Pike: all those other languages suck, but the one I invented rocks. It's elegant and simple just like Lisp was back in the sixties!
I'm reminded of this blog post I read, where the author described it as "The Hurricane Lantern Effect". You look at someone else performing a task, and you think "geez, what an idiot! I can do it better in ten different ways!".
Then they hand the task off to you, and you slowly realize that each of your ten improvements isn't actually any better.
I bet you that if it's still around in ten years, someone else will decry Go 10.0 as being a "bureaucratic programming language".
Well that's the other thing - it costs almost $0 for Amazon (or anyone with any sort of real IT infrastructure) to publish an eBook. They don't have to gear up a print run, they don't have to haggle for commercial shelf space, they don't even have to pay shipping - all they do is put a 1 MB file in their multi-petabyte storage cloud, make a page based on that one template they've been using since 2000, and set the price. Every cent they get after doing that is almost pure profit.
At that point, Amazon would be stupid to not publish every eBook they can get their hands on.
No you fool, there's only one side to the Laffer curve - the "too much taxation" part. You also have to include the "no representation" axis, even though it's mostly imaginary nowadays.
I know! it's almost like Slashdot is made up of thousands of individual people all of whom have their own opinions and voices - and not just one giant all-consuming hive mind as was previously believed! Who'da thunk it?
That's exactly what Shirt.Woot does on the weekends - anyone with a (free) Woot account can submit a design, anyone who's bought something from Woot before can say "I'd buy that!". The top three are materialized into actual shirts. Some of the people who submit designs are professional graphical artists, but quite a few people are just interested amateurs.
And frequently, they're far better than anything I've ever seen on any other t-shirt site (and it's only $10, which is pretty good for a designer shirt). I mean, just look at this shirt! It's amazing to think that he made that with only something like five or six colors, too (which is another one of the requirements, due to the limitations of cheap silkscreening).
Who gives a shit? My cheapass "free" workflow for OCR-ing PDF documents on Windows was basically what's described here. With this, all I need is to run a virtual server on my computer! That's significantly better.
This sort of thing actually backfired on them a while ago - when I interned at Microsoft, we all got a free old-generation Zune. A year later, an entire generation of Microsoft interns got a free present: all our Zunes crashed. Just think about how horrible that was for PR: that entire crop of interns, who in theory are the future of the technology industry, got a first-hand look at how shitty Microsoft's products can be.
And then they wonder why we don't have enough "cyberwarriors" to properly secure our networks.
What's really scary is that I've never actually seen a parody of an extreme American-style Left position that I had a hard time distinguishing from satire.
On the other hand, I seem to frequently batshit crazy stuff coming from the American Right that I have a hard time believing aren't parodies, like that "get your filthy government hands off my Medicare" guy or the politician who yelled out "You lie!" at the President.
Has our political system really devolved into a right wing and H.R. Geiger's parody of a right wing?
I agree completely. However, this student was suspended for creating a way around that piece of crap known as CCA, which is not illegal in any way though it may be against university policy. This student was arrested and faced 10 years in jail for offering to modify the hardware his friends owned for money (yes the modification was illegal, but that in no way means it was unethical or wrong). This student was charged with a couple of felonies for finding and reporting an unsecured file on the school network that included several pieces of private information, which is not illegal.
It's not about the laws; it's about this attitude some people have that computers are witchcraft (which is what I was alluding to in my post), and anyone who has any power over the computer that they don't understand should be shut down as hard as possible. We should nurture curiosity and exploration in all their forms, not ban them - even if it means accepting responsibility for not know what the hell you're doing with computers.
Maybe it's because we call anyone with even the smallest amount of computer knowledge a witch^H hacker, and burn them at the stake^H^H^H^H^H^H put them in jail (or detention, for the juveniles) while banning them from using computers?
It's pretty simple, guys. If you ban model rockets, you won't get a generation of rocket scientists. If you ban chemistry kits, you won't get a generation of chemical engineers. If you ban playing around with computer systems, you won't get a generation of hackers.