Sigh. I'm sitting here with a fistful of mod-points to give away, and this thread's just way over my head. Do I mod the original joke "funny", and then the serious reply "overrated"? How do I mod the serious replier's retort?
Way too complex. I know! I'll describe the dilemma - and then you guys'll know how much trouble you've caused me... plus, I won't be able to mod the discussion! Moral crisis averted.... ok, hitting Submit
Granted, the Shuttles goes into a much higher orbit, and carries a lot more payload, but the difference is still ridiculous.
Other replies here have noted that S-S-1 didn't go into orbit, but it's worth emphasizing the difference between "touching space" and getting into orbit. If you do the sums, and work out just how hard it is to achieve 5 miles/sec when your propellant only leaves the nozzle at about 2 miles/sec, you'll see how staggering an achievement it is - a single stage craft would have to consist of approx 85% fuel by mass.
Burt Rutan's achievement was remarkable for the fact that he achieved what he did for less money than NASA spends on shoe care. But in terms of achieving orbit, he's going to have to solve the remaining 90+% of the problem.
Not that I don't agree with a lot of what you said!:-)
They are only free to adapt to niches that are of no interest to humans. (like MacOSX and Linux are doing)
What a wonderful sentence! It's ok - I know what you mean, and agree - but there is a certain glory to declaring on Slashdot that non-Windows users aren't human!:-)
Sigh - is this really a forum for spelling lessons?
And as regards meaning, deprecate does mean "to belittle", but also means "to express disapproval of, or deplore, to desire the removal of" - which is pretty much the meaning that the original poster was implying.
In software development, obsolete modules which are still supported but which should be avoided are commonly marked "deprecated" (it's a keyword in at least one documentation system) so arguably the poster was using the word in a more technical sense - perfectly acceptable on Slashdot.
Everyone knows that the 3rd Millenium began on 1st Jan 2000, because that's when the big parties happened! Thus indicating a dangerous difference between theory and practice....
Of course, the whole disparity can be trivially fixed by declaring that the first decade was a nine year decade!
>Huh? That's not true at all.
That's quite strong, isn't it? It's definitely true that the process must have been able to run as root or equiv to grab the port. Therefore, if I'm sniffing around looking for targets, low numbered ports are where I'll find root exploits. The fact that some programs are written defensively enough to downgrade their privileges still makes it likely that the good stuff will be found in that region - either due to flaws in their downgrade operation or due to dumber programs that are less defensive.
> I sure as hell hope your apache doesn't run as root (God help you if it does).
:-) Absolutely! But Apache also takes care to manage this stuff pretty carefully: evolution at work. I mean, if there *were* flaws which let you remotely make Apache forget to setuid down, then the servers running on low numbered ports would probably be much more exciting to attack than those running on 8080.
(PS: I'm sort of guessing that Apache processes start as root to open the port and then setuid themselves down - is that about right? (and "don't know, don't care" is an acceptable answer:-) !))
At least in the way it was intended, ports below 1024 could only be opened by root. Therefore, if I can hit a buffer overflow on a service on your machine on a port below 1024, then I'll be gaining root privileges; if it's >=1024, then it's likely that I'll just end up as joe user. But as you suggest, all other things being equal, one open port is as good as another; the trick is that, given limited resources, ports below 1024 offer statistically richer pickings.
Arguably - from another perspective - ports below 1024 are "safer". I wouldn't ssh into a port above 1024, because I have no way to tell that it's the "real" sshd that's listening - it could be any old password logger set up by joe "unprivileged but ambitious" user.
Of course, the weasel word here is "safe". Safe - who? - from whom? - against what? As soon as I hear the "s"-word, I start thinking "uh-oh, here we go...". It's one of the favorite words of government spokespeople. Sounds like you've been around the same block...?:-)
"Is it safe?" "Yes, it's perfectly safe, it's just us who are in trouble..."
Ok, what you say is right, but I didn't think that that's what the original poster was complaining about.
I think he was trying to say that for "roughly equal" to apply, we must presume to know that P(black hole) ~= P(neutron star). Maybe we do know that, perhaps because that's generally the case (due to distribution of stars of different masses), or because we know something special about this particular case.
But if not, then the quote in the article is falling into the "either it'll happen or it won't" fallacy. Casino owners love this style of thinking, because it induces people to forget that the odds are against them, and to bet anyway: "either I'll win or I won't". It's common to confuse "2 outcomes" with "50% chance", and the article sounds like it has done so, but then again it's possible that it hasn't.
Unfortunately, in both your examples, each outcome is exactly as likely as the other - they're symmetrical (as long as they're fair!), so they don't illustrate the fallacy, because you were drawing attention to something else. Try this - it's similar to your examples, but it's asymmetric: Consider a (normal 6-sided) dice roll, where you're asked to guess if the result is a 4. The dice has rolled, but you haven't seen the result yet, and the chances of getting your 4 are 1/6, and 5/6 of not getting it - they're not "roughly equal". Does that work for you?
>The reason for a laser is that it provides coherent light, that is
>all the light that is emited is in phase. This is necsessary for the interference.
Are you sure about this? After all, the two slits experiment was performed by Thomas Young in the early 1800s - way before lasers existed. You only need reasonably monochromatic light - otherwise the fringes spread out in different places for different frequencies (sorry, energies) so they all merge and you can't see the effect so strongly. It appears that Young used sunlight, so even that requirement isn't hard and fast.
A particle interacts with itself whether or not its friends happen to be in phase with it. In fact, the exciting experiment - where you allow the photons to arrive one at a time, and the pattern forms incrementally - only involves single photons, so phase issues are irrelevant anyway!
As you say, the color of the light isn't strictly important, although the fringes are more widely spaced for red light than for blue, and that makes the experiment is more impressive.
> Darwinism works because the stupid and the weak die >off before they can procreate.
Careful here. Darwinism works because the less fit have fewer successful offspring. You don't have to die - you just need to have 3 kids when the others are having 4.
Otherwise you have to try and explain why having [tails, hairy foreheads, bald armpits, etc] killed so many early humans!:-)
Not sure these two views are opposite. I feel that driving is a privilege, because of the tremendous reponsibility that goes with it, and because you can always travel by other means. But at the same time, pulling your license for arbitrary reasons seems like an abuse of power by the authorities.
Question: do they yank the license for repeated parking violations, or for non-payment of fines? The former sort of makes sense in many cases, because thoughtful parking is part of good driving. I'm not sure I like the sound of it being used as a more general punishment though. It seems petty - I can imagine the idea expanding to "... and we'll stop collecting your garbage...":-)
>The Microsoft JVM was fully compatible with Sun's JDK 1.1.
Huh? What about RMI? What about JNI? Having to find work-arounds for that caused me a few sleepless weeks. I even used "delegate" as a variable in one piece of code that someone else later tried to build with J++...!
Dude, the MSJ++ product gratuitously used the extensions. It didn't make it that obvious.
> Sun claimed such features could harm the portability of java. But extending a programming language is not a crime.
It's a breach of contract if you say you won't do it, then do it and stick the other guy's trademark on it. Which is what MS did. They called it "Java". It wasn't Java. Sun own that mark, and IMHO they did the Right Thing in defending what it stands for. And they won that one.
Of course, what was amusing at the time was that Netscape's VM was far less compliant than MS's. But that was because it was so bug-ridden - lots of comments floating around about "malice vs stupidity"...:-)
Go on. Add the JVM to your list of reasons to hate them! You won't be alone...
> Basically a big blue phone box so police officers > could contact their station before the advent of > portable radios, they also had a phone on the > outside for the use of the public in emergencies >(behind the panel with text on it.)
I made a discovery recently... I always thought that the real Police Boxes were rather like normal telephone boxes: simple, light, wooden.
But most of them were actually serious concrete affairs, weighing over two tons (which became somewhat of a problem when they were decommissioned). They worked as miniature police stations, where an officer could imprison a suspect until help arrived. Here's a short history, and more details (PDF, sorry).
Completely agree with you - it cannot possibly create a good sense of scale (especially for children) because few people have a national sense of scale - it's just hours on a motorway. I remember how surprised one of my friends was, on doing a cross UK cycle ride (Lands End to John O'Groats), and realizing that the Scottish border was pretty close to the half-way point.
I made a scale model of the solar system for my kids in the field out the back. You need 600m of field. Here are the scales, shrinking by a factor of 1e11 (so 100km -> 1mm), giving diameter and distance from sun:
Sun (Sol) 140 mm -
Mercury: 0.5 mm 6m
Venus: 1.2 mm 10m
Earth: 1.3 mm 15m
(Moon: 0.3 mm 0.04m from Earth)
Mars: 0.7 mm 23m
Jupiter: 14.3 mm 78m
Saturn: 12.1 mm 142m
Uranus: 5.1 mm 287m
Neptune: 5.0 mm 450m
Pluto: 0.2 mm 591m
AlphaC-A: 167 mm 4,200 km
Sirius: 249 mm 8,600 km
Betelgeuse: 37 m 427,200 km
Milky Way: 100,000,000 km
(Sorry about the crap formatting - I couldn't get this through the/. lameness filter without losing tabulation.)
And it's fantastic!! You make the planets out of blu-tac or dough. It's great making the tiny ones - you're making a sphere 0.2mm across! - you roll out a thin hair of material and cut it with a knife. Jupiter's about the width of my thumb. You put little rings on the ringed planets. And you use a balloon for the Sun. Then you pace out the positions, and place them on the path, with a little marker so you can see where they are. Combine this with a good play with Celestia, and you're talking about some pretty scarily educational stuff. Celestia's fantastic, but the exponential speed control (though totally necessary) means that you can't get a perspective on size and distance.
Then you reveal (from UK) that the nearest star is in New York! (actually, that's a bit far, Cairo is a better match), and Sirius (which they know) is in San Francisco...
And look at Betelgeuse! - it's HUGE! - twice the size of our house - and it's about where the moon is. And the Milky Way... well, it all gets abstract again. But it's interesting to stand at Pluto, look towards the Sun, close your eyes a bit, and imagine that you're on the edge of an empty ball with the Sun at the centre. And then turn around, and there's nothing else before America... just emptiness....
Pretty good.
And what's weird is that so few people have any sense of scale here - my wife figured that Alpha Centauri would be in a town a few km away.
I guess that this big model they're making is a PR stunt - it raises awareness, and gets people to play with things like Celestia. After all, they seem to be trying to create a memorable impression and a sense of distributed ownership ("We own Jupiter") rather than actually draw the big picture.
Though the legal costs are capped by a "reasonable expenses" criterion - so many days in court, etc - and if you decide that it takes 30 lawyers to fight your small-claim case, then that won't be considered reasonable, and you'll be out of pocket.
I watched a trial where a guy got awarded 500 pounds costs, but had spent about 4000 pounds. He's a friend of mine - he knew he wouldn't get the costs back, but he'd been screwed by someone, and he wanted to have the defendent nailed. So he made absolutely sure his case was water-tight!
>if the judge is a friend of a friend of the company
Well, then you're pretty much dead in the water anyway! And surely they'll just get their friends in the army to shoot you?:-) After all, if your premise is that the system's been bought, then legal costs allocations are the least of your problems.
I think the problem here is your use of the word "eventually"! I don't think the fact that someone'll "eventually" figure something out marks it as it intuitive - it's gotta be "instantly apparent".
In fact, I've shown a number of people how you can use an analog watch as a compass using the sun and the little hand, and it has always surprised them that the correlation is so close.
To be honest, I don't think that people corelatate the sun's position with time at all, unless forced. I often use the sun and stars for first-approx time and navigation, and it usually gets an "oh, yes, I suppose it does" sort of response from people around me. Solar measuring is a universally shared human experience, but then so is the photoelectric effect - it doesn't mean it's something that many people have noticed!:-)
> Many people consider that the intelligence agencies "made mistakes", or perhaps even a few rouge elements >in the intelligence agencies might have lied, but not the government.
I suspect that your "rouge elements" is a typo. But it's also possible that you've been infiltrated by French Communists! I think we should be told...:-)
True... but you're describing "Keep Your Glaziers In Business By Breaking Windows" economics.
The (proclaimed) purpose of all this computing machinery is to help people get jobs done, and thus get us further along the Big Road. Malicious software gets in the way of that, and so does the cost of the countermeasures. A given firm making widgets can invest less money and makes less good widgets as a result. Given a choice, they would rather pay the people working at the AV firm to build better Widget-Making Machine Control Systems instead. They'd rather have faster switches than firewalls.
Consequently, the reason we're not colonizing distant planets is because we're having to pay this "malicious software tax". Ok, no it isn't, but you get my point - it's costing us all, one way or another, just as prisons, police, armies, and all the other necessary evils bleed us of resources, to some extent or another. It's just job creation - or it would be if we could persuade all those naughty people to be reasonable.
Now, there *are* some justifications for job creation. One is that there might exist people who can only do that job, so perhaps you may as well pay people to do the job as pay them to do nothing. However, in the case of an AV firm, or a firewall manufacturer, there's no doubt that the people who work there would be well employed working on something else - they're high-skill, flexible people.
Another justification is that the job itself may be worth doing for reasons other than money, at least in the short term. For instance, we pay an army even though we might not be planning to go to war; we pay farmers to grow crops to throw away, not because we're stupid, but because we want the reserve capacity against the unexpected.
Suppose there were no viruses or worms or spammers. Would we be happy to have the Internet operate without all the defenses it currently has? There is an argument (which nudges close to what you said) that the bad guys keep AV firms in business, and therefore we keep ourselves in better shape than we would otherwise - a strategic defence, if you like, which is paid through the taxation of extra network security. That's the "I now take backups because a virus ate my homework" consequence.
On the other hand, the army don't train by attacking our civilians, but by conducting training exercises: it'd be nice if our firewalls and AV software were developed entirely through "white hat" trials which didn't cost other businesses direct pain. It'd be nice - but it's not obvious that it'd be very effective against the Real Thing. And it's not like we've got a choice.
Conclusion? What you say, I think, does not make *economic* sense - there's no real economic value in keeping AV firms alive. But whether the Internet is stronger and better because of this continual low-level assault and the defensive products that it breeds is a far more open question.
Re:Self Censorship is a problem with nerds?
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
Are "sluttishness" and "prudishness" instances of fashionable/unfashionable behaviour? I don't think they are - there's evidence of people using their sexuality and of resenting others doing so thoughout the ages. The "oldest profession" springs to mind!
Of course, the fashion defines "normal behaviour" and so defines the degree to which a particular behaviour is acceptable - but there will always be people who are on either side of the curve. In this respect, of course, it's all relative, as you say.
But I don't think the "candyass" is violating a moral *fashion* though. She's using a personal asset to make gains, just as bribery or blackmail might, and if the company policy states that promotion and favour is gained through doing a good job, then such "out-of-band" approaches will create an atmosphere of unfairness and hypocrisy - especially if they appear to work!
The prude isn't against the slut because there's a fashion issue. What do you think? I think what you're describing is "injustice" - and that's no fashion.
Well, that only doubles the headcount. The current live human population is about the same as the dead - exponential growth and all that. This means that half the people who have ever existed are still alive. Here are some
numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Way too complex. I know! I'll describe the dilemma - and then you guys'll know how much trouble you've caused me ... plus, I won't be able to mod the discussion! Moral crisis averted .... ok, hitting Submit
Other replies here have noted that S-S-1 didn't go into orbit, but it's worth emphasizing the difference between "touching space" and getting into orbit. If you do the sums, and work out just how hard it is to achieve 5 miles/sec when your propellant only leaves the nozzle at about 2 miles/sec, you'll see how staggering an achievement it is - a single stage craft would have to consist of approx 85% fuel by mass.
Burt Rutan's achievement was remarkable for the fact that he achieved what he did for less money than NASA spends on shoe care. But in terms of achieving orbit, he's going to have to solve the remaining 90+% of the problem.
Not that I don't agree with a lot of what you said! :-)
What a wonderful sentence! It's ok - I know what you mean, and agree - but there is a certain glory to declaring on Slashdot that non-Windows users aren't human! :-)
And as regards meaning, deprecate does mean "to belittle", but also means "to express disapproval of, or deplore, to desire the removal of" - which is pretty much the meaning that the original poster was implying.
In software development, obsolete modules which are still supported but which should be avoided are commonly marked "deprecated" (it's a keyword in at least one documentation system) so arguably the poster was using the word in a more technical sense - perfectly acceptable on Slashdot.
So! Complaint dismissed!
Of course, the whole disparity can be trivially fixed by declaring that the first decade was a nine year decade!
Next problem?
> I sure as hell hope your apache doesn't run as root (God help you if it does).
(PS: I'm sort of guessing that Apache processes start as root to open the port and then setuid themselves down - is that about right? (and "don't know, don't care" is an acceptable answer :-) !))
Hang on .... that's not the whole story.
:-)
At least in the way it was intended, ports below 1024 could only be opened by root. Therefore, if I can hit a buffer overflow on a service on your machine on a port below 1024, then I'll be gaining root privileges; if it's >=1024, then it's likely that I'll just end up as joe user. But as you suggest, all other things being equal, one open port is as good as another; the trick is that, given limited resources, ports below 1024 offer statistically richer pickings.
Arguably - from another perspective - ports below 1024 are "safer". I wouldn't ssh into a port above 1024, because I have no way to tell that it's the "real" sshd that's listening - it could be any old password logger set up by joe "unprivileged but ambitious" user.
Of course, the weasel word here is "safe". Safe - who? - from whom? - against what? As soon as I hear the "s"-word, I start thinking "uh-oh, here we go...". It's one of the favorite words of government spokespeople. Sounds like you've been around the same block...?
"Is it safe?" "Yes, it's perfectly safe, it's just us who are in trouble..."
According to some survey conducted somewhere by someone ....
BHoT is second only to the Bible in this regard. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon is in third place.
I think he was trying to say that for "roughly equal" to apply, we must presume to know that P(black hole) ~= P(neutron star). Maybe we do know that, perhaps because that's generally the case (due to distribution of stars of different masses), or because we know something special about this particular case.
But if not, then the quote in the article is falling into the "either it'll happen or it won't" fallacy. Casino owners love this style of thinking, because it induces people to forget that the odds are against them, and to bet anyway: "either I'll win or I won't". It's common to confuse "2 outcomes" with "50% chance", and the article sounds like it has done so, but then again it's possible that it hasn't.
Unfortunately, in both your examples, each outcome is exactly as likely as the other - they're symmetrical (as long as they're fair!), so they don't illustrate the fallacy, because you were drawing attention to something else. Try this - it's similar to your examples, but it's asymmetric: Consider a (normal 6-sided) dice roll, where you're asked to guess if the result is a 4. The dice has rolled, but you haven't seen the result yet, and the chances of getting your 4 are 1/6, and 5/6 of not getting it - they're not "roughly equal". Does that work for you?
Cheers!
>all the light that is emited is in phase. This is necsessary for the interference.
Are you sure about this? After all, the two slits experiment was performed by Thomas Young in the early 1800s - way before lasers existed. You only need reasonably monochromatic light - otherwise the fringes spread out in different places for different frequencies (sorry, energies) so they all merge and you can't see the effect so strongly. It appears that Young used sunlight, so even that requirement isn't hard and fast.
A particle interacts with itself whether or not its friends happen to be in phase with it. In fact, the exciting experiment - where you allow the photons to arrive one at a time, and the pattern forms incrementally - only involves single photons, so phase issues are irrelevant anyway!
As you say, the color of the light isn't strictly important, although the fringes are more widely spaced for red light than for blue, and that makes the experiment is more impressive.
Here's Wikipedia on Thomas Young's experiment.
Just to nitpick ...
:-)
> Darwinism works because the stupid and the weak die
>off before they can procreate.
Careful here. Darwinism works because the less fit have fewer successful offspring. You don't have to die - you just need to have 3 kids when the others are having 4.
Otherwise you have to try and explain why having [tails, hairy foreheads, bald armpits, etc] killed so many early humans!
You knew this, right? Ok, I'll go back to work...
Question: do they yank the license for repeated parking violations, or for non-payment of fines? The former sort of makes sense in many cases, because thoughtful parking is part of good driving. I'm not sure I like the sound of it being used as a more general punishment though. It seems petty - I can imagine the idea expanding to "... and we'll stop collecting your garbage..." :-)
Huh? What about RMI? What about JNI? Having to find work-arounds for that caused me a few sleepless weeks. I even used "delegate" as a variable in one piece of code that someone else later tried to build with J++ ...!
It's ancient history now, but check this: JavaWorld article.
Dude, the MSJ++ product gratuitously used the extensions. It didn't make it that obvious.
> Sun claimed such features could harm the portability of java. But extending a programming language is not a crime.
It's a breach of contract if you say you won't do it, then do it and stick the other guy's trademark on it. Which is what MS did. They called it "Java". It wasn't Java. Sun own that mark, and IMHO they did the Right Thing in defending what it stands for. And they won that one.
Of course, what was amusing at the time was that Netscape's VM was far less compliant than MS's. But that was because it was so bug-ridden - lots of comments floating around about "malice vs stupidity"... :-)
Go on. Add the JVM to your list of reasons to hate them! You won't be alone...
Yep, thanks! ... I worked the table out when I did the project, but I figured the scale factors in my head as I typed!
1e10 it is.
Thanks...
> Basically a big blue phone box so police officers
> could contact their station before the advent of
> portable radios, they also had a phone on the
> outside for the use of the public in emergencies
>(behind the panel with text on it.)
I made a discovery recently... I always thought that the real Police Boxes were rather like normal telephone boxes: simple, light, wooden.
But most of them were actually serious concrete affairs, weighing over two tons (which became somewhat of a problem when they were decommissioned). They worked as miniature police stations, where an officer could imprison a suspect until help arrived. Here's a short history, and more details (PDF, sorry).
Was I the only person not to know this? Oh, ok.
I made a scale model of the solar system for my kids in the field out the back. You need 600m of field. Here are the scales, shrinking by a factor of 1e11 (so 100km -> 1mm), giving diameter and distance from sun:
-
Sun (Sol) 140 mm -
-
Mercury: 0.5 mm 6m
-
Venus: 1.2 mm 10m
-
Earth: 1.3 mm 15m
-
(Moon: 0.3 mm 0.04m from Earth)
-
Mars: 0.7 mm 23m
-
Jupiter: 14.3 mm 78m
-
Saturn: 12.1 mm 142m
-
Uranus: 5.1 mm 287m
-
Neptune: 5.0 mm 450m
-
Pluto: 0.2 mm 591m
-
AlphaC-A: 167 mm 4,200 km
-
Sirius: 249 mm 8,600 km
-
Betelgeuse: 37 m 427,200 km
-
Milky Way: 100,000,000 km
(Sorry about the crap formatting - I couldn't get this through theAnd it's fantastic!! You make the planets out of blu-tac or dough. It's great making the tiny ones - you're making a sphere 0.2mm across! - you roll out a thin hair of material and cut it with a knife. Jupiter's about the width of my thumb. You put little rings on the ringed planets. And you use a balloon for the Sun. Then you pace out the positions, and place them on the path, with a little marker so you can see where they are. Combine this with a good play with Celestia, and you're talking about some pretty scarily educational stuff. Celestia's fantastic, but the exponential speed control (though totally necessary) means that you can't get a perspective on size and distance.
Then you reveal (from UK) that the nearest star is in New York! (actually, that's a bit far, Cairo is a better match), and Sirius (which they know) is in San Francisco...
And look at Betelgeuse! - it's HUGE! - twice the size of our house - and it's about where the moon is. And the Milky Way ... well, it all gets abstract again. But it's interesting to stand at Pluto, look towards the Sun, close your eyes a bit, and imagine that you're on the edge of an empty ball with the Sun at the centre. And then turn around, and there's nothing else before America... just emptiness....
Pretty good.
And what's weird is that so few people have any sense of scale here - my wife figured that Alpha Centauri would be in a town a few km away.
I guess that this big model they're making is a PR stunt - it raises awareness, and gets people to play with things like Celestia. After all, they seem to be trying to create a memorable impression and a sense of distributed ownership ("We own Jupiter") rather than actually draw the big picture.
I watched a trial where a guy got awarded 500 pounds costs, but had spent about 4000 pounds. He's a friend of mine - he knew he wouldn't get the costs back, but he'd been screwed by someone, and he wanted to have the defendent nailed. So he made absolutely sure his case was water-tight!
>if the judge is a friend of a friend of the company
Well, then you're pretty much dead in the water anyway! And surely they'll just get their friends in the army to shoot you? :-) After all, if your premise is that the system's been bought, then legal costs allocations are the least of your problems.
Thank you, good story! Makes me remember why I read /.
I think the problem here is your use of the word "eventually"! I don't think the fact that someone'll "eventually" figure something out marks it as it intuitive - it's gotta be "instantly apparent".
:-)
In fact, I've shown a number of people how you can use an analog watch as a compass using the sun and the little hand, and it has always surprised them that the correlation is so close.
To be honest, I don't think that people corelatate the sun's position with time at all, unless forced. I often use the sun and stars for first-approx time and navigation, and it usually gets an "oh, yes, I suppose it does" sort of response from people around me. Solar measuring is a universally shared human experience, but then so is the photoelectric effect - it doesn't mean it's something that many people have noticed!
> Many people consider that the intelligence agencies "made mistakes", or perhaps even a few rouge elements
:-)
>in the intelligence agencies might have lied, but not the government.
I suspect that your "rouge elements" is a typo. But it's also possible that you've been infiltrated by French Communists! I think we should be told...
True ... but you're describing "Keep Your Glaziers In Business By Breaking Windows" economics.
The (proclaimed) purpose of all this computing machinery is to help people get jobs done, and thus get us further along the Big Road. Malicious software gets in the way of that, and so does the cost of the countermeasures. A given firm making widgets can invest less money and makes less good widgets as a result. Given a choice, they would rather pay the people working at the AV firm to build better Widget-Making Machine Control Systems instead. They'd rather have faster switches than firewalls.
Consequently, the reason we're not colonizing distant planets is because we're having to pay this "malicious software tax". Ok, no it isn't, but you get my point - it's costing us all, one way or another, just as prisons, police, armies, and all the other necessary evils bleed us of resources, to some extent or another. It's just job creation - or it would be if we could persuade all those naughty people to be reasonable.
Now, there *are* some justifications for job creation. One is that there might exist people who can only do that job, so perhaps you may as well pay people to do the job as pay them to do nothing. However, in the case of an AV firm, or a firewall manufacturer, there's no doubt that the people who work there would be well employed working on something else - they're high-skill, flexible people.
Another justification is that the job itself may be worth doing for reasons other than money, at least in the short term. For instance, we pay an army even though we might not be planning to go to war; we pay farmers to grow crops to throw away, not because we're stupid, but because we want the reserve capacity against the unexpected.
Suppose there were no viruses or worms or spammers. Would we be happy to have the Internet operate without all the defenses it currently has? There is an argument (which nudges close to what you said) that the bad guys keep AV firms in business, and therefore we keep ourselves in better shape than we would otherwise - a strategic defence, if you like, which is paid through the taxation of extra network security. That's the "I now take backups because a virus ate my homework" consequence.
On the other hand, the army don't train by attacking our civilians, but by conducting training exercises: it'd be nice if our firewalls and AV software were developed entirely through "white hat" trials which didn't cost other businesses direct pain. It'd be nice - but it's not obvious that it'd be very effective against the Real Thing. And it's not like we've got a choice.
Conclusion? What you say, I think, does not make *economic* sense - there's no real economic value in keeping AV firms alive. But whether the Internet is stronger and better because of this continual low-level assault and the defensive products that it breeds is a far more open question.
Of course, the fashion defines "normal behaviour" and so defines the degree to which a particular behaviour is acceptable - but there will always be people who are on either side of the curve. In this respect, of course, it's all relative, as you say.
But I don't think the "candyass" is violating a moral *fashion* though. She's using a personal asset to make gains, just as bribery or blackmail might, and if the company policy states that promotion and favour is gained through doing a good job, then such "out-of-band" approaches will create an atmosphere of unfairness and hypocrisy - especially if they appear to work!
The prude isn't against the slut because there's a fashion issue. What do you think? I think what you're describing is "injustice" - and that's no fashion.
Pencils? Wastepaper baskets?
Well, that only doubles the headcount. The current live human population is about the same as the dead - exponential growth and all that. This means that half the people who have ever existed are still alive. Here are some numbers.