You're trying to apply black and white rules to a gray area. I'm not arguing that he wasn't wrong, the fact that it self-replicated makes it a worm and he should know that what he was doing was illegal
Heh. I kinda love the "grey area" excuse that pops up everywhere. Now I'll be the first one to say that there are genuine grey areas, but it's also pretty much become the standard euphemism for some completely unrelated stuff. "If you don't aggree with me, you're applying black and white to a grey area." I don't think this was supposed to be what it means;)
In this case, then you proceed to admit that he was in the wrong and should have known it was illegal. So basically, in the end, in this case there was no grey area, no "corporations should have thanked him for making their site more secure", etc. What was the grey area again?
But let me say that there also are areas which are genuinely black-and-white. Either you broke the law or you didn't, for example. Sure, there's a ton of grayscale in what penalties we give for that. We don't execute people for jaywalking, after all. And we give the judges lots of room to maneuver on that greyscale. But in the end there's also a lot of binary/boolean stuff in there too. Did he break the law? Yes or no. Was the act premeditated? Yes or no. Should a human of reasonable intelligence have known better? Yes or no. Etc.
, but what if he hadn't made it self replicating? What if it just made everyone that visited his page a friend? What if I'm visiting a web page that sells recipes and they give you a link to/recipes/45.html and/recipes/354.html as examples, then I type in/recipes/1.html thru/recipes/999.html and print out all the recipes without paying them? Did I break the law? I'm not trying to troll you, I want to see where you think the line should be drawn. How much effort do I have to put into getting around their security before it becomes illegal? What if I saw the recipe on a search engine and extracted the other ones without even knowing they were charging for it?
The best that I can tell you there is: if you really want to know if it's illegal, ask a lawyer. "Some anonymous guy on Slashdot said it's ok" isn't going to help much in court.
That said, if you want to know my personal opinion, I'll point out the RL security model again: it's never a factor how much effort was involved. Difficulty just has nothing to do with it. Something being easy to steal is not an excuse to actually steal it.
If someone's front door was unlocked (i.e., really, there was no effort bypassing that security), it's not considered ok to walk in and help yourself to their stereo. If someone left their car unlocked at the gas station as they go pay for the gas, it's not an acceptable legal ground to hop right in and drive away with it. If a shop has displayed some books or clothes outside, and it doesn't require more effort to shoplift than taking one and walking away, it's still shoplifting. Etc.
There is a fundamental rule of human nature at play here, and it needs to be acknowledged: no one, not even those hiding behind the veil of a corporation, enjoys being embarrassed in public. Exposing a website's flaws may ultimately make it a better website. Just don't expect them to thank you for it.
Oh flippin' please... There's a difference between disclosing a vulnerability properly and actually exploiting it to your own ends.
To give you a RL example, publishing a paper about the vulnerability of locks with master keys (yep, one actually exists) is OK. Using that knowledge to break into every office in the building and vandalize it, is _not_ ok. The former is disclosing a vulnerability, the latter is breaking and entering. There is no law against the former, but there _are_ laws against the latter in any country.
Or in a similar vein:
- writing about what the limits of Kevlar vests are, is ok, shooting a SWAT trooper is not ok
- notifying a bank about a blind spot with their camera layout is ok, using that to rob the bank is not ok
- notifying a company about a vulnerability in their proxy or mail server software is ok, using that to add your name to all their internal mailing lists is industrial espionage, among other charges that you'll face
Etc.
And it seems to me disingenuous (and retarded) bullshit at its finest to pretend that a case that was purely about the latter, is somehow punishing the former.
Here's a fun concept: The fact that you know a vulnerability doesn't automatically entitle it to use it at other people's expense, and that use does _not_ count as just disclosing a vulnerability. The idea that with great knowledge or power comes great responsibility to abuse it, simply isn't recognizd by any RL code of laws.
Here's another fun concept: RL security, which is where we got those laws and legal concepts from, is _not_ based on some nerdy wild-west notion that if something isn't 100% secure then it's fair game for anyone who can break in. RL security is based simply on the law. You may know how to break into something, but we'll throw your sorry ass in jail if you actually do.
There are a lot of people who know how to steal your car or house. Yes, it's not secure. A brick through the window works just nicely. And everyone on the street knows it. But if they actually break in, we're gonna throw them in jail. _That_ is the deterrent and security factor.
It's just not feasible and it makes no economic sense to demand that everyone builds their house as a bunker, with bulletproof windows and a vault-like steel door. And then someone comes around with a bazooka, so better stand guard with your shotgun 24 hours a day. 'Cause you know, if they do break in, it was just showing that you didn't have enough security. It just doesn't work that way, and doesn't scale. It's cheaper for society as a whole to have a few cops and judges.
And I fail to see anything wrong with extending that concept to computers too. No, hi-tech as IT may be, you _don't_ automatically have a right to cause damage if you can. You may think that society owes you some great power for your being so nerdy and smart, but it actually doesn't owe you jack squat. Certainly not a right to be above the law. It doesn't work that way in any other domain, so I fail to see why IT would automatically be different. We don't give a top surgeon (and that's a very smart guy too) a right to murder, so I fail to see why we'd give a computer nerd a right to break into other people's computers.
1. I'm not really feeling sorry for anyone, as long as they're not being self-destructive with it. If blowing some money makes them feel happier, sure, why not? Some (not all) _are_ ending up in a self-destructing trap of their own imagination, though. But on the whole, well, I'm just pointing out that they're not forced to play the game. They're just playing it because they want to.
2. Well, basically look up Keynesian Economics on Wikipedia, or ask an economist. I'll try to summarize it a bit, but I'm no good at it and it's a complex topic in its own right.
Say's Law was a valid in the economy of scarcity of the early 19'th century, but nowadays it wouldn't work like that any more. Supply creates its own demand up to a point. What happened in the grand depression was that even lowering the prices no longer worked. Or not in a way that makes economic sense. Sure, you could sell stuff by selling even cheaper, but here's the killer: the only price you could sell anything was below the production price.
There were gluts and recessions before the Great Depression, that is true, and they got worse each time. They were invariably solved by reducing salaries to reduce costs and sell stuff even cheaper. It was already predictible that it can't go on for ever, because each time those measures solved less and the effect lasted less.
(Something that, for example, Marx noticed and was a part of why he predicted the end of capitalism. And in a sense the laissez-faire, pure free-market capitalism of the 19'th century did die in the Great Depression. The countries which stuck to it instead of creating extra demand got stuck in a massive depression until they got dragged into WW2. See, Canada.)
And at some point indeed it didn't work like that any more. Not entirely surprising, because lowering salaries also reduces the buying power of the population. At some point nuking wages any more just increased the problem instead of solving anything.
From a less money-oriented point of view, money only serves as a catalyst for exchanging goods. And at some point you can produce entirely too many goods with entirely too few people.
Think for example of the farmers in the Great Depression. It was possible to produce entirely too much grain. Sure, you can eat more grain, you can feed it to cattle, you can convert it to ethanol and burn it in cars, etc, but even that only works so far and it's increasinly less that you're willing to pay for that. If you're talking feeding it to cattle, for example, it's essentially competing with grass, so you're not going to pay a mint for it. The abbundance lowered the prices _dramatically_, and the free market just produced a situation where everyone was trying to sell it even cheaper, and compensate by producing more, which contributed to the glut some more. Lather, rinse, repeat. At some point the prices were just too low to even make a living out of selling grain, much less to pay taxes and buy machinery.
That's what I was thinking too. Even if they don't give a fuck about solving malaria, I'd expect then they'd give the money back, since it was for a specific purpose.
Now I realize that a donation isn't always a "you have to deliver X in Y days for Z million dollars" contract, but at the very least certain promises have been made. It's basically like saying "donate some money to help the latest tsunami/tornado/whatever victims" and then going "wtf, now I'm supposed to just give them that money? That's a stupid business model. I'll just go build a supermarket with that money instead. Now that's a good business model." It's pretty much just fraud.
And yes, some things aren't great business models, but that's the whole idea behind charity and donations. People give to charities _because_ we know they're going to use the money for a good and ultimately unprofitable cause. For a cause which wouldn't get done otherwise, precisely because it's not profitable. We don't go donate to an already profitable corporation in a profitable market. Ever considered sending a donation to IBM or Microsoft? Thought so.
The whole idea is to make a difference, to help something get done that wouldn't get done otherwise. If it were profitable, it would already get done anyway.
Given, again, the Great Depression, if everyone stopped playing the game overnight, the economy would simply collapse:P
Even the extra aggregate demand created by the government isn't enough any more to make the how-much-you-produce-vs-production-price and how-much-you-sell-vs-retail-price curves meet at any point. The causes for the Great Depression are more complex, as you do mention, but essentially that was what happened there: the two curves became parallel, with the former above the latter at any point. Aggregate supply was higher than aggregate demand. But you probably know all that already, so, yeah, I'll shut up.
That said, to get back to answering your actual point, well,
1. What you describe there is a bit like the prisoner's dilema, or a game of chicken, with 6 billion participants. Or more like being the only one giving up smoking in a room full of smokers. The temptation to get back on the fashion victim bandwagon is going to be very strong.
The only way to completely stop the game would be to make everyone stop doing it at the same time, and that is harder than it sounds.
2. That said, there are various degrees of playing the game and you don't lose _that_ horribly much by not playing it.
If we talk me personally, I'm a nerd, so what do you think? I'm supposed to be the weird guy;) I wear jeans and a sweater in winter, or jeans and a t-shirt in summer, and they look just the same whether they're Levi's or from the discount bin. And I'm the guy who rented an apartment some 2 miles from the office, so I can come by bus or on foot if I want to. So, yeah, I'll be the guy stepping out of an old bus, not out of the latest model BMW or Mercedes.
Even if you look at more mainstream people, in a world where tobacco companies saturated it with ads about how smoking is cool, hip, and fashionable (and before the backlash started), not everyone started smoking. And we have even managers here who drive a modest Skoda, and smoke the cheapest cigarettes. And you can tell that too because they're wrapped in brown paper. (Due to a fluke in the tax here, cigarillos are actually taxed a lot less, so eventually someone figured out that if they wrap cigarettes in brown paper made from tobacco they qualify as such.) I'm not even the only one coming to work by bus either.
Basically it's not like it's mandatory to be a _complete_ fashion victim. Most of the need to keep up with the Joneses, and preferrably one-up the Joneses, is only in your head. There are very few circles of peers where you actually gain anything by being the biggest fashion victims. Even if you got anyone to envy your Armani suit, it's not like they'll go, "ya know, let's make John the leader and do what he says, because he's such a cool dressed guy." And there are even fewer where you'd actually be ostracized because of not being a total fashion victim. (And if you ever find yourself in one, that's your clue to find some real friends instead.)
Most of playing the game is like smoking: it makes _you_ feel a little better for a short while. Then the effect wears off and you need the next cigarette, or in the case of consumerism to buy the next expensive, fashionable thing. Then it wears off again, and you can repeat the loop again. But that's about it. Don't imagine that you'll be hunted down by a mob with torches and pitchforks if you skip a cigarette or a consumer cycle.
Actually, I wouldn't be _too_ surprised, given how and when the Great Depression happened, and how the economy worked ever since.
Basically what happened there was that everyone could produce (and actually tried to produce) more stuff than they could possibly sell, and that was already after such inventions as planned obsolescence. And the way out involved essentially the government spending some of everyone's money, and some money it didn't even have, to create extra demand. (Think not just the New Deal in the USA. The building tanks in Germany and Italy, or the massive forced industrialization in the USSR acted as just the same: government demand creating more jobs.) We're already at a point where a ridiculous amount of the aggregate demand comes from the government, and don't think just the direct money spent by the government, but also the keynesian multiplier effect: company X who got a bunch of money from a government contract, goes and buys trucks and materials from companies Y and Z, which in turn spend their gains somewhere else. And, of course, on top of that we have the status games that you mention.
So, yeah, a huge part of the aggregate demand nowadays is status games, government spending, planned obsolescence games, etc, and all the marketting jobs and research jobs that go into that. And at least at 40 hours a week we actually _need_ those to make demand meet supply.
So, yeah, I wouldn't be that surprised. I don't know the exact number of hours a week that would work, but yeah, a lot less could work just fine if someone managed to figure out a way for the economy to work without all that.
You are basically implying that all advertising ever is unwanted. However if that was the case we wouldn't be where we are now. We would be a bunch of people in caves not trusting each other and killing each other because they took your club. People need ways of finding out about things.
Heh. No, not really. Now I'm all for comerce, and can even see some (indirect) benefit in (honest) advertising, but basically claiming that marketters are what got us out of the caves is... rich. No, seriously, I can only hope that was tongue in cheek, because it's outright funny in its silliness.
People have better ways to find things out than being fed lies, deception and FUD. We have schools, we have newspapers (or had, before the PR assholes started disguising FUD and deception as articles), we have libraries, etc, to actually find things out.
If you look at history, we remember stuff like, say, the great library of Alexandria, _not_ some big Egyptian marketting campaign. We remember the schools of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, _not_ some great ancient spammer. And if that information even got to us, we can thank some monasteries who worked dilligently to copy the manuscripts, not some medieval "enlarge thy phalus to the size of the Spanish Armada" spam campaign.
Here's some information: until _very_ recently (as in 19'th century or so, and even then in homoeopathic doses for anything that wasn't snake oil) marketting wasn't even need at _all_, and tended to not even exist. In an economy of scarcity, you don't need to distort everyone's perception to sell your stuff, you just need to bring it to the market. It'll sell itself. Trust me, when Venice or later Portugal brought a ship loaded spices from Asia, they didn't need to bulk-send leaflets hyping them: people would buy them anyway.
The disproportionate need for marketting to sell stuff is _very_ recent and a result of the economy of abundance. Large companies are no longer limited by how much they can produce, but by how much they can sell. Everyone can over-produce pretty much anything. Coca Cola or Pepsi could ramp their production to drown the whole world, Nike could make shoes for everyone on the whole planet, etc. The limit is demand nowadays. And we've already been at the point of just trying to produce more and dump them cheaper, that's how the Great Depression happened. So nowadays we end up hiring more people to create an artificial demand by marketting, than to actually produce stuff.
But again, that's a very recent phenomenon. If you picked even someone from the 17'th or 18'th century, much less a caveman, and try to tell them that somewhere there's a society where you need to beg and convince people to buy your goods, they'd think you're seriously deluded or telling them some kind of fable. The whole notion was simply alien, as the wold economy was simply always at a point where agregate demand vastly outstripped aggregate supply. Even if one place had an exceptional year and over-produced grain, two-three other places were having a severe famine, so some merchant would come and buy your grain anyway.
So basically, oh please. If you're trying to tell me that marketters got us out of the stone age and got us educated, that's on par with claiming that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy did it. It's just that ludicrious.
Bullshit. It was called spam from day one, and regarded as bad netiquete from day one. Yes, even in the 90's. Yes, it was always unwanted: that's why spammers now resort to forging headers and sender addresses in the first place. If people hadn't blocked the first non-forged batches, the need for such disguises wouldn't have existed in the first place.
Briefly: I don't give a fuck whether it's fraudulent or not, it's simply whether it's unsolicited advertising. PERIOD.
Also, oh, fucking please. Appeals to the role of advertising in a capitalist society have to be the most disingenuous spammer excuse nowadays.
Sorry to dawn some basic elementary economic clue upon you, but capitalism and the free market are give and take, supply and demand, service and payment. You get something (e.g., advertising space), and you pay something for it. Capitalism and the free market are nothing more than the mechanisms to find the right price, the right balance point for the needs of _both_ sides.
Capitalism is _not_ about just unilaterally taking whatever you want for free. So please spare me the bullshit excuse already.
We _tollerate_ advertising because it pays for other stuff. You want your ad on TV? You pay some money to subsidize that station's content. Sure, I get to see your ad, but then I also get to see a movie for free. You want your ad on a billboard? You pay some money to the municipality. Sure, I see your ugly ad when I drive to work, but then that's also a little less money on my taxes to maintain the road I drive on. Etc.
That's capitalism, in an over-simplified nutshell: you want something, you pay for it.
Does spam actually do something for us, to be tollerated like that too? Does it pay for my internet connection or something? Well, no, it doesn't. On the contrary, it jacks up everyone else's costs by needing admins and servers to deal with that deluge. So not only it doesn't pay for anything, it actually costs me money so some idiot can advertise to me.
What spammers do is more like going and spraying your own marketting grafitty on someone's wall for free. Or maybe glueing your own ad poster on every shop window in town, for free. Hey, it's just advertising and capitalism, right? Nope, sorry. There are words for that, e.g., "vandalism", "defacement", etc, but "advertising" or "normal capitalism" aren't among them.
Briefly, I don't fucking care if it's a genuine poster or fraudulent, I just don't want it glued to my house. It's that simple. Ditto for commercial emails. I don't fucking care if it's fraudulent or not, if it's clogging my inbox unsolicited, it's "spam". Plain and simple. There is _no_ such thing as "legitimate advertising" if it's unsolicited bulk mail.
Sony's rootkit didn't just cloak itself, but everything else that knew how. And I think there was at least one trojan which used just that. And I think Sony's first attempt to "fix" it actually created a security hole of its own. So, yeah, the damned thing was a security risk, not just an inconvenience.
Plus, I don't know, I think the very act of installing a rootkit on someone's computer pretty much qualifies as "taking over" by itself. If someone installed a rootkit on your machine, I'm guessing you'd be a lot less than amused, regardless of whether they actually used it to do extra damage yet.
Just to play the devil's advocate, how about taking your own advice? Get some clue to what the actual objections are, before you paint it all as closemindedness and religion?
The question is _not_ whether dwarfism could possibly exist. So let's move on from that ridiculous straw-man. Yes, we know that evolution can produce larger or smaller versions. You only need to look at a jaguar and at your house cat to know the same species can evolve in both directions.
The question is whether such a small-brained species, if one existed, would still be smart enough to use make tools or fire. _That's_ what goes contrary to all the other data we have.
No, religion has nothing to do with that objection. Especially if you _aren't_ religious, you have no reason to assume some "mind" or "soul" that's entirely independent from brain size or structure. The "mind" is entirely a product of having enough brain power to learn and process that data in real time. Scale that brain down, and the "mind" scales down to. Scale it down enough and it just stops having all that extra capacity needed to function as a human.
How's that for a very secular argument?
Can you just rewire a fraction of the neurons and get the same processing power? Then why didn't it happen someplace else too?
Because, believe it or not, that would be a _huge_ evolutionary advantage, if it were possible. The brain is a _major_ consumer of proteins and energy in your body, and each increase in brain size needed a source of more protein and energy. You can even follow the increases that were possible by inventing stuff like fire (and thus cooking), which in turn made people able to do smarter stuff, which in turn gave them enough food for the next brain size increase.
Plus having a huge brain creates a host of other disadvantages. It's really there just because evolution hasn't found any way around it. Being smarter was advantage enough to outweigh the disadvantage of needing a big brain.
If it were possible to just rewire the same neurons instead of growing a bigger brain, that race would have had an _incredible_ advantage. Between mutation A who just grew a 1% bigger brain, and mutation B who got 1% smarter by just rewiring the same neurons, mutation B has some major advantages. Between variant X who just stayed as it was, and variant Y who kept the same IQ on a 1% smaller brain, the natural selection would favour Y all the way. You wouldn't need an island for it. Put them in the same paleolythic cave, and variant B will tend to outlive variant A, and ditto for variant Y vs variant X.
And note that you don't need it happening only once, because such huge jumps tend not to happen. Evolution doesn't work that way. So that kind of mutation would have to happen again and again and again, over a helluva lot of time, producing progressively smaller brains that still are smart enough to function as a (primitive) human.
So why didn't it happen anywhere else, then? What's so special about that island? A mutation that happened millions of times there, why didn't it happen anywhere else? Because, again, it would have been a major survival advantage everywhere else too. We'd know if it happened lots. We'd all be like that.
So again, the question isn't whether a small human could have evolved, but whether it would still be a human and still able to make and use tools. _That_ is what doesn't add up there. We'd all have no problem accepting that Homo Erectus devolved into, basically, a monkey of that size. Maybe Homo Erectus shaped, but still monkey-brained. But when asked to believe that it somehow also kept the Homo Erectus mental abilities in a fraction of the brain size, that becomes much harder to swallow.
Micro-encephaly and that being a cemetery for retarded children is actually not dogma, it's really the easier to swallow hypothesis there. We already know that micro-encephaly exists. The hypothesis that a species could just rewire its brains to do the same in a fraction of the size, however, is something that's a lot less believable.
Well, I kind of wonder, though. Was it really a hobbit, or was it more like a halfling? What if it was a tall gnome, for that matter? Especially with all those tools around, it sure sounds like a (stone age) gnome engineer to me.
Now they will have to find what came between Homo Sapian and Homo Floresiensis.
The dwarves, of course.
Well, think about it. On one hand you have 6 ft tall humans, then you have 3 ft halflings. Now picture something half-way in between as height goes, and about as broad as a human. Right. It's a dwarf. Don't tell me that a species could have just jumped between extremes without hitting the points in the middle. That's not how evolution works. There has to be some grand hall under a mountain with skeletons that size and a door inscribed with "speak friend and enter";)
Now finding the elves, that's gonna be more of a problem. If those buggers only differred by having pointy ears and fair skin/hair, there's no way in heck we'll be able to tell that from a dug up skeleton.
While there are arguments both positive and negative toward the (somewhat) recent AMD/Dell alliance, this is one more indication that AMD is making even more progress in the processor market. Once considered the 'most bang for your buck' AMD is truly making a name for itself as a formidable competitor.
Actually, the way I remember history, AMD has only been "most bank for your buck" when it wasn't "best bang, period." As soon as it took the performance crown, an AMD computer (as in, once you also add the motherboard cost too) actually cost more than a similar performance Intel. As soon as it lost it, it cut prices and it was, "yeah, but we're best bang per buck" all over again.
Nothing against that, as it's just capitalism in action. Just pointing out that it's made the shift before, and the prices did end up higher than Intel's.
Which brings us to the other point that, you know, don't expect it to be any different this time.
The way I remember the definition of a "bottleneck", it's basically the lowest performance part that brakes everything else. It doesn't matter _why_ it's low performance. Just that less data gets through the bottle's neck than through everything else. If it brakes performance and other sub-systems have to wait for it, it's a bottleneck and that's that.
Defining it as "throughput" is at best prestidigitation. The _real_ throughput is how much data actually gets through. No more, no less. The keywords being "actually gets through". Not theoretical throughputs in some purely SF scenarios full of conditions and assumptions are never actually true. (Everything is read sequentially, everything fits in one single cylinder so there are no seeks, etc.)
Basically think of it this way: let's say that I write a super-duper program that, dumbly enough, uses bubble-sort for its main database sorting and searching. (Assume I write my own database files.) It doesn't matter in what theoretical conditions (e.g., the database is already sorted) my algorith would have great throughput, it only matters if in practice it brakes everything else or not. That's it. If it's the #1 cause of performance loss, then it's the bottleneck, and the next thing that should be optimized. If I came to you and said, "well, see, on the ideal case (again, think already sorted database file) my sort algorithm wouldn't be bad at all and it would have great throughput, so it's not the bottleneck, so I'm going to optimize something else instead", you'd probably tell me to take a hike and get a clue.
Given that I did not further define the character, he could very well be a perfectly nice, normal person most of the time, but one that doesn't take kindly to being jerked around and responds in-kind when some arbitrary line is crossed.
And that's one of the issues that worries me the most: that it's an _arbitrary_ line. People have been cyber-bullied for as little as being the girl who just said "no" to someone's "hur hur hur, do you, umm, wanna be my girlfriend?" pickup line. Among other fine reasons and excuses for cyber-revenge. Maybe your hypothetical character has a high enough threshold to only answer to bodily harm or something, but when glorifying the whole act of cyber-bullying as some glorious revenge of the oppressed, bear in mind that other people have other standards.
E.g., I've actually seen a call to help bully on some site along the lines of "this chick objected to my trying to give her a keylogger, please help me spam or DOS her." It's not made up. I guess that guy's arbitrary line was a lot lower, eh?
When did I mention picking on an innocent? I specifically referenced revenge, never picking on a random person.
My problem isn't with your example as such, as with the glorifying cyber-bullying across the board. And most of it _is_ just that: bullying someone weaker. Even if I were to find the occasional justifiable revenge ok, I'd still rather get rid of the whole phenomenon altogether. Because there is no safeguard to say it will only be used by a beat up nerd, and never by, say, the resident sociopath doing the online equivalent of tearing flies' wings, or whatever other non-justifiable uses.
No, there's no moral high-ground in revenge [...] Neither choice is all that smart to begin with
Well, if you realize that it's not all that smart, nor some moral high ground, I do believe I can rest the rest of my objections. Because it sounded like glorifying cyber-bullying in the first message.
1. I'm over 30. I didn't know the game had an "under 30" limit.
2. I'm not English, so it's forcing me to go through mental translation loops back and forth just to recompose the sound of it. E.g., "m8" forces me to first translate that "8" to "eight" there before I can even start translating it back. (Otherwise for me "8" = "acht", so "m8" would perhaps be "macht", i.e., maybe they're talking about power or about the Force.) I.e., it's forcing some other people to go through mental loops just so some l33t kid can sound oh so smart and maybe save a couple of keystrokes.
3. More importantly, at least for the point I was trying to make, is that it's not helping learn anything useful, hence you can't automatically say that broadband makes people smart. If I were to use that to learn English, well, sorry, I'd be just learning SMS gibberish, not English. It won't help me one bit to learn proper English spelling, and much less when it comes to learning grammar.
And from what I've been reading, it's not helping kids from the UK either. There have been reports of texting gibberish starting to appear in homeworks and test papers in schools already. It's not even that surprising. After you typed "skewl" a thousand times online and on the phone, you're already more used to that spelling than to "school."
1. Two wrongs don't make a right. Being a sociopathic asshole as revenge still makes you a sociopathic asshole. No more, no less. It does not a moral high ground make.
2. Much as I'd like to think you're some uber-l33t haxx0r that hacks right into Blizzard's login servers at the fall of a hat, reality is a lot less glamourous. If there were that easy to hack that, the gold farmer gang would have done it long ago, because they make RL money selling that gold. And frankly, the average high-school nerd isn't half as much of a computer genius as he likes to pretend. He wouldn't even know where to start.
So most actual cyber-bullying is in practice no more of a technical achievement than sending some harrassing emails and IM messages, and subscribing someone's email address to some spam and other crap. It's just the plain old harrassment over another medium, nothing even vaguely resembling some high tech Revenge Of The Nerds.
In the very few cases when a nerd actually gets someone's password, it isn't some great feat of hacking, but plain old being a dishonest asshole. E.g., being told that password and then mis-using it. Makes for some revenge possibilities against an ex-girlfriend, for example, but a great feat of hacking it ain't.
So excuse me if I'm less than impressed. Not that it would excuse being an asshole anyway, but it's not even being that high-tech an asshole.
3. Being kicked when you were an innocent, doesn't give you the right to pick on an innocent too. That's no longer even revenge. And frankly that's what 99% of cyber-bullying is. Some frustrated nobody venting frustration on an innocent third party. I'd like to believe that all cyber-bullying is only justified vengeance, but it ain't. Even your example involves harrassing someone's parents, which is already a third party to your little conflict. Most cases aren't even that targetted.
And even the "revenge" bullying is often for such dubious revenge reasons as being rejected by a girl who, frankly, was perfectly within her rights to make her own choices.
4. Frankly, much as I'm a nerd, I'll say this: if you find yourself that unpopular and targetted, please re-examine your own behaviour first. You'd be surprised how many aren't tormented just because they're smart, or whatever bullshit fairy tale they tell themselves, but because they were the dysfunctional assholes to start with. If you treat people from a "me genius, you idiot" position, they'll start disliking you in return. If you insist on following someone around because you're unable to pick a "leave me alone" hint, don't be surprised if people start treating you worse to give you that hint. Etc.
And no, that doesn't make you the poor innocent victim, nor give you a sacred right to inflict more stress upon the others.
5. Frankly, out of the two, I'll have to say I respect the physical bully more. At least he takes the risks and is prepared to deal with the consequences. I wish I could say the same about the low-lives hiding behing a pseudonym to harrass. At heart both are just the same kind of bully, at heart both would punch your clock just as gladly, except the latter doesn't have the balls to do it in person. It doesn't make a moral high ground. It just moves one from merely being a low-life sadistic idiot to being a _cowardly_ low-life sadistic idiot. It's not a redeeming quality, it's just one more low-life quality to dislike added into an already disgusting mix.
Yes, but again: I don't see these guys including books and tapes in their intelligence metrics. That's the problem. Basically from their BS metric, books and tapes don't matter at all, you're still dumb as a brick with those, heck, even Internet access over ISDN still makes you dumb, while someone with a big fat broadband connection is automatically T3H SM4RT even if they only download porn on it.
Just curious, why would a Dragunov be worse than an AK-47?
Because the Dragunov is a sniper rifle, while the AK-47 is noisy and awfully inaccurate over 300m. So with a Dragunov you can either ventilate someone's brains from considerably higher range and they won't even know where you were, or pin a patrol with a couple of bullets for longer than you could with an AK-47 and 3 full clips. Snipers do a better job at keeping someone pinned than a heavy machinegun does.
Rogerborg already hit the nail on the head, but here's something to consider: not everyone has a brand-new latest model car. I don't know about Iraq, but if it's anything like Eastern Europe, we're talking cars based on models from the 60's and 70's, and people who save for a lifetime to afford one. In some cases, it _is_ cars that have been badly patched since the 70's, because they can't afford to just buy a new one. We're also talking roads which often, well, to put it _very_ mildly, aren't quite up to western standards.
I'd imagine Iraq would be even worse, what with the war and everything.
So here's an idea for you: what if someone's car did break down? What if someone genuinely took a stroll down the wrong road? You're going to give everyone burns just because _some_ might be insurgents?
At this stage the war isn't won by heavy-handed bitch-slapping Iraqis into submission, but by convincing those people to trust you and give the new government a chance. You _can't_ keep smacking them around for ever, and creating two new insurgents for each one you get rid of. So, basically, "Fucking americans frying you if you even look in their direction" is the last thing you want in those people's heads.
What of people rioting outside of an embassy? That would be a good use for this weapon.
Did it ever occur to you that an embasy is, pretty much by definition, in the middle of another country? You know, _sovereign_ country? You won't be making many friends worldwide if the USA's embasies start frying another country's citizens just because they were making a ruckus in the wrong place.
Further, if terrorists are disbursed among civilians, you can use this weapon to stop everyone, grab the assholes with the AKs, and everyone else lives. Minimal collateral damage.
Heh. Dude, no offense, think about it for a second. I don't know what bad action movies or bad video games you've been playing, but people don't just hang around and chat nonchalantly when someone is shooting an AK. The moment someone actually started shooting an AK from the middle of the crowd, actually even before they actually shoot it, the civilians will stampede in panic to get to shelter. You don't need a freakin' heat gun to disperse them, their own "omg, I don't want to die" panic will kick in just nicely.
If you need a heat ray to disperse them, then there wasn't anyone shooting from that crowd in the first place. Any "terrorist" in that crowd didn't have anything more lethal than a slogan on a piece of cardboard, if the rest of the gang didn't already disperse.
Also convenient when assaulting a critical location with entrenched enemies that you don't want to blow up (power plant, oil refinery, etc). You can incapacitate the bad guys without blowing the building up - big win for all of the innocents that rely on the building.
Heh. Now I probably forgot most of what they taught me in the army, but that sounds as just about as pointless as trying to spray them with a water hose to assault that position. What's wrong with it? Off the top of my head:
1. This heat ray doesn't incapacitate, it just makes them take cover. No more. I.e., all it does is suppression. And at that it will cause suppression on the 1-2 you actually _hit_, whereas a single light machinegun will make a whole freakin' company take cover, and occasionally kills someone too.
2. It's just microwaves, so any tanks, APCs, God knows what else, will still be able to shoot at you just as well.
3. For that matter, a simple metal mesh will be perfectly good protection for anyone else who still wants to shoot at you. If you knew that the enemy has these things, you just give your soldiers a piece of mesh with a hole for the barrel of the gun.
Duly noted, and thanks for the correction. (Though for Russian, an 8-bit encoding does exist, and the Japanese prefer their own encoding too.)
Still, in the worst case scenario you end up with a file twice as large as ASCII. Hardly a reason to absolutely need broadband to be able to learn Russian.
Anyone the army actually wanted to give lead poisoning, it will continue to give a lead poisoning. If someone is shooting an AK-47 or worse yet a Dragunov at you, you don't want him just forced to dive around a corner. One way or another some soldiers will still have to hunt him down, sooner or later.
The only people against you'd want to use a non-lethal weapon is, well, people you don't want to give a lead poisoning in the first place. Like civilian demonstrations. That's what worries me. It's not a weapon of war, it's a crowd control device. Same as rubber bullets and water hoses, only a level meaner: when was the last time you heard of those used in a battle? It's not the kind of thing you'd win an offensive with, it the kind of thing you'd use to keep people from protesting against a puppet pro-USA dictator.
Slashdot Mirror
In this case, then you proceed to admit that he was in the wrong and should have known it was illegal. So basically, in the end, in this case there was no grey area, no "corporations should have thanked him for making their site more secure", etc. What was the grey area again?
But let me say that there also are areas which are genuinely black-and-white. Either you broke the law or you didn't, for example. Sure, there's a ton of grayscale in what penalties we give for that. We don't execute people for jaywalking, after all. And we give the judges lots of room to maneuver on that greyscale. But in the end there's also a lot of binary/boolean stuff in there too. Did he break the law? Yes or no. Was the act premeditated? Yes or no. Should a human of reasonable intelligence have known better? Yes or no. Etc. The best that I can tell you there is: if you really want to know if it's illegal, ask a lawyer. "Some anonymous guy on Slashdot said it's ok" isn't going to help much in court.
That said, if you want to know my personal opinion, I'll point out the RL security model again: it's never a factor how much effort was involved. Difficulty just has nothing to do with it. Something being easy to steal is not an excuse to actually steal it.
If someone's front door was unlocked (i.e., really, there was no effort bypassing that security), it's not considered ok to walk in and help yourself to their stereo. If someone left their car unlocked at the gas station as they go pay for the gas, it's not an acceptable legal ground to hop right in and drive away with it. If a shop has displayed some books or clothes outside, and it doesn't require more effort to shoplift than taking one and walking away, it's still shoplifting. Etc.
To give you a RL example, publishing a paper about the vulnerability of locks with master keys (yep, one actually exists) is OK. Using that knowledge to break into every office in the building and vandalize it, is _not_ ok. The former is disclosing a vulnerability, the latter is breaking and entering. There is no law against the former, but there _are_ laws against the latter in any country.
Or in a similar vein:
- writing about what the limits of Kevlar vests are, is ok, shooting a SWAT trooper is not ok
- notifying a bank about a blind spot with their camera layout is ok, using that to rob the bank is not ok
- notifying a company about a vulnerability in their proxy or mail server software is ok, using that to add your name to all their internal mailing lists is industrial espionage, among other charges that you'll face
Etc.
And it seems to me disingenuous (and retarded) bullshit at its finest to pretend that a case that was purely about the latter, is somehow punishing the former.
Here's a fun concept: The fact that you know a vulnerability doesn't automatically entitle it to use it at other people's expense, and that use does _not_ count as just disclosing a vulnerability. The idea that with great knowledge or power comes great responsibility to abuse it, simply isn't recognizd by any RL code of laws.
Here's another fun concept: RL security, which is where we got those laws and legal concepts from, is _not_ based on some nerdy wild-west notion that if something isn't 100% secure then it's fair game for anyone who can break in. RL security is based simply on the law. You may know how to break into something, but we'll throw your sorry ass in jail if you actually do.
There are a lot of people who know how to steal your car or house. Yes, it's not secure. A brick through the window works just nicely. And everyone on the street knows it. But if they actually break in, we're gonna throw them in jail. _That_ is the deterrent and security factor.
It's just not feasible and it makes no economic sense to demand that everyone builds their house as a bunker, with bulletproof windows and a vault-like steel door. And then someone comes around with a bazooka, so better stand guard with your shotgun 24 hours a day. 'Cause you know, if they do break in, it was just showing that you didn't have enough security. It just doesn't work that way, and doesn't scale. It's cheaper for society as a whole to have a few cops and judges.
And I fail to see anything wrong with extending that concept to computers too. No, hi-tech as IT may be, you _don't_ automatically have a right to cause damage if you can. You may think that society owes you some great power for your being so nerdy and smart, but it actually doesn't owe you jack squat. Certainly not a right to be above the law. It doesn't work that way in any other domain, so I fail to see why IT would automatically be different. We don't give a top surgeon (and that's a very smart guy too) a right to murder, so I fail to see why we'd give a computer nerd a right to break into other people's computers.
1. I'm not really feeling sorry for anyone, as long as they're not being self-destructive with it. If blowing some money makes them feel happier, sure, why not? Some (not all) _are_ ending up in a self-destructing trap of their own imagination, though. But on the whole, well, I'm just pointing out that they're not forced to play the game. They're just playing it because they want to.
2. Well, basically look up Keynesian Economics on Wikipedia, or ask an economist. I'll try to summarize it a bit, but I'm no good at it and it's a complex topic in its own right.
Say's Law was a valid in the economy of scarcity of the early 19'th century, but nowadays it wouldn't work like that any more. Supply creates its own demand up to a point. What happened in the grand depression was that even lowering the prices no longer worked. Or not in a way that makes economic sense. Sure, you could sell stuff by selling even cheaper, but here's the killer: the only price you could sell anything was below the production price.
There were gluts and recessions before the Great Depression, that is true, and they got worse each time. They were invariably solved by reducing salaries to reduce costs and sell stuff even cheaper. It was already predictible that it can't go on for ever, because each time those measures solved less and the effect lasted less.
(Something that, for example, Marx noticed and was a part of why he predicted the end of capitalism. And in a sense the laissez-faire, pure free-market capitalism of the 19'th century did die in the Great Depression. The countries which stuck to it instead of creating extra demand got stuck in a massive depression until they got dragged into WW2. See, Canada.)
And at some point indeed it didn't work like that any more. Not entirely surprising, because lowering salaries also reduces the buying power of the population. At some point nuking wages any more just increased the problem instead of solving anything.
From a less money-oriented point of view, money only serves as a catalyst for exchanging goods. And at some point you can produce entirely too many goods with entirely too few people.
Think for example of the farmers in the Great Depression. It was possible to produce entirely too much grain. Sure, you can eat more grain, you can feed it to cattle, you can convert it to ethanol and burn it in cars, etc, but even that only works so far and it's increasinly less that you're willing to pay for that. If you're talking feeding it to cattle, for example, it's essentially competing with grass, so you're not going to pay a mint for it. The abbundance lowered the prices _dramatically_, and the free market just produced a situation where everyone was trying to sell it even cheaper, and compensate by producing more, which contributed to the glut some more. Lather, rinse, repeat. At some point the prices were just too low to even make a living out of selling grain, much less to pay taxes and buy machinery.
That's what I was thinking too. Even if they don't give a fuck about solving malaria, I'd expect then they'd give the money back, since it was for a specific purpose.
Now I realize that a donation isn't always a "you have to deliver X in Y days for Z million dollars" contract, but at the very least certain promises have been made. It's basically like saying "donate some money to help the latest tsunami/tornado/whatever victims" and then going "wtf, now I'm supposed to just give them that money? That's a stupid business model. I'll just go build a supermarket with that money instead. Now that's a good business model." It's pretty much just fraud.
And yes, some things aren't great business models, but that's the whole idea behind charity and donations. People give to charities _because_ we know they're going to use the money for a good and ultimately unprofitable cause. For a cause which wouldn't get done otherwise, precisely because it's not profitable. We don't go donate to an already profitable corporation in a profitable market. Ever considered sending a donation to IBM or Microsoft? Thought so.
The whole idea is to make a difference, to help something get done that wouldn't get done otherwise. If it were profitable, it would already get done anyway.
Given, again, the Great Depression, if everyone stopped playing the game overnight, the economy would simply collapse :P
;) I wear jeans and a sweater in winter, or jeans and a t-shirt in summer, and they look just the same whether they're Levi's or from the discount bin. And I'm the guy who rented an apartment some 2 miles from the office, so I can come by bus or on foot if I want to. So, yeah, I'll be the guy stepping out of an old bus, not out of the latest model BMW or Mercedes.
Even the extra aggregate demand created by the government isn't enough any more to make the how-much-you-produce-vs-production-price and how-much-you-sell-vs-retail-price curves meet at any point. The causes for the Great Depression are more complex, as you do mention, but essentially that was what happened there: the two curves became parallel, with the former above the latter at any point. Aggregate supply was higher than aggregate demand. But you probably know all that already, so, yeah, I'll shut up.
That said, to get back to answering your actual point, well,
1. What you describe there is a bit like the prisoner's dilema, or a game of chicken, with 6 billion participants. Or more like being the only one giving up smoking in a room full of smokers. The temptation to get back on the fashion victim bandwagon is going to be very strong.
The only way to completely stop the game would be to make everyone stop doing it at the same time, and that is harder than it sounds.
2. That said, there are various degrees of playing the game and you don't lose _that_ horribly much by not playing it.
If we talk me personally, I'm a nerd, so what do you think? I'm supposed to be the weird guy
Even if you look at more mainstream people, in a world where tobacco companies saturated it with ads about how smoking is cool, hip, and fashionable (and before the backlash started), not everyone started smoking. And we have even managers here who drive a modest Skoda, and smoke the cheapest cigarettes. And you can tell that too because they're wrapped in brown paper. (Due to a fluke in the tax here, cigarillos are actually taxed a lot less, so eventually someone figured out that if they wrap cigarettes in brown paper made from tobacco they qualify as such.) I'm not even the only one coming to work by bus either.
Basically it's not like it's mandatory to be a _complete_ fashion victim. Most of the need to keep up with the Joneses, and preferrably one-up the Joneses, is only in your head. There are very few circles of peers where you actually gain anything by being the biggest fashion victims. Even if you got anyone to envy your Armani suit, it's not like they'll go, "ya know, let's make John the leader and do what he says, because he's such a cool dressed guy." And there are even fewer where you'd actually be ostracized because of not being a total fashion victim. (And if you ever find yourself in one, that's your clue to find some real friends instead.)
Most of playing the game is like smoking: it makes _you_ feel a little better for a short while. Then the effect wears off and you need the next cigarette, or in the case of consumerism to buy the next expensive, fashionable thing. Then it wears off again, and you can repeat the loop again. But that's about it. Don't imagine that you'll be hunted down by a mob with torches and pitchforks if you skip a cigarette or a consumer cycle.
Actually, I wouldn't be _too_ surprised, given how and when the Great Depression happened, and how the economy worked ever since.
Basically what happened there was that everyone could produce (and actually tried to produce) more stuff than they could possibly sell, and that was already after such inventions as planned obsolescence. And the way out involved essentially the government spending some of everyone's money, and some money it didn't even have, to create extra demand. (Think not just the New Deal in the USA. The building tanks in Germany and Italy, or the massive forced industrialization in the USSR acted as just the same: government demand creating more jobs.) We're already at a point where a ridiculous amount of the aggregate demand comes from the government, and don't think just the direct money spent by the government, but also the keynesian multiplier effect: company X who got a bunch of money from a government contract, goes and buys trucks and materials from companies Y and Z, which in turn spend their gains somewhere else. And, of course, on top of that we have the status games that you mention.
So, yeah, a huge part of the aggregate demand nowadays is status games, government spending, planned obsolescence games, etc, and all the marketting jobs and research jobs that go into that. And at least at 40 hours a week we actually _need_ those to make demand meet supply.
So, yeah, I wouldn't be that surprised. I don't know the exact number of hours a week that would work, but yeah, a lot less could work just fine if someone managed to figure out a way for the economy to work without all that.
People have better ways to find things out than being fed lies, deception and FUD. We have schools, we have newspapers (or had, before the PR assholes started disguising FUD and deception as articles), we have libraries, etc, to actually find things out.
If you look at history, we remember stuff like, say, the great library of Alexandria, _not_ some big Egyptian marketting campaign. We remember the schools of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, _not_ some great ancient spammer. And if that information even got to us, we can thank some monasteries who worked dilligently to copy the manuscripts, not some medieval "enlarge thy phalus to the size of the Spanish Armada" spam campaign.
Here's some information: until _very_ recently (as in 19'th century or so, and even then in homoeopathic doses for anything that wasn't snake oil) marketting wasn't even need at _all_, and tended to not even exist. In an economy of scarcity, you don't need to distort everyone's perception to sell your stuff, you just need to bring it to the market. It'll sell itself. Trust me, when Venice or later Portugal brought a ship loaded spices from Asia, they didn't need to bulk-send leaflets hyping them: people would buy them anyway.
The disproportionate need for marketting to sell stuff is _very_ recent and a result of the economy of abundance. Large companies are no longer limited by how much they can produce, but by how much they can sell. Everyone can over-produce pretty much anything. Coca Cola or Pepsi could ramp their production to drown the whole world, Nike could make shoes for everyone on the whole planet, etc. The limit is demand nowadays. And we've already been at the point of just trying to produce more and dump them cheaper, that's how the Great Depression happened. So nowadays we end up hiring more people to create an artificial demand by marketting, than to actually produce stuff.
But again, that's a very recent phenomenon. If you picked even someone from the 17'th or 18'th century, much less a caveman, and try to tell them that somewhere there's a society where you need to beg and convince people to buy your goods, they'd think you're seriously deluded or telling them some kind of fable. The whole notion was simply alien, as the wold economy was simply always at a point where agregate demand vastly outstripped aggregate supply. Even if one place had an exceptional year and over-produced grain, two-three other places were having a severe famine, so some merchant would come and buy your grain anyway.
So basically, oh please. If you're trying to tell me that marketters got us out of the stone age and got us educated, that's on par with claiming that Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy did it. It's just that ludicrious.
Bullshit. It was called spam from day one, and regarded as bad netiquete from day one. Yes, even in the 90's. Yes, it was always unwanted: that's why spammers now resort to forging headers and sender addresses in the first place. If people hadn't blocked the first non-forged batches, the need for such disguises wouldn't have existed in the first place.
Briefly: I don't give a fuck whether it's fraudulent or not, it's simply whether it's unsolicited advertising. PERIOD.
Also, oh, fucking please. Appeals to the role of advertising in a capitalist society have to be the most disingenuous spammer excuse nowadays.
Sorry to dawn some basic elementary economic clue upon you, but capitalism and the free market are give and take, supply and demand, service and payment. You get something (e.g., advertising space), and you pay something for it. Capitalism and the free market are nothing more than the mechanisms to find the right price, the right balance point for the needs of _both_ sides.
Capitalism is _not_ about just unilaterally taking whatever you want for free. So please spare me the bullshit excuse already.
We _tollerate_ advertising because it pays for other stuff. You want your ad on TV? You pay some money to subsidize that station's content. Sure, I get to see your ad, but then I also get to see a movie for free. You want your ad on a billboard? You pay some money to the municipality. Sure, I see your ugly ad when I drive to work, but then that's also a little less money on my taxes to maintain the road I drive on. Etc.
That's capitalism, in an over-simplified nutshell: you want something, you pay for it.
Does spam actually do something for us, to be tollerated like that too? Does it pay for my internet connection or something? Well, no, it doesn't. On the contrary, it jacks up everyone else's costs by needing admins and servers to deal with that deluge. So not only it doesn't pay for anything, it actually costs me money so some idiot can advertise to me.
What spammers do is more like going and spraying your own marketting grafitty on someone's wall for free. Or maybe glueing your own ad poster on every shop window in town, for free. Hey, it's just advertising and capitalism, right? Nope, sorry. There are words for that, e.g., "vandalism", "defacement", etc, but "advertising" or "normal capitalism" aren't among them.
Briefly, I don't fucking care if it's a genuine poster or fraudulent, I just don't want it glued to my house. It's that simple. Ditto for commercial emails. I don't fucking care if it's fraudulent or not, if it's clogging my inbox unsolicited, it's "spam". Plain and simple. There is _no_ such thing as "legitimate advertising" if it's unsolicited bulk mail.
Sony's rootkit didn't just cloak itself, but everything else that knew how. And I think there was at least one trojan which used just that. And I think Sony's first attempt to "fix" it actually created a security hole of its own. So, yeah, the damned thing was a security risk, not just an inconvenience.
Plus, I don't know, I think the very act of installing a rootkit on someone's computer pretty much qualifies as "taking over" by itself. If someone installed a rootkit on your machine, I'm guessing you'd be a lot less than amused, regardless of whether they actually used it to do extra damage yet.
Just to play the devil's advocate, how about taking your own advice? Get some clue to what the actual objections are, before you paint it all as closemindedness and religion?
The question is _not_ whether dwarfism could possibly exist. So let's move on from that ridiculous straw-man. Yes, we know that evolution can produce larger or smaller versions. You only need to look at a jaguar and at your house cat to know the same species can evolve in both directions.
The question is whether such a small-brained species, if one existed, would still be smart enough to use make tools or fire. _That's_ what goes contrary to all the other data we have.
No, religion has nothing to do with that objection. Especially if you _aren't_ religious, you have no reason to assume some "mind" or "soul" that's entirely independent from brain size or structure. The "mind" is entirely a product of having enough brain power to learn and process that data in real time. Scale that brain down, and the "mind" scales down to. Scale it down enough and it just stops having all that extra capacity needed to function as a human.
How's that for a very secular argument?
Can you just rewire a fraction of the neurons and get the same processing power? Then why didn't it happen someplace else too?
Because, believe it or not, that would be a _huge_ evolutionary advantage, if it were possible. The brain is a _major_ consumer of proteins and energy in your body, and each increase in brain size needed a source of more protein and energy. You can even follow the increases that were possible by inventing stuff like fire (and thus cooking), which in turn made people able to do smarter stuff, which in turn gave them enough food for the next brain size increase.
Plus having a huge brain creates a host of other disadvantages. It's really there just because evolution hasn't found any way around it. Being smarter was advantage enough to outweigh the disadvantage of needing a big brain.
If it were possible to just rewire the same neurons instead of growing a bigger brain, that race would have had an _incredible_ advantage. Between mutation A who just grew a 1% bigger brain, and mutation B who got 1% smarter by just rewiring the same neurons, mutation B has some major advantages. Between variant X who just stayed as it was, and variant Y who kept the same IQ on a 1% smaller brain, the natural selection would favour Y all the way. You wouldn't need an island for it. Put them in the same paleolythic cave, and variant B will tend to outlive variant A, and ditto for variant Y vs variant X.
And note that you don't need it happening only once, because such huge jumps tend not to happen. Evolution doesn't work that way. So that kind of mutation would have to happen again and again and again, over a helluva lot of time, producing progressively smaller brains that still are smart enough to function as a (primitive) human.
So why didn't it happen anywhere else, then? What's so special about that island? A mutation that happened millions of times there, why didn't it happen anywhere else? Because, again, it would have been a major survival advantage everywhere else too. We'd know if it happened lots. We'd all be like that.
So again, the question isn't whether a small human could have evolved, but whether it would still be a human and still able to make and use tools. _That_ is what doesn't add up there. We'd all have no problem accepting that Homo Erectus devolved into, basically, a monkey of that size. Maybe Homo Erectus shaped, but still monkey-brained. But when asked to believe that it somehow also kept the Homo Erectus mental abilities in a fraction of the brain size, that becomes much harder to swallow.
Micro-encephaly and that being a cemetery for retarded children is actually not dogma, it's really the easier to swallow hypothesis there. We already know that micro-encephaly exists. The hypothesis that a species could just rewire its brains to do the same in a fraction of the size, however, is something that's a lot less believable.
Well, I kind of wonder, though. Was it really a hobbit, or was it more like a halfling? What if it was a tall gnome, for that matter? Especially with all those tools around, it sure sounds like a (stone age) gnome engineer to me.
Or, *shudder*, what if it was an ewok?
Well, think about it. On one hand you have 6 ft tall humans, then you have 3 ft halflings. Now picture something half-way in between as height goes, and about as broad as a human. Right. It's a dwarf. Don't tell me that a species could have just jumped between extremes without hitting the points in the middle. That's not how evolution works. There has to be some grand hall under a mountain with skeletons that size and a door inscribed with "speak friend and enter"
Now finding the elves, that's gonna be more of a problem. If those buggers only differred by having pointy ears and fair skin/hair, there's no way in heck we'll be able to tell that from a dug up skeleton.
Nothing against that, as it's just capitalism in action. Just pointing out that it's made the shift before, and the prices did end up higher than Intel's.
Which brings us to the other point that, you know, don't expect it to be any different this time.
The way I remember the definition of a "bottleneck", it's basically the lowest performance part that brakes everything else. It doesn't matter _why_ it's low performance. Just that less data gets through the bottle's neck than through everything else. If it brakes performance and other sub-systems have to wait for it, it's a bottleneck and that's that.
Defining it as "throughput" is at best prestidigitation. The _real_ throughput is how much data actually gets through. No more, no less. The keywords being "actually gets through". Not theoretical throughputs in some purely SF scenarios full of conditions and assumptions are never actually true. (Everything is read sequentially, everything fits in one single cylinder so there are no seeks, etc.)
Basically think of it this way: let's say that I write a super-duper program that, dumbly enough, uses bubble-sort for its main database sorting and searching. (Assume I write my own database files.) It doesn't matter in what theoretical conditions (e.g., the database is already sorted) my algorith would have great throughput, it only matters if in practice it brakes everything else or not. That's it. If it's the #1 cause of performance loss, then it's the bottleneck, and the next thing that should be optimized. If I came to you and said, "well, see, on the ideal case (again, think already sorted database file) my sort algorithm wouldn't be bad at all and it would have great throughput, so it's not the bottleneck, so I'm going to optimize something else instead", you'd probably tell me to take a hike and get a clue.
And that's one of the issues that worries me the most: that it's an _arbitrary_ line. People have been cyber-bullied for as little as being the girl who just said "no" to someone's "hur hur hur, do you, umm, wanna be my girlfriend?" pickup line. Among other fine reasons and excuses for cyber-revenge. Maybe your hypothetical character has a high enough threshold to only answer to bodily harm or something, but when glorifying the whole act of cyber-bullying as some glorious revenge of the oppressed, bear in mind that other people have other standards.
E.g., I've actually seen a call to help bully on some site along the lines of "this chick objected to my trying to give her a keylogger, please help me spam or DOS her." It's not made up. I guess that guy's arbitrary line was a lot lower, eh?
My problem isn't with your example as such, as with the glorifying cyber-bullying across the board. And most of it _is_ just that: bullying someone weaker. Even if I were to find the occasional justifiable revenge ok, I'd still rather get rid of the whole phenomenon altogether. Because there is no safeguard to say it will only be used by a beat up nerd, and never by, say, the resident sociopath doing the online equivalent of tearing flies' wings, or whatever other non-justifiable uses.
Well, if you realize that it's not all that smart, nor some moral high ground, I do believe I can rest the rest of my objections. Because it sounded like glorifying cyber-bullying in the first message.
1. I'm over 30. I didn't know the game had an "under 30" limit.
2. I'm not English, so it's forcing me to go through mental translation loops back and forth just to recompose the sound of it. E.g., "m8" forces me to first translate that "8" to "eight" there before I can even start translating it back. (Otherwise for me "8" = "acht", so "m8" would perhaps be "macht", i.e., maybe they're talking about power or about the Force.) I.e., it's forcing some other people to go through mental loops just so some l33t kid can sound oh so smart and maybe save a couple of keystrokes.
3. More importantly, at least for the point I was trying to make, is that it's not helping learn anything useful, hence you can't automatically say that broadband makes people smart. If I were to use that to learn English, well, sorry, I'd be just learning SMS gibberish, not English. It won't help me one bit to learn proper English spelling, and much less when it comes to learning grammar.
And from what I've been reading, it's not helping kids from the UK either. There have been reports of texting gibberish starting to appear in homeworks and test papers in schools already. It's not even that surprising. After you typed "skewl" a thousand times online and on the phone, you're already more used to that spelling than to "school."
Well, then basically we're not even disaggreeing much, since we're talking about different issues, right? :P
1. Two wrongs don't make a right. Being a sociopathic asshole as revenge still makes you a sociopathic asshole. No more, no less. It does not a moral high ground make.
2. Much as I'd like to think you're some uber-l33t haxx0r that hacks right into Blizzard's login servers at the fall of a hat, reality is a lot less glamourous. If there were that easy to hack that, the gold farmer gang would have done it long ago, because they make RL money selling that gold. And frankly, the average high-school nerd isn't half as much of a computer genius as he likes to pretend. He wouldn't even know where to start.
So most actual cyber-bullying is in practice no more of a technical achievement than sending some harrassing emails and IM messages, and subscribing someone's email address to some spam and other crap. It's just the plain old harrassment over another medium, nothing even vaguely resembling some high tech Revenge Of The Nerds.
In the very few cases when a nerd actually gets someone's password, it isn't some great feat of hacking, but plain old being a dishonest asshole. E.g., being told that password and then mis-using it. Makes for some revenge possibilities against an ex-girlfriend, for example, but a great feat of hacking it ain't.
So excuse me if I'm less than impressed. Not that it would excuse being an asshole anyway, but it's not even being that high-tech an asshole.
3. Being kicked when you were an innocent, doesn't give you the right to pick on an innocent too. That's no longer even revenge. And frankly that's what 99% of cyber-bullying is. Some frustrated nobody venting frustration on an innocent third party. I'd like to believe that all cyber-bullying is only justified vengeance, but it ain't. Even your example involves harrassing someone's parents, which is already a third party to your little conflict. Most cases aren't even that targetted.
And even the "revenge" bullying is often for such dubious revenge reasons as being rejected by a girl who, frankly, was perfectly within her rights to make her own choices.
4. Frankly, much as I'm a nerd, I'll say this: if you find yourself that unpopular and targetted, please re-examine your own behaviour first. You'd be surprised how many aren't tormented just because they're smart, or whatever bullshit fairy tale they tell themselves, but because they were the dysfunctional assholes to start with. If you treat people from a "me genius, you idiot" position, they'll start disliking you in return. If you insist on following someone around because you're unable to pick a "leave me alone" hint, don't be surprised if people start treating you worse to give you that hint. Etc.
And no, that doesn't make you the poor innocent victim, nor give you a sacred right to inflict more stress upon the others.
5. Frankly, out of the two, I'll have to say I respect the physical bully more. At least he takes the risks and is prepared to deal with the consequences. I wish I could say the same about the low-lives hiding behing a pseudonym to harrass. At heart both are just the same kind of bully, at heart both would punch your clock just as gladly, except the latter doesn't have the balls to do it in person. It doesn't make a moral high ground. It just moves one from merely being a low-life sadistic idiot to being a _cowardly_ low-life sadistic idiot. It's not a redeeming quality, it's just one more low-life quality to dislike added into an already disgusting mix.
That's an excellent point and thanks for mentioning it.
Yes, but again: I don't see these guys including books and tapes in their intelligence metrics. That's the problem. Basically from their BS metric, books and tapes don't matter at all, you're still dumb as a brick with those, heck, even Internet access over ISDN still makes you dumb, while someone with a big fat broadband connection is automatically T3H SM4RT even if they only download porn on it.
Because the Dragunov is a sniper rifle, while the AK-47 is noisy and awfully inaccurate over 300m. So with a Dragunov you can either ventilate someone's brains from considerably higher range and they won't even know where you were, or pin a patrol with a couple of bullets for longer than you could with an AK-47 and 3 full clips. Snipers do a better job at keeping someone pinned than a heavy machinegun does.
Rogerborg already hit the nail on the head, but here's something to consider: not everyone has a brand-new latest model car. I don't know about Iraq, but if it's anything like Eastern Europe, we're talking cars based on models from the 60's and 70's, and people who save for a lifetime to afford one. In some cases, it _is_ cars that have been badly patched since the 70's, because they can't afford to just buy a new one. We're also talking roads which often, well, to put it _very_ mildly, aren't quite up to western standards.
I'd imagine Iraq would be even worse, what with the war and everything.
So here's an idea for you: what if someone's car did break down? What if someone genuinely took a stroll down the wrong road? You're going to give everyone burns just because _some_ might be insurgents?
At this stage the war isn't won by heavy-handed bitch-slapping Iraqis into submission, but by convincing those people to trust you and give the new government a chance. You _can't_ keep smacking them around for ever, and creating two new insurgents for each one you get rid of. So, basically, "Fucking americans frying you if you even look in their direction" is the last thing you want in those people's heads.
Did it ever occur to you that an embasy is, pretty much by definition, in the middle of another country? You know, _sovereign_ country? You won't be making many friends worldwide if the USA's embasies start frying another country's citizens just because they were making a ruckus in the wrong place.
Heh. Dude, no offense, think about it for a second. I don't know what bad action movies or bad video games you've been playing, but people don't just hang around and chat nonchalantly when someone is shooting an AK. The moment someone actually started shooting an AK from the middle of the crowd, actually even before they actually shoot it, the civilians will stampede in panic to get to shelter. You don't need a freakin' heat gun to disperse them, their own "omg, I don't want to die" panic will kick in just nicely.
If you need a heat ray to disperse them, then there wasn't anyone shooting from that crowd in the first place. Any "terrorist" in that crowd didn't have anything more lethal than a slogan on a piece of cardboard, if the rest of the gang didn't already disperse.
Heh. Now I probably forgot most of what they taught me in the army, but that sounds as just about as pointless as trying to spray them with a water hose to assault that position. What's wrong with it? Off the top of my head:
1. This heat ray doesn't incapacitate, it just makes them take cover. No more. I.e., all it does is suppression. And at that it will cause suppression on the 1-2 you actually _hit_, whereas a single light machinegun will make a whole freakin' company take cover, and occasionally kills someone too.
2. It's just microwaves, so any tanks, APCs, God knows what else, will still be able to shoot at you just as well.
3. For that matter, a simple metal mesh will be perfectly good protection for anyone else who still wants to shoot at you. If you knew that the enemy has these things, you just give your soldiers a piece of mesh with a hole for the barrel of the gun.
Duly noted, and thanks for the correction. (Though for Russian, an 8-bit encoding does exist, and the Japanese prefer their own encoding too.)
Still, in the worst case scenario you end up with a file twice as large as ASCII. Hardly a reason to absolutely need broadband to be able to learn Russian.
Anyone the army actually wanted to give lead poisoning, it will continue to give a lead poisoning. If someone is shooting an AK-47 or worse yet a Dragunov at you, you don't want him just forced to dive around a corner. One way or another some soldiers will still have to hunt him down, sooner or later.
The only people against you'd want to use a non-lethal weapon is, well, people you don't want to give a lead poisoning in the first place. Like civilian demonstrations. That's what worries me. It's not a weapon of war, it's a crowd control device. Same as rubber bullets and water hoses, only a level meaner: when was the last time you heard of those used in a battle? It's not the kind of thing you'd win an offensive with, it the kind of thing you'd use to keep people from protesting against a puppet pro-USA dictator.