Well, the way I remember that etymology (but again, I'm not an expert), it actually made some sense to link them, because the connection came through the "thing" which was discussed/debated/decided at that assembly or council. I.e., people started with thing=council, and from there eventually also used thing=that which had been decided or discussed at the council. And at that point you already have a limited form of thing=stuff. From there it takes a smaller leap to apply it to stuff that hasn't in fact, been discussed at a council or related to a council in any way.
Whether that's actually true or believable, I wouldn't know. It sounds sorta believable to me, but then since I'm not a linguist, it doesn't really say much.
Hopefully, Novell will not pull any punches, and IBM can continue the beating after Novell's had their fill.
Somehow I'm reminded of this comic strip: http://www.dungeond.com/d/20061120.html With the gnolls being SCO and the heavily armoured guards being IBM's lawyers.
True, but only to some extent, and only in some warped way of splitting hairs.
1. Either when you're getting an extremely short pulse from a spark, or when you're connected to thick wires and with your arms on metal plates (as in at least one version of the experiment), then U = I * R, or I = U / R. There's a direct and linear proportionality between the two, so "it's current that kills" vs "it's voltage that kills" is just splitting hairs.
2. In practice, neither kills you as such. In practice you need both current (or voltage, since they're proportional) and enough _time_. Either to stop the heart or to literally cook you. Neither happens instantly. So in another way you could say it's not current either, but _charge_ that kills you. (As in Q = I * T.)
But in practice even that's not as simple a relationship, because even a hideous charge if it's something like micro-amperes over 10 years, also doesn't kill you. It must reach enough voltage over the heart muscles (or current times their resistance, if you want to stick to current) to cause them to spasm, and last long enough for that heart to not just skip a beat and recover.
3. If you want to go into even deeper details, the pulse length and wave form can cause even more anomalous behaviour, as observed in people struck by lightning. Unlike people killed by touching a high voltage wire, where you can see the trail of destroyed tissue between the two points, lightning seems to cause a _flashover_ effect, where it just flashes over the surface of the body without causing much damage inside. There are thermal burns on the entry and exit points, and clothes are often burned, but the tissue in between is pretty much intact. It just doesn't show the kind of destruction that that hideously large charge would cause if it actually went through flesh. (By comparison, a smaller charge in electric chair executions causes the eyes to boil and melt, and tissue to be cooked.)
4. But that all is still somewhat irrelevant when talking about Joe Sixpack's instinctive reaction to "you can give this other guy a 450V zap". Joe Sixpack knows that his 110V socket at home can kill or cause serious tissue damage, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that 450V is four times that. Heck, I figure I know more physics, and I'm not sure I'd go much farther than that either. You don't need paper and pencil and diagrams of the exact pulse shape and duration to figure out "omg, I could _kill_ that other guy", especially when the highest voltage rating says "Danger: Extreme Shock." You know, a "Danger" sign is kinda hammered into our mind to mean just that. Doubly so when the other guy told you that he has heart problems. Even if you did the maths and stuff, the possibility of a heart arrest has hit you like a brick-inna-sock already, and you're not gonna shake it off that easily.
And that's in the end all I'm saying. That when you put an average person in a situation as unbelievable as "you can give this other guy a potentially lethal shock... oh, heh, except he's in another room and you can't actually see it", the instinctive reaction would be "you're shitting me".
Well, at least that's the etymology I've heard of. I'm not a qualified linguist, I'm just a guy who reads a lot of useless bits of info, and then remembers less than half of it, you know?:)
But the version I've heard has it the English getting it from the Norse, during the Viking invasions, along with a bunch of other words. Either way, even in your example, it changed from ting=council in the old times to ting=thing in less old times. So I'd guess at least for Swedish that change of meaning holds true.
If we're talking generally about why word meanings change, it's basically what I've said way up in the thread: because people like cool new ways of saying things.
If we're talking about how "hacker" changed meanings, my (uninformed) guess is, basically:
1. Because we nerds are a breed that other people don't understand.
Your average nerd (and it's pretty much one of the standard symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome too) has a narrow focus of interest, which he pursues in depth and just for the heck of it. Someone can be fascinated by computers, or physics, or maths, or middle east history, or internal combustion engines, or whatever, and dedicates a lot of time, energy and plain old work to that end. Just because that's, for him or her, its own reward. Finding out some new cool algorithm is for a "hacker" (in the old meaning of the word) its own reward.
For Joe Sixpack and Jane Promqueen that just doesn't add up. Joe Sixpack and Jane Promqueen do such work only because they have to, only as means to other tangible gains. Be it for a paycheck, or to be accepted in the local circle of cool guys, or to save some money, or whatever. Doing maths just for maths sake, just doesn't compute to Joe Sixpack. Where's the payoff? What do you want to gain from it? When do you stop from doing all that study and actually go gain something from it?
And when no rational reason is obvious, then average Joe Sixpack and Jane Promqueen go on to imagine some hidden payoff or agenda. Be it the warlock (read medieval guy who likes to read) working to summon demons, or Dr Frankenstein creating a monster, or the "hacker" actually being into breaking into banks, that's the kind of motivation that Joe and Jane just _have_ to assume, to have a picture that makes sense. If you remove that nefarious motivation from the picture, they're left with something absurd and nonsensical by their standards.
2. Because a ton of "script kiddies" were more than obliging to perpetuate that nefarious image.
We're talking almost invariably about people with less technical skill than my cat when it walks on the keyboard. They couldn't find their own ass with a map, written instructions, and a whole roll of toilet paper. Without running someone else's scripts, they'd be a non-entity.
But they're invariably also the kind of insecure and complexed troll who'd do anything for attention, or to prove how l33t they are. The same kind who'd troll a forum or break a window just to get _some_ attention. And they were very quick to proclaim themselves "l33t hackers" and leave a trail of destruction to "prove" their l33tness. For every real "hacker" working hard to implement a better caching or pooling algorithm, there was a "l33t hacker" leaving a trail of defaced sites to prove his "l33tness."
And Joe and Jane, even those working in the media, found in them their missing puzzle piece to make their mental image make sense. Their confirmation that, ah-ha, all those guys hacking code at night were up to no good, after all.
Yes and no. What "jihad" may mean in day to day usage is one thing, but what it means in the religious context of the Koran is an obligation of all good muslims to defend a fellow muslim against a non-muslim aggressor. By force of arms, if it's an armed aggression. Admittedly, it's still _not_ the "aggressive terrorism against western freedom and democracy" that western media mis-represents it as. But it's not quite the generic neutral word for "struggle" either.
Same, if you will, as "communion" may simply mean "association; fellowship" or "interchange or sharing of thoughts or emotions; intimate communication" in layman's speak, but it holds a very speciffic meaning in the context of the christian church. You may not eat the body and drink the blood of Christ when you just meet with a few pals, but when you're talking about "communion" in a church context, it wouldn't be a communion without those. Yes, technically it's still just derived from the layperson meaning, as in "communion with God", but nevertheless, it becomes a very specialized term with a very well defined meaning.
And so it is with "jihad" too. It's not just a random word picked on by the western media, but something with a very clearly defined meaning and requirements. It's practically jargon.
Again, admittedly, the western media did distort and mis-represent the word, making it sound like some aggressive nut-case crusade when actually the obligation is just one of mutual defense. That's a very big distortion of meanings and intentions there. In that, I do see the western media guilty of misinformation indeed.
But it's not just a fabricated buzzword, either. And there is some reason why it's translated as "violent struggle" too.
Which kinda illustrates my point. When it was a more believable experiment, and it's actually believable that you're hitting someone, you stuck with 1 or rarely 2 out of 10. And I gather that even that thought was a traumatic experience for you. Yet according to Milgram, when people believe that they're administering 450V shocks to someone with heart problems (read: almost guaranteed kill: that's how the electric chair kills, by stopping the heart), somehow, sure, no problem, they'll go all the way to 450V. So basically I'm supposed to believe that, counter-intuitively, you'd have actually less problem with actually giving someone a painful death than with giving them a mild bruise.
Think about it. Something doesn't add up there. You had trouble giving someone a punch in the face, and still sound pissed off about being subjected to that idea, 30 years later. Do you honstly see yourself, the same person, as being able to zap someone to highly probable _death_ just because the teacher says it's ok?
I strongly suspect it's just the kind of suspension of disbelief issue I'm talking about. When you actually believe you're hitting someone, you _don't_ act like a psychopath. But when you give someone a scenario as blatantly absurd as "we'll let you murder someone in the name of science, right here in the USA, and, hey, we're telling you it's perfectly ok", suspension of disbelief flies right out the window that instant. It's something that would trip people's suspension of disbelief even in a D&D campaign. IRL? Heh. And when people _don't_ believe it can possibly be real, yeah, big surprise, they can push any buttons you tell them to push.
Oh, I understand what you're saying, but that doesn't change that that's how it works. That's all I'm really saying. It may be unfair, it may be stupid, it may hurt a lot, but that word is still lost anyway.
And yeah, it's happened to other professions too. English is also not my mother tongue, and I don't live in an English-speaking country either, but I think I can come up with a few examples off the top of my head.
E.g., "butcher" is a very honourable profession normally (at least unless you ask a vegan;), yet it became used for such titles as "The Butcher Of Prague" for Reinhard Heydrich. I'm sure most honest meat merchants wouldn't feel too honoured to be compared to one of the biggest and most hated murderers in history.
E.g., "shaman" or "witch doctor" were very important and respected positions in many tribes. They weren't just the priests, but also the keepers of knowledge of their people, and often had various justice-related roles too. Seriously, they filled a very important social and cultural role in their communities. Now it's a synonim for a charlatan or con artist, with an additional conotation of stupidity/ignorance/gullibility/superstition/pseud o-science.
E.g., somewhat in the other direction, "slave" came to be used as basically "the submissive one in a kinky/depraved BDSM relationship". I'm sure that some people whose ancestors (or sometimes relatives they knew, as slavery isn't yet 100% extinct) were kidnapped, sold into slavery, mis-treated, and occasionally killed... well, would find it less than flattering to think of that suffering stripped of all its meaning and associated with just someone being horny and (depending on your morals and/or bigotry) depraved.
Yes, but these are not just any words, they are technical jargon words. Part of the reason such jargon exists is to more clearly define how certain words and concepts relate. "Harddisk" does not refer to CD-ROMs, even though a CD-ROM is hard and a disc. "Computer" is not the same as "PC"; there are lots of computers that aren't PCs.
Very insightful and true... if you're a techie. For the rest of the population, though, it's just another word, subject to the same rules and changes as the rest of the language.
First of all, if I didn't care, I wouldn't have answered. Second, no offense, but before posting all that, it may be advisable that you actually RTFM. Or at least Milgram's own synopsis of the experiment.
First: informed consent was not what we know today. At that point, you essentially signed a form that said "I agree to participate", and that was it. Deception was key to the whole thing, and people thought they were in a learning study, not an authority study.
We're talking the 60's, not the middle ages. They still had laws against murder, manslaughter, holding someone hostage against their will, etc. It was just as stupid to believe back then that it's just normal in a university experiment to tie someone down and zap them to death, as it is nowadays.
Second: the labels did not have actual voltages, but rather "pain-levels" or "danger-levels".
According to Milgram's own synopsis I've linked to: "The generator has 30 switches in 15 volt increments, each is labeled with a voltage ranging from 15 up to 450 volts. Each switch also has a rating, ranging from "Slight shock" to "Danger: Severe Shock"."
Third: individuals were debriefed (largely because of how disturbing this was) and asked about the deception. Most indicated that they had no idea that they were not really shocking someone. The whole experiment hinges on this, and they went to great lengths that it was believable.
Actually, the debriefing is one of the most debatable aspects of it all. Participants were _not_ debriefed up to modern standards. And according to the exit interviews, most people seemed to not even really understand what they've done. Yes, a few went on some rant about how they had some enlightening revelation about themselves in the process, and those were cherry-picked and repeated all over the place. But most people were not even sure what they've really been involved in. So, please.
In this whole farce, people were at the very least, if not completely disbelieving, at least in a state of confusion and bordering on shock. Even if we accept that they were actually thinking they're shocking someone (although it would trip everyone's disbelief even in a D&D campaign, because it's _that_ bogus), we'd still be talking about people who were confused and disoriented at the time they complied. That hardly qualifies as the same as the Nazi officer who goes to work every day, fully knowing that he'll execute more Jews today. We're comparing confused and disoriented people coaxed into submission at every step, to someone doing it every day and fully aware of what it means.
Fourth, the whole idea was that the "actor" was telling them to comply with the experiment. The idea is that if you are continually told to do something by an authority you will be more likely to do it.
A) And that is why it becomes crucial whether the actor was actually believable or not. Because if someone's whole attitude tells you "wth, this can't be REAL", you'll act like in a computer game.
B) It still doesn't support Milgram's whole sensationalist thrust about normal people being able to become the equivalent of Adolf Eichmann. These were people who had to be coaxed by a figure of authority at every single step, while Adolf Eichmann was someone who continued to round up and ship Jews to the death camps even after he'd been ordered to _stop_. So I'm basically supposed to believe that (A) he too was just coaxed by some figure of authority at every step (even though he actually did it on his own for years, without someone giving him 4 warnings all the time to keep doing it), yet (B) ignoring he had no trouble disobeying the exact same authority figure when it told him to stop. Something doesn't add up, you know.
Welcome to the real world: words change meanings continuously. "Thing" once meant a council meeting (waay back in the norse times), now it mean, well, "thing". "Gay" once meant cheerful/happy, then it meant "homosexual", and now it's in the middle of becoming just "uncool". Etc.
That's how we ended up with so many languages. As a species we have a sort of a "Babel tower" mechanism built in. Get two communities isolated for long enough, and even starting from the same language you end up with two new languages or dialects. Each of the two changed words independently, and eventually you end up with the whole language of each not even resembling the language of the other. (Don't believe me? English and Greek both evolved from the same Indo-European roots.)
People hear some cool new word, or a new way to use an existing word, or some wisecrack and latch to it. And if it gets enough followers, there you go, you have a new word or a new meaning for a word.
Some cool kid uses, say, "twink" in a MMO once for someone buffed or equipped beyond the means of a normal player that level. Some people hear it, like it, and start using it too. Repeat a few iterations, and next thing you know it becomes the new primary meaning of that word in relation to MMOs.
And so it was with "hacker" too. Except this time it was also boosted by a whole generation of clueless journalists, who promptly bombarded everyone with their new meaning. Everyone has had it hammered into their heads that "hacker" doesn't mean the old-style "guy who really likes computers and doing amazingly hard/low-level stuff", but, yes, basically "high tech criminal".
As early as the end of the 90's I've had the surprise to hear even computer engineers using it that way. Yes, literally. I was for example at some training back then and the guy teaching goes, "anyone knows what a 'hacker' is?" Me: "Someone who really loves computers and programming?" Him: "Nope, a criminal breaking into other people's computers." Go figure.
So, way I figure it, we might as well let go. That battle is lost, and we don't even have the means to fight it. For every time you tell someone "no, no, no, 'hacker' was never supposed to mean 'criminal'", they'll promptly have a dozen TV show hosts, pseudo-tech journos, etc, hammering the opposite right back into them. That word is lost. By now it's not just "mis-used", it simply _is_ the new meaning of the word.
At the risk of going off-topic, the Milgram Experiment seems to me more like an exercise in "let's assume that people are terminally stupid and gullible, and base a whole experiment and its conclusion on that unproven assumption."
What's wrong with it?
- When the range of "punishments" is as stupidly large as 450V, which is _far_ into the lethal range, few people would assume this to be anything but a bulshitting experiment. Everyone knows that 110V can be deadly, and 220V usually _is_ deadly, by simple virtue of having a wall socket in their home. If anyone told me that I'm participating in some bullshit game where, basically, if I'm pressing a button someone dies (whether shot in the head, or zapped with 450V), I'd just have to assume that they're plain old bullshitting me, because otherwise they've just told everyone that they're doing something illegal in that lab.
- There's also the issue of whether the volunteers were first given a form to sign that says, basically, "I'm ok with being zapped by 450V, a probably lethal voltage." It works against the experiment both ways. If you weren't, you'd find it extremely hard to believe that the other guy, who _also_ never signed that (remember, it's supposed to be a random choice) could be subjected to it without risking some nasty legal consequences.
(And if they did sign that, congrats, you've just found some people who are crazy enough to sign a death-wish for $4.50. Do you actually expect those to be representative for the rest of the population? Plus you just told them then that the other guy is ok with it too, so in which way is it comparable to doing the same to a non-consentual victim in a concentration camp? Because that was the supposed point of the experiment.)
- When you're raised and live in a western country, you'll also know that depriving someone of freedom is a criminal offense. You can't just hold someone hostage against their will, or not without some serious legal consequences. So the assumption is that the other guy is probably either free to abort the experiment at any time they wish, or all these people in lab coats are all cheerfully doing something highly illegal without even trying to hide it. Or he's an actor.
- People have this thing called empathy. Or so I'm told. So unless all the test subjects were Asperger's Syndrome sufferers, the question is also how good were all the actors involved in this. Remember that they're trying to convince you that they're doing something highly illegal in broad daylight, and in the middle of a university, and with everyone's knowledge. They damn better be _outstanding_ actors there. (And somewhat supporting that idea, the test subjects obedience dropped a _lot_ when they weren't face to face with the actor telling them what to do.)
Basically, if anything, this experiment just proves the limits of suspension of disbelief. If the premise is so unbelievably over the top, then people just won't believe it. They'll (correctly) assume that it's a bogus game where noone is actually hurt, and humour you just long enough to get their $4.50.
Basically any conclusions based on such an experiment are completely irrelevant if the test subjects didn't actually believe it was real. Think if you were asked to steer a starship into a black hole for such an experiment. Any "look at the harm people can do while obeying orders" conclusions are only valid if you actually believed you're actually steering a real starship, loaded with real people. If you actually thought "wth, this is just a computer game", then we've only discovered that you can play a space sim. Nothing more.
It's also a prime example of how bogus someone's "research" can get when their "research" is tainted by having a personal agenda to prove.
Even if we swallow the whole "surrendering responsibility" idea (as opposed to just being so unbelievable that the test subjects simply didn't take it seriously.)... there are still massive differences bewtween (A) doing this for an hour in a controlled exper
One of the most significant contributions to human rights in all of human history came from Hammurabi - The concept of a written code of laws, which everyone could know and which applied equally to all people, thus making "justice" less subject to the biases of the king / emperor / caliph / whatever. He may not have quite lived up to that ideal, but as a basis for all modern reasonably-fair legal systems, it forms a cornerstone on which we've built everything since.
AllOfMP3, whether the RIAA like it or not, operated within Russian law (or at least, they did so until this past September).
Bingo. So as of September, a Russian law _does_ exist, under which offering such downloads is illegal. And it applies to everyone, not only to AllOfMP3.
It's not even new. According to the very article you've linked to: " Luckily Russia passed just such a law a couple years ago... though it didn't go into effect until just last week." I took the liberty of highlighting a crucial point there. It's not some law passed over-night right now, but something that had been voted years ago.
So a law does exist, and it does apply to everyone. Exactly like in all modern legal systems. And there were a couple of years given to everyone to clean up their act, before it goes in effect. Which is actually a lot more than most other modern legal systems give you.
At best all that the new aggreement with the USA says is, "yep, we're actually going to enforce that law." Which, again, is perfectly normal in any modern legal system. And it seems to be what you ask for anyway: a law should apply to everyone equally, even if they're the emperor's friends or favourite purveyors of stolen goods. So, yes, it should equally apply to AllOfMP3 too.
So basically please spare me the bullshit. If you have something against copyright, fine by me. But you can find better stuff to support it with than bogus "oh, there goes western civilization and rule of the law" arguments.
"Don't click on links in email messages. Type the URL in your browser manually." - bit overkill. Check to see where they're going first. And your mail client shouldn't have any active content enabled for viewing mail in the first place, so a JavaScript onmouseover/onmouseout/onclick handler attached to a link would have no effect anyway. If you're following the other suggestions on the list, this doesn't matter anyway, since your email is plain text and any links that appear in the body of the mail message are a result of the mail client automatically highlighting what looks like a link.
Not necessarily overkill. An exploit which existed for quite sometime are Unicode characters which look the same as an US ASCII character. E.g., the greek omicron looks pretty much exactly like an "o". Someone could jolly well have you think you're going to "www.mozilla.com" when it's actually written with an omicron and is, in fact, a completely different site. Or there are a lot of other blocks in Unicode, e.g., the cyrillic (russian) block that has characters which look just like an US ASCII character to you, but to a computer (e.g., to the DNS server) they're a completely different character code.
So if your mail client supports UTF-8, and honours the encoding in the headers, you can stare at that link long and hard and even in text mode, and it will look legit.
"Disable the preview pane in all your inboxes." - That's what you disable any sort of active content for in the first place - it should be the default in any reasonable mail client to not have any sort of active content running in your mail client.
Disabling active content will go a long way, but won't defend you against buffer overflows. If you have a preview pane enabled in Outlook, you can't even (easily) delete such a virus without becoming infected, because the moment you've clicked on it, the buffer overflow has already happened. So, yes, by all means, please do disable the active content, but also do disable the preview pane.
"Don't use Java, JavaScript, and ActiveX." - It's not Java and JavaScript that you need to worry about so much, it's ActiveX. And since the only browser that will run ActiveX is MSIE, that's already been taken care of by one of the other suggestions farther down this list.
A lot of exploits are/were based on JavaScript exploits, believe it or not. A lot of the fake-ui phishing attacks use JavaScript to, for example, spawn a window without the toolbars and URL bar and with a faked set of bars there. And a lot of cross-site scripting attacks rely on JavaScript to do the dirty work. It may be a badly designed site, rather than a vulnerability of JavaScript itself, but you can do a lot worse than disabling one piece of the puzzle that they rely on. Etc.
As for ActiveX, heh. Don't dismiss that so quickly. I know at least one marketter-turned-(bad-wannabe-)programmer who was telling me about how he cleverly uses Mozilla to be safe from all the IE exploits, but installed some plugin that executes ActiveX in Mozilla. Now I don't know what plugin that is, and wasn't too interested to find out, but I found it funny that someone could be that clueless. The moment you install the same inherent vulnerability in Mozilla, then all that false feeling of security is just Cargo Cult.
Or see the many people who think they're somehow secure because of ditching IE... when all they've done is download some "3rd party browser" that's just a funky border around IE. There are thousands of those "browsers" by now.
So, yeah, I'd insist on hammering that one separately into people's heads. Because, as above, if you just tell them "don't use IE because it's not secure", but they don't understand why and what parts, they'll find a way to shoot themselves in the foot unknowingly.
Well, I've never had an original Sony Walkman, but I did have a portable cassette player during high school and university. Does that, in your opinion, qualify as a valid comparison?
The thing was almost literally as big as a brick, half as heavy, and it was mostly a mechanical thing. As in, you would actually push a button hard, and some metal levers and cogs would move inside. You didn't have a CPU taking those buttons as input, but literally if you wanted to rewind, you'd push the rewind button until it locked into place, and that would push the needed levers and cogs into place so the thing would start rewinding. In fact, forget CPUs, it was also a very low tech thing: it actually had transistors and whatnot on the PCB, not ICs.
It also took 4 AA batteries normally, and went through them in a couple of hours. But I had made a pack of 4 _D_ batteries that fit snugly in a pocket of my jeans and you could hardly see the wire to the walkman. Now _those_ offered some serious play time.
Yeah, so it's one of those "back in my days" stories. Uphill hrough the snow both ways;)
The thing is, that thing lasted me for, oh, I think some 7 years total. And even then it wasn't because it failed, but because then I finally upgraded to one of those newfangled CD players.
And did I mention through the snow, uphill both ways yet? Because the thing was with me through snow, dust, or through my getting caught for one hour in what seemed like a re-enactment of the biblical flood. Not just a rain, but really, more a case of some air in the water than the other way around. And the thing was unprotected at my belt, not even in a pocket or anything. (I didn't have pockets that big anyway.) It has had its share of being nudged, pushed accidentally off a nightstand, rarely kicked, and occasionally disassembled. (That's how I know it was a mechanical thing.)
Oh, it got scratched and dented all right by the end of those 7 years and all that abuse. But it didn't actually break.
And see, far from considering that some unreasonable thing that idiot users subject their poor delicate electronics to, I think that's what a portable gizmo should be like. I don't want something that needs to be treated like a newborn human baby. I want something I can just take with me and forget about it. The whole purpose of the damn thing is to serve _me_, whatever I might be doing at the time and in whatever environment I might be. It's not supposed to be the other way around, with me having to change my habits and be responsible for the gadget's well being.
Heck, I don't even want to have to remember to recharge it every evening. I miss those battery packs, really. If the thing ran out of juice, I'd just open it and shove 4 new batteries inside, right there and then. Even in the middle of a bus or train ride, you know?
Oh, fucking please. He didn't say he owns the same company that he quit from. And he certainly didn't say he was swiping computer parts.
So whatever "it's good to not have morals" crusade you're on, I'm sure you can find less lame ways to support it than baseless "selling old computer parts you swipe from work doesn't really qualify as a business" accusations.
Maybe you just really don't have morals. Good for you. By all means, stick to that, then. But some of us do and still have a good job anyway. Some of us did leave jobs we didn't like (for ethical or other reasons)... and just found a better job instead. Go figure. Not all jobs require being a spineless minion to the biggest sociopath available.
In fact, sometimes a better job than the insecurity/denial guys trying to rationalize their taking shit and being used.See, the funny thing is, the PHB's who can operate an unethical business, usually don't show much more empathy to their employees either.
And _especially_ if your reason is "but I won't find another job if I quit", I'd strongly advise you to rethink and reevaluate it all again. Don't tell me whether it was true or not, tell it to yourself in the mirror. Do you actually believe it? Really? Again, don't tell me, tell it to yourself.
Because in all cases I've seen, it wasn't true. It was just a case of a sociopath PHB keeping a _good_ employee in line by crushing their self-esteem and sense of security.
So was it your own idea, or did someone (directly or indirectly) give you an idea along the lines of, "If you quit working for me, you'll never find another job at your age / in this economy / whatever"? Because if it was someone else, rest assured that it was a lie. The kind who'd keep you in line with that kind of a lie, would replace you at the drop of a hat, if they actually thought there are better people than you available cheaper in the unemployed pool. If you actually were too expensive / old / unskilled / unable to learn / whatever for the job, then the same kind of boss would have already replaced you long ago. (And it would be only business, so don't take it as necessarily criticizing them.) Rest assured that all the "be thankful to me that you have a job at all" BS is just a lie to keep you too scared to grow a spine or a pair of balls. They're _not_ doing you a favour, they're only doing themselves a favour with that lie.
One of these choices has a future... and let me add that "quitting because of a moral choice" doesn't look good on a resume or in an interview
Oh really? Guess it's funny then. I made sure to tell all my prospective employers, including the one I currently work for, about how I refused to lie to a customer when an ex-boss requested that. The funny thing is that I've had no problem finding well paid jobs for people who didn't have a problem with that. Some found that there were plenty of other jobs in their organization, where I don't have to talk to a customer at all. And some actually said some version of, "well, see, that's exactly what we want anyway. We want the customers to be happy and trusting of us, not to pull a quick scam and get that kind of a reputation."
So it seems to me that the moral choice had a pretty good future too, so far. _And_ wasn't a liability in job interviews either.
What you probably _don't_ want on your resume is something like "I abruptly resigned in the middle of a project because I suddenly realized I don't like it." But that's not really a moral high ground to start with. If you leave over a moral choice, do make sure you do fulfill your contractual obligations, get your replacement trained, etc, and generally leave on good terms.
But "I find X and Y morally wrong"? There are plenty of jobs were you don't have to do either X or Y. There are jobs where X or Y would be actually bad for business.
That applies to softcore porn as well. Now I'm not against it personally, but I seriously can't see someone's "I don't want to work on porn projects" as being that much of a liability either. There are plenty of companies which don't really have anything to do with porn of any kind. There are plenty of companies which (regardless of what Joe Manager or Jack Owner do at home), try to maintain an image of being family- and community-friendly, upstanding pillars of the community, and all that PR image stuff.
More people have been fired _because_ of becoming associated with porn (e.g., women employees who thought it might be fun to start posing naked all over the place), or caused quite a nasty backlash against the company by doing so, than because of having something against it. So if a prospective employee is against porn? Good. Then they've just told you that you won't have to deal with the fallout of suddenly discovering that they've become an "amateur" gay porn star in their free time.
Sure, you might lose one or two options on the whole, by putting that in your resume. But it's not the end of the world. And if you actually _have_ those moral principles, it's probably the options you didn't want in the first place. The choices which you'd either refuse anyway, or where you'd be fairly unhappy anyway.
On the other hand, if you're really more worried about an extra buck or two than about upholding your ethical principles, then you didn't really have ethical principles to start with. "I think X is wrong only as long as I can't get paid an extra buck to do X" isn't a moral principle in the first place. It's at best a lie to make yourself feel warm and fuzzy about yourself.
So basically you're telling me that unless it's some grand-scale freedom or human rights issue, we should just ignore morals and ethics altogether? That, say, stealing from your neighbour or poisoning his dog is ok, because it's small compared to the issues of human rights violations in China?
I like to think you don't mean that. Because it would be a really shitty (and probably really short) life if everything was free-for-all as long as it's below the level of 1 billion people enslaved.
_Real_ morals exist at every level and in every moment of your life. And chances are you expect them from others, or take them for granted, every day. From the neighbours who _didn't_ scratch your car just because they could, to the gas station who didn't tweak its meters to show a gallon when you only filled 0.9 gallons, to the bank or investment fund who didn't just take all the money and one day and ran to East Bumfuckistan, or didn't tell you to buy the loser shares they were trying to dump quickly. Etc. At every step you take and every move to make, there were certain decisions involved, and chances are you expected them to be the ethical ones. You probably didn't expect to be robbed and cheated blind at every step, just because, hey, it's not a human rights or freedom issue, so it can't be real morals.
And, yes, there are a lot of valid moral questions that don't involve "oh, look, boobies" either.
E.g., I've been asked by one employer to basically abuse my consultant position to actively lie to a customer, and get them to buy stuff they didn't need and couldn't even use. (I refused, and that was the end of their using me as a consultant.) Is that OK in your book, just because it's not a human rights issue? Because in my set of morals it's not OK to abuse a relationship of trust like that.
Is it that impossible to do the right thing there? It seems to me that I'm making more money now at another company. And the ones who asked me to lie to customers went out of business in the meantime. I'm not sure it's related to their morals, because I can't say I was that interested to follow what happened with that company in detail. But it kinda makes you wonder.
E.g., take the case of a small company (it doesn't matter which, for the scope of this discussion) which some years back got caught doing a massive campaign of astro-turfing and sock-puppetry. Both to make it seem like all the smart guys are using their products, and actively trying to defame and discredit anyone who posted any criticism. Their excuse? "Well, MS is doing it too, we can't compete without doing the same", basically.
Is that ok just because it's not an outright human rights violation? I don't think so.
Is it really _impossible_ to do no harm in this industry, or is it that we've just become jaded and complacent? There are a ton of other industries where they compete on merits, marketting, etc, without outright lies and cheating. WTH makes software or IT that different? Why are we so eager to accept dishonest behaviour that would put one out of business in any other industry?
A) are very low resolution, so a speck of dust here and there, or even a hole/stain/discolouration here and there, isn't all that much. When you "encode" the letter "A" as a big hand-written letter, there is a lot of space it's spread over. Even without any additional hints (see next points) you could destroy a quarter of that area and still take an informed guess that it looks like an "A". By comparison, the same surface destroyed in this guy's encoding scheme (if it weren't a scam, which it is), you've lost a few megabytes worth of data.
B) have a much higher tolerance to stains, discolouration, etc. If you were to print this message and spill coffee over it, chances are that you could still tell there's an "A" here, because you only have to deal with two colours. If it looks like a darker "A" on brown, it's still the same as an "A" on white. But when you have thousands of superimposed shapes of all colours, a brown triangle on yellow may well be a whole different thing than a cyan triangle on white meant before the coffee spill.
C) writing and human languages have a great deal of redundancy in them, so you can still use the context to guess when bits are missing. If you have a hole in the page and you read something like "ye olde m_nks" you can take an informed guess that it was "monks". You also have the historical context there. If you were to read somewhere something like "N__ths__re Abbey", you could guess that it probably meant "Northshire Abbey", because we don't know any other that fits those letters.
Binary data doesn't have that luxury. By comparison, when you miss about an 1000x1000 bits area (and that may well be less than one square millimeter at this density -- again, if it weren't a scam anyway), even if you encoded each sector with a generous ECC code and stored checksums on each row _and_ column, you're still basically boned. It's not going to repair that much missing data.
D) conversely, writing and human languages have a certain "locality" and contexts only span so far. If the half the page about Northshire Abbey was missing from the Domesday Book, you could still read the next entry just as well. Even if half the book went missing, we could still extract _some_ info from the other half. In binary data, you don't always have that luxury. An exe where half of it is missing, is pretty much just screwed. A Domesday database where one of the normalized tables is gone, may well become nearly useless, depending on which table was lost.
Now none of those are necessarily the end of the world (or not as much as the fact that this is just as scam), because you can store the information repeatedly all over the place, and build baroque structures on ECC on top of other ECC, to the point of achieving the same effect. But by that time, you've lost most of the advantage anyway. And you've certainly lost the advantage compared to using a more robust medium in the first place, and not needing as much redundancy in the first place.
That's exactly what I thought. "Huh? Why give up? There are lots of ways to game that don't require squeezing a gamepad in your hands."
One thing that comes to mind, for example, are the tracking pads that some laptops use instead of a mouse. If you can move your hand at all, you can drag a finger over one of those. It may not be good enough to be a FPS clansman, but it should be enough for NWN2 or, yeah, anything that's turn based or can be paused.
Another thing I've personally used (albeit without arthritis) and can vouch for their accuracy, are Wacom tablets. Downside, it still uses a pen or a mouse. It also takes some getting used to, because it tracks (X,Y) coordinates on that pad. I don't know how to explain it well, but basically: with a mouse, if you want to move left-right horizontally, you typically actually move your hand in an arc around the elbow. With a tablet, moving the mouse in an arc actually makes the cursor reproduce exactly that arc, instead of going left-right. If you want to draw a horizontal line, you actually have to move the mouse or pen along the X axis of the pad. So it gets some getting used to.
However, all it needs is to sense the position of the tip of the pen on that surface, and a "click" with the pen is just pressing it against the tablet. It also doesn't need batteries or anything: it's really just a lot of plastic around a small gizmo that the tablet tracks.
So if my using a computer depended on it, I'm sure I could take one (or more) of those pens apart and figure out a way to make a pen-glove, carrying that tip on the index finger. Or maybe somewhere on the palm, if that feels more comfortable. There you go. Depending on how good the rest of the joints are, it may even be good for die-hard FPS.
They love to pose as just the smart ones, yes. They do that a lot.
But in the end that all bears fairly little relevance. Even if there is no afterlife at all (in fact, especially if there isn't one), there are some millenia of learning to, more or less, work together to make our stay here reasonably acceptable. That's in the end all that society is.
If all humans actually were unchecked wolves to other humans, you'd probably find this one existence here to be very shitty and very short. Because at least 1%, the elite among the elites, as psychopathy goes, would be perfectly capable even to slice you up for nothing more than because they're bored and would find it funny to see you scream.
So instead we've worked out a way to live with each other somewhat better. It's not perfect, but it's the best we've managed.
And these people being "smart" invariably comes at the expense of everyone else's happiness. One unchecked prick can cause 1000 or 100,000 people to be happy. Or several million. At the risk of invoking Goodwin's law, Hitler was a diagnosed psychopath. They're the school bully being happy at the expense of a lot of other kids being a lot unhappier.
Even if we accept them "smart" to ruthlessly pursue only their own happiness, it's something that causes more unhappiness on the whole. A society where they're left unchecked isn't particularly happy even for the most of them, as most of them will just find a bigger bully stepping on their toes. And a lot less for the rest of us.
So basically, well, it's still in everyone's interest to keep them in check and stop falling for the various excuses.
Nothing against all that, and yes, I knew that they're not uncommon. I was going by a roughly 4% number, but 3.6% is close enough. In a nutshell, yes, we can very quickly aggree about all you've wrote.
The point still stands that you can't just snap your fingers and become one, so it's kinda pointless to dream about becoming one. "Man, if I were alone with this guy for a minute, I'd soo punch his clock" is a pipe dream. Either you aren't a sociopath at all, and in practice you couldn't do anything to this guy. Or if you are one and not already in jail, chances are you have better passtimes than beating a spammer up. Also chances are you wouldn't give enough of a damn about the rest of humanity to rid them of a spammer.
And the second point, although I just skirted it in the last paragraph is: we're IMHO better off just recognizing these guys for what they are, than dreaming of becoming one.
Their main weapon and "super-power" is the ability to pass for just a guy like you or me, except they always have a good excuse to be callous and ruthless. "We're the good guys, so it's ok if we break the rules." (At which point we're not the good guys any more.) "You can't make an omelett without breaking a few eggs." (Except they invariably break a lot of eggs and practically never end up with a decent omelett. Because in the end, breaking eggs is just for the fun, and the omelett is just an excuse.) "Everyone else is doing it, so it's ok if we do it too." (At which point we're a part of the problem too.) "You can't get ahead by being one of the sheep." (But at what cost to the society of those "sheep"?) "It may be unpopular/unethical/whatever, but someone has to do it. It's just doing what's necessary." (Really? I've yet to see many situations where being an asshole is _necessary_. An easy way out, maybe, but an absolute necessity for society, almost never.) Etc.
And since they almost never can do all the harm alone, they have to use those a lot. They have to recruit their, well, basically "accomplices", by posing as the guys like you and me, only with the smarts and willpower to do what, sadly, needs to be done. So basically the worst thing you can do to one is to stop believing those lies and excuses.
Dreaming to become one, just gets one closer to _accepting_ that line of reasoning. Once you've accepted that it's ok to act antisocially and illegally if it's for the right reason (e.g., beating this guy up because he's a spammer,) you're one step closer to accepting it for a lot less clear-cut reasons.
Yes, it won't really get you closer to actually becoming one. But it might get you one step closer to accepting it from someone who is one.
1. It would be, if it weren't very much possible to pay 1 human for 1000 bots. As I was saying, practically no site requires a captcha per message, so the bot can post quite a bit of spam for as little as 10 seconds of a human's time. Assuming that breaking captchas, sweatshop style, takes as long as 30 seconds (which is about 5-6 times more than it would realistically take), in an that's 120 captchas per hour, or almost 1000 per 8-hour workday (but in 3rd world countries you can get away with demanding more than 8 hours a day). If spammer accounts are purged, say, daily (though some sites probably aren't that active in fighting spam), essentially you can have 1 human driving 1000 bots.
2. Make no mistake, machine B in my example is still just a bot. It just needs to call home once a day and have a human type in its captcha. This is hardly the same as paying a human to post advertising for your product.
3. More importantly, it still is as dishonest as it can get. And under CAN-SPAM as illegal as it gets. It's not a human using his real work email or IP, which you can just block and be done with it. It's hiring a human at a couple of bucks per hour to drive a small battallion of bots. But at the end of the day, you still get hijacked computers, faked IPs, faked email addresses and the by now infamous Joe Jobs.
The fact that there are a couple of humans in the loop doesn't change _that_ much. After all, we already had at least 1 human behind it all: the spammer himself. Adding 1-2 more isn't solving the _real_ problem.
So, again, solving _that_ and calling it a day is just solving the wrong problem.
So basically with all that IP checking and all, you've just said (in so many words) that the spammer must use a proxy.
Basically if machine A is the server, machine B is doing the spamming, and the paid peon cracking captchas for a living is on machine C, then it can jolly well go on like this:
- the peon's machine C connects to one of the many machines B doing the spamming (it can also be the other way around: machine B could initiate a connection and wait for the human to be ready. Works great if machine B is behind a firewall too, since outgoing connections typically get through just fine.)
- machine B connects to the server A, gets the image, the cookie and everything
- machine B relays this to machine C
- the peon does the captcha on his machine C, in the chinese sweatshop where he works
- machine C relays this answer back to machine B
- machine B now gives it to your server, together with the cookie and all. It comes with the right cookie, from the right IP, etc. So _how_ is your server going to know about all the proxying behind it?
- machine B now proceeds to spam with impunity, since most servers don't ask for a captcha for each and every single message sent
It's not even a new idea. Exactly this kind of relaying, in various forms (including this, and using unknowing visitors to a porn site to crack proxied captchas thinking they're logging in to the porn site, etc) has been discussed ever since the first lemming thought that captchas are _the_ ultimate, unbreakable solution.
Except every time it prompted a barrage of weird "well, it hasn't happened yet, so it's not possible" and similar, and the lemmings went back to pretending that proxying doesn't exist, and machine recognition is obviously the only way to crack a captcha. In fact, back to solving the wrong problem.
Well now it's happening exactly as predicted. In a way I feel vindicated, even though it's sad that something harmful has to happen for people to finally pry their heads out of their asses and acknowledge reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the way I remember that etymology (but again, I'm not an expert), it actually made some sense to link them, because the connection came through the "thing" which was discussed/debated/decided at that assembly or council. I.e., people started with thing=council, and from there eventually also used thing=that which had been decided or discussed at the council. And at that point you already have a limited form of thing=stuff. From there it takes a smaller leap to apply it to stuff that hasn't in fact, been discussed at a council or related to a council in any way.
Whether that's actually true or believable, I wouldn't know. It sounds sorta believable to me, but then since I'm not a linguist, it doesn't really say much.
Somehow I'm reminded of this comic strip: http://www.dungeond.com/d/20061120.html
With the gnolls being SCO and the heavily armoured guards being IBM's lawyers.
... if by "power user" you mean "someone who uses lots of power," then yes.
True, but only to some extent, and only in some warped way of splitting hairs.
1. Either when you're getting an extremely short pulse from a spark, or when you're connected to thick wires and with your arms on metal plates (as in at least one version of the experiment), then U = I * R, or I = U / R. There's a direct and linear proportionality between the two, so "it's current that kills" vs "it's voltage that kills" is just splitting hairs.
2. In practice, neither kills you as such. In practice you need both current (or voltage, since they're proportional) and enough _time_. Either to stop the heart or to literally cook you. Neither happens instantly. So in another way you could say it's not current either, but _charge_ that kills you. (As in Q = I * T.)
But in practice even that's not as simple a relationship, because even a hideous charge if it's something like micro-amperes over 10 years, also doesn't kill you. It must reach enough voltage over the heart muscles (or current times their resistance, if you want to stick to current) to cause them to spasm, and last long enough for that heart to not just skip a beat and recover.
3. If you want to go into even deeper details, the pulse length and wave form can cause even more anomalous behaviour, as observed in people struck by lightning. Unlike people killed by touching a high voltage wire, where you can see the trail of destroyed tissue between the two points, lightning seems to cause a _flashover_ effect, where it just flashes over the surface of the body without causing much damage inside. There are thermal burns on the entry and exit points, and clothes are often burned, but the tissue in between is pretty much intact. It just doesn't show the kind of destruction that that hideously large charge would cause if it actually went through flesh. (By comparison, a smaller charge in electric chair executions causes the eyes to boil and melt, and tissue to be cooked.)
4. But that all is still somewhat irrelevant when talking about Joe Sixpack's instinctive reaction to "you can give this other guy a 450V zap". Joe Sixpack knows that his 110V socket at home can kill or cause serious tissue damage, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that 450V is four times that. Heck, I figure I know more physics, and I'm not sure I'd go much farther than that either. You don't need paper and pencil and diagrams of the exact pulse shape and duration to figure out "omg, I could _kill_ that other guy", especially when the highest voltage rating says "Danger: Extreme Shock." You know, a "Danger" sign is kinda hammered into our mind to mean just that. Doubly so when the other guy told you that he has heart problems. Even if you did the maths and stuff, the possibility of a heart arrest has hit you like a brick-inna-sock already, and you're not gonna shake it off that easily.
And that's in the end all I'm saying. That when you put an average person in a situation as unbelievable as "you can give this other guy a potentially lethal shock... oh, heh, except he's in another room and you can't actually see it", the instinctive reaction would be "you're shitting me".
Well, at least that's the etymology I've heard of. I'm not a qualified linguist, I'm just a guy who reads a lot of useless bits of info, and then remembers less than half of it, you know? :)
But the version I've heard has it the English getting it from the Norse, during the Viking invasions, along with a bunch of other words. Either way, even in your example, it changed from ting=council in the old times to ting=thing in less old times. So I'd guess at least for Swedish that change of meaning holds true.
If we're talking generally about why word meanings change, it's basically what I've said way up in the thread: because people like cool new ways of saying things.
If we're talking about how "hacker" changed meanings, my (uninformed) guess is, basically:
1. Because we nerds are a breed that other people don't understand.
Your average nerd (and it's pretty much one of the standard symptoms of Asperger's Syndrome too) has a narrow focus of interest, which he pursues in depth and just for the heck of it. Someone can be fascinated by computers, or physics, or maths, or middle east history, or internal combustion engines, or whatever, and dedicates a lot of time, energy and plain old work to that end. Just because that's, for him or her, its own reward. Finding out some new cool algorithm is for a "hacker" (in the old meaning of the word) its own reward.
For Joe Sixpack and Jane Promqueen that just doesn't add up. Joe Sixpack and Jane Promqueen do such work only because they have to, only as means to other tangible gains. Be it for a paycheck, or to be accepted in the local circle of cool guys, or to save some money, or whatever. Doing maths just for maths sake, just doesn't compute to Joe Sixpack. Where's the payoff? What do you want to gain from it? When do you stop from doing all that study and actually go gain something from it?
And when no rational reason is obvious, then average Joe Sixpack and Jane Promqueen go on to imagine some hidden payoff or agenda. Be it the warlock (read medieval guy who likes to read) working to summon demons, or Dr Frankenstein creating a monster, or the "hacker" actually being into breaking into banks, that's the kind of motivation that Joe and Jane just _have_ to assume, to have a picture that makes sense. If you remove that nefarious motivation from the picture, they're left with something absurd and nonsensical by their standards.
2. Because a ton of "script kiddies" were more than obliging to perpetuate that nefarious image.
We're talking almost invariably about people with less technical skill than my cat when it walks on the keyboard. They couldn't find their own ass with a map, written instructions, and a whole roll of toilet paper. Without running someone else's scripts, they'd be a non-entity.
But they're invariably also the kind of insecure and complexed troll who'd do anything for attention, or to prove how l33t they are. The same kind who'd troll a forum or break a window just to get _some_ attention. And they were very quick to proclaim themselves "l33t hackers" and leave a trail of destruction to "prove" their l33tness. For every real "hacker" working hard to implement a better caching or pooling algorithm, there was a "l33t hacker" leaving a trail of defaced sites to prove his "l33tness."
And Joe and Jane, even those working in the media, found in them their missing puzzle piece to make their mental image make sense. Their confirmation that, ah-ha, all those guys hacking code at night were up to no good, after all.
Yes and no. What "jihad" may mean in day to day usage is one thing, but what it means in the religious context of the Koran is an obligation of all good muslims to defend a fellow muslim against a non-muslim aggressor. By force of arms, if it's an armed aggression. Admittedly, it's still _not_ the "aggressive terrorism against western freedom and democracy" that western media mis-represents it as. But it's not quite the generic neutral word for "struggle" either.
Same, if you will, as "communion" may simply mean "association; fellowship" or "interchange or sharing of thoughts or emotions; intimate communication" in layman's speak, but it holds a very speciffic meaning in the context of the christian church. You may not eat the body and drink the blood of Christ when you just meet with a few pals, but when you're talking about "communion" in a church context, it wouldn't be a communion without those. Yes, technically it's still just derived from the layperson meaning, as in "communion with God", but nevertheless, it becomes a very specialized term with a very well defined meaning.
And so it is with "jihad" too. It's not just a random word picked on by the western media, but something with a very clearly defined meaning and requirements. It's practically jargon.
Again, admittedly, the western media did distort and mis-represent the word, making it sound like some aggressive nut-case crusade when actually the obligation is just one of mutual defense. That's a very big distortion of meanings and intentions there. In that, I do see the western media guilty of misinformation indeed.
But it's not just a fabricated buzzword, either. And there is some reason why it's translated as "violent struggle" too.
Which kinda illustrates my point. When it was a more believable experiment, and it's actually believable that you're hitting someone, you stuck with 1 or rarely 2 out of 10. And I gather that even that thought was a traumatic experience for you. Yet according to Milgram, when people believe that they're administering 450V shocks to someone with heart problems (read: almost guaranteed kill: that's how the electric chair kills, by stopping the heart), somehow, sure, no problem, they'll go all the way to 450V. So basically I'm supposed to believe that, counter-intuitively, you'd have actually less problem with actually giving someone a painful death than with giving them a mild bruise.
Think about it. Something doesn't add up there. You had trouble giving someone a punch in the face, and still sound pissed off about being subjected to that idea, 30 years later. Do you honstly see yourself, the same person, as being able to zap someone to highly probable _death_ just because the teacher says it's ok?
I strongly suspect it's just the kind of suspension of disbelief issue I'm talking about. When you actually believe you're hitting someone, you _don't_ act like a psychopath. But when you give someone a scenario as blatantly absurd as "we'll let you murder someone in the name of science, right here in the USA, and, hey, we're telling you it's perfectly ok", suspension of disbelief flies right out the window that instant. It's something that would trip people's suspension of disbelief even in a D&D campaign. IRL? Heh. And when people _don't_ believe it can possibly be real, yeah, big surprise, they can push any buttons you tell them to push.
Oh, I understand what you're saying, but that doesn't change that that's how it works. That's all I'm really saying. It may be unfair, it may be stupid, it may hurt a lot, but that word is still lost anyway.
d o-science.
And yeah, it's happened to other professions too. English is also not my mother tongue, and I don't live in an English-speaking country either, but I think I can come up with a few examples off the top of my head.
E.g., "butcher" is a very honourable profession normally (at least unless you ask a vegan;), yet it became used for such titles as "The Butcher Of Prague" for Reinhard Heydrich. I'm sure most honest meat merchants wouldn't feel too honoured to be compared to one of the biggest and most hated murderers in history.
E.g., "shaman" or "witch doctor" were very important and respected positions in many tribes. They weren't just the priests, but also the keepers of knowledge of their people, and often had various justice-related roles too. Seriously, they filled a very important social and cultural role in their communities. Now it's a synonim for a charlatan or con artist, with an additional conotation of stupidity/ignorance/gullibility/superstition/pseu
E.g., somewhat in the other direction, "slave" came to be used as basically "the submissive one in a kinky/depraved BDSM relationship". I'm sure that some people whose ancestors (or sometimes relatives they knew, as slavery isn't yet 100% extinct) were kidnapped, sold into slavery, mis-treated, and occasionally killed... well, would find it less than flattering to think of that suffering stripped of all its meaning and associated with just someone being horny and (depending on your morals and/or bigotry) depraved.
Etc.
Very insightful and true... if you're a techie. For the rest of the population, though, it's just another word, subject to the same rules and changes as the rest of the language.
We're talking the 60's, not the middle ages. They still had laws against murder, manslaughter, holding someone hostage against their will, etc. It was just as stupid to believe back then that it's just normal in a university experiment to tie someone down and zap them to death, as it is nowadays.
According to Milgram's own synopsis I've linked to: "The generator has 30 switches in 15 volt increments, each is labeled with a voltage ranging from 15 up to 450 volts. Each switch also has a rating, ranging from "Slight shock" to "Danger: Severe Shock"."
Actually, the debriefing is one of the most debatable aspects of it all. Participants were _not_ debriefed up to modern standards. And according to the exit interviews, most people seemed to not even really understand what they've done. Yes, a few went on some rant about how they had some enlightening revelation about themselves in the process, and those were cherry-picked and repeated all over the place. But most people were not even sure what they've really been involved in. So, please.
In this whole farce, people were at the very least, if not completely disbelieving, at least in a state of confusion and bordering on shock. Even if we accept that they were actually thinking they're shocking someone (although it would trip everyone's disbelief even in a D&D campaign, because it's _that_ bogus), we'd still be talking about people who were confused and disoriented at the time they complied. That hardly qualifies as the same as the Nazi officer who goes to work every day, fully knowing that he'll execute more Jews today. We're comparing confused and disoriented people coaxed into submission at every step, to someone doing it every day and fully aware of what it means.
A) And that is why it becomes crucial whether the actor was actually believable or not. Because if someone's whole attitude tells you "wth, this can't be REAL", you'll act like in a computer game.
B) It still doesn't support Milgram's whole sensationalist thrust about normal people being able to become the equivalent of Adolf Eichmann. These were people who had to be coaxed by a figure of authority at every single step, while Adolf Eichmann was someone who continued to round up and ship Jews to the death camps even after he'd been ordered to _stop_. So I'm basically supposed to believe that (A) he too was just coaxed by some figure of authority at every step (even though he actually did it on his own for years, without someone giving him 4 warnings all the time to keep doing it), yet (B) ignoring he had no trouble disobeying the exact same authority figure when it told him to stop. Something doesn't add up, you know.
Welcome to the real world: words change meanings continuously. "Thing" once meant a council meeting (waay back in the norse times), now it mean, well, "thing". "Gay" once meant cheerful/happy, then it meant "homosexual", and now it's in the middle of becoming just "uncool". Etc.
That's how we ended up with so many languages. As a species we have a sort of a "Babel tower" mechanism built in. Get two communities isolated for long enough, and even starting from the same language you end up with two new languages or dialects. Each of the two changed words independently, and eventually you end up with the whole language of each not even resembling the language of the other. (Don't believe me? English and Greek both evolved from the same Indo-European roots.)
People hear some cool new word, or a new way to use an existing word, or some wisecrack and latch to it. And if it gets enough followers, there you go, you have a new word or a new meaning for a word.
Some cool kid uses, say, "twink" in a MMO once for someone buffed or equipped beyond the means of a normal player that level. Some people hear it, like it, and start using it too. Repeat a few iterations, and next thing you know it becomes the new primary meaning of that word in relation to MMOs.
And so it was with "hacker" too. Except this time it was also boosted by a whole generation of clueless journalists, who promptly bombarded everyone with their new meaning. Everyone has had it hammered into their heads that "hacker" doesn't mean the old-style "guy who really likes computers and doing amazingly hard/low-level stuff", but, yes, basically "high tech criminal".
As early as the end of the 90's I've had the surprise to hear even computer engineers using it that way. Yes, literally. I was for example at some training back then and the guy teaching goes, "anyone knows what a 'hacker' is?" Me: "Someone who really loves computers and programming?" Him: "Nope, a criminal breaking into other people's computers." Go figure.
So, way I figure it, we might as well let go. That battle is lost, and we don't even have the means to fight it. For every time you tell someone "no, no, no, 'hacker' was never supposed to mean 'criminal'", they'll promptly have a dozen TV show hosts, pseudo-tech journos, etc, hammering the opposite right back into them. That word is lost. By now it's not just "mis-used", it simply _is_ the new meaning of the word.
Give up, move on, find another one.
At the risk of going off-topic, the Milgram Experiment seems to me more like an exercise in "let's assume that people are terminally stupid and gullible, and base a whole experiment and its conclusion on that unproven assumption."
What's wrong with it?
- When the range of "punishments" is as stupidly large as 450V, which is _far_ into the lethal range, few people would assume this to be anything but a bulshitting experiment. Everyone knows that 110V can be deadly, and 220V usually _is_ deadly, by simple virtue of having a wall socket in their home. If anyone told me that I'm participating in some bullshit game where, basically, if I'm pressing a button someone dies (whether shot in the head, or zapped with 450V), I'd just have to assume that they're plain old bullshitting me, because otherwise they've just told everyone that they're doing something illegal in that lab.
- There's also the issue of whether the volunteers were first given a form to sign that says, basically, "I'm ok with being zapped by 450V, a probably lethal voltage." It works against the experiment both ways. If you weren't, you'd find it extremely hard to believe that the other guy, who _also_ never signed that (remember, it's supposed to be a random choice) could be subjected to it without risking some nasty legal consequences.
(And if they did sign that, congrats, you've just found some people who are crazy enough to sign a death-wish for $4.50. Do you actually expect those to be representative for the rest of the population? Plus you just told them then that the other guy is ok with it too, so in which way is it comparable to doing the same to a non-consentual victim in a concentration camp? Because that was the supposed point of the experiment.)
- When you're raised and live in a western country, you'll also know that depriving someone of freedom is a criminal offense. You can't just hold someone hostage against their will, or not without some serious legal consequences. So the assumption is that the other guy is probably either free to abort the experiment at any time they wish, or all these people in lab coats are all cheerfully doing something highly illegal without even trying to hide it. Or he's an actor.
- People have this thing called empathy. Or so I'm told. So unless all the test subjects were Asperger's Syndrome sufferers, the question is also how good were all the actors involved in this. Remember that they're trying to convince you that they're doing something highly illegal in broad daylight, and in the middle of a university, and with everyone's knowledge. They damn better be _outstanding_ actors there. (And somewhat supporting that idea, the test subjects obedience dropped a _lot_ when they weren't face to face with the actor telling them what to do.)
Basically, if anything, this experiment just proves the limits of suspension of disbelief. If the premise is so unbelievably over the top, then people just won't believe it. They'll (correctly) assume that it's a bogus game where noone is actually hurt, and humour you just long enough to get their $4.50.
Basically any conclusions based on such an experiment are completely irrelevant if the test subjects didn't actually believe it was real. Think if you were asked to steer a starship into a black hole for such an experiment. Any "look at the harm people can do while obeying orders" conclusions are only valid if you actually believed you're actually steering a real starship, loaded with real people. If you actually thought "wth, this is just a computer game", then we've only discovered that you can play a space sim. Nothing more.
It's also a prime example of how bogus someone's "research" can get when their "research" is tainted by having a personal agenda to prove.
Even if we swallow the whole "surrendering responsibility" idea (as opposed to just being so unbelievable that the test subjects simply didn't take it seriously.)... there are still massive differences bewtween (A) doing this for an hour in a controlled exper
Bingo. So as of September, a Russian law _does_ exist, under which offering such downloads is illegal. And it applies to everyone, not only to AllOfMP3.
It's not even new. According to the very article you've linked to: " Luckily Russia passed just such a law a couple years ago... though it didn't go into effect until just last week." I took the liberty of highlighting a crucial point there. It's not some law passed over-night right now, but something that had been voted years ago.
So a law does exist, and it does apply to everyone. Exactly like in all modern legal systems. And there were a couple of years given to everyone to clean up their act, before it goes in effect. Which is actually a lot more than most other modern legal systems give you.
At best all that the new aggreement with the USA says is, "yep, we're actually going to enforce that law." Which, again, is perfectly normal in any modern legal system. And it seems to be what you ask for anyway: a law should apply to everyone equally, even if they're the emperor's friends or favourite purveyors of stolen goods. So, yes, it should equally apply to AllOfMP3 too.
So basically please spare me the bullshit. If you have something against copyright, fine by me. But you can find better stuff to support it with than bogus "oh, there goes western civilization and rule of the law" arguments.
Not necessarily overkill. An exploit which existed for quite sometime are Unicode characters which look the same as an US ASCII character. E.g., the greek omicron looks pretty much exactly like an "o". Someone could jolly well have you think you're going to "www.mozilla.com" when it's actually written with an omicron and is, in fact, a completely different site. Or there are a lot of other blocks in Unicode, e.g., the cyrillic (russian) block that has characters which look just like an US ASCII character to you, but to a computer (e.g., to the DNS server) they're a completely different character code.
For reference, see Bruce Schneier.
So if your mail client supports UTF-8, and honours the encoding in the headers, you can stare at that link long and hard and even in text mode, and it will look legit.
Disabling active content will go a long way, but won't defend you against buffer overflows. If you have a preview pane enabled in Outlook, you can't even (easily) delete such a virus without becoming infected, because the moment you've clicked on it, the buffer overflow has already happened. So, yes, by all means, please do disable the active content, but also do disable the preview pane.
A lot of exploits are/were based on JavaScript exploits, believe it or not. A lot of the fake-ui phishing attacks use JavaScript to, for example, spawn a window without the toolbars and URL bar and with a faked set of bars there. And a lot of cross-site scripting attacks rely on JavaScript to do the dirty work. It may be a badly designed site, rather than a vulnerability of JavaScript itself, but you can do a lot worse than disabling one piece of the puzzle that they rely on. Etc.
As for ActiveX, heh. Don't dismiss that so quickly. I know at least one marketter-turned-(bad-wannabe-)programmer who was telling me about how he cleverly uses Mozilla to be safe from all the IE exploits, but installed some plugin that executes ActiveX in Mozilla. Now I don't know what plugin that is, and wasn't too interested to find out, but I found it funny that someone could be that clueless. The moment you install the same inherent vulnerability in Mozilla, then all that false feeling of security is just Cargo Cult.
Or see the many people who think they're somehow secure because of ditching IE... when all they've done is download some "3rd party browser" that's just a funky border around IE. There are thousands of those "browsers" by now.
So, yeah, I'd insist on hammering that one separately into people's heads. Because, as above, if you just tell them "don't use IE because it's not secure", but they don't understand why and what parts, they'll find a way to shoot themselves in the foot unknowingly.
Well, I've never had an original Sony Walkman, but I did have a portable cassette player during high school and university. Does that, in your opinion, qualify as a valid comparison?
;)
The thing was almost literally as big as a brick, half as heavy, and it was mostly a mechanical thing. As in, you would actually push a button hard, and some metal levers and cogs would move inside. You didn't have a CPU taking those buttons as input, but literally if you wanted to rewind, you'd push the rewind button until it locked into place, and that would push the needed levers and cogs into place so the thing would start rewinding. In fact, forget CPUs, it was also a very low tech thing: it actually had transistors and whatnot on the PCB, not ICs.
It also took 4 AA batteries normally, and went through them in a couple of hours. But I had made a pack of 4 _D_ batteries that fit snugly in a pocket of my jeans and you could hardly see the wire to the walkman. Now _those_ offered some serious play time.
Yeah, so it's one of those "back in my days" stories. Uphill hrough the snow both ways
The thing is, that thing lasted me for, oh, I think some 7 years total. And even then it wasn't because it failed, but because then I finally upgraded to one of those newfangled CD players.
And did I mention through the snow, uphill both ways yet? Because the thing was with me through snow, dust, or through my getting caught for one hour in what seemed like a re-enactment of the biblical flood. Not just a rain, but really, more a case of some air in the water than the other way around. And the thing was unprotected at my belt, not even in a pocket or anything. (I didn't have pockets that big anyway.) It has had its share of being nudged, pushed accidentally off a nightstand, rarely kicked, and occasionally disassembled. (That's how I know it was a mechanical thing.)
Oh, it got scratched and dented all right by the end of those 7 years and all that abuse. But it didn't actually break.
And see, far from considering that some unreasonable thing that idiot users subject their poor delicate electronics to, I think that's what a portable gizmo should be like. I don't want something that needs to be treated like a newborn human baby. I want something I can just take with me and forget about it. The whole purpose of the damn thing is to serve _me_, whatever I might be doing at the time and in whatever environment I might be. It's not supposed to be the other way around, with me having to change my habits and be responsible for the gadget's well being.
Heck, I don't even want to have to remember to recharge it every evening. I miss those battery packs, really. If the thing ran out of juice, I'd just open it and shove 4 new batteries inside, right there and then. Even in the middle of a bus or train ride, you know?
Oh, fucking please. He didn't say he owns the same company that he quit from. And he certainly didn't say he was swiping computer parts.
So whatever "it's good to not have morals" crusade you're on, I'm sure you can find less lame ways to support it than baseless "selling old computer parts you swipe from work doesn't really qualify as a business" accusations.
Maybe you just really don't have morals. Good for you. By all means, stick to that, then. But some of us do and still have a good job anyway. Some of us did leave jobs we didn't like (for ethical or other reasons)... and just found a better job instead. Go figure. Not all jobs require being a spineless minion to the biggest sociopath available.
In fact, sometimes a better job than the insecurity/denial guys trying to rationalize their taking shit and being used.See, the funny thing is, the PHB's who can operate an unethical business, usually don't show much more empathy to their employees either.
And _especially_ if your reason is "but I won't find another job if I quit", I'd strongly advise you to rethink and reevaluate it all again. Don't tell me whether it was true or not, tell it to yourself in the mirror. Do you actually believe it? Really? Again, don't tell me, tell it to yourself.
Because in all cases I've seen, it wasn't true. It was just a case of a sociopath PHB keeping a _good_ employee in line by crushing their self-esteem and sense of security.
So was it your own idea, or did someone (directly or indirectly) give you an idea along the lines of, "If you quit working for me, you'll never find another job at your age / in this economy / whatever"? Because if it was someone else, rest assured that it was a lie. The kind who'd keep you in line with that kind of a lie, would replace you at the drop of a hat, if they actually thought there are better people than you available cheaper in the unemployed pool. If you actually were too expensive / old / unskilled / unable to learn / whatever for the job, then the same kind of boss would have already replaced you long ago. (And it would be only business, so don't take it as necessarily criticizing them.) Rest assured that all the "be thankful to me that you have a job at all" BS is just a lie to keep you too scared to grow a spine or a pair of balls. They're _not_ doing you a favour, they're only doing themselves a favour with that lie.
Oh really? Guess it's funny then. I made sure to tell all my prospective employers, including the one I currently work for, about how I refused to lie to a customer when an ex-boss requested that. The funny thing is that I've had no problem finding well paid jobs for people who didn't have a problem with that. Some found that there were plenty of other jobs in their organization, where I don't have to talk to a customer at all. And some actually said some version of, "well, see, that's exactly what we want anyway. We want the customers to be happy and trusting of us, not to pull a quick scam and get that kind of a reputation."
So it seems to me that the moral choice had a pretty good future too, so far. _And_ wasn't a liability in job interviews either.
What you probably _don't_ want on your resume is something like "I abruptly resigned in the middle of a project because I suddenly realized I don't like it." But that's not really a moral high ground to start with. If you leave over a moral choice, do make sure you do fulfill your contractual obligations, get your replacement trained, etc, and generally leave on good terms.
But "I find X and Y morally wrong"? There are plenty of jobs were you don't have to do either X or Y. There are jobs where X or Y would be actually bad for business.
That applies to softcore porn as well. Now I'm not against it personally, but I seriously can't see someone's "I don't want to work on porn projects" as being that much of a liability either. There are plenty of companies which don't really have anything to do with porn of any kind. There are plenty of companies which (regardless of what Joe Manager or Jack Owner do at home), try to maintain an image of being family- and community-friendly, upstanding pillars of the community, and all that PR image stuff.
More people have been fired _because_ of becoming associated with porn (e.g., women employees who thought it might be fun to start posing naked all over the place), or caused quite a nasty backlash against the company by doing so, than because of having something against it. So if a prospective employee is against porn? Good. Then they've just told you that you won't have to deal with the fallout of suddenly discovering that they've become an "amateur" gay porn star in their free time.
Sure, you might lose one or two options on the whole, by putting that in your resume. But it's not the end of the world. And if you actually _have_ those moral principles, it's probably the options you didn't want in the first place. The choices which you'd either refuse anyway, or where you'd be fairly unhappy anyway.
On the other hand, if you're really more worried about an extra buck or two than about upholding your ethical principles, then you didn't really have ethical principles to start with. "I think X is wrong only as long as I can't get paid an extra buck to do X" isn't a moral principle in the first place. It's at best a lie to make yourself feel warm and fuzzy about yourself.
So basically you're telling me that unless it's some grand-scale freedom or human rights issue, we should just ignore morals and ethics altogether? That, say, stealing from your neighbour or poisoning his dog is ok, because it's small compared to the issues of human rights violations in China?
I like to think you don't mean that. Because it would be a really shitty (and probably really short) life if everything was free-for-all as long as it's below the level of 1 billion people enslaved.
_Real_ morals exist at every level and in every moment of your life. And chances are you expect them from others, or take them for granted, every day. From the neighbours who _didn't_ scratch your car just because they could, to the gas station who didn't tweak its meters to show a gallon when you only filled 0.9 gallons, to the bank or investment fund who didn't just take all the money and one day and ran to East Bumfuckistan, or didn't tell you to buy the loser shares they were trying to dump quickly. Etc. At every step you take and every move to make, there were certain decisions involved, and chances are you expected them to be the ethical ones. You probably didn't expect to be robbed and cheated blind at every step, just because, hey, it's not a human rights or freedom issue, so it can't be real morals.
And, yes, there are a lot of valid moral questions that don't involve "oh, look, boobies" either.
E.g., I've been asked by one employer to basically abuse my consultant position to actively lie to a customer, and get them to buy stuff they didn't need and couldn't even use. (I refused, and that was the end of their using me as a consultant.) Is that OK in your book, just because it's not a human rights issue? Because in my set of morals it's not OK to abuse a relationship of trust like that.
Is it that impossible to do the right thing there? It seems to me that I'm making more money now at another company. And the ones who asked me to lie to customers went out of business in the meantime. I'm not sure it's related to their morals, because I can't say I was that interested to follow what happened with that company in detail. But it kinda makes you wonder.
E.g., take the case of a small company (it doesn't matter which, for the scope of this discussion) which some years back got caught doing a massive campaign of astro-turfing and sock-puppetry. Both to make it seem like all the smart guys are using their products, and actively trying to defame and discredit anyone who posted any criticism. Their excuse? "Well, MS is doing it too, we can't compete without doing the same", basically.
Is that ok just because it's not an outright human rights violation? I don't think so.
Is it really _impossible_ to do no harm in this industry, or is it that we've just become jaded and complacent? There are a ton of other industries where they compete on merits, marketting, etc, without outright lies and cheating. WTH makes software or IT that different? Why are we so eager to accept dishonest behaviour that would put one out of business in any other industry?
The problem there is that books:
A) are very low resolution, so a speck of dust here and there, or even a hole/stain/discolouration here and there, isn't all that much. When you "encode" the letter "A" as a big hand-written letter, there is a lot of space it's spread over. Even without any additional hints (see next points) you could destroy a quarter of that area and still take an informed guess that it looks like an "A". By comparison, the same surface destroyed in this guy's encoding scheme (if it weren't a scam, which it is), you've lost a few megabytes worth of data.
B) have a much higher tolerance to stains, discolouration, etc. If you were to print this message and spill coffee over it, chances are that you could still tell there's an "A" here, because you only have to deal with two colours. If it looks like a darker "A" on brown, it's still the same as an "A" on white. But when you have thousands of superimposed shapes of all colours, a brown triangle on yellow may well be a whole different thing than a cyan triangle on white meant before the coffee spill.
C) writing and human languages have a great deal of redundancy in them, so you can still use the context to guess when bits are missing. If you have a hole in the page and you read something like "ye olde m_nks" you can take an informed guess that it was "monks". You also have the historical context there. If you were to read somewhere something like "N__ths__re Abbey", you could guess that it probably meant "Northshire Abbey", because we don't know any other that fits those letters.
Binary data doesn't have that luxury. By comparison, when you miss about an 1000x1000 bits area (and that may well be less than one square millimeter at this density -- again, if it weren't a scam anyway), even if you encoded each sector with a generous ECC code and stored checksums on each row _and_ column, you're still basically boned. It's not going to repair that much missing data.
D) conversely, writing and human languages have a certain "locality" and contexts only span so far. If the half the page about Northshire Abbey was missing from the Domesday Book, you could still read the next entry just as well. Even if half the book went missing, we could still extract _some_ info from the other half. In binary data, you don't always have that luxury. An exe where half of it is missing, is pretty much just screwed. A Domesday database where one of the normalized tables is gone, may well become nearly useless, depending on which table was lost.
Now none of those are necessarily the end of the world (or not as much as the fact that this is just as scam), because you can store the information repeatedly all over the place, and build baroque structures on ECC on top of other ECC, to the point of achieving the same effect. But by that time, you've lost most of the advantage anyway. And you've certainly lost the advantage compared to using a more robust medium in the first place, and not needing as much redundancy in the first place.
That's exactly what I thought. "Huh? Why give up? There are lots of ways to game that don't require squeezing a gamepad in your hands."
One thing that comes to mind, for example, are the tracking pads that some laptops use instead of a mouse. If you can move your hand at all, you can drag a finger over one of those. It may not be good enough to be a FPS clansman, but it should be enough for NWN2 or, yeah, anything that's turn based or can be paused.
Another thing I've personally used (albeit without arthritis) and can vouch for their accuracy, are Wacom tablets. Downside, it still uses a pen or a mouse. It also takes some getting used to, because it tracks (X,Y) coordinates on that pad. I don't know how to explain it well, but basically: with a mouse, if you want to move left-right horizontally, you typically actually move your hand in an arc around the elbow. With a tablet, moving the mouse in an arc actually makes the cursor reproduce exactly that arc, instead of going left-right. If you want to draw a horizontal line, you actually have to move the mouse or pen along the X axis of the pad. So it gets some getting used to.
However, all it needs is to sense the position of the tip of the pen on that surface, and a "click" with the pen is just pressing it against the tablet. It also doesn't need batteries or anything: it's really just a lot of plastic around a small gizmo that the tablet tracks.
So if my using a computer depended on it, I'm sure I could take one (or more) of those pens apart and figure out a way to make a pen-glove, carrying that tip on the index finger. Or maybe somewhere on the palm, if that feels more comfortable. There you go. Depending on how good the rest of the joints are, it may even be good for die-hard FPS.
They love to pose as just the smart ones, yes. They do that a lot.
But in the end that all bears fairly little relevance. Even if there is no afterlife at all (in fact, especially if there isn't one), there are some millenia of learning to, more or less, work together to make our stay here reasonably acceptable. That's in the end all that society is.
If all humans actually were unchecked wolves to other humans, you'd probably find this one existence here to be very shitty and very short. Because at least 1%, the elite among the elites, as psychopathy goes, would be perfectly capable even to slice you up for nothing more than because they're bored and would find it funny to see you scream.
So instead we've worked out a way to live with each other somewhat better. It's not perfect, but it's the best we've managed.
And these people being "smart" invariably comes at the expense of everyone else's happiness. One unchecked prick can cause 1000 or 100,000 people to be happy. Or several million. At the risk of invoking Goodwin's law, Hitler was a diagnosed psychopath. They're the school bully being happy at the expense of a lot of other kids being a lot unhappier.
Even if we accept them "smart" to ruthlessly pursue only their own happiness, it's something that causes more unhappiness on the whole. A society where they're left unchecked isn't particularly happy even for the most of them, as most of them will just find a bigger bully stepping on their toes. And a lot less for the rest of us.
So basically, well, it's still in everyone's interest to keep them in check and stop falling for the various excuses.
Nothing against all that, and yes, I knew that they're not uncommon. I was going by a roughly 4% number, but 3.6% is close enough. In a nutshell, yes, we can very quickly aggree about all you've wrote.
The point still stands that you can't just snap your fingers and become one, so it's kinda pointless to dream about becoming one. "Man, if I were alone with this guy for a minute, I'd soo punch his clock" is a pipe dream. Either you aren't a sociopath at all, and in practice you couldn't do anything to this guy. Or if you are one and not already in jail, chances are you have better passtimes than beating a spammer up. Also chances are you wouldn't give enough of a damn about the rest of humanity to rid them of a spammer.
And the second point, although I just skirted it in the last paragraph is: we're IMHO better off just recognizing these guys for what they are, than dreaming of becoming one.
Their main weapon and "super-power" is the ability to pass for just a guy like you or me, except they always have a good excuse to be callous and ruthless. "We're the good guys, so it's ok if we break the rules." (At which point we're not the good guys any more.) "You can't make an omelett without breaking a few eggs." (Except they invariably break a lot of eggs and practically never end up with a decent omelett. Because in the end, breaking eggs is just for the fun, and the omelett is just an excuse.) "Everyone else is doing it, so it's ok if we do it too." (At which point we're a part of the problem too.) "You can't get ahead by being one of the sheep." (But at what cost to the society of those "sheep"?) "It may be unpopular/unethical/whatever, but someone has to do it. It's just doing what's necessary." (Really? I've yet to see many situations where being an asshole is _necessary_. An easy way out, maybe, but an absolute necessity for society, almost never.) Etc.
And since they almost never can do all the harm alone, they have to use those a lot. They have to recruit their, well, basically "accomplices", by posing as the guys like you and me, only with the smarts and willpower to do what, sadly, needs to be done. So basically the worst thing you can do to one is to stop believing those lies and excuses.
Dreaming to become one, just gets one closer to _accepting_ that line of reasoning. Once you've accepted that it's ok to act antisocially and illegally if it's for the right reason (e.g., beating this guy up because he's a spammer,) you're one step closer to accepting it for a lot less clear-cut reasons.
Yes, it won't really get you closer to actually becoming one. But it might get you one step closer to accepting it from someone who is one.
That's, more or less, all I'm trying to say.
1. It would be, if it weren't very much possible to pay 1 human for 1000 bots. As I was saying, practically no site requires a captcha per message, so the bot can post quite a bit of spam for as little as 10 seconds of a human's time. Assuming that breaking captchas, sweatshop style, takes as long as 30 seconds (which is about 5-6 times more than it would realistically take), in an that's 120 captchas per hour, or almost 1000 per 8-hour workday (but in 3rd world countries you can get away with demanding more than 8 hours a day). If spammer accounts are purged, say, daily (though some sites probably aren't that active in fighting spam), essentially you can have 1 human driving 1000 bots.
2. Make no mistake, machine B in my example is still just a bot. It just needs to call home once a day and have a human type in its captcha. This is hardly the same as paying a human to post advertising for your product.
3. More importantly, it still is as dishonest as it can get. And under CAN-SPAM as illegal as it gets. It's not a human using his real work email or IP, which you can just block and be done with it. It's hiring a human at a couple of bucks per hour to drive a small battallion of bots. But at the end of the day, you still get hijacked computers, faked IPs, faked email addresses and the by now infamous Joe Jobs.
The fact that there are a couple of humans in the loop doesn't change _that_ much. After all, we already had at least 1 human behind it all: the spammer himself. Adding 1-2 more isn't solving the _real_ problem.
So, again, solving _that_ and calling it a day is just solving the wrong problem.
So basically with all that IP checking and all, you've just said (in so many words) that the spammer must use a proxy.
Basically if machine A is the server, machine B is doing the spamming, and the paid peon cracking captchas for a living is on machine C, then it can jolly well go on like this:
- the peon's machine C connects to one of the many machines B doing the spamming (it can also be the other way around: machine B could initiate a connection and wait for the human to be ready. Works great if machine B is behind a firewall too, since outgoing connections typically get through just fine.)
- machine B connects to the server A, gets the image, the cookie and everything
- machine B relays this to machine C
- the peon does the captcha on his machine C, in the chinese sweatshop where he works
- machine C relays this answer back to machine B
- machine B now gives it to your server, together with the cookie and all. It comes with the right cookie, from the right IP, etc. So _how_ is your server going to know about all the proxying behind it?
- machine B now proceeds to spam with impunity, since most servers don't ask for a captcha for each and every single message sent
It's not even a new idea. Exactly this kind of relaying, in various forms (including this, and using unknowing visitors to a porn site to crack proxied captchas thinking they're logging in to the porn site, etc) has been discussed ever since the first lemming thought that captchas are _the_ ultimate, unbreakable solution.
Except every time it prompted a barrage of weird "well, it hasn't happened yet, so it's not possible" and similar, and the lemmings went back to pretending that proxying doesn't exist, and machine recognition is obviously the only way to crack a captcha. In fact, back to solving the wrong problem.
Well now it's happening exactly as predicted. In a way I feel vindicated, even though it's sad that something harmful has to happen for people to finally pry their heads out of their asses and acknowledge reality.