There are many "scientific" postulates that for all intent and purposes are untestable. The topology of the universe, for example, is one of those.
Our mathematical models of the topology of the universe are perfectly testable. The "space-bending" effect you talk about can be easily demonstrated in a number of ways. One example is the gravitational lensing effect, whereby several images of the same star appear in the vicinity of a massive body - the light emanating in several directions from the star is being bent round the object, so the star appears to be in several places.
As an aside, the reason it took so bloody long to notice that Euclid's Fifth Postulate didn't hold was because the universe we live in is locally Euclidean - if you take a small enough chunk of it, it behaves as if the Postulate were true (this is the definition of a manifold). Thankfully, the universe is sufficiently non-Euclidean on a large scale that we eventually noticed and started drawing conclusions, General Relativity being the most famous example.
So many posts here are concluding that ID must be false because it hasn't been proved true--and that is, I think, calling the kettle black.
Most of the posts that I've seen aren't saying ID must be false, for precisely the reason you describe. Instead, they point out that ID is unscientific in that it is untestable - if God/aliens/the flying spaghetti monster can do anything, there is no possible set of observations that can contradict ID. Evolution, on the other hand, is scientific as there is only so much that you can do with random mutations and we have yet to find anything that can't be done that way. If we ever find anything that can't be evolved, we'll have disproved evolution as a means for that thing to arise; the same cannot be said of ID.
Open formats don't deny anyone access. That's rather the point. Closed/proprietary formats may deny access, especially if the people designing the access software prefer to use the GPL or similar inheritable licenses and especially if the company "owning" the format is big on patenting.
Were you referring to the fact that there are more tools available for the proprietary format? That *is* a valid concern. However, the mandation of a document format is *not* the mandation of a program, and I think it's a good idea to keep them as separate as humanly possible. The only time that I would consider it valid to worry about programs when thinking about a format is if there was absolutely nothing that supported it - anything else just becomes a slippery slope turning choice of format into choice of program.
On that basis, morality is an individual thing and you have no right to calll your morality superior or expect others to follow it. There is no such tihng as truly goor or evil because everything is relative. The holocaust wasn't evil; Hitler just had a different morality. Pol Pot wasn't evil, he just defined morality differently to others. Stalin wasn't evil; he just thought that good and evil had different meanings to you.
Go to the top of the class! Right on all points. My understanding is that morality is a relative, individual thing - I take as evidence the fact that almost every culture in the world has a different definition of the word. I have absolutely no right to call my morality superior on general principles (although there are objective metrics - more on that later). The Holocaust, Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin weren't evil, their behaviour was just the product of different moralities.
However, whilst they can't be called objectively evil (of course it's fine to say "I consider their attitudes evil"), it seems fairly evident that they were, on the whole, rather stupid. If nothing else, creating an environment where killing is the norm puts even the leader at risk - if someone's spent the day killing Jews, why shouldn't they top Hitler (who had Jewish blood)? If you kill all the bureaucrats, starve the populace and ban technology, you shouldn't be surprised if your pseudocommunist regime doesn't have a long shelf life. If you create an atmosphere in which only the biggest bastards can survive, you're not going to be able to sleep at night without at least one eye open.
I mostly consider stupidity the best metric for morality. In my experience, sociopathy is far less effective than ethical behaviour in building the sort of environment I would want to live in, hence I go with the latter as a rule of thumb. It could be argued that the purpose of society is to create an environment where this is the state of affairs.
I give God his due honour by accepting that he is the one should should define morality, rather than a much lesser being such as myself, but I have a responsibility to follow it.
Why do you consider it God's "due honour" to define your morality for you? What does "lesser being" mean in this context? I'll accept that we're less powerful than God, and have less processing power and experience, but you'll need to talk me through why this should mean that His morality is necessarily superior to ours. For example, I doubt either of us have ever nuked a town - isn't that an immoral act by almost anyone's definition?
It's a lot harder to follow someone else' morality than one I make up, twist to suit my circumstances and which requires no accountability.
In my experience, it's easier to follow someone else's morality than come up with a self-consistent one of one's own. I know it took me several years of hard thought and debate before I was satisfied that I'd covered all the major bases. But this is a subjective issue and also somewhat irrelevant - the difficulty or otherwise of following a moral code doesn't indicate the value of that code.
One day I will be accountable before God.
So you follow His rules because one day He'll be in a position to punish/reward you based on this? Very moral:P
Enlightened self-interest. Mostly this gives the same answers as the non-religious parts of modern Christian morality - it's just the fringe cases that are different. For example, I wouldn't take a bullet for someone else (but I would push them out the way or attack the gunman if I had a decent chance of not dying).
Who is in a better position to justify an action: God or man?
Me. I'm the only one who can decide whether, to me, an action seems justified. On that basis, I choose not to accept God since so many of his actions seem wholly unjustifiable within the moral system he is supposed to exemplify. Favourite examples: Exodus 12:12 (killing of children by God), Judges 21:10 (slaughter of everyone but the young girls, who were kidnapped), pretty much the whole of Joshua.
Dumping all responsibility for making moral choices over to God is a wonderful idea, but then you have to state the basis of this moral choice itself.
No they are not receiving funding - its a private school. - Ah, apologies for the misunderstanding. I'm from Britain, where schools like this receive large amounts of government cash.
Like it or not, parents have the right to send their children to shitty places like this. Hell, if parents want, they can send their kids to military school. - That's rather my point. The kids don't have a choice in the matter, so my gut reaction is that we should try to compensate for this where possible by, for example, protecting their ability to express their opinions freely.
But both hope they'll be in charge in the near future. So neither is going to substantially undermine the power of government over us plebs. If you had a multiparty system in the US then this would be less of an issue, as there would be enough large parties for them not to be able to assume that they'd get their turn eventually.
This is broadly the situation in the UK, where the Liberal Democrats (the third major party) tend to fairly consistently campaign against Big Government. Call me cynical, but I rather suspect that if they came consistently higher in the polls they might change their tune somewhat. No slur on the Lib Dems, it's just that they'd start to empathise with the goverment far more.
There have been many many types of government throughout history. Iran is a theocracy, China is pretty much the equivalent, but substitute Communism for Islam. Neither is a dictatorship. The fact that they are not dictatorships does not mean that they are democracies.
I don't particularly like either of them, but that's cos they suck not cos they're not democracies. I also think that the Salem region of Massachusetts sucked in 1692 to a similar degree, regardless of its democratic status.
FTA: "The board's investigations range from "technical violations to more substantive violations of statutes or executive orders," Lotrionte said."
So my understanding is that they mostly just breached administrative guidelines. The really scary thing is what they were up to the rest of the time - one guy being snooped on for five years, with only 15 months of it in breach of the Patriot act, and that because of a technicality.
Historically, showing faith in your government will inevitably lead to that faith being abused. The scariest examples of this are probably the communist regimes (which is why you'll see phrases like "If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear, Comrade" appear so often on Slashdot) - people were expected to show complete trust of the ruling party regardless of their actions. Same goes for Nazi Germany.
Conversely, the American ideal is to place as little trust in the government as humanly possible, with the result that the government is comparatively trustworthy (cos it'll get caught out if it isn't). This is why (iirc) the US Constitution contains the right to bear arms - it's cos the Founding Fathers felt that a revolution every so often was both inevitable and necessary for healthy government, and wanted to make it fairly easy to rebel.
Trust the government and sooner or later you'll be sorely disappointed. Mistrust the government and you'll keep the buggers on their toes.
But aren't they receiving federal funding for this? And isn't it involuntary for the kids, since their parents/guardian have the final say in which school they go to?
Kids don't have many rights compared to adults, thus I feel that we should put more effort than usual into protecting the ones they do have
I've noticed the same thing at my university, in most of the more "technical" subjects (apart from biological natural sciences which has a large female contingent). The conclusion I've come to is that some part of Western cultural brainwashing trains girls to be less obsessive than guys. I have no firm idea why this should be, although it makes a sort of sense if you accept "man get food, woman clean home" as the most common situation a few years back. The man would need to specialise (see Hobbes et al) and the woman would need to stay general enough to do all the tasks relating to the home.
I figure that the trend will eventually reverse itself, and we'll get more girls spending their Sundays tinkering with random electronics and programming and stuff like a lot of the guys I know.
I'm saying that we don't have the ability to change to a non-hierarchical system and still be assured of finding what we're after. Having an authoritative place to look demands an authority to define that place.
On the other hand, I'm on Ubuntu Linux and I can honestly say that OS and application installation is trivial. Both operating systems have moved on from the historical stereotype portrayed in the grandparent.
If I were going to compare negative features these days, I'd point to Linux's lack of standardisation (binary compatibility and gui toolkits being the most annoying) and Windows' lack of command line control. A decent implementation of kill -9 would be almost enough to get me using Windows; a consistent user experience would be almost enough to make me swear off anything other than Linux forever.
You're probably right about a lot of that, and maybe we shouldn't give power to the UN. On the other hand, I'm not happy about having my nation's information infrastructure under the ultimate power of the US Dept. of Commerce. Can you suggest another international organisation who should be entrusted with said power?
(For the record, I'm a Brit - we're probably the last country the US would screw over if it didn't need to. I'm still really not comfortable with it, especially after the.xxx thing. And I can't imagine that countries like France, despite their popularity in the US, would be any happier.)
The UN sure as hell aren't perfect, but can you point to any decision of theirs anywhere that was sexist/racist to the degree you just described? Or was that just made up on the spot? Hey, if we're playing that game I'm sure I can come up with a few relevant scenarios regarding the US.
Feel free to point to as many specific, real decisions of the UN as you like in your attempt to prove them unfit to control the root server. But making decisions up just shows that either a) you're too lazy to do the research or b) there's little enough to find that your argument from anecdote falls down.
There are other ways of finding information on the internet.
Maybe so, but finding specific information can be something of a challenge without a hierarchy for it to have a fixed place in. Say I want to find about company X, for example. What I generally do is go search google, but this is dependent on being able to find google in the first place. If I want to go visit slashdot, I'm reliant on slashdot.org still being occupied by the same people.
I've heard a lot of people say "We don't need DNS". What's the alternative? Non-hierarchical systems are intrinsically disorganised, which in many cases is a strength, but it really doesn't help if you're trying to locate something specific. I have the same trouble with my room.
Mathematically speaking, unless the probability of having a pandemic is either zero or dropping, a pandemic is guaranteed. The relevant calculation is:
sum over n from 0 to infinity of (P(A)*P(A')^n) = P(A)*sum(P(A')^n)
= P(A)/(1-P(A')) [it's a geometric series]
= P(A)/P(A)
= 1.
where P(A) is the probability of an epidemic in year n (taken as being constant) and P(A') is the probability of no epidemic in that year.
If the situation is more complicated you could probably model it as a markov chain or a stochastic difference/differential equation. Regardless, unless there's a concrete reason for the probability falling as time goes by - and I can think of several reasons why it might actually be rising* - there will eventually be a pandemic.
And regards your comment about basic medical care: the only such care that will reduce the spread of a pandemic is the one where you lock people in their homes and paint a big cross on the door. Until someone succeeds in manufacturing a vaccine, which takes many many months, there is no other way to inhibit a viral pandemic than to segregate people. And these are approaches that have been tried since the middle ages.
*Reasons include: decreased strength of the average immune system in the First World due to better drugs; increased world population; increased travel and travel distance. The first raises the transmission rate per opportunity within a population, the second raises the number of opportunities within a population and the third reduces the difficulty of spreading between populations.
With the advent of local loop unbundling, it's possible to have another phone company hook your handset up to the rest of the country, by allowing them to implement the backend half of that specification. The result is ultra-fast dark fibre MANs in places like France, Italy and Japan (iirc anyway). By comparison, bandwidth rates in most of the US stalled years ago - the only counterexample is New York, and that was only an attempt to wipe out the cablecos.
(I worked for a business analysis company specialising in telecoms over the summer vacation. This is one of the few things I can remember after 4 weeks of maths.)
Mostly just seeming like a nice guy and having a convincing story that, coincidentally, allowed him to slowly escalate the amount of money he needed. Was something along the lines of:
Could he have some cash for food please? [being an untrusting sort - hah! - I bought him a burger from the nearest fast food joint.]
And since I seemed a nice guy, was there any chance I could give him some cash to get into a hostel? Cos once he was in there he could get a council job - the only thing stopping him from getting it was lack of fixed address. And he had neeeearly enough money...
Oh, and some money for a bus pass would be nice as well, cos of course he'd be going for a cheaper hostel which was thus far out of town, and he had an injured foot.
And anything I could do for his gf would also be good.
And pleasepleaseplease because if he didn't get this all sorted out soon he'd get chucked off his course at the local polytechnic and then his working life would to all effects and purposes be over, but if I could just give him this small amount it would all come back together for him...
Basically it was pure social engineering - building rapport, producing a convincing story, making me feel that if I would just help him then all would be good with the world. It was somewhat scary on reflection to see how quickly he was able to build up a level of trust between us, and I pretty much count it as money well spent just to know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of something like this.
Also, I have a tendency to throw good money after bad. I tend to get my arse kicked at poker as a result.
A street guy managed to con a decent chunk of money (about £30) out of me one time. I was young and naive, but felt less idiotic after I discovered he'd also got two of my friends in separate incidents. Obviously a) he was very efficient and b) I hang around with a lot of gullible people...
Problem is, in these cases, the schools are making publically available enough information to seriously inconvenience you should an identity thief come across it a few years down the line. This means that keeping your mouth shut is less of an option.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many "scientific" postulates that for all intent and purposes are untestable. The topology of the universe, for example, is one of those.
Our mathematical models of the topology of the universe are perfectly testable. The "space-bending" effect you talk about can be easily demonstrated in a number of ways. One example is the gravitational lensing effect, whereby several images of the same star appear in the vicinity of a massive body - the light emanating in several directions from the star is being bent round the object, so the star appears to be in several places.
As an aside, the reason it took so bloody long to notice that Euclid's Fifth Postulate didn't hold was because the universe we live in is locally Euclidean - if you take a small enough chunk of it, it behaves as if the Postulate were true (this is the definition of a manifold). Thankfully, the universe is sufficiently non-Euclidean on a large scale that we eventually noticed and started drawing conclusions, General Relativity being the most famous example.
So many posts here are concluding that ID must be false because it hasn't been proved true--and that is, I think, calling the kettle black.
Most of the posts that I've seen aren't saying ID must be false, for precisely the reason you describe. Instead, they point out that ID is unscientific in that it is untestable - if God/aliens/the flying spaghetti monster can do anything, there is no possible set of observations that can contradict ID. Evolution, on the other hand, is scientific as there is only so much that you can do with random mutations and we have yet to find anything that can't be done that way. If we ever find anything that can't be evolved, we'll have disproved evolution as a means for that thing to arise; the same cannot be said of ID.
No, science is a trust network, a main goal of which is to remove all the ideology humanly possible from its store of data and theories.
Open formats don't deny anyone access. That's rather the point. Closed/proprietary formats may deny access, especially if the people designing the access software prefer to use the GPL or similar inheritable licenses and especially if the company "owning" the format is big on patenting.
Were you referring to the fact that there are more tools available for the proprietary format? That *is* a valid concern. However, the mandation of a document format is *not* the mandation of a program, and I think it's a good idea to keep them as separate as humanly possible. The only time that I would consider it valid to worry about programs when thinking about a format is if there was absolutely nothing that supported it - anything else just becomes a slippery slope turning choice of format into choice of program.
On that basis, morality is an individual thing and you have no right to calll your morality superior or expect others to follow it. There is no such tihng as truly goor or evil because everything is relative. The holocaust wasn't evil; Hitler just had a different morality. Pol Pot wasn't evil, he just defined morality differently to others. Stalin wasn't evil; he just thought that good and evil had different meanings to you.
:P
Go to the top of the class! Right on all points. My understanding is that morality is a relative, individual thing - I take as evidence the fact that almost every culture in the world has a different definition of the word. I have absolutely no right to call my morality superior on general principles (although there are objective metrics - more on that later). The Holocaust, Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin weren't evil, their behaviour was just the product of different moralities.
However, whilst they can't be called objectively evil (of course it's fine to say "I consider their attitudes evil"), it seems fairly evident that they were, on the whole, rather stupid. If nothing else, creating an environment where killing is the norm puts even the leader at risk - if someone's spent the day killing Jews, why shouldn't they top Hitler (who had Jewish blood)? If you kill all the bureaucrats, starve the populace and ban technology, you shouldn't be surprised if your pseudocommunist regime doesn't have a long shelf life. If you create an atmosphere in which only the biggest bastards can survive, you're not going to be able to sleep at night without at least one eye open.
I mostly consider stupidity the best metric for morality. In my experience, sociopathy is far less effective than ethical behaviour in building the sort of environment I would want to live in, hence I go with the latter as a rule of thumb. It could be argued that the purpose of society is to create an environment where this is the state of affairs.
I give God his due honour by accepting that he is the one should should define morality, rather than a much lesser being such as myself, but I have a responsibility to follow it.
Why do you consider it God's "due honour" to define your morality for you? What does "lesser being" mean in this context? I'll accept that we're less powerful than God, and have less processing power and experience, but you'll need to talk me through why this should mean that His morality is necessarily superior to ours. For example, I doubt either of us have ever nuked a town - isn't that an immoral act by almost anyone's definition?
It's a lot harder to follow someone else' morality than one I make up, twist to suit my circumstances and which requires no accountability.
In my experience, it's easier to follow someone else's morality than come up with a self-consistent one of one's own. I know it took me several years of hard thought and debate before I was satisfied that I'd covered all the major bases. But this is a subjective issue and also somewhat irrelevant - the difficulty or otherwise of following a moral code doesn't indicate the value of that code.
One day I will be accountable before God.
So you follow His rules because one day He'll be in a position to punish/reward you based on this? Very moral
Enlightened self-interest. Mostly this gives the same answers as the non-religious parts of modern Christian morality - it's just the fringe cases that are different. For example, I wouldn't take a bullet for someone else (but I would push them out the way or attack the gunman if I had a decent chance of not dying).
Who is in a better position to justify an action: God or man?
Me. I'm the only one who can decide whether, to me, an action seems justified. On that basis, I choose not to accept God since so many of his actions seem wholly unjustifiable within the moral system he is supposed to exemplify. Favourite examples: Exodus 12:12 (killing of children by God), Judges 21:10 (slaughter of everyone but the young girls, who were kidnapped), pretty much the whole of Joshua.
Dumping all responsibility for making moral choices over to God is a wonderful idea, but then you have to state the basis of this moral choice itself.
No they are not receiving funding - its a private school. - Ah, apologies for the misunderstanding. I'm from Britain, where schools like this receive large amounts of government cash.
Like it or not, parents have the right to send their children to shitty places like this. Hell, if parents want, they can send their kids to military school. - That's rather my point. The kids don't have a choice in the matter, so my gut reaction is that we should try to compensate for this where possible by, for example, protecting their ability to express their opinions freely.
But both hope they'll be in charge in the near future. So neither is going to substantially undermine the power of government over us plebs. If you had a multiparty system in the US then this would be less of an issue, as there would be enough large parties for them not to be able to assume that they'd get their turn eventually.
This is broadly the situation in the UK, where the Liberal Democrats (the third major party) tend to fairly consistently campaign against Big Government. Call me cynical, but I rather suspect that if they came consistently higher in the polls they might change their tune somewhat. No slur on the Lib Dems, it's just that they'd start to empathise with the goverment far more.
There have been many many types of government throughout history. Iran is a theocracy, China is pretty much the equivalent, but substitute Communism for Islam. Neither is a dictatorship. The fact that they are not dictatorships does not mean that they are democracies.
I don't particularly like either of them, but that's cos they suck not cos they're not democracies. I also think that the Salem region of Massachusetts sucked in 1692 to a similar degree, regardless of its democratic status.
FTA: "The board's investigations range from "technical violations to more substantive violations of statutes or executive orders," Lotrionte said."
So my understanding is that they mostly just breached administrative guidelines. The really scary thing is what they were up to the rest of the time - one guy being snooped on for five years, with only 15 months of it in breach of the Patriot act, and that because of a technicality.
Historically, showing faith in your government will inevitably lead to that faith being abused. The scariest examples of this are probably the communist regimes (which is why you'll see phrases like "If you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear, Comrade" appear so often on Slashdot) - people were expected to show complete trust of the ruling party regardless of their actions. Same goes for Nazi Germany.
Conversely, the American ideal is to place as little trust in the government as humanly possible, with the result that the government is comparatively trustworthy (cos it'll get caught out if it isn't). This is why (iirc) the US Constitution contains the right to bear arms - it's cos the Founding Fathers felt that a revolution every so often was both inevitable and necessary for healthy government, and wanted to make it fairly easy to rebel.
Trust the government and sooner or later you'll be sorely disappointed. Mistrust the government and you'll keep the buggers on their toes.
But aren't they receiving federal funding for this? And isn't it involuntary for the kids, since their parents/guardian have the final say in which school they go to?
Kids don't have many rights compared to adults, thus I feel that we should put more effort than usual into protecting the ones they do have
I've noticed the same thing at my university, in most of the more "technical" subjects (apart from biological natural sciences which has a large female contingent). The conclusion I've come to is that some part of Western cultural brainwashing trains girls to be less obsessive than guys. I have no firm idea why this should be, although it makes a sort of sense if you accept "man get food, woman clean home" as the most common situation a few years back. The man would need to specialise (see Hobbes et al) and the woman would need to stay general enough to do all the tasks relating to the home.
I figure that the trend will eventually reverse itself, and we'll get more girls spending their Sundays tinkering with random electronics and programming and stuff like a lot of the guys I know.
I'm saying that we don't have the ability to change to a non-hierarchical system and still be assured of finding what we're after. Having an authoritative place to look demands an authority to define that place.
The GPL does contain EULA-like provisions. Happily, it limits them to "The act of running the Program is not restricted".
It *is* mostly a developer license, but it contains an End-User License Agreement as a subset of that.
On the other hand, I'm on Ubuntu Linux and I can honestly say that OS and application installation is trivial. Both operating systems have moved on from the historical stereotype portrayed in the grandparent.
If I were going to compare negative features these days, I'd point to Linux's lack of standardisation (binary compatibility and gui toolkits being the most annoying) and Windows' lack of command line control. A decent implementation of kill -9 would be almost enough to get me using Windows; a consistent user experience would be almost enough to make me swear off anything other than Linux forever.
You're probably right about a lot of that, and maybe we shouldn't give power to the UN. On the other hand, I'm not happy about having my nation's information infrastructure under the ultimate power of the US Dept. of Commerce. Can you suggest another international organisation who should be entrusted with said power?
.xxx thing. And I can't imagine that countries like France, despite their popularity in the US, would be any happier.)
(For the record, I'm a Brit - we're probably the last country the US would screw over if it didn't need to. I'm still really not comfortable with it, especially after the
The UN sure as hell aren't perfect, but can you point to any decision of theirs anywhere that was sexist/racist to the degree you just described? Or was that just made up on the spot? Hey, if we're playing that game I'm sure I can come up with a few relevant scenarios regarding the US.
Feel free to point to as many specific, real decisions of the UN as you like in your attempt to prove them unfit to control the root server. But making decisions up just shows that either a) you're too lazy to do the research or b) there's little enough to find that your argument from anecdote falls down.
There are other ways of finding information on the internet. Maybe so, but finding specific information can be something of a challenge without a hierarchy for it to have a fixed place in. Say I want to find about company X, for example. What I generally do is go search google, but this is dependent on being able to find google in the first place. If I want to go visit slashdot, I'm reliant on slashdot.org still being occupied by the same people.
I've heard a lot of people say "We don't need DNS". What's the alternative? Non-hierarchical systems are intrinsically disorganised, which in many cases is a strength, but it really doesn't help if you're trying to locate something specific. I have the same trouble with my room.
If the situation is more complicated you could probably model it as a markov chain or a stochastic difference/differential equation. Regardless, unless there's a concrete reason for the probability falling as time goes by - and I can think of several reasons why it might actually be rising* - there will eventually be a pandemic.
And regards your comment about basic medical care: the only such care that will reduce the spread of a pandemic is the one where you lock people in their homes and paint a big cross on the door. Until someone succeeds in manufacturing a vaccine, which takes many many months, there is no other way to inhibit a viral pandemic than to segregate people. And these are approaches that have been tried since the middle ages.
*Reasons include: decreased strength of the average immune system in the First World due to better drugs; increased world population; increased travel and travel distance. The first raises the transmission rate per opportunity within a population, the second raises the number of opportunities within a population and the third reduces the difficulty of spreading between populations.
With the advent of local loop unbundling, it's possible to have another phone company hook your handset up to the rest of the country, by allowing them to implement the backend half of that specification. The result is ultra-fast dark fibre MANs in places like France, Italy and Japan (iirc anyway). By comparison, bandwidth rates in most of the US stalled years ago - the only counterexample is New York, and that was only an attempt to wipe out the cablecos.
(I worked for a business analysis company specialising in telecoms over the summer vacation. This is one of the few things I can remember after 4 weeks of maths.)
Basically it was pure social engineering - building rapport, producing a convincing story, making me feel that if I would just help him then all would be good with the world. It was somewhat scary on reflection to see how quickly he was able to build up a level of trust between us, and I pretty much count it as money well spent just to know what it feels like to be on the receiving end of something like this.
Also, I have a tendency to throw good money after bad. I tend to get my arse kicked at poker as a result.
A street guy managed to con a decent chunk of money (about £30) out of me one time. I was young and naive, but felt less idiotic after I discovered he'd also got two of my friends in separate incidents. Obviously a) he was very efficient and b) I hang around with a lot of gullible people...
Problem is, in these cases, the schools are making publically available enough information to seriously inconvenience you should an identity thief come across it a few years down the line. This means that keeping your mouth shut is less of an option.
The examples you gave aren't actually rootkits. However, the Honeynet project could well be described that way, so substitute that for your examples.