You know, I have absolutely no love for Scientology, but it really irks me that no one can seem to use the word without also invoking words like "cult" or "crackpot." The difference between Scientology and most other mainstream religions is that
A) It hasn't been around nearly as long B) It has embraced the legal system as a source of power. (as opposed to relying on the traditional "DO YOU WANT TO GO TO HELL?!" psychological source of power.)
Beyond that, it has wacky beliefs and its adherents occasionally do weird things just like every other religion in the world. Yet people (even non-Christians) continue to think of Scientology as a cult or a joke, while they regard Christianity as a respectable institution. Like somehow the Old Testiment is less weird (from a non-Christian point of view) than the crap L. Ron Hubbard wrote...like somehow a few cease and desists are worse than a systemic repression of healthy sexual desires (and repression of women's rights.) I mean fuck, right now you've got 2 informative mods, 2 funny mods, and one measley flamebait mod (assuming I'm deciphering the "slashmath" correctly.) I bet that if you used the phrase "crackpot Christian" your post would've been modded down by all but the most rabid Christian-haters.
Despite my dislike of it, I do see the purpose of religion, and one of the few rays of hope I have is that the dominant religions of the world will evolve into something more enlighted or a new, more enlighted religion will take their place. But double standards like these really make me wonder if the dominant religions of the world aren't completely immune to all rational thought.
Law enforcement should not have extensive powers of surveillence over law-abiding citizens whom have given no sign that they have broken any law. As long as there is fundemental disagreement in this country as to what is right and wrong, it is a bad idea to give our government the ABSOLUTE ability to impose the (currently) popular ideology on the minority. It's a good thing that people are able to rebel. Bad laws are often defeated by people breaking the law (see: civil rights of the 1960s and the Prohibition.)
I know this is a hard concept to wrap your head around, but if the government is given the means to completely wipe out all lawbreakers, it will be the end of democracy and the birth of a sickening (and yes, Orwellian) form of totalitarianism. Everything our legislators pass will instantly become a reality, and there will be no way to stop or reverse it even if it turns out to be a REALLY BAD IDEA.
Openness is bad because our productive society as a whole (I'm exluding "hardened criminals" here) does NOT have a unified moral code. Personally, I don't want to give the FBI the ability to, say, prevent sex toys from being sold if President Jeb Bush manages to sell congress on the "war on dildos." I don't want to give the DEA the power to eradicate all pot in the USA. I don't want to give the FBI the ability to investigate to find out if a person is gay, and then "accidentally" leak this information if they don't like that person's (perfectly legal) actions.
Maybe you disagree with all of these personal preferences, and that's fine, but just remember that it's not guaranteed that YOUR preferred rule of law will be passed by an essentially omnipotent "open" government. If you're not a Protestant Christian, for example, it's likely you will disagree with many of the laws that come out of a conservative-controlled DC.
But you will have no choice but to follow them at all times, because even the slightest rebellion can be detected and you will be arrested long before you have the chance to start a even a peaceful, Ghandi-like campaign.
By the way, I love the fact that you're in complete agreement with an obviously ironic post. Re-read it, and see if you can spot the sarcasm this time. Bonus points for every contradictory sentence you find.
Instead of expecting the government to do everything for you take matters into your own hands by letting the government track you!
...
We haven't had one attack since 9/11 here and it's because we've given up the illusion of privacy for true personal privacy that WE control ourselves by NOT being criminals.
Those two lines alone are a dead giveaway. Anyone intelligent enough to actually form a coherent, properly spelled rant is also intelligent enough not to say something so blatantly stupid and self-contradictory. Thus, we know he's not being serious, and is really against such gross invasions of privacy.
Given any reasonable timeframe, the median number of Americans who die every year from terrorism is zero. (Granted, median doesn't give any weight to the number of people who died in a specific year, but a few thousand isn't much compared to just about any other cause of death and misery you're likely to see on the news.)
I do not know how much we spend on heart disease research, but I highly doubt that it's anywhere near the cost of the Afganistan war, the Iraq war, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, extra security at the airport, time that the politicians spend debating inane but ostensibly terrorist-related issues, time and money our police officers spend on anti-terrorism training and security (I live in a backwater town in Florida that most Floridians have never heard of, and last Easter we had an entire freaking army of cops out to make sure the terrorists weren't going to steal our Easter eggs. I'm serious, they barricaded off a five block area and were at least a dozen of them walking through the crowd wearing unusually large sidearms... I coulda sworn they were.50 Desert Eagles), those dehumanizing "most wanted" decks of cards, our very weak dollar, etc. etc.
The two wars alone probably cost more than we spend on heart disease in a decade. It sucks that a few thousand people died back in 2001, and no one is saying that nothing should be done. But what we should do should be PROPORTIONAL to the threat, and terrorists just aren't that big a threat. Even the small threat they do pose is practically impossible to eliminate, at least by our current measures. What the hell is all this bullshit about GPS and Total Information Awareness and ID cards? None of that will ever stop a terrorists. Many (most?) of the hijackers were here legally. The only truly effective methods of stopping terrorism (refusing all immigration from hardline Muslim theocrasies and/or telling Israel that they're on their own) never seem to be brought up.
All we ever get is THIS... programs and technologies that are piss-poor at stopping terrorism, but awesome at tracking and controlling American citizens.
And awesome at wasting money too. Throw those billions at heart disease, and you save millions of lives every year around the globe. That's a hellofalot more important than pissing off the Sunnis and making sure Osama doesn't try to blow up our Easter Eggs.
1. Anyone who thinks it's immature or offensive or juvenile to talk about the female (or male) orgasm is immature and downright offensive to the rest of the (sane, non-puritanical) world's sensabilities. The article makes a valid point and the submission is very frank and mature. If you hear schoolchildren laughing when you read this submission, it's only because YOU need to grow the fuck up. Pleasure is pleasure, and this is an interesting (and IMO at least half-right) comparison.
2. I cannot believe no one has mentioned REZ yet. Speaking as a geek who has a geek GF, I think that sex and videogames should be used in the same sentence much more often.
If that's the number you're looking for (total number of users), you're much better off simply polling random people and asking them what browser they're using, then apply that number to web surfers as a whole. Finding one reasonably reliable statistic is easier and more accurate than finding five (or more) reasonably reliable statistics and then trying to extrapolate the actual number you're looking for.
The original poster was talking about "just for the hell of it"-worm authors. I should point out that these blackhats in particular should NEVER get caught unless they are extremely prideful and/or stupid. Worms that "call home" can obviously be traced, but proof of concept and cause-a-lot-of-chaos worms are only ever connected to their author for one brief instant--when they are uploaded. This instant can be when they are connected at a coffee shop from several blocks away during rush hour. Wash, rinse, repeat for all of the popular public hotspots in the area, over the course of a week to ensure that your worm is seeded in multiple locations. Then, after a week (or after your virus is identified in the wild) halt all distribution and watch the chaos unfold. Unless you suffer from supremely bad luck (i.e. hidden camera in the area FIVE BLOCKS AWAY from the actual hotspot manages to catch you in the act and the FBI agents actually check the camera and they actually manage to spot your woktenna through your tinted car windows) there is no way you will ever be caught. You can even be stupid brag about it on IRC to all your buddies and even if the FBI arrests you, you can just say you were being a lying little prick and as long as you've wiped your HD, they'll won't have enough evidence to indite you (what are they gonna do, arrest every script kiddie on IRC that claims they wrote the worm? heh.)
Actually, just-for-the-hell-of-it random crime in general is a lot harder to trace than motivated crime. Nothing short of Orwellian-level surveillence can reliably solve random, profit-less crime committed by smart criminals. Fortunately, these two things--random, profit-less crime and smart criminals--are very rarely connected.
As the parent says, I don't think that triangulation will be nearly that easy. As long as you're honey-pot savvy and rotate your MAC address and change your hotspot every day, no one from the physical world is going to get you (not because it's 100% impossible, but beacuse they're just not going to care.)
Now, it's possible that someone looking at your cyber-activities can track you down and figure out that all of your activities stem from the same geographical area. It is possible for them to then stake out these hotspots and hope you come roaming by, monitor the connection real-time and hope they can spot your car (out of the perhaps hundreds within range) or attempt to triangulate you during the few minutes that you do your dirty work. However, if you're a two-bit criminal it's just not likely that anyone will go to this kind of trouble. A list of a several hundred hotspots rotated each use that you use, say, twice a week will last you a year or two. Sure, someone could wardrive the area and stake out all availible hotspots, but who the hell would go to that kind of trouble? Not an individual whose WAP gets used by a single MAC address for a few hours (and then possibly gets used again by a different MAC address a year later) that's for damn sure.
The FBI might go to that much trouble, but only if you're defrauding people or corporations on the order of millions of dollars. If that's the case, then you can afford to quit your job and go on a permanent road trip, logging on from a different city each day. I'm not saying you'll never get caught, because the actual "fraud" part of computer fraud is much riskier to pull off, but random triangulation by some bored geek whom goes after every rogue MACs he sees at three in the morning (or alternately noon, if it's a busy coffee shop) is really the least of your concerns.
You know, sometimes I think I'd make a damn good blackhat... stupid freakin' ethics...
I'm no blackhat, but I've got to point out that any hacker that's been arrested is careless, and it's been that way for quite a few years now. I live in a small to medium-sized town, and there are at least half a dozen public WiFi access points that I know of. Not all of them are free, but even a half-assed hacker could get aroud their security. I'm sure that there are at least a hundred personal WiFi routers around town, too. The vast majority are probably unsecured, or at best secured with WEP and MAC filtering (both easily breakable.)
The point is, anyone who's capable of creating an original exploit should also be able to construct a cantenna (or a woktenna) and access a hotspot from a block (or five) away in complete anonymity, rotating hotspots frequently and using proxies whenever possible. Any hacker who does not do this is indeed being (extremely) careless. Any hacker who DOES do this is almost certain not to get caught (unless he does something stupid like use a stolen credit card number to have something shipped to his house--but then, that's not careless cracking, that's careless fraud.)
In essence, not only are harsher penalities defeated by self-delusion ("I'll never get caught!"), they're also defeated by healthy levels of intelligence and paranoia ("Hey, I DIDN'T get caught!)
As far as your solution goes, as long as blackhat hacking continues to inspire fear and yields real power (botnets and stolen IDs), I don't think that we'll be able to psyche them out into quitting. Graffiti is essentially an aethetic crime/sport, whereas hacking and worm authoring can lead to tangible benefits... and you can't really expect stop a thief by calling him silly names.
In the end, I believe that the solution must be technical.
So let's say Hitler's production capability was somehow increase tenfold in the early 1940's. Suddenly, superior German tanks (which we only defeated through sheer numbers) and other tech is being churned out far faster than we can destroy them. If Hilter had 5 panzers for every Sherman we'd have, the land war would be over, period. So for the sake of argument (since you say that some things can never be justified), let's pretend that he did. Let's pretend that he has naval and air superiority, too. Let's pretend that the ONLY thing we have is the A-Bomb (contrary to myth, Germany's atomic program was actually lagging behind ours by quite a bit.)
So basically, your choice is to start annihilating German towns and hope you can scare him into surrender (because we only have 3 working bombs, including the Trinity test bomb) or let Hitler take over the world and execute or exile or enslave every Jew, black person, mentally/physically disabled person, non-Christian person, etc. on Earth.
Absolute morality has no place in war--at least, not any sort of conventional morality. If failiure means annihilation of the people and values you hold dear, all bets are off. Evil through inaction becomes worse than the evil through action. There is no such thing as a good or just war. War is NEVER a good thing... but sometimes refusing to play can be even worse.
If we could not defeat Hitler's planes or his panzers or his subs, then yes, we damn well should have nuked his factories and cities until he surrendered. Innocents will die--I'm sorry, but that just happens in war. Even today, with our precision-guided weapontry, already something like 12,000+ civillians have died in Iraq as a result of collateral damage.
In the end, civillians build the weapons that destroy you, they feed the troops that shoot you, and even if they are entirely innocent and opposed to their government, they can still live next door to an army base.
Even Mohandas Ghandi himself began to acknowledge that there comes a time when war and destruction and death is unavoidable and necessary. It sucks, but in the face of annihilation, it is unavoidable. And not even Ghandi himself would have been willing to sacrfice every single Indian (or Jew...) on the face of the earth.
It's inevitable that someone will talk about how these bombings (along with Dresden) were basically wholesale slaughterings of civilians, by today's definitions tantamount to terrorism and thus (presumably) inherently evil. The other side will always bring up XYZ reasons why the bombings were absolutely necessary, usually saying that they saved more lives in the long run, etc.
Frankly, I think both sides are full of shit.
First, NOTHING was necessary. Even if Japan was never going to surrender, we did not have to invade Japan--by that point in the war, they certainly weren't going to invade us anytime soon. We could have precision-bombed (or whatever passed for precision bombing in 1945) their major factories, blockaded their harbors, and they wouldn't have been a threat to anyone anymore.
On the other hand, in a major conflict that will decide the fate of the world, "terrorism" in any conventional sense of the word is not inherently evil. If you cannot stand against the planes that bomb your cities and ships, targeting the civilians that are making the planes that bomb your cities and ships is perfectly reasonable. Additionally, causing "terror" in your enemy and thus compelling them to surrender is a valid and can SAVES LIVES ON BOTH SIDES.
In a nutshell, no we weren't saints when we vaporized and poisoned hundreds of thousands of civilians (and then invaded them and destroyed much of their culture.) But you don't win wars by being saint-like. In a more one-sided war (like Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan), it is the moral duty of the much superior force to be humane, but in the middle of WWII the victor was anything but assured.
Concepts like "rules of war" and "terrorism" are shams. There is no line in the sand you can draw, no action that is absolutely unjustified if we're talking about the fate of millions or billions of lives. That doesn't mean we're no better than the terrorists, or that there is no right or wrong. Far from it, it means that we simply need to hate and fight them for what they are--closed minded religious bigots whom cannot peacefully co-exist with other ideologies. That is all.
On September 11, they attacked our financial infrastructure and our military headquarters. Considering that they are by far the underdogs, this is (and I urge mods to wait and read and think before doing anything rash) a perfectly acceptable guerrilla tactic for a group so hopelessly out-gunned.
The TACTIC is valid; their REASONS are utter bullshit and that is why we should wipe them off the face of the Earth.
(To even come close to justifying that level of extreme violence, we'd need to do something insanely evil, not just stick up for Israel in the UN and maintain a military base in Saudi Arabia.)
I worry desperately when people say that killing civilians or causing terror is wrong 100% of the time, except for when we vaporize a few hundred thousand civilians but that's ok because of reasons XYZ. It's ok to admit that anything goes in war. Doing so does not legitimize your opponent in the least, because at the end of the day you are fighting for the rights and ideologies and ways of life that will live long after the dead are put in ground. You must always seek to justify your actions (or rather, you must always seek to act justly) , but no single action is inherently unjustifiable.
Just so you know, I happen to think that Hiroshima was justified, Nagasaki wasn't, Afghanistan was justified, and Iraq wasn't, but the point is the criteria you use, not the judgment itself. If you're not consistent in your criteria, don't be surprised when no one takes your own personal "axis of evil" seriously.
Anyway, sorry for the interruption, you may now resume dredging up every questionable action from the United States' and Japan's history.
This is actually a great idea for Wikipedia. Modding can allow people truly committed to informative, accurate, neutral-point-of-view to edit unfettered, while newbies and troll submissions are subject to review.
I don't understand why you guys think I'm attacking Nextel as a whole or saying that this sort of plan is the norm. I know they have better plans; I know they offer unlimited direct connect. My semi-OT point was regarding governmental inefficiency and stupidity, not the pricing policies of the Nextel corporation.
I never implied that every business or government agency in the country has this plan, just our local government (and perhaps some other local governments, too.) If you guys are really going to insist that I'm a liar, I'll hunt down the bill. It's dated from around February of this year.
From what I've seen, cell phone companies are more than happy to let you hang yourself. This is not unique to Nextel. Usually they only offer to transfer you to a new plan if you specifically ask--or threaten to cancel your service. Chances are this was a very old plan, and government inefficiency/apathy/bribery meaent that no one ever bothered to change it once the rates got better.
If you wanna call someone stupid, let me go find that bill and scan it for ya... though I'm not sure who's dumber, the people in charge of our county telecommunications, or the taxpayers who let them get away with this crap.
I found it very hard to believe too, but the numbers were staring me in the face, and a little asking around confirmed that everyone was on the same plan.
Assuming this isn't a case of outright bribery, I think that the only explanation is that perhaps 10 or so years ago was when they first signed up with Nextel, and no one has bothered to change the plan since then. I'm not suggesting that this is the best Nextel has to offer, that'd be utterly insane on their part. But this was hardly the only case of government waste I saw at my job (though it is definitely the worst), and I'm guessing that Nextel is quite wisely remaining silent to milk this thing for all it's worth. If anyone actually stood up and threatened to switch, I'm sure they'd give them a a better plan in a heartbeat.
I can't believe that a great company like Nextel wants to merge with a crappy company like Sprint. It kind of reminds me when Sears merged with K-mart. The sad thing is that it's usually the weaker partner that wins out.
--
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
I laughed out loud when I read your sig, because I've seen firsthand how government inefficiently is helping Nextel prosper and grow.
I just quit my job at the county Parks and Recreation department, and everyone there has Nextels. We shared a building with the sheriffs, and they had Nextels too. Pretty much every county employee in the county uses Nextels, and from what I gather many of the neighboring counties use them too. This is because of the walkie-talkie feature, which theoretically saves a lot of money. It made sense, and I figured that Nextel must be offering them a pretty nice discount.
Then one day I actually saw the bill for one of those things, and I nearly shit myself. FORTY CENTS A MINUTE. No free minutes at all, just forty cents a minute, PLUS A CONNECTION CHARGE of $0.75.
Everyone in the county was on this same plan. So much for the discount. But hey, no big loss because we're all supposed to be using the walkie-talkie feature, right?
Hah. First, the walkie-talkie was billed at around $0.15 a minute. Just for reference, there are PREPAID phones out that offer ten cents a minute for REAL phone capability. Second, we used the walkie-talkie feature maybe 10% of the time at best. Often we were calling land lines, but mostly we were just too lazy to search through the address book for the (often cryptic) walkie-talkie phone ID when we could just dial the number by hand. Oh yeah, and there were personal calls, too. They'd did monitor your bill, but as long as you kept each call under ten minutes they didn't care. Under their wonderfully discounted Nextel plan, a one-minute call was a mere $1.15!
Incidentally, this is how I found out about the billing plan. I made a few hour-long calls to a girl I was interested in, figuring that it was worth the $10-$25 I'd have to pay (if I even had to pay at all... I assumed my plan had SOME free minutes.) Imagine my surprise when I was slapped with a bill that was well over $100...
Somebody SOMEWHERE has got to be watching the bottom line...I mean fuck, given the size of our county, it must be in the millions. Either they're terminally apathetic, or they just can't tear their eyes off of the free phones (and cars?) Nextel keeps sending them.
So um, yeah, if Nextel really isn't doing that well, I wouldn't be at all surprised if government inefficiency was to blame... maybe with a healthy dose of criminal activities on the side...
I re-read your post and the post you replied to. If you were intending to make some other point, it escapes me entirely.
Why no outcry when the left tries to force their beliefs on the public schools?
"Environmentalism" and "diversity" and "social justice" are indistinguishable from religion. Yet somehow they find their way into public schools with no problem, and slashdot doesn't seem to mind.
Disregarding my mini-rant on environmentalism, my point was that we don't mind these things because they are not taught in science class. Thus, there is no outcry. If people started saying that Darwinian evolution meant social justice was a flawed concept, I'd be just as pissed. There is no outcry when these beliefs are "forced" into public schools because they are "forced" into the appropriate classes.
Ideas like diversity and social justice and environmentalism ARE important to *some* degree, and if you're a reasonable person I'm sure you'll agree with me on this point. (if you do not, check out orim's reply to your post--without these things present in at least small amounts, this country would be an unspeakably horrid and evil place.) Moral and ethical philosophies (which including religion), the ways we approach the world around us, are also important--hell, maybe even MORE important. Our objection is not to the subject itself, but to this alleged "controversy", this pitting of a (mostly) religious philosophy vs. an empirical science.
If your point is something else then make it, but I cannot seem to read your post any other way.
With the exception of environmentalism, none of those are ever taught in SCIENCE class. I don't object to religion being taught in philosophy (neither would most slashdotters.) I do object to it masquerading as a science.
Environmentalism is sometimes taught in science classes, and I agree that sometimes textbooks and teachers go too far by making the issue a moral one--all primates have human-like rights, we have a moral obligation to prevent any and all species from going extinct, etc. I agree that these sentiments do not belong in the SCIENCE classroom.
However, there is a very rational and scientific face to environmentalism, too. Talking about harmful chemicals in the air (and how we'd actually save money in the long run by enforcing stricter emissions regulations and thus reducing respitory illness) is in no way religious or inappropriate so long as the assertions are firmly grounded in scientific studies. It's also not inappropriate to talk about human impact on other species, including exinctions and such, and discuss the pros and cons of stricter environmental regulation.
In short, it's not inappropriate to talk about facts and scientific theories in the science classroom. Neither is it inappropriate to talk about moral and philosophical issues (including religion) in the philosophy classroom. It IS inappropriate to tell the students what to believe, or to devote any significant amount of time discussing moral/nontangible/philosophical issues, while in the SCIENCE classroom.
Why just an hour ago, I asked
http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard.html">our adminitrator if he could give me a little more storage space and he said not to worry, I now have 10x the free space I had...be...
I wonder, at what point does it become moral to be one of those McVeigh's and fight an oppressive government? At what point does it become immoral to serve a once-righteous (or even better, a half-righteous) government?
Are there any points at all, or is it just one big sliding scale of grayness from Utopia all the way to 1984's Oceania?
Just something to think about; don't particularly feel like starting a flame war today...
I don't fear that this will be completely ineffective. I fear that it will be effective by a small amount and politicians will use it to claim that they're winning the war on terrorism. Bit by bit, these measures DO have an effect.
The problem is, the security gained is not worth the freedom lost, and by the time we have near-absolute security, this country will make 1984's Oceania look like a fucking amusment park. It is not a leap that we're willing to make all at once, but given a few generations, it will be easy to enact these security measures, one by one. They don't do much, but to the average Joe they don't appear to take away much freedom, either.
Make no mistake, collectively they CAN stop terrorism, but they WILL destroy everything that made our society worth defending from terrorism in the first place.
This is why we should focus on security measures that do not try (in vain) to track everything, to have absolute control over everything. These are at best a waste of money and at worse a step towards the death of freedom. Effective security measures which do NOT threaten our freedom do not focus on trying to track and control the population at large. They target our likely enemies and our likely points of weakness with simple, common-sense safeguards and policy changes (regarding Middle Eastern nationals, regarding our nigh-unwavering UN support of Israel, etc.)
Unfortunately, most of the western world seems hellbent on responding to a mosquito bite with a claw hammer instead of Off! insect repellant . I can only hope that they will someday realize how self-destructive these tactics are.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I have absolutely no love for Scientology, but it really irks me that no one can seem to use the word without also invoking words like "cult" or "crackpot." The difference between Scientology and most other mainstream religions is that
A) It hasn't been around nearly as long
B) It has embraced the legal system as a source of power. (as opposed to relying on the traditional "DO YOU WANT TO GO TO HELL?!" psychological source of power.)
Beyond that, it has wacky beliefs and its adherents occasionally do weird things just like every other religion in the world. Yet people (even non-Christians) continue to think of Scientology as a cult or a joke, while they regard Christianity as a respectable institution. Like somehow the Old Testiment is less weird (from a non-Christian point of view) than the crap L. Ron Hubbard wrote...like somehow a few cease and desists are worse than a systemic repression of healthy sexual desires (and repression of women's rights.) I mean fuck, right now you've got 2 informative mods, 2 funny mods, and one measley flamebait mod (assuming I'm deciphering the "slashmath" correctly.) I bet that if you used the phrase "crackpot Christian" your post would've been modded down by all but the most rabid Christian-haters.
Despite my dislike of it, I do see the purpose of religion, and one of the few rays of hope I have is that the dominant religions of the world will evolve into something more enlighted or a new, more enlighted religion will take their place. But double standards like these really make me wonder if the dominant religions of the world aren't completely immune to all rational thought.
Law enforcement should not have extensive powers of surveillence over law-abiding citizens whom have given no sign that they have broken any law. As long as there is fundemental disagreement in this country as to what is right and wrong, it is a bad idea to give our government the ABSOLUTE ability to impose the (currently) popular ideology on the minority. It's a good thing that people are able to rebel. Bad laws are often defeated by people breaking the law (see: civil rights of the 1960s and the Prohibition.)
I know this is a hard concept to wrap your head around, but if the government is given the means to completely wipe out all lawbreakers, it will be the end of democracy and the birth of a sickening (and yes, Orwellian) form of totalitarianism. Everything our legislators pass will instantly become a reality, and there will be no way to stop or reverse it even if it turns out to be a REALLY BAD IDEA.
Openness is bad because our productive society as a whole (I'm exluding "hardened criminals" here) does NOT have a unified moral code. Personally, I don't want to give the FBI the ability to, say, prevent sex toys from being sold if President Jeb Bush manages to sell congress on the "war on dildos." I don't want to give the DEA the power to eradicate all pot in the USA. I don't want to give the FBI the ability to investigate to find out if a person is gay, and then "accidentally" leak this information if they don't like that person's (perfectly legal) actions.
Maybe you disagree with all of these personal preferences, and that's fine, but just remember that it's not guaranteed that YOUR preferred rule of law will be passed by an essentially omnipotent "open" government. If you're not a Protestant Christian, for example, it's likely you will disagree with many of the laws that come out of a conservative-controlled DC.
But you will have no choice but to follow them at all times, because even the slightest rebellion can be detected and you will be arrested long before you have the chance to start a even a peaceful, Ghandi-like campaign.
By the way, I love the fact that you're in complete agreement with an obviously ironic post. Re-read it, and see if you can spot the sarcasm this time. Bonus points for every contradictory sentence you find.
Those two lines alone are a dead giveaway. Anyone intelligent enough to actually form a coherent, properly spelled rant is also intelligent enough not to say something so blatantly stupid and self-contradictory. Thus, we know he's not being serious, and is really against such gross invasions of privacy.
Given any reasonable timeframe, the median number of Americans who die every year from terrorism is zero. (Granted, median doesn't give any weight to the number of people who died in a specific year, but a few thousand isn't much compared to just about any other cause of death and misery you're likely to see on the news.)
.50 Desert Eagles), those dehumanizing "most wanted" decks of cards, our very weak dollar, etc. etc.
I do not know how much we spend on heart disease research, but I highly doubt that it's anywhere near the cost of the Afganistan war, the Iraq war, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, extra security at the airport, time that the politicians spend debating inane but ostensibly terrorist-related issues, time and money our police officers spend on anti-terrorism training and security (I live in a backwater town in Florida that most Floridians have never heard of, and last Easter we had an entire freaking army of cops out to make sure the terrorists weren't going to steal our Easter eggs. I'm serious, they barricaded off a five block area and were at least a dozen of them walking through the crowd wearing unusually large sidearms... I coulda sworn they were
The two wars alone probably cost more than we spend on heart disease in a decade. It sucks that a few thousand people died back in 2001, and no one is saying that nothing should be done. But what we should do should be PROPORTIONAL to the threat, and terrorists just aren't that big a threat. Even the small threat they do pose is practically impossible to eliminate, at least by our current measures. What the hell is all this bullshit about GPS and Total Information Awareness and ID cards? None of that will ever stop a terrorists. Many (most?) of the hijackers were here legally. The only truly effective methods of stopping terrorism (refusing all immigration from hardline Muslim theocrasies and/or telling Israel that they're on their own) never seem to be brought up.
All we ever get is THIS... programs and technologies that are piss-poor at stopping terrorism, but awesome at tracking and controlling American citizens.
And awesome at wasting money too. Throw those billions at heart disease, and you save millions of lives every year around the globe. That's a hellofalot more important than pissing off the Sunnis and making sure Osama doesn't try to blow up our Easter Eggs.
All very good points, and I mostly agree with you, though your original post wasn't a billionth as clear.
1. Anyone who thinks it's immature or offensive or juvenile to talk about the female (or male) orgasm is immature and downright offensive to the rest of the (sane, non-puritanical) world's sensabilities. The article makes a valid point and the submission is very frank and mature. If you hear schoolchildren laughing when you read this submission, it's only because YOU need to grow the fuck up. Pleasure is pleasure, and this is an interesting (and IMO at least half-right) comparison.
2. I cannot believe no one has mentioned REZ yet. Speaking as a geek who has a geek GF, I think that sex and videogames should be used in the same sentence much more often.
Oh Jesus Christ fucking Buddha with a stick... it's comments like these that make me wish comment moderation wasn't capped at +5.
If that's the number you're looking for (total number of users), you're much better off simply polling random people and asking them what browser they're using, then apply that number to web surfers as a whole. Finding one reasonably reliable statistic is easier and more accurate than finding five (or more) reasonably reliable statistics and then trying to extrapolate the actual number you're looking for.
The original poster was talking about "just for the hell of it"-worm authors. I should point out that these blackhats in particular should NEVER get caught unless they are extremely prideful and/or stupid. Worms that "call home" can obviously be traced, but proof of concept and cause-a-lot-of-chaos worms are only ever connected to their author for one brief instant--when they are uploaded. This instant can be when they are connected at a coffee shop from several blocks away during rush hour. Wash, rinse, repeat for all of the popular public hotspots in the area, over the course of a week to ensure that your worm is seeded in multiple locations. Then, after a week (or after your virus is identified in the wild) halt all distribution and watch the chaos unfold. Unless you suffer from supremely bad luck (i.e. hidden camera in the area FIVE BLOCKS AWAY from the actual hotspot manages to catch you in the act and the FBI agents actually check the camera and they actually manage to spot your woktenna through your tinted car windows) there is no way you will ever be caught. You can even be stupid brag about it on IRC to all your buddies and even if the FBI arrests you, you can just say you were being a lying little prick and as long as you've wiped your HD, they'll won't have enough evidence to indite you (what are they gonna do, arrest every script kiddie on IRC that claims they wrote the worm? heh.)
Actually, just-for-the-hell-of-it random crime in general is a lot harder to trace than motivated crime. Nothing short of Orwellian-level surveillence can reliably solve random, profit-less crime committed by smart criminals. Fortunately, these two things--random, profit-less crime and smart criminals--are very rarely connected.
As the parent says, I don't think that triangulation will be nearly that easy. As long as you're honey-pot savvy and rotate your MAC address and change your hotspot every day, no one from the physical world is going to get you (not because it's 100% impossible, but beacuse they're just not going to care.)
Now, it's possible that someone looking at your cyber-activities can track you down and figure out that all of your activities stem from the same geographical area. It is possible for them to then stake out these hotspots and hope you come roaming by, monitor the connection real-time and hope they can spot your car (out of the perhaps hundreds within range) or attempt to triangulate you during the few minutes that you do your dirty work. However, if you're a two-bit criminal it's just not likely that anyone will go to this kind of trouble. A list of a several hundred hotspots rotated each use that you use, say, twice a week will last you a year or two. Sure, someone could wardrive the area and stake out all availible hotspots, but who the hell would go to that kind of trouble? Not an individual whose WAP gets used by a single MAC address for a few hours (and then possibly gets used again by a different MAC address a year later) that's for damn sure.
The FBI might go to that much trouble, but only if you're defrauding people or corporations on the order of millions of dollars. If that's the case, then you can afford to quit your job and go on a permanent road trip, logging on from a different city each day. I'm not saying you'll never get caught, because the actual "fraud" part of computer fraud is much riskier to pull off, but random triangulation by some bored geek whom goes after every rogue MACs he sees at three in the morning (or alternately noon, if it's a busy coffee shop) is really the least of your concerns.
You know, sometimes I think I'd make a damn good blackhat... stupid freakin' ethics...
I'm no blackhat, but I've got to point out that any hacker that's been arrested is careless, and it's been that way for quite a few years now. I live in a small to medium-sized town, and there are at least half a dozen public WiFi access points that I know of. Not all of them are free, but even a half-assed hacker could get aroud their security. I'm sure that there are at least a hundred personal WiFi routers around town, too. The vast majority are probably unsecured, or at best secured with WEP and MAC filtering (both easily breakable.)
The point is, anyone who's capable of creating an original exploit should also be able to construct a cantenna (or a woktenna) and access a hotspot from a block (or five) away in complete anonymity, rotating hotspots frequently and using proxies whenever possible. Any hacker who does not do this is indeed being (extremely) careless. Any hacker who DOES do this is almost certain not to get caught (unless he does something stupid like use a stolen credit card number to have something shipped to his house--but then, that's not careless cracking, that's careless fraud.)
In essence, not only are harsher penalities defeated by self-delusion ("I'll never get caught!"), they're also defeated by healthy levels of intelligence and paranoia ("Hey, I DIDN'T get caught!)
As far as your solution goes, as long as blackhat hacking continues to inspire fear and yields real power (botnets and stolen IDs), I don't think that we'll be able to psyche them out into quitting. Graffiti is essentially an aethetic crime/sport, whereas hacking and worm authoring can lead to tangible benefits... and you can't really expect stop a thief by calling him silly names.
In the end, I believe that the solution must be technical.
So let's say Hitler's production capability was somehow increase tenfold in the early 1940's. Suddenly, superior German tanks (which we only defeated through sheer numbers) and other tech is being churned out far faster than we can destroy them. If Hilter had 5 panzers for every Sherman we'd have, the land war would be over, period. So for the sake of argument (since you say that some things can never be justified), let's pretend that he did. Let's pretend that he has naval and air superiority, too. Let's pretend that the ONLY thing we have is the A-Bomb (contrary to myth, Germany's atomic program was actually lagging behind ours by quite a bit.)
So basically, your choice is to start annihilating German towns and hope you can scare him into surrender (because we only have 3 working bombs, including the Trinity test bomb) or let Hitler take over the world and execute or exile or enslave every Jew, black person, mentally/physically disabled person, non-Christian person, etc. on Earth.
Absolute morality has no place in war--at least, not any sort of conventional morality. If failiure means annihilation of the people and values you hold dear, all bets are off. Evil through inaction becomes worse than the evil through action. There is no such thing as a good or just war. War is NEVER a good thing... but sometimes refusing to play can be even worse.
If we could not defeat Hitler's planes or his panzers or his subs, then yes, we damn well should have nuked his factories and cities until he surrendered. Innocents will die--I'm sorry, but that just happens in war. Even today, with our precision-guided weapontry, already something like 12,000+ civillians have died in Iraq as a result of collateral damage.
In the end, civillians build the weapons that destroy you, they feed the troops that shoot you, and even if they are entirely innocent and opposed to their government, they can still live next door to an army base.
Even Mohandas Ghandi himself began to acknowledge that there comes a time when war and destruction and death is unavoidable and necessary. It sucks, but in the face of annihilation, it is unavoidable. And not even Ghandi himself would have been willing to sacrfice every single Indian (or Jew...) on the face of the earth.
It's inevitable that someone will talk about how these bombings (along with Dresden) were basically wholesale slaughterings of civilians, by today's definitions tantamount to terrorism and thus (presumably) inherently evil. The other side will always bring up XYZ reasons why the bombings were absolutely necessary, usually saying that they saved more lives in the long run, etc.
Frankly, I think both sides are full of shit.
First, NOTHING was necessary. Even if Japan was never going to surrender, we did not have to invade Japan--by that point in the war, they certainly weren't going to invade us anytime soon. We could have precision-bombed (or whatever passed for precision bombing in 1945) their major factories, blockaded their harbors, and they wouldn't have been a threat to anyone anymore.
On the other hand, in a major conflict that will decide the fate of the world, "terrorism" in any conventional sense of the word is not inherently evil. If you cannot stand against the planes that bomb your cities and ships, targeting the civilians that are making the planes that bomb your cities and ships is perfectly reasonable. Additionally, causing "terror" in your enemy and thus compelling them to surrender is a valid and can SAVES LIVES ON BOTH SIDES.
In a nutshell, no we weren't saints when we vaporized and poisoned hundreds of thousands of civilians (and then invaded them and destroyed much of their culture.) But you don't win wars by being saint-like. In a more one-sided war (like Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan), it is the moral duty of the much superior force to be humane, but in the middle of WWII the victor was anything but assured.
Concepts like "rules of war" and "terrorism" are shams. There is no line in the sand you can draw, no action that is absolutely unjustified if we're talking about the fate of millions or billions of lives. That doesn't mean we're no better than the terrorists, or that there is no right or wrong. Far from it, it means that we simply need to hate and fight them for what they are--closed minded religious bigots whom cannot peacefully co-exist with other ideologies. That is all.
On September 11, they attacked our financial infrastructure and our military headquarters. Considering that they are by far the underdogs, this is (and I urge mods to wait and read and think before doing anything rash) a perfectly acceptable guerrilla tactic for a group so hopelessly out-gunned.
The TACTIC is valid; their REASONS are utter bullshit and that is why we should wipe them off the face of the Earth.
(To even come close to justifying that level of extreme violence, we'd need to do something insanely evil, not just stick up for Israel in the UN and maintain a military base in Saudi Arabia.)
I worry desperately when people say that killing civilians or causing terror is wrong 100% of the time, except for when we vaporize a few hundred thousand civilians but that's ok because of reasons XYZ. It's ok to admit that anything goes in war. Doing so does not legitimize your opponent in the least, because at the end of the day you are fighting for the rights and ideologies and ways of life that will live long after the dead are put in ground. You must always seek to justify your actions (or rather, you must always seek to act justly) , but no single action is inherently unjustifiable.
Just so you know, I happen to think that Hiroshima was justified, Nagasaki wasn't, Afghanistan was justified, and Iraq wasn't, but the point is the criteria you use, not the judgment itself. If you're not consistent in your criteria, don't be surprised when no one takes your own personal "axis of evil" seriously.
Anyway, sorry for the interruption, you may now resume dredging up every questionable action from the United States' and Japan's history.
This is actually a great idea for Wikipedia. Modding can allow people truly committed to informative, accurate, neutral-point-of-view to edit unfettered, while newbies and troll submissions are subject to review.
I don't understand why you guys think I'm attacking Nextel as a whole or saying that this sort of plan is the norm. I know they have better plans; I know they offer unlimited direct connect. My semi-OT point was regarding governmental inefficiency and stupidity, not the pricing policies of the Nextel corporation.
I never implied that every business or government agency in the country has this plan, just our local government (and perhaps some other local governments, too.) If you guys are really going to insist that I'm a liar, I'll hunt down the bill. It's dated from around February of this year.
From what I've seen, cell phone companies are more than happy to let you hang yourself. This is not unique to Nextel. Usually they only offer to transfer you to a new plan if you specifically ask--or threaten to cancel your service. Chances are this was a very old plan, and government inefficiency/apathy/bribery meaent that no one ever bothered to change it once the rates got better.
If you wanna call someone stupid, let me go find that bill and scan it for ya... though I'm not sure who's dumber, the people in charge of our county telecommunications, or the taxpayers who let them get away with this crap.
No, this was more like four months ago.
I found it very hard to believe too, but the numbers were staring me in the face, and a little asking around confirmed that everyone was on the same plan.
Assuming this isn't a case of outright bribery, I think that the only explanation is that perhaps 10 or so years ago was when they first signed up with Nextel, and no one has bothered to change the plan since then. I'm not suggesting that this is the best Nextel has to offer, that'd be utterly insane on their part. But this was hardly the only case of government waste I saw at my job (though it is definitely the worst), and I'm guessing that Nextel is quite wisely remaining silent to milk this thing for all it's worth. If anyone actually stood up and threatened to switch, I'm sure they'd give them a a better plan in a heartbeat.
I laughed out loud when I read your sig, because I've seen firsthand how government inefficiently is helping Nextel prosper and grow.
I just quit my job at the county Parks and Recreation department, and everyone there has Nextels. We shared a building with the sheriffs, and they had Nextels too. Pretty much every county employee in the county uses Nextels, and from what I gather many of the neighboring counties use them too. This is because of the walkie-talkie feature, which theoretically saves a lot of money. It made sense, and I figured that Nextel must be offering them a pretty nice discount.
Then one day I actually saw the bill for one of those things, and I nearly shit myself. FORTY CENTS A MINUTE. No free minutes at all, just forty cents a minute, PLUS A CONNECTION CHARGE of $0.75.
Everyone in the county was on this same plan. So much for the discount. But hey, no big loss because we're all supposed to be using the walkie-talkie feature, right?
Hah. First, the walkie-talkie was billed at around $0.15 a minute. Just for reference, there are PREPAID phones out that offer ten cents a minute for REAL phone capability. Second, we used the walkie-talkie feature maybe 10% of the time at best. Often we were calling land lines, but mostly we were just too lazy to search through the address book for the (often cryptic) walkie-talkie phone ID when we could just dial the number by hand. Oh yeah, and there were personal calls, too. They'd did monitor your bill, but as long as you kept each call under ten minutes they didn't care. Under their wonderfully discounted Nextel plan, a one-minute call was a mere $1.15!
Incidentally, this is how I found out about the billing plan. I made a few hour-long calls to a girl I was interested in, figuring that it was worth the $10-$25 I'd have to pay (if I even had to pay at all... I assumed my plan had SOME free minutes.) Imagine my surprise when I was slapped with a bill that was well over $100...
Somebody SOMEWHERE has got to be watching the bottom line...I mean fuck, given the size of our county, it must be in the millions. Either they're terminally apathetic, or they just can't tear their eyes off of the free phones (and cars?) Nextel keeps sending them.
So um, yeah, if Nextel really isn't doing that well, I wouldn't be at all surprised if government inefficiency was to blame... maybe with a healthy dose of criminal activities on the side...
Disregarding my mini-rant on environmentalism, my point was that we don't mind these things because they are not taught in science class. Thus, there is no outcry. If people started saying that Darwinian evolution meant social justice was a flawed concept, I'd be just as pissed. There is no outcry when these beliefs are "forced" into public schools because they are "forced" into the appropriate classes.
Ideas like diversity and social justice and environmentalism ARE important to *some* degree, and if you're a reasonable person I'm sure you'll agree with me on this point. (if you do not, check out orim's reply to your post--without these things present in at least small amounts, this country would be an unspeakably horrid and evil place.) Moral and ethical philosophies (which including religion), the ways we approach the world around us, are also important--hell, maybe even MORE important. Our objection is not to the subject itself, but to this alleged "controversy", this pitting of a (mostly) religious philosophy vs. an empirical science.
If your point is something else then make it, but I cannot seem to read your post any other way.
With the exception of environmentalism, none of those are ever taught in SCIENCE class. I don't object to religion being taught in philosophy (neither would most slashdotters.) I do object to it masquerading as a science.
Environmentalism is sometimes taught in science classes, and I agree that sometimes textbooks and teachers go too far by making the issue a moral one--all primates have human-like rights, we have a moral obligation to prevent any and all species from going extinct, etc. I agree that these sentiments do not belong in the SCIENCE classroom.
However, there is a very rational and scientific face to environmentalism, too. Talking about harmful chemicals in the air (and how we'd actually save money in the long run by enforcing stricter emissions regulations and thus reducing respitory illness) is in no way religious or inappropriate so long as the assertions are firmly grounded in scientific studies. It's also not inappropriate to talk about human impact on other species, including exinctions and such, and discuss the pros and cons of stricter environmental regulation.
In short, it's not inappropriate to talk about facts and scientific theories in the science classroom. Neither is it inappropriate to talk about moral and philosophical issues (including religion) in the philosophy classroom. It IS inappropriate to tell the students what to believe, or to devote any significant amount of time discussing moral/nontangible/philosophical issues, while in the SCIENCE classroom.
I always assumed they had sarcasm in Europe, but now I know otherwise. Or perhaps you're actually from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse?
Joking aside, kudos for the insightful post.
Why just an hour ago, I asked http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard.html">our adminitrator if he could give me a little more storage space and he said not to worry, I now have 10x the free space I had...be...
WHERE THE HELL DID ALL MY FILES GO?!
I wonder, at what point does it become moral to be one of those McVeigh's and fight an oppressive government? At what point does it become immoral to serve a once-righteous (or even better, a half-righteous) government?
Are there any points at all, or is it just one big sliding scale of grayness from Utopia all the way to 1984's Oceania?
Just something to think about; don't particularly feel like starting a flame war today...
I don't fear that this will be completely ineffective. I fear that it will be effective by a small amount and politicians will use it to claim that they're winning the war on terrorism. Bit by bit, these measures DO have an effect.
The problem is, the security gained is not worth the freedom lost, and by the time we have near-absolute security, this country will make 1984's Oceania look like a fucking amusment park. It is not a leap that we're willing to make all at once, but given a few generations, it will be easy to enact these security measures, one by one. They don't do much, but to the average Joe they don't appear to take away much freedom, either.
Make no mistake, collectively they CAN stop terrorism, but they WILL destroy everything that made our society worth defending from terrorism in the first place.
This is why we should focus on security measures that do not try (in vain) to track everything, to have absolute control over everything. These are at best a waste of money and at worse a step towards the death of freedom. Effective security measures which do NOT threaten our freedom do not focus on trying to track and control the population at large. They target our likely enemies and our likely points of weakness with simple, common-sense safeguards and policy changes (regarding Middle Eastern nationals, regarding our nigh-unwavering UN support of Israel, etc.)
Unfortunately, most of the western world seems hellbent on responding to a mosquito bite with a claw hammer instead of Off! insect repellant . I can only hope that they will someday realize how self-destructive these tactics are.
If beer leaves a sour taste in your mouth, you may find Wine to be much tastier.
I'm 92.7% sure that he was being sarcastic.