If they're convinced that they don't want to do any violence (say like Gandhi) I'm not too concerned, he doesn't seem like a real dangerous fellow.
Gandhi was actually pretty much a racist, and a potentially violent one at that. Don't believe the white-washed Disney version of history people give you about Gandhi. His views about africans are probably more extreme and hateful than David Duke.
Although perhaps in the USA everything is sterilized? Seems a bit nuts to kill all the bateria (yogurt is essentially a culture of bateria) and then add them back in again.
It is a weird coalition of capitalists and reactionary leftists at work in America.
The big corporations like Kraft realize that it is much more expensive to sell foods with live cultures and bacteria in it, as they have a shorter shelf life and are more expensive to manifacture. The trouble is, the stuff with live cultures tastes better and is healthier.
So what the companies like Kraft did is push for legislation that sets "Safety Standards", that require all dairy products to be pasterized, that set strict limits on the live bacteria that is allowed in food, and essentially have made real foods illegal or prohibitively expensive.
And since the left almost universally love big government and regulations, then jump in to support the regulations. "GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS ARE HERE TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN FROM BEING POISONED BY EVIL BIG CORPORATIONS!!! IF WE DON'T REQUIRE ALL FOOD TO BE PASTURIZED, OUR CHILDREN WILL DIE!!!". They accuse anyone who doesn't support the regulation of being "evil capitalists" Since the left are pretty much incapable of looking at any law or regulation on industry with any degree of skeptism, they play right into the hands of the big corporations who push for self-serving regulations.
So now, Kraft doesn't have to compete with real traditional foods... all foods are required by law to be as cheap, tastless, and unhealthy as Kraft products, and if anyone complains about not being able to buy unpasturized cheese from France, the leftist do their part for Kraft by accuse the people of being "evil capitalists" and "industry shills" and whatnot.
It is brilliant, actually. You have to admire the capitalists for turning a group of people whose raison d'être is to destroy capitalism into being political tools of big corporations.
So, in the United States, you have things like Stevia (a natural and safe plant ingredient that is a low calorie sweetner) being banned as a food additive because the FDA recieved one single annonmous complaint (YES! That is right, they banned the substance because on one single anonymous complaint of a stomach ache!)... while corn syrup (which is causing an epidemic of obesity), and sacharine (which has been shown to cause cancer) are all totally legal! (You can guess which products are manufactured by large American corporations!:) )... and the great thing is if anyone complains about the situation, THEY get accused of being a "shill for the corporations". (Like that big, powerful, uh, Stevia lobby, you know!).
The most vicious and dangerous people in the world are true believers trying to do the right thing. The corrupt and greedy usually have limits - they just want to get rich quick and that is that. The people willing to engage in true stupidy, cruelity, and destruction, are the people who are convinced they are doing the right thing.
The late nineteenth century Senate belonged to the Capitalists. The Silver Senators. The Senators for Sugar, Coal and Wheat, Copper and Steel. The baronies of the Northern Pacific, the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Well, my point was to suggest a different aproach to solve the problem, not engineer the solution myself. But for the heck of it, I will come up with a solution. The solution is to tie votes to a scarce item or resource.
Now, you could use platinum or gold, but the urge to melt down platinum or gold instead of using it would probably be too high... so instead, have the U.S. Mint create a currency-like voting certificate. Something similiar to money that would be difficult and perhaps cost-prohibitive to counterfit.
Then, prior to an election, a vote certificate would be distributed to registered voters by the government. The registered voters would then "pay" the party they want to vote for with this currency. The parties would then take their votes, and "bid" on the election. The one who can "pay" the most voting certificates, wins.
The system would work a lot like money. While there is counterfitting and fraud with money, the money system is completly untraceable... and far less prone to corruption than the election system.
Of course, if you were looking at this from an engineering perspective, you would realize there is going to be a certain amount of voter fraud in any election, and develop a system where the outcome would not change based on say a 5% or a 10% miscount of votes (or somewhere around the max voter fraud you can do without it being blatently obvious that the election has been rigged). You make the system fault tolerant.
Any system that pretends that there is no voting fraud, and depends on there being no voter fraud to function properly, is like developing a network protocal that catastrophicly fails if so much as a single packet is lost. Part of the trouble with politics is that we have given what are really communications systems (an election IS a communication system), a certain moral content. It is "right" that all votes need to be counted, and "wrong" that some should be lost, so we end up designing a system on a rather arbitrary set of moral beliefs instead of engineering it the same way we would a telephone switching system.
One book that kinda goes into the problem is "WHY MOST THINGS FAIL: Evolution, Extinction and Economics" by Paul Ormerod ( http://www.amazon.com/Most-Things-Fail-Paul-Ormero d/dp/0571220126 )... although the book is more about companies than politics, a lot of the same principles apply.
Since everything fun for a kid to do will get the kid arrested, or will get the person allowing them to do that activity sued... what else is there to do?
If they are lucky enough to have a playground to hang out in (playgrounds are lawsuit magnets, and many cities don't want to deal with the liability), then if they play a game of "cops and robbers" or any sort of fighting game (like kids do) they will get arrested for making terroristic threats. They can't play ball or ride their bike in the street... curfews say they have to be home at 6... and if a police officer even sees them walking around without an adult they are going to be harrassed for "loitering". Every damn sport has to be played with expensive safety equipment and non-stop adult supervision, which means no sports other than your weekly supervised soccor practice.
The ironic thing is that people are going to call for "more government action" to stop this problem... like the problem isn't too much government action to "protect the children" in the first place.
In politics, you never take the most extreme position possible, you constantly push the moderate position in a certain direction.
So, at first, you support carding video game buyers. Then you support a government oversight board to regulate game ratings. Then you attack the companies, claiming that their advertising is aimed at kids (like Joe Camel, you need to show ID to buy smokes too). You attack on a number of fronts, slowing increasing and increasing the restrictions until you ban the industry, or exercise total control over the industry.
Much like the people who support a total gun ban, they lobby for gun registration and pre-purchase background checks. They don't want to stop at that point, they openly admit they want to ban guns, but they known damn well that any restriction brings them closer to their goal. Video game prohibitionists (who are pretty much the same bunch as gun prohibitionists), use the same tactic.
The larger issue of uneducated (or undereducated) lawmakers is where the gaming public needs to focus its energy.
Or perhaps, instead of trying to win over an appease the lawmakers, to be pleasant masters... we could remove their extra constitution censoring powers?
for years these wannabe musicians (hip-hop DJ's) have been stealing tracks and music from people who actually make music and then going back and paying them after the fact.i hate to be on the side of the RIAA, but this is one time i am.
So you are saying, that if you don't pay your next parking ticket (which is like totally against the law), a SWAT team should assault your house, confiscate and destroy your property, and hold you on a $100,000 while they process criminal charges?
1. Create a sub-par work of "art" that is intended to promote outrage from the general public.
2. Paint yourself as a victim of censorship or intolerance when the art flops, or when people find it in bad taste.
3. Watch people rally around your otherwise unremarkable work as a counter-reaction.
This game is crap. It is not a very good game. It is not very compelling as art. I am not offended by the game because of its "controversial" subject matter (I would have no problem with a well-crafted and well written RPG about Columbine being presented as art), I am offended that the Slamdance Contest would promote something that they damn well know stinks in order to score some cheap publicity for the Slamdance contest.
The system will be mounted on the belly of the aircraft, so an air-to-air missile launched from above will not be affected by it.
But, my god, what would we do if the terrorists attacked with F-22 Raptors!!! Our airlines would be defenseless! Someone, please, think of the children and do something!
Sure, lets do that right after we adopt the same strategy for food, autos, toys, and workplace safety since we know that markets are perfect, people are rational and make sound judgements about risk, and the interplay between people and markets can be relied upon to produce the best outcome in almost all cases. That explains why MS Windows runs well over 90% of all PCs.
I would venture to say that the market, while often not perfect, is still much better than a government system that suggests we should spend tens of billions of dollars on airline missle defense systems to protect ourselves from terrorists who attack with box cutters. If you wanted to make a point about government dictatorship being better than the market, you picked a poor topic to prove your point with.
Aside from that, the U.S. government's adoption of the IBM PC as its standard personal computer in the 80's, government anti-trust legislation that wouldn't let IBM write their own OS and so were forced to purchase it from Microsoft, and the U.S. government adopting Microsoft products such as word as an internal standard as well as for dealing with contractors, and also lock-in contracts with schools and other government funded institutions, helped create the Microsoft monopoly. Responsiblity for the Microsoft monopoly falls squarely in the hands of the U.S. government. You chose another poor example to make your point with.
Yeah, think of how many lives could be saved if the billions of dollars this will cost was instead spent on this was spent on, say, childhood immunizations, prenatal care, or automobile safety. Why do we spend money for creating the appearance of action against obscure but frightening risks, instead of focusing on less glamorous areas where our efforts can actually make a difference?
Actually, probably not that many more lives would be saved if billions were spend on childhood immunizations (immunizations are already free for all children in the U.S.), or if billions were spent on auto safety (as cars get safer, people take more risks, it all evens out), or even prenatal care (This might actually have a marginal effect on infant mortality, so it is the least silly out of the examples you gave, but probably not as much as you believe).
Just because you are correct that airplane defense systems are a waste of money, doesn't mean we should blow loads of money on something else.
Another thing... it just goes to show you how few people are actually willing to risk their lives to attack the United States. Shit, couldn't those terrorists have done SOMETHING since 9/11? Schoolkids have killed more people in the U.S. since 9/11 than terrorists.
Except they explicitly said they wanted to ban violent games. So when they say "we want to ban violent games", how exactly does that mean that they don't want to ban games?
The trouble is, that the government by being a top-down centralized authoritarian power structure inherently leads to class stratification and concentration of wealth. Government power is the primary cause of the current concentration of wealth. So a government program designed to eliminate the concentration of wealth is a paradox.
Nice to see this from the FCC chair, but what can he do about it?
He can do a lot as soon as we get rid of that nasty little historic document, The Bill of Rights, and there is no First Amendment to worry about! Remember folks, destroying freedom of speech is a small price to pay in order to shut up Rush Limgaugh.
I have seen computers infected with malware that sent spam mail or did DOS attacks. If someone wanted to download something illegal, why wouldn't they just get one of the off-the-shelf rootkit programs, take over an vulnarable machine, and use it as a proxy?
Put yourself in the shoes of the criminal, and reverse engineer what is happening? How would you go about not getting caught? Now, assume the criminals have already been doing the same thing.
Your instructor is pretty dense for someone teaching a "Data Forensics Course". A trojan or rootkit downloads whatever the person who created the program wants it to download. Typically, they are used to send spam or engage in DOS attacks, but there is absolutly no reason that if someone wanted to download illegal materials, that they wouldn't use a compromised machine to hide their actions.
I keep warning the Canadian government that hockey is dangerous... and every year the government of Canada sponsers youth hockey, resulting in the inevitable accidental death of several children, EVERY YEAR!!! I don't know what sort of corporation-friendly laws let the Hockey-Industrial complex promote this sort of dangerous behavior to our children. We expect those ruthless Americans who hate their children to allow activities like hockey to continue... but in Canada? In Europe?
Certainly the leaders of Canada, as well as most of Europe, who have GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES HOCKEY PROGRAMS need to be thrown in jail! Everyone who doesn't think promoting hockey is a crime is a brainwashed zombie listening to the propoganda and lies that are promoted by the Puck industry!
There is no reason to believe that water drinking contests are any more risky than bobbing for apples, pie eating contests, pinnatas, bungie jumping, or any other generally safe activity that occasionally kills someone (a couple people die every year from all those activies... probably more so than drinking too much water).
Some activities have an inherent risk. Thanks to frivilous lawsuits, and people like you who help spread the safety paranoia, the list of fun things people can do is rapidly diminishing. Our concepts of risk and responsiblity are all out of whack, and the oppressive restrictions that are placed on us far outweight the extremly unlikely dangers of things like this.
One example - Cities used to often have a municipal sledding hill, where people could go to and sled. My friends and I would go in the evening after the kiddies left, and have a good time doing all kinds of dangerous and stupid stunts down the sledding hill. Of course, that is virtually impossible to do nowadays. Most cities are closing off their sledding hills (because the liability is too high), and those who don't now have posted times the place is open, when the hill is strictly supervised, and you can't sled after the kiddies leave. Why is the fun being ruined? Because safety paranoid people like you want us all to live in your nightmare world where any risky behavior is not allowed!
Stop ruining everyone's fun! A water drinking contest? Who cares! If the choice is between a person dying of water poisioning every year or so, and living in the nightmare totalitarian safety world where nothing remotely dangerous is allowed, I will gladly take the risk, thank you! Move out to your gated community in the suburbs, use your germ-fighting-soap, don't let your kids go trick or treating and don't buy them a chemistry set, and leave the rest of us alone!
But do you really want sexually-deprived people taking your tax money in preference to sexually-active people? No, mainly because this has nothing to do with what research they're doing and what the usefulness is.
Of course you are correct. It would be much much better if the requirement in order to get a research grant had something to do with the what the grant was about. That IS what would happen if the requirement was put in their by design.
I am calling this a "happy accident". Do I think all researchers should have a Windows machine to get a grant? No. But the barrier, just being a barrier in and of itself, is positive. It is like a "speed bump".
Here is the thing: If you can't somehow get temporary access to a Windows machine to fill out a form... or if you aren't dedicated enough to go a month with sexual intercourse to get a grant... if those sorts of things are too great challenges to overcome, then how are you going to overcome the challenge of curing cancer, or building micro-credit for developing nations, or whatever important research or work that we assume is being funded? (of course, in real life it will be art grants for "piss christ", and "Homeland Security" grants to upgrade the gym at a rural police station... but we will pretend the money goes to worthy causes just for the sake of arguement)
It is like "Hell Week" for Navy Seals - It doesn't nessicarilly train them specificly, or help them specificly, but it is a way to weed out the less dedicated.
Slashdot Mirror
If they're convinced that they don't want to do any violence (say like Gandhi) I'm not too concerned, he doesn't seem like a real dangerous fellow.
Gandhi was actually pretty much a racist, and a potentially violent one at that. Don't believe the white-washed Disney version of history people give you about Gandhi. His views about africans are probably more extreme and hateful than David Duke.
http://www.trinicenter.com/WorldNews/ghandi4.htm
Although perhaps in the USA everything is sterilized? Seems a bit nuts to kill all the bateria (yogurt is essentially a culture of bateria) and then add them back in again.
:) )... and the great thing is if anyone complains about the situation, THEY get accused of being a "shill for the corporations". (Like that big, powerful, uh, Stevia lobby, you know!).
It is a weird coalition of capitalists and reactionary leftists at work in America.
The big corporations like Kraft realize that it is much more expensive to sell foods with live cultures and bacteria in it, as they have a shorter shelf life and are more expensive to manifacture. The trouble is, the stuff with live cultures tastes better and is healthier.
So what the companies like Kraft did is push for legislation that sets "Safety Standards", that require all dairy products to be pasterized, that set strict limits on the live bacteria that is allowed in food, and essentially have made real foods illegal or prohibitively expensive.
And since the left almost universally love big government and regulations, then jump in to support the regulations. "GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS ARE HERE TO PROTECT OUR CHILDREN FROM BEING POISONED BY EVIL BIG CORPORATIONS!!! IF WE DON'T REQUIRE ALL FOOD TO BE PASTURIZED, OUR CHILDREN WILL DIE!!!". They accuse anyone who doesn't support the regulation of being "evil capitalists" Since the left are pretty much incapable of looking at any law or regulation on industry with any degree of skeptism, they play right into the hands of the big corporations who push for self-serving regulations.
So now, Kraft doesn't have to compete with real traditional foods... all foods are required by law to be as cheap, tastless, and unhealthy as Kraft products, and if anyone complains about not being able to buy unpasturized cheese from France, the leftist do their part for Kraft by accuse the people of being "evil capitalists" and "industry shills" and whatnot.
It is brilliant, actually. You have to admire the capitalists for turning a group of people whose raison d'être is to destroy capitalism into being political tools of big corporations.
So, in the United States, you have things like Stevia (a natural and safe plant ingredient that is a low calorie sweetner) being banned as a food additive because the FDA recieved one single annonmous complaint (YES! That is right, they banned the substance because on one single anonymous complaint of a stomach ache!)... while corn syrup (which is causing an epidemic of obesity), and sacharine (which has been shown to cause cancer) are all totally legal! (You can guess which products are manufactured by large American corporations!
The most vicious and dangerous people in the world are true believers trying to do the right thing. The corrupt and greedy usually have limits - they just want to get rich quick and that is that. The people willing to engage in true stupidy, cruelity, and destruction, are the people who are convinced they are doing the right thing.
The late nineteenth century Senate belonged to the Capitalists. The Silver Senators. The Senators for Sugar, Coal and Wheat, Copper and Steel. The baronies of the Northern Pacific, the Pennsylvania Railroad.
And it has changed how?
Oh, what bullshit. Look, if the constitution wasn't supposed to be amended, then Article Five wouldn't be there in the first place, would it?
Sure, the constitution can be amended... but much like prohibition, eliminating state legislators from electing senators sucks, amendment or not.
Well, my point was to suggest a different aproach to solve the problem, not engineer the solution myself. But for the heck of it, I will come up with a solution. The solution is to tie votes to a scarce item or resource.
Now, you could use platinum or gold, but the urge to melt down platinum or gold instead of using it would probably be too high... so instead, have the U.S. Mint create a currency-like voting certificate. Something similiar to money that would be difficult and perhaps cost-prohibitive to counterfit.
Then, prior to an election, a vote certificate would be distributed to registered voters by the government. The registered voters would then "pay" the party they want to vote for with this currency. The parties would then take their votes, and "bid" on the election. The one who can "pay" the most voting certificates, wins.
The system would work a lot like money. While there is counterfitting and fraud with money, the money system is completly untraceable... and far less prone to corruption than the election system.
Of course, if you were looking at this from an engineering perspective, you would realize there is going to be a certain amount of voter fraud in any election, and develop a system where the outcome would not change based on say a 5% or a 10% miscount of votes (or somewhere around the max voter fraud you can do without it being blatently obvious that the election has been rigged). You make the system fault tolerant.
o d/dp/0571220126 )... although the book is more about companies than politics, a lot of the same principles apply.
Any system that pretends that there is no voting fraud, and depends on there being no voter fraud to function properly, is like developing a network protocal that catastrophicly fails if so much as a single packet is lost. Part of the trouble with politics is that we have given what are really communications systems (an election IS a communication system), a certain moral content. It is "right" that all votes need to be counted, and "wrong" that some should be lost, so we end up designing a system on a rather arbitrary set of moral beliefs instead of engineering it the same way we would a telephone switching system.
One book that kinda goes into the problem is "WHY MOST THINGS FAIL: Evolution, Extinction and Economics" by Paul Ormerod ( http://www.amazon.com/Most-Things-Fail-Paul-Ormer
Since everything fun for a kid to do will get the kid arrested, or will get the person allowing them to do that activity sued... what else is there to do?
If they are lucky enough to have a playground to hang out in (playgrounds are lawsuit magnets, and many cities don't want to deal with the liability), then if they play a game of "cops and robbers" or any sort of fighting game (like kids do) they will get arrested for making terroristic threats. They can't play ball or ride their bike in the street... curfews say they have to be home at 6... and if a police officer even sees them walking around without an adult they are going to be harrassed for "loitering". Every damn sport has to be played with expensive safety equipment and non-stop adult supervision, which means no sports other than your weekly supervised soccor practice.
The ironic thing is that people are going to call for "more government action" to stop this problem... like the problem isn't too much government action to "protect the children" in the first place.
I think you miss the big picture:
In politics, you never take the most extreme position possible, you constantly push the moderate position in a certain direction.
So, at first, you support carding video game buyers. Then you support a government oversight board to regulate game ratings. Then you attack the companies, claiming that their advertising is aimed at kids (like Joe Camel, you need to show ID to buy smokes too). You attack on a number of fronts, slowing increasing and increasing the restrictions until you ban the industry, or exercise total control over the industry.
Much like the people who support a total gun ban, they lobby for gun registration and pre-purchase background checks. They don't want to stop at that point, they openly admit they want to ban guns, but they known damn well that any restriction brings them closer to their goal. Video game prohibitionists (who are pretty much the same bunch as gun prohibitionists), use the same tactic.
The larger issue of uneducated (or undereducated) lawmakers is where the gaming public needs to focus its energy.
Or perhaps, instead of trying to win over an appease the lawmakers, to be pleasant masters... we could remove their extra constitution censoring powers?
for years these wannabe musicians (hip-hop DJ's) have been stealing tracks and music from people who actually make music and then going back and paying them after the fact.i hate to be on the side of the RIAA, but this is one time i am.
e rve ), and Led Zepplin ( http://www.illegal-art.org/audio/historic.html ), who were all punished for stealing music... Rock musicians are nothing but a bunch of talentless thieves!
Yeah, not to mention wannabe musicians like the Beatles ( http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/mysweet.htm ), and The Verve ( http://www.superswell.com/samplelaw/horror.html#v
So you are saying, that if you don't pay your next parking ticket (which is like totally against the law), a SWAT team should assault your house, confiscate and destroy your property, and hold you on a $100,000 while they process criminal charges?
We all knows how the recipe works:
1. Create a sub-par work of "art" that is intended to promote outrage from the general public.
2. Paint yourself as a victim of censorship or intolerance when the art flops, or when people find it in bad taste.
3. Watch people rally around your otherwise unremarkable work as a counter-reaction.
This game is crap. It is not a very good game. It is not very compelling as art. I am not offended by the game because of its "controversial" subject matter (I would have no problem with a well-crafted and well written RPG about Columbine being presented as art), I am offended that the Slamdance Contest would promote something that they damn well know stinks in order to score some cheap publicity for the Slamdance contest.
The system will be mounted on the belly of the aircraft, so an air-to-air missile launched from above will not be affected by it.
But, my god, what would we do if the terrorists attacked with F-22 Raptors!!! Our airlines would be defenseless! Someone, please, think of the children and do something!
Sure, lets do that right after we adopt the same strategy for food, autos, toys, and workplace safety since we know that markets are perfect, people are rational and make sound judgements about risk, and the interplay between people and markets can be relied upon to produce the best outcome in almost all cases. That explains why MS Windows runs well over 90% of all PCs.
I would venture to say that the market, while often not perfect, is still much better than a government system that suggests we should spend tens of billions of dollars on airline missle defense systems to protect ourselves from terrorists who attack with box cutters. If you wanted to make a point about government dictatorship being better than the market, you picked a poor topic to prove your point with.
Aside from that, the U.S. government's adoption of the IBM PC as its standard personal computer in the 80's, government anti-trust legislation that wouldn't let IBM write their own OS and so were forced to purchase it from Microsoft, and the U.S. government adopting Microsoft products such as word as an internal standard as well as for dealing with contractors, and also lock-in contracts with schools and other government funded institutions, helped create the Microsoft monopoly. Responsiblity for the Microsoft monopoly falls squarely in the hands of the U.S. government. You chose another poor example to make your point with.
Yeah, think of how many lives could be saved if the billions of dollars this will cost was instead spent on this was spent on, say, childhood immunizations, prenatal care, or automobile safety. Why do we spend money for creating the appearance of action against obscure but frightening risks, instead of focusing on less glamorous areas where our efforts can actually make a difference?
Actually, probably not that many more lives would be saved if billions were spend on childhood immunizations (immunizations are already free for all children in the U.S.), or if billions were spent on auto safety (as cars get safer, people take more risks, it all evens out), or even prenatal care (This might actually have a marginal effect on infant mortality, so it is the least silly out of the examples you gave, but probably not as much as you believe).
Just because you are correct that airplane defense systems are a waste of money, doesn't mean we should blow loads of money on something else.
Another thing... it just goes to show you how few people are actually willing to risk their lives to attack the United States. Shit, couldn't those terrorists have done SOMETHING since 9/11? Schoolkids have killed more people in the U.S. since 9/11 than terrorists.
Except they explicitly said they wanted to ban violent games. So when they say "we want to ban violent games", how exactly does that mean that they don't want to ban games?
The trouble is, that the government by being a top-down centralized authoritarian power structure inherently leads to class stratification and concentration of wealth. Government power is the primary cause of the current concentration of wealth. So a government program designed to eliminate the concentration of wealth is a paradox.
Nice to see this from the FCC chair, but what can he do about it?
He can do a lot as soon as we get rid of that nasty little historic document, The Bill of Rights, and there is no First Amendment to worry about! Remember folks, destroying freedom of speech is a small price to pay in order to shut up Rush Limgaugh.
I have seen computers infected with malware that sent spam mail or did DOS attacks. If someone wanted to download something illegal, why wouldn't they just get one of the off-the-shelf rootkit programs, take over an vulnarable machine, and use it as a proxy?
Put yourself in the shoes of the criminal, and reverse engineer what is happening? How would you go about not getting caught? Now, assume the criminals have already been doing the same thing.
Your instructor is pretty dense for someone teaching a "Data Forensics Course". A trojan or rootkit downloads whatever the person who created the program wants it to download. Typically, they are used to send spam or engage in DOS attacks, but there is absolutly no reason that if someone wanted to download illegal materials, that they wouldn't use a compromised machine to hide their actions.
I keep warning the Canadian government that hockey is dangerous... and every year the government of Canada sponsers youth hockey, resulting in the inevitable accidental death of several children, EVERY YEAR!!! I don't know what sort of corporation-friendly laws let the Hockey-Industrial complex promote this sort of dangerous behavior to our children. We expect those ruthless Americans who hate their children to allow activities like hockey to continue... but in Canada? In Europe?
Certainly the leaders of Canada, as well as most of Europe, who have GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES HOCKEY PROGRAMS need to be thrown in jail! Everyone who doesn't think promoting hockey is a crime is a brainwashed zombie listening to the propoganda and lies that are promoted by the Puck industry!
There is no reason to believe that water drinking contests are any more risky than bobbing for apples, pie eating contests, pinnatas, bungie jumping, or any other generally safe activity that occasionally kills someone (a couple people die every year from all those activies... probably more so than drinking too much water).
Some activities have an inherent risk. Thanks to frivilous lawsuits, and people like you who help spread the safety paranoia, the list of fun things people can do is rapidly diminishing. Our concepts of risk and responsiblity are all out of whack, and the oppressive restrictions that are placed on us far outweight the extremly unlikely dangers of things like this.
One example - Cities used to often have a municipal sledding hill, where people could go to and sled. My friends and I would go in the evening after the kiddies left, and have a good time doing all kinds of dangerous and stupid stunts down the sledding hill. Of course, that is virtually impossible to do nowadays. Most cities are closing off their sledding hills (because the liability is too high), and those who don't now have posted times the place is open, when the hill is strictly supervised, and you can't sled after the kiddies leave. Why is the fun being ruined? Because safety paranoid people like you want us all to live in your nightmare world where any risky behavior is not allowed!
Stop ruining everyone's fun! A water drinking contest? Who cares! If the choice is between a person dying of water poisioning every year or so, and living in the nightmare totalitarian safety world where nothing remotely dangerous is allowed, I will gladly take the risk, thank you! Move out to your gated community in the suburbs, use your germ-fighting-soap, don't let your kids go trick or treating and don't buy them a chemistry set, and leave the rest of us alone!
But do you really want sexually-deprived people taking your tax money in preference to sexually-active people? No, mainly because this has nothing to do with what research they're doing and what the usefulness is.
Of course you are correct. It would be much much better if the requirement in order to get a research grant had something to do with the what the grant was about. That IS what would happen if the requirement was put in their by design.
I am calling this a "happy accident". Do I think all researchers should have a Windows machine to get a grant? No. But the barrier, just being a barrier in and of itself, is positive. It is like a "speed bump".
Here is the thing: If you can't somehow get temporary access to a Windows machine to fill out a form... or if you aren't dedicated enough to go a month with sexual intercourse to get a grant... if those sorts of things are too great challenges to overcome, then how are you going to overcome the challenge of curing cancer, or building micro-credit for developing nations, or whatever important research or work that we assume is being funded? (of course, in real life it will be art grants for "piss christ", and "Homeland Security" grants to upgrade the gym at a rural police station... but we will pretend the money goes to worthy causes just for the sake of arguement)
It is like "Hell Week" for Navy Seals - It doesn't nessicarilly train them specificly, or help them specificly, but it is a way to weed out the less dedicated.