truly a sociopath. They know that they're ruining the lives of others; they just don't care.
That was my first thought too. And now, the 'good life' is permanently out of reach to him, and he's facing sharing a jail cell with a guy who's been taking the very stuff the spammer has been pushing (viagra, penis pills, etc), and he want's the easy way out. If he killed off his whole family then maybe you could think he had some noble (to his deranged mind) intention of preventing them from living in poverty after all their wealth gets taken away, but he only killed his wife and one of his kids.
Of course, it's always risky forming conclusions about motives from brief press releases...
I wholeheartedly agree with this. From the first moment we got our first computer when I was a kid - Amstrad CPC664 - I couldn't keep my hands off it. Playing games was fun of course, but the Amstrad, like the Commodore 64, came with a very good reference book that contained all an 8 year old needed to get started programming with. Now, over 20 years later, I still can't get enough of programming...
Either your kid is passionate about it or he isn't. And if he is, you wouldn't be able to stop him anyway.
You could try telling him that writing programs is a good way to impress girls, but the chances are he'll see through you. A career as a male ballerina is probably a better option if that's what he wants anyway:)
I guess part of the problem is that computers are everywhere, and aren't the exciting and mysterious things that they were to me when I first got my hands on one. My kids at about 3 years old could turn on the computer, log in (password = username, and usernames are only about 5 letters), and start playing flash games without any assistance, after being shown how a few times, even though they barely recognise the letters. Just like they figure out how to use the remote or press the right buttons on the tv. As far as computers are concerned, they are just another box that does stuff, and they'll learn the minimum amount of stuff to make them do what they want.
People ARE a bunch of idiots. 50% of them are below average. 90% of the adult population has driver's licenses. It doesn't take a math genius to know that a very large number of people on the road are really too stupid to drive.
Below average does not necessarily mean bad though, provided the average is high enough.
It'll never happen, but it would be cool to make it a driving license requirement to pass a stress test. Something like a simulator with a wife next to you who's birthday you forgot (or husband that you ticked off somehow), 3 kids in the back that you've just given a cola drink to, and a driver in front who slows down to 80kph around bends but speeds up to 105kph every time there is a good spot to overtake (assuming speed limit = 100kph). The passing criteria would be to endure that for 30 minutes and then not punch the test administrator afterwards when he asks how you feel:)
The CDC, and local and state health departments all have a list of "reportable" diseases. (Things from TB to gonnorhea to ebola to SARS) If a doctor encounters them, they are supposed to notify the health authorities. That is for biostatistics and epidemiology purposes.
What about non-reportable diseases? German Measles, Chicken Pox, and many others are not reportable, and most people wouldn't even bother going to the doctor if their kids came down with them (or is that not the case anymore? seems like everyone goes running to the doctor at the slightest hint of being unwell these days...)
If the local news picked up on the latest round of Chicken Pox then this program might be able to pick up on it.
I wonder if this Slashdot article is being reported on right now - google seems incredibly quick these days!
A better use of GM's time would be to detect when a driver is old, then disable the engine and lock the brakes.
Oh, ambiguous word choice. Imagine that happening once the car is on the highway. The car would redline as it goes into neutral and skid all over as the ABS starts to do the opposite of what it was originally intended to do.
Now that would be fun. You'd be driving along and as soon as the clock ticks over to your 65th birthday the engine would stop and the brakes would lock. Everyone driving past would yell out 'happy birthday grandpa!', and then the age police would take you away a la Logans Run.
People are absolutely obsessed with speed as if it is the ultimate safety no-no.
I've found it's almost the opposite. People are absolutely obsessed with speed as if the posted speed limit is a mandatory minimum. People get so pissed if someone is doing 80kph in a 100kph zone. It's as if they feel that their rights are being violated by being 'forced' to drive 20kph below the limit. Driving at 80kph instead of 100kph for 20km until you have a safe spot to pass isn't going to kill you, in fact it's almost certainly going to do the opposite.
20km is probably an extreme in terms of the amount of time you'd be stuck behind someone, and if the roads are such that you'd go 20km without finding a safe place to overtake then maybe driving at the posted speed limit isn't such a hot idea anyway.
Anyway, at 100kph, it will take you about 12 minutes to travel 20km. At 80kph, it will take you about 15 minutes, 3 minutes more. Even if you were stuck behind that someone for 100km, it'll only take you an extra 15 minutes.
My examples are probably a little bit extreme though, the people I would normally get 'stuck' behind are usually traveling less than 5kph under the posted limit, and it's normally for much less than 20km.
Everyone just needs to calm down and stop behaving like a bunch of idiots who think their lives will come to an end if they can't do the speed they want to do.
This sort of logic is where nerd myopia falls right on its four-eyed face.
You've noticed that too? The fact that a plausible (but probably unlikely) situation could be constructed where he could legitimately stumble across such information appears to be far more important that the fact that it didn't happen that way.
Whenever I hear such things i'm always reminded of "Mr. Heckles", the downstairs neighbor in the tv show Friends (and in case you are wondering, yes I had to look up his name on wikipedia:). Conversations often went like this:
Mr Heckles: Stop making noise, you are disturbing my cat. Friend: You don't have a cat. Mr Heckles: I could have a cat.
shades of the apologists for Reiser come to mind now, though this crime isn't as bad as murder.
I'm going to create a law that will be called James's Law. It's basically Godwin's law but specifically relating to crime committed by someone in the IT industry and "s/Nazis or Hitler/Hans Reiser".
So:
" As an internet discussion on the subject of crime committed by someone in the IT industry[1] grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hans Reiser approaches one. [1] The crime does not necessarily relate to the IT industry itself "
Server 2003 wasn't really any more stable than XP.
Server 2003 was one of the most stable RTM releases ever, but only because it was basically XP and they'd released XP a while earlier and incorporated all the bugfixes from that:)
I made a monumental screwup and broke the firewall (iptables on a Linux machine) in such a way that there was no filtering to one of our/24 IP addresses. The IP address belonged to a Windows server running an unpatched version of MSSQL, and Blaster was at it's peak. It took no less than 10 seconds from the time I activated the updated (broken) firewall rules to me scratching my head wondering why the router appeared completely dead.
Blaster had infected the machine within about 10 seconds and the traffic had killed the router (well... not killed, it came back to life when I pulled the plug on the infected machine).
Fortunately Blaster was memory resident only so there was no lasting damage.
Of course one infection doesn't prove anything, looking through the firewall logs at the time the average blaster packet per IP address was a few minutes so I think I was just unlucky to have been owned that quickly.
What a bonehead you are, if you're going to act like an immature fool, always remember to post as an anonymous coward. You weren't trolling, you spoke your mind and the rest of us were amazed at the hollow echoes.
You think so? I'll restate my comment here:
That's the beauty of the whole conspiracy. Big Oil are hiding behind shell companies and using false names and own the whole patent system anyway, so you'll never find the patents no matter how hard you look, nor any evidence to prove it either way. But we all know it's true.
I was attempting to point out the fallacy of the original "Big Oil has been buying and burying patents for 50 years" post - the whole beauty of conspiracy theories is that you can never convince the zealots that believe them because they have a 'logical' explanation for every argument you put forward. eg if you tell them "show me the patents then", the response you'll get is that you can't find the patents because they are owned by shell companies etc.
Obviously my attempt at humor was too subtle as you weren't the only one who misunderstood...
That's the beauty of the whole conspiracy. Big Oil are hiding behind shell companies and using false names and own the whole patent system anyway, so you'll never find the patents no matter how hard you look, nor any evidence to prove it either way. But we all know it's true.
Bullshit. WHAT definition? The one that says "People can't simply be bad, or evil; there must be something wrong with them that is out of their control, because no REASONABLE person would kill/rape/rob/whatever".
I was more referring to his behaviour subsequent to the murder. Not so much the 'trying to cover up his actions' stuff, more the expectation that the reasons he put forward for his actions were in some way plausible. He didn't come across as someone who had a sound grasp on reality.
Locking him away for a good chunk of the rest of his days is probably the only reasonable solution... it's just a shame that it has to come to this before something can be done.
I'm curious though... say he got pissed at his wife one night and killed her in a fit of rage, do you think that makes him an evil person?
What about if she threatened to take the kids back to Russia and so he plotted for a few weeks to kill her? (I don't think he did, but what if?)
Do you think a few years in prison is going to change him for the better, or do you think the idea is for him to 'pay for' his crime?
That defense would normally be when the victim can't just walk away because threats have been made to 'hunt you down and make you suffer', or 'kill you and the kids'.
Just make sure that when you ask her out, you promise you won't murder her in the car and then bury her body in the bush. That should put aside any doubts she has about you.
he's a despicable human being and deserves no luck at this point.
I used to have an attitude like that, but by definition anyone who behaves that way is obviously mentally ill, and probably a jail term is only going to make things worse for him. I'm not sure there is alternative though...
And that's what makes me sad, I don't think that there is an answer to the question 'what could have been done beforehand to prevent this?'. You can't just go locking people away because they are a bit (or a lot) arrogant and nerdy - slashdot's user base would disappear overnight! Maybe we need that 'voice in your head' ray gun pointing at people 24/7 with a message 'thou shalt not kill. thou shalt not kill. thou shalt not kill. (drink pepsi).'
Hopefully the kids are now in a more stable environment...
The product is not unethical, although some of it's uses could be, but that is also true of the kitchen knife. This is a common source of hypocrisy on slashdot. It would be like saying that p2p software is unethical because it allows users to easily distribute products that they didn't pay for.
but I'm astounded that anyone would ever buy an extended warranty.
For some products, I'm astounded that they don't. A certain computer manufacturer (or maybe others do this too?) has a basic 1 year warranty on their laptops, or a 3 year upgraded warranty. The upgraded warranty means several things: . Call center in the same country as you, with accents that you can actually understand . Onsite warranty, as opposed to carry in . Something else I can't remember right now.
The problem with blanket statements like yours is that you'll always find someone who will disagree with you:)
Concerning extended warranty, you basically have to make a judgement call yourself on a case by case basis, eg: . What will the warranty cost me? . How long is it for? . What is the value of the product? . What is the likelihood of the product developing a fault? . What other value does it add to the product? . If the product broke outside the standard warranty period, how would it affect me?
I bought a washing machine a few years back. It came with a 2 year warranty, with the option of a 5 year warranty for an extra $50. The washing machine cost about $800 (had to serve a family of 6 so I wanted a decent one), so $50 represented a 6% increase in price, which I was happy enough to pay. It broke down after 3 years and required about $30 in parts and probably another $40 in labour. Had it not been under warranty i'd have repaired it myself, but still I think it was a pretty good deal.
On the other hand, if it was a $200 TV with a 2 year warranty, and the upgrade to a 3 year warranty was $50, then I would probably be saying no thanks. If it broke down i'd just gift it to the local repair shop (if they wanted it) and would get a new one.
I see this with customers pabx systems all the time. They are sold as 'VoIP Ready' so the customer thinks all they have to do is attach a few handsets to their network, but 'VoIP Ready' means that the PABX will accept a VoIP card, which will cost a whole heap of $$$, and the salesman does nothing to enlighten them before the sale.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my first thought too. And now, the 'good life' is permanently out of reach to him, and he's facing sharing a jail cell with a guy who's been taking the very stuff the spammer has been pushing (viagra, penis pills, etc), and he want's the easy way out. If he killed off his whole family then maybe you could think he had some noble (to his deranged mind) intention of preventing them from living in poverty after all their wealth gets taken away, but he only killed his wife and one of his kids.
Of course, it's always risky forming conclusions about motives from brief press releases...
That looks like an iterative sig to me... no wisdom or truth to be found here.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. From the first moment we got our first computer when I was a kid - Amstrad CPC664 - I couldn't keep my hands off it. Playing games was fun of course, but the Amstrad, like the Commodore 64, came with a very good reference book that contained all an 8 year old needed to get started programming with. Now, over 20 years later, I still can't get enough of programming...
Either your kid is passionate about it or he isn't. And if he is, you wouldn't be able to stop him anyway.
You could try telling him that writing programs is a good way to impress girls, but the chances are he'll see through you. A career as a male ballerina is probably a better option if that's what he wants anyway :)
I guess part of the problem is that computers are everywhere, and aren't the exciting and mysterious things that they were to me when I first got my hands on one. My kids at about 3 years old could turn on the computer, log in (password = username, and usernames are only about 5 letters), and start playing flash games without any assistance, after being shown how a few times, even though they barely recognise the letters. Just like they figure out how to use the remote or press the right buttons on the tv. As far as computers are concerned, they are just another box that does stuff, and they'll learn the minimum amount of stuff to make them do what they want.
Below average does not necessarily mean bad though, provided the average is high enough.
It'll never happen, but it would be cool to make it a driving license requirement to pass a stress test. Something like a simulator with a wife next to you who's birthday you forgot (or husband that you ticked off somehow), 3 kids in the back that you've just given a cola drink to, and a driver in front who slows down to 80kph around bends but speeds up to 105kph every time there is a good spot to overtake (assuming speed limit = 100kph). The passing criteria would be to endure that for 30 minutes and then not punch the test administrator afterwards when he asks how you feel :)
What about non-reportable diseases? German Measles, Chicken Pox, and many others are not reportable, and most people wouldn't even bother going to the doctor if their kids came down with them (or is that not the case anymore? seems like everyone goes running to the doctor at the slightest hint of being unwell these days...)
If the local news picked up on the latest round of Chicken Pox then this program might be able to pick up on it.
I wonder if this Slashdot article is being reported on right now - google seems incredibly quick these days!
Now that would be fun. You'd be driving along and as soon as the clock ticks over to your 65th birthday the engine would stop and the brakes would lock. Everyone driving past would yell out 'happy birthday grandpa!', and then the age police would take you away a la Logans Run.
I've found it's almost the opposite. People are absolutely obsessed with speed as if the posted speed limit is a mandatory minimum. People get so pissed if someone is doing 80kph in a 100kph zone. It's as if they feel that their rights are being violated by being 'forced' to drive 20kph below the limit. Driving at 80kph instead of 100kph for 20km until you have a safe spot to pass isn't going to kill you, in fact it's almost certainly going to do the opposite.
20km is probably an extreme in terms of the amount of time you'd be stuck behind someone, and if the roads are such that you'd go 20km without finding a safe place to overtake then maybe driving at the posted speed limit isn't such a hot idea anyway.
Anyway, at 100kph, it will take you about 12 minutes to travel 20km. At 80kph, it will take you about 15 minutes, 3 minutes more. Even if you were stuck behind that someone for 100km, it'll only take you an extra 15 minutes.
My examples are probably a little bit extreme though, the people I would normally get 'stuck' behind are usually traveling less than 5kph under the posted limit, and it's normally for much less than 20km.
Everyone just needs to calm down and stop behaving like a bunch of idiots who think their lives will come to an end if they can't do the speed they want to do.
You've noticed that too? The fact that a plausible (but probably unlikely) situation could be constructed where he could legitimately stumble across such information appears to be far more important that the fact that it didn't happen that way.
Whenever I hear such things i'm always reminded of "Mr. Heckles", the downstairs neighbor in the tv show Friends (and in case you are wondering, yes I had to look up his name on wikipedia :). Conversations often went like this:
Mr Heckles: Stop making noise, you are disturbing my cat.
Friend: You don't have a cat.
Mr Heckles: I could have a cat.
I'm going to create a law that will be called James's Law. It's basically Godwin's law but specifically relating to crime committed by someone in the IT industry and "s/Nazis or Hitler/Hans Reiser".
So:
"
As an internet discussion on the subject of crime committed by someone in the IT industry[1] grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hans Reiser approaches one.
[1] The crime does not necessarily relate to the IT industry itself
"
Expect to never hear of this law again.
Hmmm... that's an interesting one... What is the procedure for securely erasing a flash disk? 30 seconds in the microwave?
Server 2003 was one of the most stable RTM releases ever, but only because it was basically XP and they'd released XP a while earlier and incorporated all the bugfixes from that :)
No, that's normal.
I made a monumental screwup and broke the firewall (iptables on a Linux machine) in such a way that there was no filtering to one of our /24 IP addresses. The IP address belonged to a Windows server running an unpatched version of MSSQL, and Blaster was at it's peak. It took no less than 10 seconds from the time I activated the updated (broken) firewall rules to me scratching my head wondering why the router appeared completely dead.
Blaster had infected the machine within about 10 seconds and the traffic had killed the router (well... not killed, it came back to life when I pulled the plug on the infected machine).
Fortunately Blaster was memory resident only so there was no lasting damage.
Of course one infection doesn't prove anything, looking through the firewall logs at the time the average blaster packet per IP address was a few minutes so I think I was just unlucky to have been owned that quickly.
You think so? I'll restate my comment here:
I was attempting to point out the fallacy of the original "Big Oil has been buying and burying patents for 50 years" post - the whole beauty of conspiracy theories is that you can never convince the zealots that believe them because they have a 'logical' explanation for every argument you put forward. eg if you tell them "show me the patents then", the response you'll get is that you can't find the patents because they are owned by shell companies etc.
Obviously my attempt at humor was too subtle as you weren't the only one who misunderstood...
YHBT
YHL
HAND
That's the beauty of the whole conspiracy. Big Oil are hiding behind shell companies and using false names and own the whole patent system anyway, so you'll never find the patents no matter how hard you look, nor any evidence to prove it either way. But we all know it's true.
Good thing there aren't any incompetent lawyers out there then...
I was more referring to his behaviour subsequent to the murder. Not so much the 'trying to cover up his actions' stuff, more the expectation that the reasons he put forward for his actions were in some way plausible. He didn't come across as someone who had a sound grasp on reality.
Locking him away for a good chunk of the rest of his days is probably the only reasonable solution... it's just a shame that it has to come to this before something can be done.
I'm curious though... say he got pissed at his wife one night and killed her in a fit of rage, do you think that makes him an evil person?
What about if she threatened to take the kids back to Russia and so he plotted for a few weeks to kill her? (I don't think he did, but what if?)
Do you think a few years in prison is going to change him for the better, or do you think the idea is for him to 'pay for' his crime?
I don't recall expressing an opinion on that...
That defense would normally be when the victim can't just walk away because threats have been made to 'hunt you down and make you suffer', or 'kill you and the kids'.
Just make sure that when you ask her out, you promise you won't murder her in the car and then bury her body in the bush. That should put aside any doubts she has about you.
I used to have an attitude like that, but by definition anyone who behaves that way is obviously mentally ill, and probably a jail term is only going to make things worse for him. I'm not sure there is alternative though...
And that's what makes me sad, I don't think that there is an answer to the question 'what could have been done beforehand to prevent this?'. You can't just go locking people away because they are a bit (or a lot) arrogant and nerdy - slashdot's user base would disappear overnight! Maybe we need that 'voice in your head' ray gun pointing at people 24/7 with a message 'thou shalt not kill. thou shalt not kill. thou shalt not kill. (drink pepsi).'
Hopefully the kids are now in a more stable environment...
The product is not unethical, although some of it's uses could be, but that is also true of the kitchen knife. This is a common source of hypocrisy on slashdot. It would be like saying that p2p software is unethical because it allows users to easily distribute products that they didn't pay for.
For some products, I'm astounded that they don't. A certain computer manufacturer (or maybe others do this too?) has a basic 1 year warranty on their laptops, or a 3 year upgraded warranty. The upgraded warranty means several things:
. Call center in the same country as you, with accents that you can actually understand
. Onsite warranty, as opposed to carry in
. Something else I can't remember right now.
The problem with blanket statements like yours is that you'll always find someone who will disagree with you :)
Concerning extended warranty, you basically have to make a judgement call yourself on a case by case basis, eg:
. What will the warranty cost me?
. How long is it for?
. What is the value of the product?
. What is the likelihood of the product developing a fault?
. What other value does it add to the product?
. If the product broke outside the standard warranty period, how would it affect me?
I bought a washing machine a few years back. It came with a 2 year warranty, with the option of a 5 year warranty for an extra $50. The washing machine cost about $800 (had to serve a family of 6 so I wanted a decent one), so $50 represented a 6% increase in price, which I was happy enough to pay. It broke down after 3 years and required about $30 in parts and probably another $40 in labour. Had it not been under warranty i'd have repaired it myself, but still I think it was a pretty good deal.
On the other hand, if it was a $200 TV with a 2 year warranty, and the upgrade to a 3 year warranty was $50, then I would probably be saying no thanks. If it broke down i'd just gift it to the local repair shop (if they wanted it) and would get a new one.
I see this with customers pabx systems all the time. They are sold as 'VoIP Ready' so the customer thinks all they have to do is attach a few handsets to their network, but 'VoIP Ready' means that the PABX will accept a VoIP card, which will cost a whole heap of $$$, and the salesman does nothing to enlighten them before the sale.