The entire situation is just ridiculous office politics that turned into bullying by the state. Four years for breaking a few workplace rules is extremely nasty.
This isn't just a matter of workplace rules. The guy didn't break the dress code. He held the network hostage until he got what he wanted.
To use your car analogy, drunk driving is punished severely precisely because of what can happen when a person drinks and drives. Sure, if you actually hit (or god forbid, kill) someone, the penalty is worse, but it's no defense to say, "Well, yeah, I drank and drove, but I didn't hurt anyone, so all's well that ends well."
I can understand how someone would think the penalty was too harsh for what he did, but I still think it was appropriate, because he could've brought the network to its knees. You don't want to put yourself in the situation where the next time someone does something like that, you have to prove malicious intent.
No. That isn't justice. Justice IS about fairness. Justice comes first, and laws are supposed to support justice.
If all you have is a set of laws and the stated punishment for breaking them, all you have is the worst kind of bureaucracy. Assuming that laws are always right is one of the worst things you can do.
That's not actually how things work, though. It's not just assumed that laws are always right. If laws are wrong, there's a system for replacing those laws. Nothing in this outcome (that I've heard so far, anyway) persuades me that the law should be changed here.
The author seems to think that, because murderers sometimes serve less time for their crimes, this defendant should get a lesser sentence. That's ass-backwards, though. A murderer getting two years in murder is insane. The last thing we should be doing, as a nation, is adjusting all of our sentences based on idiotic sentencing decisions.
I agree with you. It's a bad scene. Sometimes you can have a teachable moment where you can try to explain to your supervisors what you do and why, but in the case of dangerously incompetent people, it's usually best to just move on. You don't have the power to fix anything, and even if you do, you won't get the credit for it. Such organizations usually just crash and burn, and you don't want to be stuck in the wreckage.
What other "bad guys" (legally) are there in this scenario? It's not illegal to be merely incompetent. That's the whole problem. I can understand his reluctance to give passwords to people he thought ware incompetent, but anyone over the age of 16 has had the experience of working under someone they thought was an idiot. You don't get the option of not obeying your supervisors.
What he did was basically blackmail: "Let me talk ot the mayor or I'll keep you locked out of your network."
Riiiight.... and when I go home for the day, I'm, implicitly blackmailing my boss... "Either pay me time-and-a-half or I won't fix your network!"
If anybody other than my Manager, or the CEO of the company requested I reveal my passwords, I'm going to tell them to get lost as well. I'm not blackmailing them because I feel like talking to the CEO...
If you have a prior agreement that you get paid time and a half for overtime, then you're within your rights to expect it. There are plenty of jobs that don't get overtime, and if you were in that situation, it would be blackmail.
The people over him were the ones asking for the passwords. He would only give the passwords to the mayor, who has as much to do with his job as the mayor has to do with the garbage men.
You can't let the guy off easy just because he happened to be harmless. Next time, you might not be so lucky.
He didn't just happen to prove harmless. It's pretty clear his superiors were in fact just as incompetent as he mad them out to be, and caused downtime just as soon as they did finally get the password. And if he did hand over his password to just anybody, and the same down-time happened? I bet he'd be facing charges for violating the restrictions in his contract anyhow.
As long as he handed over the passwords to someone who was authorized to have them, there'd be no issue. The issue here was that he wouldn't give the passwords to someone who was authorized to have them.
I could understand it if he wanted to be a whistleblower in this situation, but you don't do it by holding the system hostage. Like you said, you document everything, and then you go to a responsible party with your issues. You might lose your job over it, but that's a hell of a lot better than going to jail.
It wasn't a simple personal disagreement. He basically held the computer system hostage. It's a lot more serious than just posting funny pictures of your boss.
I do agree with those who say that the city bears some responsibility for this. I don't think he should've ever been in the position to hold the city hostage. In that respect, it was a systemic problem. But you can't give the guy a pass just because he exploited a problem that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Lots of people have to work under supervisors who are total idiots. That doesn't give anyone the right to sabotage their supervisor or their company. What he did was basically blackmail: "Let me talk ot the mayor or I'll keep you locked out of your network." You can't let the guy off easy just because he happened to be harmless. Next time, you might not be so lucky.
I can certainly understand how it's justifiable from a plot standpoint. I assume that the original idea wasn't to have Anakin turn to the dark side so young. But doesn't that just sort of expose a plot hole in the prequels? I mean, it's my understanding that Shaw wasn't on this mortal coil for the prequel movies, but they could've found someone of the same approximate age and done a little bit of CGI on him, couldn't they? The problem, as I see it, is that the prequels didn't span enough time. He went from Jedi to evil in the space of his teenage years.
Part of good writing is continuity, and the prequels just were not well-written, from that standpoint, IMHO.
The most disturbing thing to me wasn't the shiny newness of the DVD version. Rather, it was the actual changes made to the story and the scenes between the old version and the new one. Adding Hayden Christensen into scenes where the original had Sebastian Shaw just made me cringe.
The information isn't required to be entirely harmless. It only has to be a lot more helpful than harmful. I personally wouldn't wish to take the moral burden of causing unintended deaths or injuries and if it would happen (didn't yet, as far as we know) Assange would have to bear that burden.
You kind of lost me with the first sentence there. "The information isn't required to be entirely harmless" for what, exactly? Are you saying that espionage is protected speech?
But why is it that noone talks about the number of lives that the release of these documents will save?
Obviously, I can't speak about the motives of others, but I think that it's reasonable to assume that the dangers involved in revealing this kind of information far outweigh the hypothetical benefits. You might want to read this article about the Taliban's reaction to the leaked documents. It's a certainty that lives were put at risk by what this asshat did. At best, it's only a possibility that the length of the war will be shortened by the WikiLeaks documents. With the exception of the operational details the reports contain, a lot of this information was known by the press (and the members of the public who've been paying attention) already. It's been known (or at least suspected) for some time that Pakistan and Iran both have dogs in the fight in Afghanistan. The fact that this is mentioned in the reports shouldn't come as a real surprise to anyone.
I think the release of the information by WikiLeaks was grossly irresponsible, and Assange should be arrested by Iceland and deported to the U.S. to face trial for espionage. The person in the Army who leaked the information should face treason charges (when he/she is found) and if found guilty, be executed. If there turns out to be a Hell, may they both burn there eternally.
Who says that reporting raw data is necessarily better? In fact, I would argue that raw data is much worse, precisely because it's not screened for sensitive information that could get people killed. (And by the way: The fact that Assange says he hasn't heard of anyone getting killed because of the information means precisely nothing, even if you assume he's telling the truth.)
I get that Wikileaks feels that they have a moral imperative to take these actions. But a part of taking that stance is accepting the responsibility of those actions.
That's pretty much how I feel about it. It's one thing for WikiLeaks to claim the right -- or even the responsibility -- to publish the documents. (I personally find it reprehensible, but at least they have the right to argue that way.) But to turn around and disclaim responsibility for what happens because of their decision is ludicrous. Its no one's responsibility but theirs to make sure that what gets published doesn't get anyone killed. If they're not sure about it, they shouldn't publish any of it. That's the responsible thing to do. They can't just whine about no one helping them redact the material, and then publish it all anyway. (Well, they obviously can, but it's a profoundly stupid position to take.)
Reporting involves analysis (and, hopefully, a basic understanding of what one is writing about). Assange isn't reporting. He's puking up someone else's documents on a Web page. Hopefully, they never hand out Pulitzers for that kind of thing.
He asked for the money to hire people to go through and remove all the names from the documents, after Amnesty and the others refused his request for help doing so.
It's pretty obvious the US government is spreading a lot of FUD and attempting to take wikileaks down.
Wikileaks is under serious US Government attack.
When WikiLeaks decided to post the information, they became responsible for the information they posted. Assange can't cry about the fact that no one is helping him release the information responsibly when it's not information he should be posting in the first place. With the ability to post the information comes the responsibility for what happens when you post it, and you can't shirk that responsibility just by whining that no one will help you.
The fact of the matter is, if you release this kind of information, then it's on you to go through and filter it to make sure that nothing harmful is released. If you can't do that, then the responsible thing is to not release the information at all (which is not unrelated to the reason the material was classified in the first place).
The fact of the matter is, there is such a thing as an information expert for a given field. If you're not an expert in the field, and you just start puking up information on a Web page because no one can stop you, then you bear responsibility (moral and otherwise) for what happens when people use that information. Assange needs to grow a pair and deal with reality as it is, not as he'd wish it was.
+1
Amen. The idea that WikiLeaks would be capable of determining what would endanger the armed forces, and what wouldn't, is absurd.
You should also keep in mind that this miscreant wants to be paid $700,000 for this "harm minimization review".
I say, each of the affected nations should take turns hanging his ass, and the last country in line gets to finish the job.
Talkative and extroverted: The magnet; the centre of attention
This is a social child.
Quiet and extroverted: The iron; reverts to more solitary activities without a magnet
This I don't accept. How can one be both quiet and extroverted? You're either socially outgoing, or you're not. If it takes someone else to get you out of your shell, then you're not extroverted. The other person is. Such a person isn't always socially awkward. I'll grant you that much. But on a continuum, such a person should be classified as "shy" and would certainly appear socially awkward in most situations.
Quiet and introverted: Prefers reading books, playing video games, etc.
Again, how is this distinct from social awkwardness or shyness? Preferring not to be in social situations is the very definition of "socially awkward", is it not?
Talkative and introverted: Talks to dolls, stuffed animals, whatever else won't talk back
3) Since you used the British slang "daft," I will also go out on a limb and speculate that Americans will be more resistant to the idea that personality is immutable. We're all about the self-reliant personal re-invention.
I'm actually an American.:) I was trying to avoid using even less flattering words.;)
I should've actually said "Caucasian boys grow up to be white men" in my example.
As to the relationship between "less talkative" and "socially awkward", how, exactly, are "less talkative" and "shy" different concepts? Or is it your position that "shy" and "socially awkward" are two different things?
And for the vast majority of those people, all you ever had in common with them was that you were forced to occupy the same physical structure for 7 hours every day.
The fact that you went to the same high school often (although maybe not always) indicates that you share at least a socioeconomic background and a cultural background (e.g., middle class kids go to public school, rich kids go to private school). The fact that you were in the same building also probably meant that you lived in the same neighborhood, knew the same people, etc. But after high school, most of those ties are at least at risk.
I think you're missing the point. Being less talkative is being socially awkward. It's like saying "Caucasian children grow up to be white men." It's not actually saying anything.
If the study had ventured a guess as to what makes children less talkative, that might've been worthy of a study. But saying shy children grow up to be socially awkward isn't just common knowledge. It's a tautology.
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This isn't just a matter of workplace rules. The guy didn't break the dress code. He held the network hostage until he got what he wanted.
To use your car analogy, drunk driving is punished severely precisely because of what can happen when a person drinks and drives. Sure, if you actually hit (or god forbid, kill) someone, the penalty is worse, but it's no defense to say, "Well, yeah, I drank and drove, but I didn't hurt anyone, so all's well that ends well."
I can understand how someone would think the penalty was too harsh for what he did, but I still think it was appropriate, because he could've brought the network to its knees. You don't want to put yourself in the situation where the next time someone does something like that, you have to prove malicious intent.
That's not actually how things work, though. It's not just assumed that laws are always right. If laws are wrong, there's a system for replacing those laws. Nothing in this outcome (that I've heard so far, anyway) persuades me that the law should be changed here.
The author seems to think that, because murderers sometimes serve less time for their crimes, this defendant should get a lesser sentence. That's ass-backwards, though. A murderer getting two years in murder is insane. The last thing we should be doing, as a nation, is adjusting all of our sentences based on idiotic sentencing decisions.
I agree with you. It's a bad scene. Sometimes you can have a teachable moment where you can try to explain to your supervisors what you do and why, but in the case of dangerously incompetent people, it's usually best to just move on. You don't have the power to fix anything, and even if you do, you won't get the credit for it. Such organizations usually just crash and burn, and you don't want to be stuck in the wreckage.
What other "bad guys" (legally) are there in this scenario? It's not illegal to be merely incompetent. That's the whole problem. I can understand his reluctance to give passwords to people he thought ware incompetent, but anyone over the age of 16 has had the experience of working under someone they thought was an idiot. You don't get the option of not obeying your supervisors.
Riiiight.... and when I go home for the day, I'm, implicitly blackmailing my boss... "Either pay me time-and-a-half or I won't fix your network!"
If anybody other than my Manager, or the CEO of the company requested I reveal my passwords, I'm going to tell them to get lost as well. I'm not blackmailing them because I feel like talking to the CEO...
If you have a prior agreement that you get paid time and a half for overtime, then you're within your rights to expect it. There are plenty of jobs that don't get overtime, and if you were in that situation, it would be blackmail.
The people over him were the ones asking for the passwords. He would only give the passwords to the mayor, who has as much to do with his job as the mayor has to do with the garbage men.
He didn't just happen to prove harmless. It's pretty clear his superiors were in fact just as incompetent as he mad them out to be, and caused downtime just as soon as they did finally get the password. And if he did hand over his password to just anybody, and the same down-time happened? I bet he'd be facing charges for violating the restrictions in his contract anyhow.
As long as he handed over the passwords to someone who was authorized to have them, there'd be no issue. The issue here was that he wouldn't give the passwords to someone who was authorized to have them.
I could understand it if he wanted to be a whistleblower in this situation, but you don't do it by holding the system hostage. Like you said, you document everything, and then you go to a responsible party with your issues. You might lose your job over it, but that's a hell of a lot better than going to jail.
It wasn't a simple personal disagreement. He basically held the computer system hostage. It's a lot more serious than just posting funny pictures of your boss. I do agree with those who say that the city bears some responsibility for this. I don't think he should've ever been in the position to hold the city hostage. In that respect, it was a systemic problem. But you can't give the guy a pass just because he exploited a problem that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Lots of people have to work under supervisors who are total idiots. That doesn't give anyone the right to sabotage their supervisor or their company. What he did was basically blackmail: "Let me talk ot the mayor or I'll keep you locked out of your network." You can't let the guy off easy just because he happened to be harmless. Next time, you might not be so lucky.
I can certainly understand how it's justifiable from a plot standpoint. I assume that the original idea wasn't to have Anakin turn to the dark side so young. But doesn't that just sort of expose a plot hole in the prequels? I mean, it's my understanding that Shaw wasn't on this mortal coil for the prequel movies, but they could've found someone of the same approximate age and done a little bit of CGI on him, couldn't they? The problem, as I see it, is that the prequels didn't span enough time. He went from Jedi to evil in the space of his teenage years. Part of good writing is continuity, and the prequels just were not well-written, from that standpoint, IMHO.
The most disturbing thing to me wasn't the shiny newness of the DVD version. Rather, it was the actual changes made to the story and the scenes between the old version and the new one. Adding Hayden Christensen into scenes where the original had Sebastian Shaw just made me cringe.
The information isn't required to be entirely harmless. It only has to be a lot more helpful than harmful. I personally wouldn't wish to take the moral burden of causing unintended deaths or injuries and if it would happen (didn't yet, as far as we know) Assange would have to bear that burden.
You kind of lost me with the first sentence there. "The information isn't required to be entirely harmless" for what, exactly? Are you saying that espionage is protected speech?
But why is it that noone talks about the number of lives that the release of these documents will save?
Obviously, I can't speak about the motives of others, but I think that it's reasonable to assume that the dangers involved in revealing this kind of information far outweigh the hypothetical benefits. You might want to read this article about the Taliban's reaction to the leaked documents. It's a certainty that lives were put at risk by what this asshat did. At best, it's only a possibility that the length of the war will be shortened by the WikiLeaks documents. With the exception of the operational details the reports contain, a lot of this information was known by the press (and the members of the public who've been paying attention) already. It's been known (or at least suspected) for some time that Pakistan and Iran both have dogs in the fight in Afghanistan. The fact that this is mentioned in the reports shouldn't come as a real surprise to anyone.
I think the release of the information by WikiLeaks was grossly irresponsible, and Assange should be arrested by Iceland and deported to the U.S. to face trial for espionage. The person in the Army who leaked the information should face treason charges (when he/she is found) and if found guilty, be executed. If there turns out to be a Hell, may they both burn there eternally.
Who says that reporting raw data is necessarily better? In fact, I would argue that raw data is much worse, precisely because it's not screened for sensitive information that could get people killed. (And by the way: The fact that Assange says he hasn't heard of anyone getting killed because of the information means precisely nothing, even if you assume he's telling the truth.)
I can't mod this up right now, but for what it's worth: +1*10^350
I get that Wikileaks feels that they have a moral imperative to take these actions. But a part of taking that stance is accepting the responsibility of those actions.
That's pretty much how I feel about it. It's one thing for WikiLeaks to claim the right -- or even the responsibility -- to publish the documents. (I personally find it reprehensible, but at least they have the right to argue that way.) But to turn around and disclaim responsibility for what happens because of their decision is ludicrous. Its no one's responsibility but theirs to make sure that what gets published doesn't get anyone killed. If they're not sure about it, they shouldn't publish any of it. That's the responsible thing to do. They can't just whine about no one helping them redact the material, and then publish it all anyway. (Well, they obviously can, but it's a profoundly stupid position to take.)
Reporting involves analysis (and, hopefully, a basic understanding of what one is writing about). Assange isn't reporting. He's puking up someone else's documents on a Web page. Hopefully, they never hand out Pulitzers for that kind of thing.
He asked for the money to hire people to go through and remove all the names from the documents, after Amnesty and the others refused his request for help doing so. It's pretty obvious the US government is spreading a lot of FUD and attempting to take wikileaks down. Wikileaks is under serious US Government attack.
When WikiLeaks decided to post the information, they became responsible for the information they posted. Assange can't cry about the fact that no one is helping him release the information responsibly when it's not information he should be posting in the first place. With the ability to post the information comes the responsibility for what happens when you post it, and you can't shirk that responsibility just by whining that no one will help you.
starts playing world's smallest violin...
The fact of the matter is, if you release this kind of information, then it's on you to go through and filter it to make sure that nothing harmful is released. If you can't do that, then the responsible thing is to not release the information at all (which is not unrelated to the reason the material was classified in the first place).
The fact of the matter is, there is such a thing as an information expert for a given field. If you're not an expert in the field, and you just start puking up information on a Web page because no one can stop you, then you bear responsibility (moral and otherwise) for what happens when people use that information. Assange needs to grow a pair and deal with reality as it is, not as he'd wish it was.
+1 Amen. The idea that WikiLeaks would be capable of determining what would endanger the armed forces, and what wouldn't, is absurd. You should also keep in mind that this miscreant wants to be paid $700,000 for this "harm minimization review". I say, each of the affected nations should take turns hanging his ass, and the last country in line gets to finish the job.
Talkative and extroverted: The magnet; the centre of attention
This is a social child.
Quiet and extroverted: The iron; reverts to more solitary activities without a magnet
This I don't accept. How can one be both quiet and extroverted? You're either socially outgoing, or you're not. If it takes someone else to get you out of your shell, then you're not extroverted. The other person is. Such a person isn't always socially awkward. I'll grant you that much. But on a continuum, such a person should be classified as "shy" and would certainly appear socially awkward in most situations.
Quiet and introverted: Prefers reading books, playing video games, etc.
Again, how is this distinct from social awkwardness or shyness? Preferring not to be in social situations is the very definition of "socially awkward", is it not?
Talkative and introverted: Talks to dolls, stuffed animals, whatever else won't talk back
That can hardly be called socially well-adjusted.
I suppose if no other reason works for you, there's always that. Hopefully, other reasons would come into play way before that, though. :)
3) Since you used the British slang "daft," I will also go out on a limb and speculate that Americans will be more resistant to the idea that personality is immutable. We're all about the self-reliant personal re-invention.
I'm actually an American. :) I was trying to avoid using even less flattering words. ;)
I should've actually said "Caucasian boys grow up to be white men" in my example. As to the relationship between "less talkative" and "socially awkward", how, exactly, are "less talkative" and "shy" different concepts? Or is it your position that "shy" and "socially awkward" are two different things?
And for the vast majority of those people, all you ever had in common with them was that you were forced to occupy the same physical structure for 7 hours every day.
The fact that you went to the same high school often (although maybe not always) indicates that you share at least a socioeconomic background and a cultural background (e.g., middle class kids go to public school, rich kids go to private school). The fact that you were in the same building also probably meant that you lived in the same neighborhood, knew the same people, etc. But after high school, most of those ties are at least at risk.
I think you're missing the point. Being less talkative is being socially awkward. It's like saying "Caucasian children grow up to be white men." It's not actually saying anything. If the study had ventured a guess as to what makes children less talkative, that might've been worthy of a study. But saying shy children grow up to be socially awkward isn't just common knowledge. It's a tautology.