Why bother to threaten? Why not just expose them? The Jester believes he has hacked "known-bad" people. His list of "known-bad" may not coincide withe people guilty of crimes, and probably coincides even less with people chargeable with crimes.
His evidence probably isn't admissible in court, at least in the USA. I would guess that chain-of-posession is at least a lot suspect. So, The Jester can't really give this to any law enforcement that can use it.
Why not just release the data? What does The Jester believe he/she/it/them can gain from just a threat?
That's great, studies and evidence suggest that patents and copyrights result in decreased innovation. Are we going to do away with patents and copyrights? No? Why not?
Cap-and-trade may or may not have other effects that make the resulting possible decrease in innovation worth it to society as a whole.
Also, the famous slogan was "The network is the computer", not "The internet is the computer". That was Sun Microsystem's tagline or slogan. Given that "The Internet" really isn't a single technology (except maybe with respect to TCP/IP, but even that's changing as IPv6 makes its way in) or even a single network, why are we fear mongering about this right now? Between Anonymous turning off The Internet, and China's Water Army disrupting USA in-flight refueling ops, one has to wonder if a coordinated PR campaign isn't taking place.
I have not read this book, but I did hear him on NPR's "Science Friday" last week.
I think Tyson misses something huge. The USA actually had a large number of career engineers to do the Space Program with. From 1945 to 1960, a lot of WW2 vets went to college, and a lot of those college-goers went into engineering. Civil, mining and mechanical engineering were traditional "first-in-family-to-college" majors. They were a way for a farmer's son or a miner's son to become a professional without having to exhibit all the social graces.
From 1945 to 1960, the US military-industrial complex went from piston-driven props to jet turbines, from high subsonic aerodynamics to the X-15. A lot of engineering went into airplanes and rockets and missiles during that time.
The USA, indeed, the world, does not have a stock of engineers to do the design, nor does it have the scientists to make the spec the design meets.
I don't think the USA, or the world, can duplicate the 1960s "Space Race", much less surpass it.
Given all the other noise about QU8K's rocket reaching 120,00 feet (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvDqoxMUroA) and other relatively sophisticated rockets based on off-the-shelf electronics and model rocket technology, when do we see a war between drones and the surveilled?
The purest of propaganda gibberish. Available from "your Mercedes partner" on the 15th of June. "Partner". Really? Don't you mean "member of the price-fixing cartel"? Because that's what a car dealership is in the USA.
Sure, some mathematics is outside the purview of programming. Certainly some programming activities are only loosely mathematical. But to say that the clerical part of programming is all that matters (and that's really what he says here) is totally ridiculous.
Ah ha! A Dutch auction (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_auction). This might be a good thing for people who can get away with less-powerful servers (and who can't these days?). I can't find the reference I want to find, but a little ways down in http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Auctions.html it says that a Dutch auction does not maximize revenue for the seller. So you have to wonder why the seller is using this auction style.
Dutch auctions are supposed to take place faster than other types, and risk aversion is supposed to make bidders choose a higher price than they would otherwise. Are people bidding on used servers particularly risk averse, or do sellers just want to unload them?
Interesting things to ask, to be sure. But why all the cuts? I mean, I'm sure they had to edit out the usual number of "ummm" and "ahhhh", and "wait, wait!" phrases. But the director had at least 3 cameras on him, from different angles, and kept cutting between a tight closeup, and three-quarters profiles from both left and right.
Why? Is this sort of thing done just to prove you're not filming it on your Droid, that you've got the resources to have 3 cameraa, 3 photographers, and you can edit it all together? Because I'm not too sure that the editing added much to this one.
high-ceremony Java enterprise folk - is that a way of not including a "lightning rod" or layers of linkbait and trolling? Because I think of the work of "Java enterprise folk" in different terms. "Bloatware", "boilerplate", "marching morons" and a number of other more derogatory terms come to mind.
This article contains a good observation: he wraps his key idea in layers of link-bait and nerd-traps, shallow but emotionally charged ideas that side-track all but the strongest minds.
Hey, this idea is my Intellectual Property! I invented it to keep the morons at bay during Usenet's Eternal September, beginning with AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe's addition to Usenet in 1993. I always tried to put "lightning rod" prose into any Usenet article to divert the idiots into responding with idiocy. Only people with some knowledge can pass up a "lightning rod" and deal with the real issues.
The author takes the idea of "intellectual property" for granted. What about the problem of independent invention? The telegraph, telephone and lots of other major inventions had multiple pretenders to the throne of "inventor". I think that this fact make "IP" into something less than property.
The problems with this article extend further into its underpinnings than merely assuming a problem without explaining what the problem is.
Anybody who has used Linux at home, and Windows at work can tell you that. In fact, Windows has only recently caught up with Linux in OS reliability. X11 is still vastly more reliable than Win32.
This article illustrates what's wrong with "enterprise" type software: HiPPO rules in that context, and it costs too much to do testing to validate any design choices. In fact, most "enterprise" development managers believe that software is fractally buggy (any piece of the whole has an infinite number of bugs) and so if something is in production, they will not change it unless forced to do so at virtual gunpoint.
could very well be ahead of public research - does that mean you've had meetings with groups of 3 federal employees, one of whom does nothing but ensure the other 2 don't say too much? You know, like the feds that visited IBM to make DES more resistant to differential cryptanalysis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27...)?
How about something like this for the "Card Services" scams?
These are the robo-calls with the female voice telling you that you can lower your credit card's interest rate, but it's only for a limited time, so press 1 to talk to a service rep.
I've gone pretty far down the road with a few of these "service reps". I'm convinced they want credit card number, expiration date and CVS/CVC for cards with a large available balance. They hang up on me if I just want the lower interest, or if I inquire too closely about who they work for, or why they need the CVS/CVC (3-digit code on the back of a card).
His evidence probably isn't admissible in court, at least in the USA. I would guess that chain-of-posession is at least a lot suspect. So, The Jester can't really give this to any law enforcement that can use it.
Why not just release the data? What does The Jester believe he/she/it/them can gain from just a threat?