It's an analogy for the second law of thermodynamics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics. The point is that it's “challenging” and that complex events “evade a straightforward explanation”. That “challenge” is our intuitive experience of the directional arrow of entropy. A similar analogy would be to consider the difficulty of un-cracking an egg. Also, imagine comparing one bowl of soup to another bowl which was made just from tasting (or distilling) the first. Intuitively these are not likely to taste the same, otherwise a notable episode of Seinfeld would be invalidated.
The semaphore ploy strikes me as much more rooted in information, thus the description “cyber”. Stealing code is just theft, since the object of theft doesn't generally qualify the act (though it does in some cases).
> I just want to say that the comments on this thread are absolutely ridiculous and I expected better. Does anyone actually think the customers would find out at the last minute? That the company would leave its users without any support? It's baseless speculation and my guess is it's totally wrong.
Well, it's their baseless speculation and your guess, so a level playing field. You can make the same point without baiting other commenters—in fact you just make your point without baiting other commenters, that's how.
> I mean that's like saying if a huge percentage of Americans have been arrested...
No, it's not like saying that. It's saying that public shaming might eventually become less damaging. If you want an analogy that expressed the point of the commenter, one was provided:
> A historic parallel of diminishing effect is posting identifiable pictures on the Internet.
I have a feeling, based on absolutely nothing, that it isn't until later in life that we realize that this is it. As in, you can basically consider what you are doing now to be your life. There really isn't some big shift ahead where finally, all of a sudden you manage to bicker your spouse into who you wish they were. It's just... this.
Life is sort of a joke, but it takes a bloody long time to get.
My gut feeling is that this sort of thing is cyclical. We oscillate back and forth in countless ways, micro and macro. So the bug fix is to ride the crazy train until we reach the apex and then keep riding it back down to “sanity”, overshoot, then do it all again forever.
Self-centeredness (illustrated here as violence through revenge) is a characteristic most strongly associated with single-cell organisms. Along that axis, humans are characterized by being a complex system embedded in a complex system. We are defined by our internal and external organization, and are always striving in this way. The biggest denial of our humanity is to think of ourselves and our actions as apart from the reality of this systemic functioning.
Probably useless in terms of existing, standard development processes, but it seems to me like this Limbo effort is to come up with a new one (in which we can assume, by the principle of charity, that this is not entirely useless).