Comment by sillysaurus3
12 years ago
Be careful what you wish for. History has shown that countries which are free to think will eventually outthink those that aren't. And what you're arguing for is restriction of thought.
12 years ago
Be careful what you wish for. History has shown that countries which are free to think will eventually outthink those that aren't. And what you're arguing for is restriction of thought.
You're free to think whatever you want. This is about interfering with other peoples' property.
Personally, I think people over-romanticize hacker culture in saying it's a key part of technological progress. Scientific advancement is a process that overwhelmingly happens purposefully, not through tinkering. It's DARPA funding defense contractors to invent TCP/IP, not some kids "learning" by breaking into other peoples' property.
The stuff Bill and Steve did--they did it because they were smart kids and could get away with it. But saying it was a necessary component of their future success is just romanticization.
Perhaps these "other people" who don't want their property "interfered with" should not wantonly hook it up to a global communications network full of anonymous actors. In an ideal world the law would quickly change to match the reality of an unaccountable network, hacking itself would be legal, and only specific intended harm caused by it would be a crime.
The problem here stems from young being people more in touch with actual reality, as they haven't been beaten down by society to respect arbitrary social mores. So they take risks doing things that seemingly should have no consequence - like smoking marijuana or sending nonstandard signals over communication networks. And so a few unlucky ones get caught, and the best they can currently hope for is to have an institution that will go to bat and isolate them from the "real world" of public persecutors' scoreboards.
cool! would you be okay if someone hacked your computer and posted all of your e-mail to the public?
1 reply →
"Scientific advancement is a process that overwhelmingly happens purposefully, not through tinkering."
Tinkering is exactly what got us Linux, what got us Unix, and what got us radio communication and x-rays.
So, no, I do believe you are mistaken.
Linux isn't a great example of scientific advancement, being a clone of UNIX. UNIX was the product of a commercial research lab. BSD was the product of an academic research lab. I'm not sure who you're referring to with radios and Xrays, but those were discovered in a very different time. A lot of those folks were professors and today would be doing funded work at universities.
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> Personally, I think people over-romanticize hacker culture in saying it's a key part of technological progress. Scientific advancement is a process that overwhelmingly happens purposefully, not through tinkering. It's DARPA funding defense contractors to invent TCP/IP, not some kids "learning" by breaking into other peoples' property.
It's hacker culture that created GNU/Linux (and lots of other free software), not DARPA's funding.
Based entirely on work done by professionals at AT&T. Color me unimpressed.
A lot of the major game-changing breakthroughs result from tinkering. Feynman was already cited above; he attributes his Nobel-winning work to a silly question motivated by watching plates wobble in the cafeteria, or some such thing.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2698
And where was his salary coming from at the time?
People's "property".