* Posts by wub

164 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Page:

Windows 10's demise nears, but Linux is forever

wub

Re: I agree with the majority of the article...

Panorama image stitching in Linux? Try Hugin (https://hugin.sourceforge.io/). I found it in my distro's repository when I first wanted to try my hand, and I found Hugin to be extremely easy and effective.

Ransomware scum make it personal for Reg readers by impersonating tech support

wub
IT Angle

Who are us, anyway?

When I read the title, I expected that somehow Register readers, as a group, had been included in the targeting, somehow.

Reading the article reassured me that we had not been singled out for the criminals' special attention - then I realized that what it may mean is that "impersonating IT" is impersonating US, since there are a fair few Register readers who work in IT, no?

Perfect 10 directory traversal vuln hits SailPoint's IAM solution

wub

Counting blessings.

Well, at least none of SailPoint's clients are telecoms, right? Right???

Abstract, theoretical computing qualifications are turning teens off

wub
Happy

Re: which it says is "theoretical and demanding."

Somewhere along my path, it finally struck me that good programming started with a proper understanding of the problem. Then you decide how best to solve it, given the tools available. Then you design and build your program, to teach the machine how to do it.

Or - if you don't fully understand the problem, you aren't as likely to solve it as you are to turn it into a different problem. It may look like it works, at first, but over time the failures will force another attempt to solve it.

I'm sure none of that matters, now that we have tools like ChatGPT to do all that for us, so we don't have to break a sweat trying to figure out how best to get the problem solved.

/s

Trump tariffs transform into bigger threats for Mexico, Canada than China

wub

Re: Bring it on

"There are already Asian majority suburbs in Vancouver. "

Um, if you're suggesting these folks will be the vanguard of a wave of Canadian trade with China, reflect on the fact that there was an enormous exodus of Hong Kong residents to Commonwealth nations after the British 99-year lease expired, and Canada was a very popular destination. The folks that fled Hong Kong rather than find out what the Chinese government was planning for them now know they were right to leave when they did. I don't think they are going to want to have close connections to that government or its companies.

wub

Wow, have you shopped online recently?

"with the exception of things like Baidu the Chinese don't sell directly to US consumers"

There are lots of websites that are just marketplaces giving buyers access to sellers. You know the big names. One of them has big, dark blue trucks that drive around my neighborhood every day. I buy merchandise that ships directly to me from Chinese companies often, and have done so for years. I would rather purchase from a seller with a shipping point inside the US, but I don't always get that option for specific items I want to buy.

Look around a bit, then come back and tell me that Baidu is the only one.

Oregon Trail 'action comedy' film in the works from Apple

wub

Re: What's next?

Could this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oregon_Trail_(TV_series)] be the series you are describing? A pilot plus 13 episodes.

"NBC cancelled the show after six episodes, but the remaining seven episodes were later aired on BBC 2 in the UK,[3] and the entire series was shown in the UK on BBC1 from November 1977 to January 1978. "

What's all this about foisting off left-pondian cultural artifacts on the UK? As written, it appears as if the second half of the series, never broadcast in the US, was popular enough in the UK to support acquiring the rights to the whole thing and putting it in the esteemed BBC1 lineup.

I'm kinda sorry I missed it - in 1977 I was in graduate school, and didn't have much spare time for television watching. I do recall going to Star Wars (tm) with my future wife and a couple of friends. We spent some time on the way home trying to figure out what the fuss was about. I was particularly disappointed that after 2001 finally got the spaceship noises right, we had to go back to spaceships that went woosh, and energy weapons that went "pew pew". Doesn't explain why I like Star Trek so much, though. Maybe R2D2 should have fallen over more. That moment in the trailer was one of the main reasons I wanted to see the film. But that was a rare humorous moment in a pretty solemn entertainment.

Internet Archive exposed again – this time through Zendesk

wub

Paypal, anyone?

"Anyone else feel like this might not be quite the moment to entrust the Internet Archive with credit card details?"

Anyone who has attempted to visit archive.org will have noticed the message near the middle of the page:

"Our patrons have asked how they can support: PayPal."

Of course, I wasn't able to convince PayPal to let me in - I passed the Captcha, but it froze at the point where it agreed that I am not a robot, apparently I'm failing the final Security Check. Oh well.

Verizon outages across US as hurricane recovery continues

wub

Orange County, California - between us we have one iPhone (eSim), 2 Galaxies (1 each Sim, eSim) - all three phones incommunicado all day. Started the day in the Coachella valley, nothing worked there, either. Txting doesn't work, neither does Wifi Calling, although wifi connections are working.

Rust for Linux maintainer steps down in frustration with 'nontechnical nonsense'

wub
Coat

Re: xBSD Waiting

That'll be great - I've still got my t-shirt!!

Missing scissors cause 36 flight cancellations in Japan

wub

Re: Thats attention to detail

Went from Southern California to Yellowstone in 2002. I took my spotting scope to assist in looking at wildlife, wondering what security would say about an x-ray opaque metal cylindar about 3 inches in diameter, 10 inches long (or thereabouts). Answer: at Lax, absolutely nothing. At West Yellowstone airport on return trip, “Open this up, and show me what's inside.“ Fortunately, just optical glass and air. I thanked her for being thorough.

Disney claims agreeing to Disney+ terms waives man's right to sue over wife's death

wub

Eternal T&Cs?

I think i"m confused. He bought Epcot tickets online, but never used them, and they were refunded. He also accepted a one month free trial of Disney+ in 2019. Somehow, one of these events contained conditions that preclude his attempt to sue Disney in court over harm that occurred in 2023? I realize this is a lawsuit, and asking about "sense" is missing the point, but still...

OK, so if I ever take a free trial of any online product, I will forgo any opportunity to sue the providing company, no matter what the situation, until the heat death of the universe, if they remembered to include this condition in their Terms and Conditions? Wow... I never cease to be amazed at the ways lawyers manage to slip little "gotchas" into those boring blocks of fine print.

Techie told 'Bill Gates' Excel is rubbish – and the Microsoft boss had it fixed in 48 hours

wub

Re: Brad sent "a quite angry email" to billg@microsoft.com

Never having been an Oracle customer, I thought support@oracle.com was funny. I guess I probably harmed my karma, but I did have some interesting conversations with folks collecting email addresses at point of sale.

Georgia's voter portal gets a crash course in client versus backend input validation

wub

Why does unregistering have to be fast, easy and convenient?

My father was a Georgia resident when he decided to move out of state to be closer to me and my family. Sadly, he died a relatively short time later. At the time he died, among my tasks as executor was cancelling his voter registration. He had registered in my state prior to his death, so I notified the registration authorities that he had died, and enclosed a copy of his death certificate with the letter.

How hard is that?

What's troubling me is that I'm reasonably sure that we did not actively cancel his registration in Georgia when he registered here, assuming that the state voter registration authority would do that as a matter of course. Hmmm. When I moved to this state, I'm pretty sure I didn't cancel my previous registration either, for the same reason.

In any case, I have read many times that combing the voter registration lists for the dead and other anomalies is a routine task for those folks, so they should catch most of this without any outside assistance.

I think the whole idea behind this particular website is wrong, and the process seems to be just begging to be abused.

Windows: Insecure by design

wub
Unhappy

Re: Happily switch to Linux, but.....

How did you get iOS devices to accept your Nextcloud? My attempt worked fine with Android and Linux, but SWMBO uses an iPad which cried endlessly about lack of a cert. I started to self-certify, but worried about possible unintended consequences and stopped.

Raspberry Pi stock surges after London IPO

wub

Downvoters please check the definition of "fiduciary duty"

Publicly traded companies have a "fiduciary duty" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiduciary] to maximize each shareholder's return on investment. When properly expressed, this means that decisions must favor profit for the current quarter, potentially at the expense of longer range plans. Stuff like supporting the Pi 1 B until 2030. Is that a profit-driven decision, or was it motivated by technical or even nostalgic interest?

I feel that privately held companies have more flexibility in making future plans. It won't happen suddenly, but it will happen.

Twitter 'supersharers' of fake news tend to be older Republican women

wub

Did you see Ken Burns' commencement speech to Brandeis graduates?

"The politicisation of everything will be the downfall of the US. Americans should now be worried about the beast from within more than the beast on the outside."

That's exactly what Ken Burns said to the Brandeis graduates. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n1OqPzIKH4) He also said that there is no "other" - when we begin to distinguish between "us" and "them" we've already missed the point.

As hard as it may be to believe, I feel that we still have more in common with each other than differences. If we can just find ways to get back to the time when it was OK to "agree to disagree" and treat each other with at least a small amount of respect we should be able to just get on with it.

US senator claims UnitedHealth's CEO, board appointed 'unqualified' CISO

wub

Re: I think this is overblown

United Healthcare has been cutting corners for years in various ways. I'm not surprised they weren't interested in spending more than the minimum on security.

On an unrelated note, I'm impressed that no one mentioned this guy's 14 year stint at Microsoft as having any impact on his decision making in the C suite.

This >is< a big deal! Pharmacy access was significantly impacted for weeks, and PII of over 100 million people was released. If the top managers of this corp are responsible for its successes, and are rewarded accordingly, why are they NOT responsible for its failures?

Multi-day DDoS storm batters Internet Archive

wub

Re: The world of music...

Excellent point. I was only mentioning music because in that case there is at least some means of attempting to locate the copyright holder. My apologies for not recalling how poorly that system actually works.

wub

Please correct me if I'm wrong

Yeah, well try it from a non-UK IP address. Yes, I know there a ways to fool the geofence, but if I want to properly acknowledge the value of intellectual property, I'm not expecting to be granted free access. But there is no mechanism for me to do this, that I know of. In the past I have tried to ask the BBC for a mechanism to pay for access to their archives, but there we never even a response. It looks like there may be something in the works, but I'm not sure I'll live long enough...

wub

Re: Copyright infringement

"The USA physical libraries break copyright rules set elsewhere. They can use any physical book and don't pay any per loan royalty to authors on copyright material, like in UK and Ireland."

Interesting. For thing, why do you believe the author is the owner of the copyright? Copyright is a valuable asset which can be sold and bought. The creator of a work may be the entity that initially registers the copyright for that work (if it is registered at all) but after registration the copyright may change hands any number of times, and the registrar does not get notified. In practice it can be extremely difficult to determine who holds the copyright for a given work now. So, who do you pay?

In the world of music, there are entities that exist to handle this for you. You pay the middleman, and they make sure the money gets into the right hands (mostly). But I guess there has never been enough money in book publishing to support this sort of middleman.

This problem of tracing copyright ownership also causes significant problems for people who are attempting to use some or all of the work as the basis of another work - if you can't figure out who owns the copyright, how do you ask them for permission? This is at the heart of the idea that copyright should expire - Much creative work is based on existing creative work, and if copyright is forever, how long can that continue?

I still love the irony of Walt Disney's "Steamboat Willy" being the benchmark for copyright on Mickey Mouse, since the cartoon is clearly based on Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill, Jr." although, who knows? Maybe Disney got permission...

Fujitsu to shutter operations in Republic of Ireland

wub
FAIL

The Fifth Stage of a Project

...Punishment of the innocent.

I suspect many to most of those about to be out of work were innocents.

And I'm sure the stages came out of order. No one is going to receive praise and honors at this point...

How to run an LLM on your PC, not in the cloud, in less than 10 minutes

wub

Local

...because? Local.

See earlier comments about trusting stuff at the other end of a URL.

Tesla Berlin gigafactory goes dark after alleged eco-sabotage

wub
Alert

Re: If they're camped in a German forrest...

Um, yeah it might clear out the protesters, but then the forest will be gone, too. And I'm not so sure the Gigafactory would survive either...

Legal eagles demand $6B in Tesla stock after overturning Musk's mega pay package

wub

Re: Why do the lawyers want money from Tesla

If the shareholders >are< Tesla, who brought the lawsuit?

Tesla is a "non-human person" in US law I believe, although IANAL.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

wub
WTF?

Re: Similar mistakes not limited to public sector

When I was a university student, I received a notice that I was being charged for books that were way, way overdue. From one of the campus libraries that I did not previously know existed. The titles were in German, a fine language that I never got around to learning.

So I found out where the library was, and took my letter in to try and explain that it wasn't me. The librarian said, "Oh, when we look up the checkout information, sometimes the system gives us a 'magic' number that does not match any library patron's card. So we just pick the next nearest library card number and fine that person."

They rescinded the fine against me, but I'm sure they went back to the list, and picked the next nearest match...

Dumping us into ad tier of Prime Video when we paid for ad-free is 'unfair' – lawsuit

wub

Don't overlook your local library

I don't know about other areas/countries, but here in southern California, all the public libraries have DVD/BR collections which can be checked out free. Some libraries in my area also subscribe to a service called Kanopy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanopy) which is a streaming service that does not charge viewers money - look up the deal. For those who are tracking the advertising thread - Kanopy has no ads.

For some reason, that I do not understand, I can get library cards for cities I do not live in, provided I show up in person with the right identification. Apparently, this operates statewide in California. Again, I have no idea whether this is true in other areas. I have not gotten really ambitious about this, so I only have three library cards, so far...

Everyone's suing AI over text and pics. But music? You ain't seen nothing yet

wub

"...elements of the song sounded a bit like something he could have written."

Ask John Fogerty about his solo album Centerfield. The owner of the rights to the Creedence Clearwater Revival albums successfully sued Fogerty over Centerfield because the music it contains sounds too much like CCR, which Fogerty also wrote. Basically, he lost because he wrote new music in the style of his earlier music, and the rights owner claimed this reduced the value of the existing back catalog.

This really sucks - how else is he supposed to write? But at the same time, the point about diluting the future value of the prior catalog is "sound". Ick.

wub

"I'm personally looking forward to..."

You phrased that perfectly! You can obtain, and look at, and even perform sufficiently old music without violation.

But if someone else performs it, you'll need to find a Creative Commons licensed recording or one that is in the public domain. Music performances are subject to performance rights, which can be violated just like creation rights.

It is amazing how often decisions get made that ignore intellectual property rights, considering how serious the consequences sometimes turn out. The rights owners really don't do much education, relying entirely on punishment to get the word out.

The local repertory theater I sometimes attend started playing music prior to performances, while the audience was seating itself. When I realized that this amounted to a public performance, it scared me - I didn't want them to get sued, and at any given performance in southern California, I could easily imagine a lawyer with the right in the audience. I quietly asked one of the ushers if that sound I was hearing was music, and whether there had been a negotiation about rights.

Now we enter the theater to either silence, or to music that is included in the performance that is about to start. Sad, much less fun, but at least there is less risk to expensive litigation...

New York Times sues OpenAI, Microsoft over 'millions of articles' used to train ChatGPT

wub
Thumb Up

Re: If it's free on the Internet

Too right. I'm doing my best to keep away from all the doom and gloom. But it is really hard. Very best wishes on your quest!

Is it 2000 or 2023? Get ready for AI-anchored news. Again

wub

Watching the newsreader read this one on air

I don't know if this moment is available online somewhere, but I happened to be watching KTLA Channel 5, an independent Los Angeles station yesterday morning when they covered this story.

The previous story was about the continuing decline in newspapers and other traditional news sources as readership/viewership dries up, along with advertising income.

When the desk anchor started in reading the text that went with the clips from Channel 1's demo reel, his distaste was clearly evident. He kept his voice level and mostly free of overtones, but he sure paused a lot compared to his usual style. I can't help feeling that he felt like his was dancing on his own grave, in advance.

While folks are commenting about news readers here, I really wish I could remember the name of the fellow who was on the BBC News desk a few years ago at what worked out to 6 PM PST. He was the person I most wanted to receive the day's news from. It wasn't that he said anything differently, he was able to convey quite a lot in his expression and the occasional nod. It was a difficult time for me when I learned he was retiring. On the one hand, I knew how much I'd miss him. On the other, I wish him the best in the retirement he richly earned - I was well aware his shift was the middle of the bloody night in London.

I really hope Channel 1 is not the future of "news". Who is going to ask politicians and business leaders the really difficult, pointy questions?

Tesla says California's Autopilot action violates its free speech rights

wub
Thumb Up

Re: Quote from Terry Pratchett - Going Postal

Sir Terry said the order wasn't important (but it is in a few cases).

This time of year, I'd read Hogfather - something I do every December or so. Or I watch the live action video version.

HP printer software turns up uninvited on Windows systems

wub
FAIL

Maybe there's an HP device visible from wifi or bluetooth?

Am I the only one who sees strange devices advertising their presence that apparently belong to folks who are nearby? One of my neighbors had a Rivian, and it seemed to be offering at least three different bluetooth opportunities to connect. My neighbor on the other side has an HP something that is always in my list of potential wifi access points... It seems possible that the device makers who may be collecting lists of hardware visible from our systems aren't concerned about whether we are authorized to connect to them, or ever have connected to them.

We're getting that fry-day feeling... US Army gets hold of drone-cooking microwave rig

wub
Happy

Re: Hmmmm..

"Inverse square law.... ?"

Ah, Tom Swift had to deal with a similar problem when building his Megascope Space Prober. From http://www.tomswift.info/homepage/prober.html:

"""

How practical is it to build a Megascope Space Prober? Not very practical, to say the least. The entire invention hangs on Tom's "anti-inverse-square-wave" -- a wave that defies everything known about physics by exceeding the speed of light and not diminishing over distance. I know of no bylaw that would permit such a wave to exist. Maybe Tom invented a machine that could send waves through the imaginary realm of hyperspace or maybe he found a way to easily generate exotic nuclear particles (such as neutrinos) that can exceed the speed of light. At any rate, with our current knowledge of physics, building a space prober is entirely out of the question.

However, it might be possible to build a Megascope Space Prober that works with normal radio waves. Such a device, though, would be expensive, rather costly, and practically useless. After all, if the images aren't in color and aren't real-time why bother with all the expense? Ordinary light reflected from objects is good enough for most people.

What are the properties of Tom's "anti-inverse-square-wave"? The unique and mind-boggling wave that Tom invented has some interesting properties: it can exceed the speed of light; it is invisible; it can be generated fairly easily; it can be used to generate full-color real-time images of very distant objects; it does not cope very well with certain types of gases and radiation, and it does not diminish in power over long distances.

"""

In a nutshell, problem solved!

Microsoft pins hopes on AI once again – this time to patch up Swiss cheese security

wub
Alert

Training set?

What, exactly, is Mictosoft going to rely on for suitable secure software code to train their AI on?

Japan cruises ahead with drive-thru EV charging trial

wub

Mild climate

The test area is in Chiba prefecture, and according to Wikipedia the weather is pretty mild there. Doesn't freeze much, and not terribly hot. So the interesting problems of heavy vehicles driving over the dissimilar materials (charging coils embedded in the road surface material) are minimized. I bet they don't have a lot of potholes there, and they don't spread salt around to melt ice on the road. These are some of the potential difficulties that came to mind while I was reading about testing and durability.

I am curious about the issues that might fall into the "safety" category.

Colleges snub Turnitin's AI-writing detector over fears it'll wrongly accuse students

wub
FAIL

NIce racket

Summarizing a bit from the article and some of the comments above: Buy our tool, use it, but ignore the results when you don't think they make sense.

Hmmm. I think I could save the universities a chunk of cash by recommending they skip the first part and keep the money. Ehhh, you can always raise tuition to cover the cost, though, right?

Attackers accessed UK military data through high-security fencing firm's Windows 7 rig

wub

I laughed when I read the headline, but when I got the sentence you quoted, I sobered up. I used to work in an environment the depended on some very sophisticated scientific equipment which was computer controlled. We could not afford to throw out perfectly functional half-a-megabuck hardware just because M$ excreted a new OS, and the manufacturer hadn't bothered to update their software for prior customers. Sometimes we could move the software to a newer OS, but most often not.

I do have sympathy for these guys - I expect they had their reasons for not air-gaping the old systems, but I'm going to guess that convenience was the main one.

LG's $1,000 TV-in-a-briefcase is unlikely to travel much further than the garden

wub

Re: Students?

Um, no. Vehicle registration is a better analogy than a subscription. In kind, it resembles the money you pay the government annually to operate your motor vehicle after you have purchased it.

If only it was comparable to a subscription - I'd love to be able to get into the BBC archives, and apparently they are available to folks with licenses, but not to those of us without them. And I have asked about the possibility of obtaining a license only to be resoundingly ignored. After getting over the frustration of being geofenced out (yes, I know vpn, which is an ongoing arms race - I'd rather be legal if possible) I realize that no one in their right mind would try to register a car bought and used in the US for operation on UK roads.

For one thing, the controls are all on the "wrong" side...

Florida Man and associates indicted for conspiracy to steal data, software

wub

Best free pubilcity in the world

I hear complaints from various places, initially the Candidate/Defendant himself, that all of these legal travails are purely intended to nobble him during the campaign. But why doesn't anyone ask about the absolutely unprecedented free international publicity he has been given? Did I remember to mention that it is completely free?

One detail that was mentioned by PBS at the time the indictment was announced is that in Georgia the entire trial could be televised?? My first thought was, "Who-hoo! where's my popcorn??" But my second thought was, "Holy Shit!! No other candidate will get anything like that amount of free publicity in any campaign during the remainder of the United States of America, however short that time may be. So I deeply and sincerely hope that the proceeding will be closed. We'll get the juicy bits quickly enough, and at least the publicity he gets won't include so much screen time.

'Joan Is Awful' Black Mirror episode rebounds on Netflix

wub

Another cautionary tale.

Humancentipad ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HumancentiPad )

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

wub
Unhappy

Re: The flip side of this is a unique name

Uh, another very common name here. Years ago, my dentist in Evanston, Illinois had four patients who went by John Hill. I'm generally glad to have a tough to search name was well.

But recently I tried to order a pair of earbuds through NewEgg (the seller was a company located in Hong Kong). That company told me, "Your name is blacklist". I had never even heard of that company, let alone ordered anything from them before. They asked if I had another name to use for delivery, and I said I didn't. Ultimately, they cancelled my order and refunded me my payment.

I don't think I'm going to be able to get off that blacklist. Oh well...

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

wub
Pint

Re: Make America Kittens Again!

Oh my god! Thank you, thank you, thank you! This is GREAT!!! Wish I could upvote you more than once. Have one on me -->

Windows XP's adventures in the afterlife shows copyright's copywrongs

wub

Re: What's the monetary damage?

As occasionally gets pointed out, there are large, expensive scientific and medical devices out there that require complex software programs to operate. The manufacturer writes their software to the latest stable version of Windows, then never updates it. Commercial entities run and maintain these expensive devices for extended periods. Yes, I know, they are supposed to be depreciated in 3 years (or perhaps 5) but even if they are replaced with the latest version, the devices also have an afterlife - there is a healty market for used equipment of this sort.

Different copyright considerations arise when the device is sold by the original purchaser, but I'm only here to say that as long as those devices are running, they are utterly dependent on old/ancient versions of Windows. No upgrade path there. Even if the updated OS is cheap, it rarely turns out to support the software.

Large language models' surprise emergent behavior written off as 'a mirage'

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Flame

Cold Fusion?

Why does this sober analysis of the situation, placing emphasis on the tools used to determine the outcome of the experiment - and the proper use of these tools -oh and knowing how to actually interpret the results from these tools correctly remind me of all the overheated excitement about cold fusion?

Dump these insecure phone adapters because we're not fixing them, says Cisco

wub

Re: Bit hard on the bright young things?

"Distorted in a way that they like."

You remind me that every vinyl pressing has to be distorted (carefully) using the RIAA equilization curve, so that the low frequency sounds don't overwhelm the high frequency sounds in the grove. And then on playback, one has to carefully redistort the output to attempt to restore the original balance between low and high frequencies for a high fidelity experience.

DEF CON to set thousands of hackers loose on LLMs

wub

Re: Better than hackers for red teaming an LLM

I feel that to find the nasty corners in ML, as in anything, we need folks with the hacker spirit. Coloring inside the lines isn't going to expose the obscure problems.

But hey, the more the merrier and we can always use more diverse viewpoints banging on these things.

Curiosity gets interplanetary software patch for better driving and more on Mars

wub

Re: Well worth a read

Gee, I thought AI was going to solve all of our software creation problems! </sarcasm>

But maybe this approach could eventually come up with a system that could drive an automobile autonomously. Too bad no one would ever be able to even fantasize about that in a commercial environment...

To improve security, consider how the aviation world stopped blaming pilots

wub

The Howard Cosell Syndrome

My apologies to William Macomber, a philosophy professor I had in college if I get the details wrong. In the process of attempting to teach undergraduates something about Greek philosophy, he used what was then a recent incident anyone would easily recall.

At the 1972 Olympic games, someone failed to notify an American team about a last-minute change of venue (or time of event). At any rate, the whole team forfeited because they failed to show up to compete. This human error caused a great deal of righteous outrage, and among the loudest and most indignant voices was Howard Cosell's.

What Professor Macomber attempted to show us was that in "ancient Greece" there was a very different cultural belief about the nature of human free will. Mistakes we would attribute to an individual making an unforced error were viewed as having been caused by one or another of the gods, and the individual was considered to simply be the agent through which that god was operating at the time. Sounds a bit fatalistic, in the sense that in that view the mistake could not be prevented by any amount of planning or redesign. But it is interesting to consider that an entire nation could potentially hold a different view on the need for and application of blame. There would have been no Howard Cosell running around shouting for someone to be punished.

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