i see you don't, and i can respect the position. the blame i place on him is by no means whole. perhaps bittorrent is the better comparison. it too serves a need (past and future?) and adds value. it also, by human nature, has very obvious and tempting misapplications. but as with any pandora's box type of dilemma, it's tough to be pointedly blaming.

yes, this was just an effective automation of something that was done manually before, and that's very enabling from an engineer's perspective. becoming an industry standard has its own problems though. even presuming empathy, people begin trusting the magic black box. more cynically, such a system is rife with potential to be manipulated and serve as an obfuscation for ill intent. especially if those things combine and you have a system being widely trusted and not being paid due attention to. i hold the opinion that a system so powerful is only half-built without further checks on it. same as a race car without safety engineering, a driver without licensing, or bittorrent without god-knows-what-i-wish-i-knew.

thus, why i ended my post "I should explain, this is a meme, and honestly an unfair comparison". working for a financial institution is not tantamount to working for an evil empire. that's a completely overblown comparison, and i know it. still, i couldn't resist over-reaching for the star wars reference. if you can excuse the conflation, the part of the metaphor i'd hoped to highlight was being aware of the broader impact of your work.

this author has shown enough intelligence and introspection in the piece that i believe he was fully conscious of the likely effects of the tool. i'm positive the original developers of napster and gnutella had an inkling of the effects their creations would have too. yes, truthfully its the individual users of the program that are "pulling the trigger", but the authors already knew the users well enough to be fairly certain of its eventual useage patterns.

since i'm being long-winded already, i'll just add that studying the scientists behind the manhattan project is a fascinating look at these kinds of ethical conflicts.

the note is juvenile, this person is enjoying their hacker fantasy with no appreciation for the wrath they're bringing upon themselves. there is just no way that a person this cocksure and mouthy will refrain from making a mistake during this.

i'd be a lot more afraid of something done discreetly and professionally. conversely, i'm already afraid of virginia state it administrators and their lack of professionalism.

oh good, my comments still there from the first time i saw the story:

i programmed in some of the same subject matter for several years recently, and much of this strikes me as a very believable tale. ...except it feels history-rewritten so as to remove any negative light from the author. he comes off entirely too saintly-while-surrounded-by-evil, and that makes me wonder what else to believe.

in particular how he made it seem like he just happened to fall into his deal to maintain/integrate/etc the software for its new owner, unpaid for a cut of its sales. that's a daring endeavor you take only when you honestly believe in long-term success, so i don't see "i'm tired and wanna take something easier", i see "all in, show your hands boys" kinda farm-betting. he knew then like he said now that his software could become the standard, shot for and achieved success. but i don't think his waxing philosophical about the potential dangers of that success started only after the trouble.

the contractors building the death star knew the risks of that association, so to speak. (I should explain, this is a meme, and honestly an unfair comparison)

I've often wondered, since we're talking about putting these things offshore anyway, why they're air turbines and not water ones.

water's denser and can thus exert more force in its flow; tides are a lot more predictable than wind patterns..

sure, directly translated it'd be a fish-grinder the same way the air ones are supposedly bird-grinders. but going back to water being denser, i bet we'd find we could make a more efficient archimedes-corkscrew kinda turbine instead of something like an airplane propeller.

cayenne pepper, etcetc.

something that won't spoil and stink, is nonlethal, and non-appetizing to rats. get a rag and fill it full of the stuff, then wipe down your cables.