Scribit Bas Wijnen dies 28/04/2006 hora 15:21: > > I admit I do sometimes think the same way (and do act in this way), > > but I'm not sure it's not morally objectionable, sincerely. > It isn't, it is worth a lot of praise. The position of "I didn't do > anything wrong, I only made it posible" combined with "I didn't know I > was doing anything wrong, it was so easy" directly leads to bad things > happening.
But we were not talking about doing or letting anyone do something wrong. Instead, we talked about morally objectionable uses, which is very different IMO. > In practice, Alice can give Bob a binary, and it's well-known that > reverse-engineering a binary is much harder than simply redoing the > thing. Still, this assertion is far from true in all cases, and thus should not be considered a valid argument to prevent a feature. > > Your conclusions about the fact that reverse engineering is harder > > than writing from scratch, that NDA are dangerous and than educating > > people instead of limiting them are, at best, true in the general > > case. > Eh, what is true in the general case is also true in a specific > case... You don't seem to mean that. Maybe I was not as clear in English as I would have been in French: the conlusions are _usually_ true (which translates in French to « en général »), not always. > > But building principles on the general or, worse, ideal case is a > > very dogmatic position, IMHO. > Of course it is. What's the difference between a dogma and a design > principle? A dogma is a definite position that cannot admit any exception. Only in mathematics, AFAIK, do principles never admit exceptions. Design principles are not inflexible laws, merely strong guidelines. > We should still educate Bob that he should talk to Alice and they > would both be more productive when they look at each other's code. Typically, yes. But when you teach, you quickly learn that showing even a part of the solution is sometimes the worst thing to do with some students. Semantically, Nowhere man -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] OpenPGP 0xD9D50D8A
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