Millionaire hacker gets 9 years in death of man building nuclear bunker tunnels
baltimoresun.com
baltimoresun.com
I dispute all posts saying "the sentence is too harsh" and that this was "a genuine accident." This person is dangerous and willfully endangered others in his pursuits.
This type of "accident" would not happen "in normal circumstances" because there is no normal circumstance in which your employer intentionally masks your location and forces you to defecate into a bucket in the basement of their own home.
Personally I believe Daniel used the investment he made in the victim's company to manipulate him into this situation.
From my POV it was only a matter of time that he did something that resulted in serious harm. It is terribly unfortunate that someone had to lose their life before he was able to get help for his mental illness.
I do not have an axe to grind against him personally, nor do I lack empathy for the mentally ill. But for those quick to jump to the other side, you should know what the experience is like living near someone in this circumstance. It is quite viscerally terrifying, to the extent that I have made no public comments about this for fear of retribution on his part despite the fact he'll be separated from society for quite some time.
> https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlueAndOrangeMor...
Dealing with mentally ill people is quite challenging, but if one is 'walking on eggshells to avoid ..' one is doing it wrong. The necessary role for the healthy person is to be the healthy person, and not let the ill person's issue distort healthy behavior.
He was building a series of tunnels beneath a bomb shelter to protect himself from an impending nuclear war with North Korea.
He’s not weird, he’s crazy.
The problem is not that he built some tunnels. The problem is that he lethally endangered his employee. Rich people make tasteless decisions all the time (for proof, drive through any tony suburb). It is important that their tastelessness not be negligent.
I do think there's a huge double standard where companies get treated better than individuals, but I also think that this guy ignored enough regulations regarding construction that he should definitely be held liable for this death.
I expect that a lot of people here would prefer not to be personally liable because some bug they were responsible for caused a significant financial loss much less an injury even though they worked for a company.
If you are an individual, you should probably set up a corporate structure and take out insurance.
Your example about a software bug is a great one- that would clearly be a civil issue in most cases, but in the case that the law was broken in the process (say, a car company explicitly programs their vehicles to have lower emissions during testing than they do in real world scenarios) then you should expect some jailtime[1].
So going back to my example- if people follow the law but kill someone during testing (such as with Uber) then they probably shouldn't be held criminally liable, but if they are breaking the law (like comma.ai did) and kill someone as a result I would be shocked if they weren't held criminally liable.
1. https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/6/16743308/volkswagen-olive...
As cold and cynical it is, what the self-driving car "pioneers" are doing -- it's not nearly as reckless (and flat-out clueless) as what this guy did.
We don't allow people to drive without seatbelts because of the risk of them losing control and causing avoidable fatalities but half-baked autonomous machines vaguely guessing about what might be in front of them are perfectly ok?
Disclaimer: Written from my Model S at a Supercharger, having driven over 10k miles on autopilot/navigate on autopilot in the last 6 months
The particular malice here, I believe, was that he was texted about an emergency, and did not respond in a timely manner.
Does that mean that he was unable to get out of the tunnel by himself? If the poor guy was trapped in a hole with no way out then you could argue that this goes beyond being a simple accident.
Auto-steer is just one step above radar cruise control, which is also semi-autonomous and hugely buggy. Shipping cars come with radar cruise which suddenly turns off below 25 mph, presumably because radar processing is imprecise with position. No one is crusading to ban it.
Furthermore, using a massive training set comparing against human interventions is precisely how you get up the safety curve given the current tech approach, which will never suffice for full autonomy sans humans.
I say this as someone who does a great deal of unprofessional carpentry, electrical work, mechanical repair, excavation, plumbing, etc. for myself and for family members. I would never have gone willingly into that hole. I certainly would never have asked anyone else to do so. No unexploited worker would have done this work.
- an underground multi-level beach hut: https://youtu.be/AojTrc_UMaM
- apocalypse bunker under his shed: https://youtu.be/KO25JYAaJC0
Property owners should be able to do their own work on their own property or act as their own general contractors. Disallowing that is right up there with gated communities that tell you exactly how tall your grass should be but that's the only way to prevent this kind of thing. I don't think everone's (already highly limited) right do what they want on their own property should be further curtailed because of one bad actor.
Yes that would have been too expensive for Beckwitt, and he would have never been able to get permits for it. That would have been society functioning correctly.
To simply all those considerations down to "double standards is crazy" literally puts them on the same plane of judgable circumstances.
You have something against the pursuit for automotive driving which is understandable/admirable, but to do so like this is cheapening both sides.
In order for this to happen he had ignore this body of safe practice knowledge that has been built up. Safety regulations are written in blood and to ensure that more blood isn't spilt unsafe practices that result in death have to be punished.
I don't think that there is an equivalent with the autonomous cars issue. It is a young field and we still don't know what the acceptable practices are in it.
http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2013-01-22/former-ui-...
This podcast has been around for a while but I recently discovered it and has become a personal favorite.
In the last few years I have become increasingly aware of a trend where we wonder if successful people with blatant signs of being an idiot are in fact geniuses. My recent favorite being the pizza bomber woman from the aptly but honestly completely inappropriately named Netflix documentary “Evil Genius”. (I would recommend maybe two episodes and then just wikipedia’ing the rest)
I’m curious if this is Protestant work ethic fallacies in American culture or if it is prevalent elsewhere too.
> I’m curious if this is Protestant work ethic fallacies in American culture or if it is prevalent elsewhere too.
In my opinion (as a German), the reason rather lies in the fact that very smart people (by, say, IQ), (IMHO rightfully) observe that their intelligence does not lead to success. So they try to "reverse-engineer" the "true success formula". For this, it is obvious that people who are "idiots", but very successful provide good test cases to validate/disprove the "reverse-engineered success formula".
Coincidentally (?), the phrase occurs in the novel shortly before a politician is evacuated from the capitol building through a secret Cold-War-era civil defense tunnel.
So bizarre.
"Nobody" is willing to appoint such "millionaire" hackers as "benevolent dicators" in multiple countries, which would be near to a necessity to enable them to avert this scenario. So the best they can do is dig holes.
It should be telling that I created a throwaway account to post this for fear of my safety _even if he won't get out for another decade_.
The sentencing is harsh to say the least.
Because they are prepare themselves for the scenarios that they believe might happen and will be uncomfortable for them. You cannot mitigate against all conspiracies, but for some, prepping is a form of mitigation against the possible consequences.
It's about time he lost his shirt over that, you can't have people throw around accusations of that sort.