Breaking the System

I read this great article on Wired today, http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/ff_lottery/. If you have a chance to read the article you will learn some very interesting things about the world. Firstly, there are systems behind everything. Secondly, there are some very smart people who bother to take the time to figure out the systems. And finally, the people who invent and run the systems do not generally react to the problems.

Now, I'm not about to go and teach a class about breaking the lottery system, but I think that it brings out an important part of technology that many people seem to ignore.

Take a movie, for example, Live Free or Die Hard (2007). In this movie, the idea is that "hackers" in a mobile workstation (a semi), have the ability to hack the world and create a "firestorm". In this movie, these hackers are made out to be these shady characters who operate exclusively in DOS, and access non-Internet-linked systems from their laptops.

But what if it didn't take these computer gods to break the system. I think we must consider the possibility that the are people such as the topic of that article who have that capability, and could pull off some incredible technological feats if given the opportunity.

Food for though, I think!