It's easier to ban dangerous products than ignorant people

It's easier to ban dangerous products than ignorant people

Posted Dec 11, 2008 19:57 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)
In reply to: usermod as non-root user by felixfix
Parent article: Fedora and CAPP

Ban the tool when the tool itself is harmless, rather than the subset of its actions which are the real evil.

It's always easier (and more politically "correct") to ban dangerous products/tools rather than ignorant and/or unintelligent people. Notice that I don't mention evil/malicious people, as we (supposedly) have a law enforcement and criminal justice infrastructure to deal with them.

While there's some cynicism in my comment, I generally agree with you—There's a lot of regulatory compliance (e.g., the OSHA labels) forced upon consumer products—some might argue too much—because the consumer public simply has too much to think about at any given moment to fully understand the consequences of (mis-)using things. Like a simple usermod(8) shell command.

---

(Log in to post comments)