but as a member of humanity the least you can do is not help someone (who looks sketchy, talks sketchy, and acts sketchy) you see trying to bust through a window of with their fists, by pointing out that a brick or a sledge hammer would work better.
But that's not the case here. Imagine if you were a hardware store employee, and someone in the store asked you what would be more useful to break a window, a brick or a sledge hammer -- you'd have no way to know why they wanted the information. You'd just answer them, and that would be the right thing to do -- unless they told you why they wanted it.

Providing the information when unclear about intent is the right thing to do. Making your own choice about providing the information when intent is clear is probably the right thing to do as well.

There are two goals at work here, and they work against each other in a situation like this -- Security, and Information Transfer. Information Transfer is the more important goal, IMHO, but even more important than that is the fact that the intent is the point of failure, the reason that the window's going to get broken isn't because of a recommendation from a hardware store employee. It's because there's a punk looking to break stuff.

Admittedly, once intent becomes clear, this is not an issue any more. When freak indicated this was for Bad Things, then I would agree that it becomes personal choice about the resulting actions.

Even in a court of law, the hardware store employee who sold the vandal the sledge hammer would be untouchable -- UNLESS the intent was communicated, in which case there could be a tenuous concept of conspiracy. (Not that I'm aligning myself with the legal system, just saying that even a courtroom would be hard pressed to say that you're facilitating a crime if you don't know one is going to occur.)



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You are what you think.

In reply to Re^2: Information sharing by chaoticset
in thread Information sharing by dragonchild

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