Re: CIA Fears UmpTeen InfoNukes

Mike M Nally wrote:

>By the way, there was a thing in the Yahoo/Reuters feed about "attacks"
>on DoD computers; apparently British police arrested a "hacker" the
>other day.  Anyway, the article included a claim that there have been
>250,000 attempted break-ins on DoD computers over the past year.
>
>Does anybody know how they count
that?
>
>______c____________________________________________________________________
_
>Mike M Nally * Tiv^H^H^H IBM * Austin TX    * pain is inevitable  
>       m5@tivoli.com * m101@io.com          *
>      <URL:http://www.io.com/~m101>         * suffering is optional
>

Probably the same way other things are counted when used to make a
political point (# of homeless people, # of date rape victims, etc.).  Make
a wild-ass guess based on a very small sample, then multiply by a factor of
10 or 100.  I think lying with statistics has become a national pastime
recently.  I tend to not trust numbers issued by folks who stand to gain
from the use of the numbers.

	Clay

***************************************************************************
Clay Olbon II       *      Clay.Olbon@dynetics.com
Systems Engineer    *    PGP262 public key on web page
Dynetics, Inc.      * http://www.msen.com/~olbon/olbon.html
***************************************************************** TANSTAAFL

On 26 Jun 1996, Clay Olbon II wrote:

> 
> Probably the same way other things are counted when used to make a
> political point (# of homeless people, # of date rape victims, etc.).  Make
> a wild-ass guess based on a very small sample, then multiply by a factor of
> 10 or 100.  I think lying with statistics has become a national pastime
> recently.  I tend to not trust numbers issued by folks who stand to gain
> from the use of the numbers.
> 
> 	Clay
> 

Lying with statistics probably started with the invention of the same. 
Mark Twain put it best:

"There are lies, damn lies, and statistics"

:-)

...Paul