I had cataract surgery in my left eye (which is the dominant eye) four years ago, at age 49. I had cataract surgery in the right eye 18 months later.
Simply put--as your eyes cloud over, your brain has to work substantially harder to compensate. Your brain has to decipher blurred vision, compensate for the "halo" effect cataracts give you around bright lights (the reason why older people don't drive at night is the halo effect of oncoming headlights--completely blinding them).
All of that changes with cataract surgery--you don't just see better. (And you see MUCH better--if you wore corrective lenses beforehand they implant a custom-fit lens that corrects your vision to 20/20 or better.) All of the "clock cycles" that your brain was devoting to countering the effects of cataracts (even things like keeping your balance) are all of a sudden freed up. The change is dramatic--it really is life-transforming.
My mother-in-law is 90--she had cataract surgery last fall. Last summer, before the surgery, her daughters were wondering about "what are we going to do about Mom"--at the time I suggested that they wait till after the cataract surgery; I was sure it would have a big impact. Boy, did it--my mother-in-law is active, alert, far more capable, and busy with plans for an expanded vegetable garden this summer.
Until you go through the experience, you can't really understand how much effort your brain puts into interpreting what you see. The impact of cataract surgery is unbelievable.
You can find tons of public domain music at the Werner Icking Music Archive, save the PDFs, and open the PDFs in PhotoScore. You can then open them in Sibelius or another music editing application.
The overwhelming majority of lawsuits never go to trial. But the cost of simply responding to a lawsuit can be staggering. Prior to the enactment of the SPEECH Act, the owners of TechDirt could ignore Jeffrey Morris and his U.K. attorney, and not respond to their lawsuit. However, were Morris to actually file suit in a U.K. court, and TechDirt did not respond, the court would more or less automatically find for the plaintiff by "default judgment."
You got that part--the question you're asking is, "so what?"
Read the letter from the lawyer at the TechDirt article: Addlestone (the lawyer) makes plain that he will litigate in the U.K., win a judgment--and then promises to pursue "relief" in the U.S. courts. That's the threat.
Once they win in the U.K., they can file suit in the U.S. to collect on a judgment issued by a court in the U.K. Before the SPEECH Act, a U.S. court would, at the least, hold a hearing to determine whether the suit has merit. That--by itself--would involve major legal fees. Large enough fees that TechDirt would probably be wiser to offer a settlement, paying Morris (and his attorney) cash to go away.
The SPEECH Act changes that: Morris and his attorney can go into court in the U.K., get a judgment, and bring their judgment to the U.S. Where a judge will simply throw them out of court--potentially awarding attorney's fees to TechDirt.
In addition to encouraging you to RTFA, let me strongly encourage you to consider the political position consistently advocated by the paper that published the FA. The Guardian makes no pretense at all of being balanced, centrist, unbiased, or apolitical. This is the British newspaper (and web site) that developed a web site with the names and addresses of registered voters in Ohio, and encouraged their readers to write to them to exhort them to vote for John Kerry rather than George Bush. (Bush won Ohio by a handful of votes--which Ohio politicos attributed to the furious backlash the Guardian created, but that's another story.)
In other words, the Guardian article is an advocacy piece meant to alarm, rather than enlighten. If you're a Brit, this will come as no surprise--if you're as Internet-savvy as a SlashDot reader should be, you shouldn't be surprised, either.
The sun will come up tomorrow, even in Texas...
Despite the panicked anxiety of the writer (and the New York Times, here), it's not terribly controversial to emphasize the strong Christian views of many of America's founders. Which is not to say that America's Constitution is a statement of Christian faith--which is often how this argument is misconstrued. (A standard freshman year American History exam question is to compare and contrast the Christian and Deist views expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.) But it is interesting to know that in most U.S. states you had to be a professing Christian in order to run for political office--it provides a perspective on our First Amendment that is all-too-often missing when discussing what the "separation of church and state" means. (What it meant, then, was that no state could "establish" a church--in the way that the Church of England is established in the U.K., or the Lutheran Church is established in Denmark. They're supported by taxes, their leadership is appointed by government, etc.--they are state religions. Jefferson wrote about a "vast wall separating church and state" to reassure Baptists in New England that they would not face oppression by Congregationalists.).
Isaac Newton vs. military technology:
Well gosh--I can see the insidious hand of Sarah Palin here, too. Or...perhaps, it might be worthwhile to consider that the intentional pursuit of military technology as a means of achieving battlefield superiority has been a hallmark of U.S. strategy since the Civil War. Especially in Texas, home to Ft. Hood, Ft. Sam Houston, Lackland AFB, and most U.S. Air Force pilot training. To me (who majored in Economics and American History) that sounds like a pretty perceptive point to make. I'd include Isaac Newton, too--but presumably they decided something had to give. Oh, well.
Guns
TFA breathlessly tells Brit readers that:
The new curriculum asserts that "the right to keep and bear arms" is an important element of a democratic society.
One can understand that this would so shock a Brit that he might drop his second or third pint of Guinness Stout that he'd swilled that day. Which is to say, what a Brit might find commonplace (down two or three pints of Guinness Stout in the U.S. and you're a de facto alcoholic) in the U.S. is seen as entirely normative. Again--given that the entire point of the Second Amendment was a direct reaction to the abuses of British occupation forces prior to American independence--this is a pretty welcome emphasis on the impact of early American history on our constitution and present-day policy. Not to mention, of course, that in Texas even self-avowed liberals emphasize their support for "Second Amendment Rights".
Think critically--read critically
I'm far less bothered by this article (it's the Guardian, for heaven's sake, what would you expect?) than I am by the fact that SlashDot's editors include
This is pretty simple. North Carolina is bluffing, hoping that Amazon will not take this to the federal appellate courts.
There is longstanding legal precedent banning government authorities from requiring bookstores or libraries to disclose information about a customer's interests. This has been litigated repeatedly, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; the rulings have subsequently been applied to videotape/CD rentals as well. There is related case law pertaining to the subscription lists of magazines and newspapers--but that's a slightly different subject.
Brief synopsis of legal history:
A brief synopsis of bookstore and library privacy issues can be found at ReaderPrivacy.org.
But there's a bit more
As the Reader Privacy article notes, the PATRIOT Act (rushed into law immediately after the 9/11 tragedy) specifically gives the FBI the ability to subpoena purchase records from bookstores, as well as borrowing records from libraries. However--that power is limited to the FBI (although it can probably be exercised by other federal law enforcement agencies)--but it requires a federal judge to sign the warrant, based on probable cause, naming a specific individual. That gives no support at all to a state sales tax authority asking for a complete data dump of 7 years worth of purchase transactions.
In short--this will annoy Amazon's management, provide hefty fees for a bunch of lawyers, and produce a grand total of zero revenue for the state of North Carolina.
I did a bunch of work for a dot-com startup in the early 2000s focusing on vehicle-tracking applications. I have a daughter with Down syndrome; Downs kids tend to wander too, so we looked at this issue quite hard. The good news: the technology is pretty straightforward. The bad news: that's about the only good news.
Batteries
A GPS chipset enables a controller embedded in the shoes (or on a device strapped to the person) to know where it is. The second half of the problem is to transmit your location to somebody else. The simplest and cheapest approach is sending the data via the cell phone system--eight years ago we were using the digital control channels of the AMPS (analog) cell system; today you'd use G3. But think of the problems you have keeping your cell phone charged--how often would you recharge the batteries in your patient's (or your child's) shoes?
GPS
GPS is a really cool technology--but it is frequently viewed as the high-tech cure for what ails ya. It is not perfect. In particular, GPS depends upon an extremely weak signal--the GPS chipsets use DSPs to dig the signal out of the ether. GPS chipsets lose "lock" all the time. If the patient is wandering around outside in plain sight, his GPS coordinates are going to be accurate. But when the chipset loses "lock" on the satellites, tracking devices will continue to report the last known good position. This can be disastrous: the patient wanders from a nursing facility out onto the public street--and gets on a bus. Inside that nice, big aluminum box he can ride all the way downtown--and his GPS-enabled sneakers will continue to report that he's out in the nursing home parking lot.
There's a serious challenge to solving problems with technology--you also have to make sure that the people who depend upon that technology know (and act on the knowledge) that it must be maintained, or it will fail. Consider, for just a moment, how many people die of smoke inhalation every year even though they have smoke detectors in their homes. But they didn't change the batteries....
There's a much smarter solution
As I mentioned above, I looked at this issue long and hard with a dot-com startup eight years ago. As we looked at it, we found a substantially better solution than GPS. Project Lifesaver is a not-for-profit organization started in Chesapeake, Virginia that has developed a simple, effective solution targeted at Alzheimers patients, Downs kids, and other "wanderers." The patient has a small bracelet (like a hospital bracelet) attached to his or her wrist: once per minute the bracelet broadcasts a serial value on a digital (i.e. low-power) frequency. If/when a patient goes missing, the people responsible for the patient call the police or the sheriff's office. The cops arrive with two directional antennas tuned to the frequency: they go off in different directions, do a little bit of trigonometry, and Grandpa is back in the facility in less than ten minutes.
The Project Lifesaver solution is not perfect. They have the same battery issue that the "GPS sneakers" approach has (the GPS sneakers approach has been tried again, and again, and again). They also will only work with local law enforcement agencies--in our county the @##$%#^^# sheriff cannot be bothered. They have had a lot of success with local service clubs funding the cost of the bracelets, and (more important) paying for and replacing the batteries.
The GPS sneakers thing sounds like cool technology. Using differential antennas and good ol' trig is much more effective. My daughter still wanders off occasionally (and we live adjacent to a state park)--I wish we could take advantage of the Project Lifesaver program here.
I don't mean to do something contrary to the spirit and ethos of SlashDot--but please allow me to apologize. You're entirely correct--my response to your post was really more of a generalized response to a number of posts I'd read that evinced an attitude of
We're grad students, so
We're smarter than you industry dolts, so
We can't be held accountable for safety
That's not the point that you made, and I was unfair in teeing off on your post.
Australian standards?
But your response reminds me--you have been involved in defining safety standards for your lab. The practical effect of U.S. liability law is that, in essence, we don't care about safety standards: we are entirely focused on making sure nobody gets hurt. We cannot use "but my product met the safety standard" as a defense in court: the literature is full of examples of people who did stupid things with well-designed products and collected big damage awards when (surprise!) somebody got hurt. (Tractor-trailer driver pulls out onto a two-lane road, oncoming car cannot stop in time, driver of the car is decapitated. The family sues...the trailer manufacturer. And wins.)
Can you use "we met the safety standards" as an affirmative defense in Australia?
For the record, I'm a software developer. And over the course of my career I have done a lot of software development related to the production, distribution, and use of very hazardous gases and chemicals, including weapons-grade nerve gas agents; I presently work for a large engineering company that makes high-voltage components used on building construction. I am current on lab safety training for handling very high-voltage current (simulating lightning strikes) for UL certification.
First off, let's dispense with the silly notion that nobody is doing experimentation in industry. We're not just trotting out books of alchemy and chanting "bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble" as we stir the cauldron. We're figuring out hard subjects like how to build stuff without a) burning buildings down, or b) kill people. We evaluate issues like that all the time.
The big difference, as TFA plainly states, is that in industry you simply cannot ignore safety. Two of the hazmat producers I have done work for have much the same attitude toward safety: there is no such thing as an accident (corollary: there IS such a thing as a negligent attitude toward safety); and safety failure is inexcusable. (The former client I most respect assesses the cost of any safety violation to the manager with profit-and-loss responsibility for the business unit. He starts the year with a $0 line item for safety violations--he has to explain to the board of directors if he exceeds his line item budget. It tends to focus the manager's attention.)
Ignoring a safety issue (such as the citation of lack of safety equipment by UCLA's in-house safety folks three months before the accident) is manslaughter, pure and simple. The responsible parties should go to prison. The "business unit" (in this case, academic department) should be disbanded. Do that once, somewhere, publicly--you'll be amazed at the impact on everybody else. Somebody gets killed in the Chemistry lab? Fire the professor responsible for the lab, fire the department chair who allowed the professor to permit this kind of gross negligence, and fire everybody else involved. Then turn 'em over to the police.
Think that's unrealistic? It's pretty much the atmosphere in which a lot of industry functions. There used to be a time when a business could figure that an occasional death--and the resulting Workmen's Compensation claim--represented an acceptable cost of doing business. Those days are long gone--get somebody killed, and you can face criminal prosecution. And personally, I think that's a good thing.
Firstly, any software running in a medical device (i.e. mammogram machine) has to be certified.
Please re-read my post: I'm referring to the setup of a standard-issue PC with high-end video displays for the purpose of reading the mammography after the image was taken. No--it doesn't have to be "certified"--radiologists can read "film" on a notebook if they so choose.
FUD? Not.
I'm guessing that most of your study of the law has come from watching TV. The whole problem of "joint and several liability" in American tort law is that plaintiffs do not have to prove any "chain of causality"--they don't even have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the software you developed did anything wrong. (The "reasonable doubt" standard applies to criminal trials. The standard for civil litigation is demonstrating a "preponderence of evidence".)
In order to win a civil suit the plaintiff has to be able to demonstrate that an actual injury occurred; and that the defendants--jointly and severally, by a preponderence of evidence--caused that injury in whole or in part.
Examples:
Way too many to decide which one to use. Recall that, in my original post, I was the system architect for the claims management system used by a major commercial insurer for handling liability suits. Our design work involved reviewing hundreds of current and former liability claims--mostly those claims that went all the way to trial. I have subsequently been involved professionally in legal and financial systems in the U.S., Canada, and Asia.
Posting angry comments here on SlashDot can be recreational--but all the ranting and raving anyone does here won't make a bit of difference in the real world.
What WILL make a difference in the real world, of course, is taking advantage of all of the links so helpfully provided in TFA. All you have to do is send a polite email to some of the people involved, pointing out that the two Loomis employees acted really foolishly; that the REI "loss prevention officer" made REI look...well, like losers; and that the Seattle Police Department really, really needs to send a couple of officers off to Constitution Camp.
Here's the email I just sent to the U.S. headquarters of Loomis (employer of the guards who started this nonsense):
Folks,
It looks like two of your employees went way, way far out of their way to find something to step in this morning in Seattle:
Follow the link: it shows a photo of your two employees, shortly before they grossly violated the civil rights of a law-abiding citizen. And had their stupidity compounded by the Seattle police.
Talk to somebody in your I.T. department who is knowledgeable about the Internet. Ask him or her what happens when a story like this gets posted all over the web. About how tens, or hundreds of thousands of emails flood in to the responsible parties (like, for instance, REI--YOUR CUSTOMER). And how that can have a really, really damaging impact on YOUR CUSTOMER's business.
Then you might consider the impact on your relationship with a corporate customer after two of your employees have exposed them to a phenomenal amount of really, really bad publicity.
You might want to think about how you could mollify this guy.
Cheers!
Oh--and just to save you the trouble, I emailed your corporate headquarters in Sweden to bring them up to speed on the story too.
Civil rights are like muscles. If you don't exercise them, they waste away.
I'm a bit mystified about this post--software developers already are liable for damages and/or injury caused by flaws in their work. There's a whole category of liability insurance (and matching case law to boot) around the subject. In the insurance business it's called "software errors and omissions."
If you're not aware of this...
you're either not in the software business, or you probably should be talking to your insurance agent. If you work in the United States, do business in the United States, or can be found to have a "business nexus" within the United States, you can find yourself named as a respondent in a U.S. liability lawsuit. And there's a nasty little element of U.S. liability law known as "joint and several liability" that essentially means that whether you are at fault or not, if the jury finds that the plaintiff was injured--and that some degree of the fault lies with any of the respondents, all of the respondents are jointly responsible to pay damages.
An earlier post in this topic wrote, in essence, "between the developers, the tester, the customer, the business analyst--good luck figuring out who made the mistake." That's the point of joint and several liability--they sue all of you. The jury doesn't have to decide whether it was the tester, the developer, the analyst, or the end user. So long as at least some part of the injury was caused by negligence of some kind--you can be found liable.
The Achilles heel of Open Source
Suppose you join a project on SourceForge--like a nifty project to develop Open Source Linux video drivers for high-end plasma video displays. You produce some really spectacular work--and you draw the applause of a small community of really high-end gamers when you ship your first release.
But, unbeknownst to you, a networking consultant in New Jersey finds your project, and uses it to provide a low(er)-cost solution for a radiologist who uses the same video card/monitor system to read CAT scans. The radiologist is reading mammograms.
(Ominous chord plays here.)
Seventeen months later, a woman is diagnosed with an "aggressive" form of breast cancer. Had it been detected earlier, she might not have required a mastectomy, or serious chemotherapy. Now she has lost both breasts, and all of her hair has fallen out. She--and her attorneys--want to know why the radiologist didn't find the problem in the mammogram seventeen months earlier.
Right. The mammogram the radiologist viewed on a high-end plasma display. Using an Open Source video driver. The one you helped to develop.
Another ominous chord. This time in a minor key.
You are in deep yogurt. And whether the video driver had anything to do with it at all, you can expect to be served notice that you have been sued in federal court. And you will then be staggered to discover just how much it costs just to respond to the lawsuit. And the fact that you didn't get paid a dime--hey, it was Open Source, right?--doesn't make a lick of difference.
Fairness, Justice, and the Law are Three Different Things...
Fifteen years ago I was the system architect on a project to manage liability insurance claims for a very, very large insurance company. A liability claim is a lawsuit--we evaluated all kinds of circumstances (prior history in this jurisdiction, prior history with this judge, who the plaintiff was, who plaintiff's counsel was, who our counsel was, yadda yadda yadda). We went through a bunch of factors, carefully weighing each of them, till we got to the end of the process. The very last questions were--does plaintiff have an injured child to show in the courtroom? Does plaintiff have a disfigured woman to show in the courtroom? Does plaintiff have a dying victim--particularly with soon-to-be-orphaned small children--to show in the courtroom? If so, then all bets were off--it did not matter in the slightest if our
The first (and perhaps still only) municipality in the world to wire every single building in the town with fiber optic. As a municipal service. You pay for it the same way you pay for trash collection, sewer, water, phone, and electricity.
Outsourcing has nothing to do with H1B. I'm talking about hiring staff on H1Bs at half the salary that you'd give to a US citizen.
I'm sorry that I wasn't more clear. What AIG did was to lay off Americans, and replace them with H1Bs working here, in America. This wasn't off-shoring--this was train-your-replacement-who-is-getting-one-third-what-you-do.
As far as I know, there has been no major disclosure or legal action against a practice like this. All that has been are stories that people have put up in the web.
Yes--there has. AIG (the company that got the biggest bailout) tried to lay off almost 90% of their I.T. people back in the early 1990s--and outsource all of their jobs to an Indian company. The backlash was fast and furious--Maurice Greenberg, then the CEO, spent major time in front of Congress explaining.
I'm not particularly afraid of H-1Bs (although they do depress wages)--but just want to point out that there is a factual basis for the complaints.
I've traveled out of the U.S. and back in five or six times so far this year--I have traveled outside the U.S. dozens of times over the past fifteen years.
Every single time I was carrying a notebook or portable PC. I have never, ever been stopped, searched, or seen anyone else get hassled.
That said, though:
One thing I have observed at border control in several countries (most notably Japan) is that if the authorities feel you are being disrepectful, they will become far more inquisitive. And if you get "uppity"--particularly if you start shooting off your mouth about your constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms (while entering another country) you are just begging to get hassled.
My sense of the horror stories about notebook seizures, etc., is that somebody made an ass of himself, and the feds decided to make his life miserable. That's not to excuse what they're doing--but a suggestion that if you make even the slightest effort to act and dress presentably, you're not likely to have a problem.
I'm at a loss trying to decide who I have less sympathy for--T-Mobile for thinking they can charge $10 for a Wi-Fi connection, or Starbucks for thinking that providing the $10 connection is going to bring in the 'Net-savvy customer.
Panera Bread Company and McDonald's are both offering free (as in beer) Wi-Fi access. In my experience McD's Wi-Fi is not terribly consistent--it appears to depend heavily on the technical sophistication of the local franchise owner. Panera Bread, on the other hand, has been uniformly consistent all across the country.
(We're developing a "routinely connected" application that we're deploying on sales reps' notebooks--so we're carefully watching Wi-Fi hotspot deployment. We *love* Panera Bread Company--if they'd give us an updated list of locations each month we'd publish it to our reps.)
Nope--I'm not stoned, and I'm not insane. And while I'm not a patent attorney, I am involved with patents and intellectual property development for an electronics company.
Why patent something this simple?
There are zillions of patents out there for seemingly trivial things. Case in point: Amazon.com's infamous "one-click" shopping patent. Why in the world would anybody want to patent this? The patent application in TFA would seem to fall into the same category--why in the world would Microsoft want to patent something so obvious as an emoticon?
It's not the patent--it's where the patent application is filed
Different countries have different systems of patent application. In the U.S., patents are issued--and litigated--based on the principle of first discovery. If you and I each--independently--discover a method for creating, oh, temporary freckles, the USPTO will award the patent to whichever of us can demonstrate that we reduced our idea to fixed form (in most cases, wrote down a detailed description of the invention) first. It doesn't matter that you filed first--if I came up with the invention months before you, and can prove it, I win.
Many other countries use a different system, named "first to file." This system eliminates the litigation over who wrote down how much when, and at what point was enough written down to have something worthy of a patent. Many Europeans tout this as a feature of their system. But "first to file" has a nasty side effect: you can be the first to file about all sorts of stuff, and thereby prevent anybody else from doing something that seems obvious.
Think of this as the patent equivalent of domain squatting
Remember domain squatting? In the early days of the World Wide Web entrepreneurs were registering the name of every corporation in the world--in the expectation that when Amalgamated Widget came to want a web site, they'd have to buy amalgamatedwidget.com domain. The difference between "first to file" and "first discovery" can be used in the same kind of way: a patent filed for something trivial (like emoticons) can be issued in a "first to file" country. So long as the applicant, or the patent authority, are not aware of a competing patent in existance some place else, the applicant gets the patent.
So what? So suppose a company in the U.S., like Qualcomm (developers of Eudora, which has displayed emoticons to warn you of offensive language since at least version 6) notices that a patent has been issued for emoticons in a "first to file" country like France. That patent is worthless in the U.S.--Qualcomm developed the technology first. But it effectively blocks Qualcomm from selling Eudora in France--because Qualcomm's own invention violates the French poacher's patent.
So what do you do?
If you're working with technology in a "first discovery" country (principally the U.S.) you have to make a point of patenting everything--especially all the teensy-tiny innovations that make your product special. Because if one of those key features is not patented, you can be shut out of a huge market by some wise guy who beats you to the patent office.
How bad is it? Suppose that you're in the electrical devices business--and you come out with a new line of designer outlets. Suppose that you include a useful improvement on the outlet design--you chamfer the edges of the receptacle to make it ever-so-much easier to stick the plug in the wall. A nice little effect--but people have been chamfering edges to make connections easier for decades, so why bother paying the fees to file a patent? Bring out your new line of 240-volt electrical receptacles for Europe--and some joker runs down to the patent office in Vienna, filing a patent on chamfering electrical receptacles. That patent is worthless in the U.S.--but it shuts you out of Austria, which probably means that European electrical distributors and retailers won't carry your line at all. You have to pay off the poacher to "li
Legally, this isn't hard. The parents are not being prosecuted--they are being sued for damages by the assistant principal. The assistant principal claims to have suffered sleepless nights and other forms of injury as a result of this defamatory website, and seeks to recover damages from the parents of the kids who have harmed her.
This is called a "tort."
A tort is an injury--here is a link to the Wikipedia page on torts involving negligence. The assistant principal is claiming that the parents were negiligent in supervising their children, and the assistant principal was harmed as a result. She is suing for damages.
A couple of observations:
First--there's a fundamental rule of litigation: it is one thing to bring a lawsuit--depending upon the jurisdiction (and Texas certainly fits this description), your dog can file a lawsuit. It is something else entirely to bring that lawsuit to trial; it is something else to actually win the case.
Second, it's pretty likely that the assistant principal has no expectation of this case ending up in court. She is suing the parents--if the parents own real estate, their homeowners insurance policies will almost certainly include broad form liability protection. That's essentially lawsuit insurance--the parents turn to their insurance companies, and the insurors will likely attempt to settle the case for a couple of bucks to make it go away.
Third, the first and second points describe, in glaring detail, some of what is significantly wrong with the American legal system.
Does she have a case?
It seems to me that this is one of those matters where both parties are jerks. The boys were jerks--that's why they attracted the attention of the assistant principal to start with. Then they demonstrated that they were jerks by putting up a web site mocking the assistant principal. Do assistant principals pick on kids in high school? Sure. Do big boys take their punishment without whining? They should. These two are jerks.
On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that the assistant principal is a jerk, too. If she managed to get the job of being assistant principal without noticing that the job includes a fair measure of criticism, she's not just a jerk, she's stupid too. But she is more than just a jerk--or stupid: she is a government employee. She is a government employee with substantial power--typically the assistant principal can issue (or petition a magistrate to issue) a court summons for a truant student; the assistant principal can also bring action to remove a child from home, sending the child to foster care. An assistant principal can suspend a student--within the walls of a school, an assistant principal is a very powerful figure whose authority is generally not subject to any supervision or right of appeal. And that makes this a constitutional issue.
The Constitutional argument
There are parts of the U.S. Constitution that provoke controversy. The right to criticize public officials in the performance of their duties is not one of them. There is a long and rich history of published criticism of public officials that is far, far more injurious than calling a woman a lesbian. (Abraham Lincoln, for example, was routinely described as having sold his soul to the Devil (here, for instance, and his wife's mental illness was frequently characterized as demon possession--and just reward for her husband's opposition to slavery.) The constitutional protection of a free press is well and widely understood to have a very broad reach. The U.S. Supreme Court held unanimously, a couple of years ago, that web pages are precisely the kind of "pamphleteering" that the framers of the Constitution had in mind. The principal focus of the pamphleteers was criticism of public policy and public officials--and they called people names.
Yes.
The writer of TFA is whining that computers no longer ship with a BASIC interpreter. That's been true since Microsoft shipped Windows 95--and at the time (which, er, was 1995) a number of columnists (including me) noted the loss, and wondered what impact it would have.
Eleven years later....
The earth still continues to revolve around the sun, and kids are still learning to write code. They're not learning to write code by typing in exercises from a math book--they're learning to write code to develop macros in Excel (or OpenOffice Calc); they're learning to write JavaScript to enable custom functionality in Adobe Acrobat files; they're learning to write HTML.
Not to get all pedagogical on you, or anything...
But this may be a circumstance where the Education Establishment is doing something right. Typing code into GW-BASIC produces...what? Typically, an output value. Read these input values, produce that output value. That's a CRT-based emulation of a deck of punch cards--and while I believe I benefited enormously from learning to code on punch cards, very very few people in the programming world agree with me. Think about what the newbie programmer's early coding experiences are like:
Open DOS window
Launch interpreter
Persuade interpreter to load your file
Start the program
Enter two or three input values
See the resulting output value
That experience--being able to compile and run a program in something like real time, was HUGE--in 1974. Nowadays it is so outdated that I'd bet most kids would not see any correlation between that and a computer program that they are familiar with. How do you explain to a ten-year-old that the BASIC exercise from the math book is essentially identical to the internal processes of a video game, a web server, or the embedded micro-processor that drives your microwave oven?
By contrast, a web page is a terrific introduction. Open a simple web page with "View Source", modify the text, and display the new page--it has changed. Iterate several times--add paragraphs, change colors, play with fonts--and the kid gets it. Playing with a text editor (which, incidentally, still does come for free) the student can go a long, long way in HTML. Depending upon his or her interests the student can pursue graphic design, animation, AJAX programming--all sorts of stuff. Key point: the difference between a "Hello World" HTML page and EBay is only a matter of degree--and that is immediately obvious to the student. Making the mental link between an ancient BASIC program and--for instance--a Windows application developed in Visual Basic.Net is not obvious at all.
A case in point...
I have three daughters. Growing up in a house with more computers than people--and a T1 connection to the Internet--they have had more exposure to computers than most kids. The oldest two are in college, and both had summer jobs this year at the electronics company where I work. Daughter #1 worked in customer service role--spending a lot of time with Excel spreadsheets. Somebody asked if she could program--she replied that her dad was a programmer, but she didn't really know how to. As she said this, she was writing Visual Basic macro scripts to automate a lot of manual key-entry for the customer service staff. What she was doing was very similar to the old-fashioned "get input, produce output" coding that punch card decks and BASIC programs performed. But the IDE (in this case, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications) and the paradigm (a GUI) made it extremely easy to understand and do. So easy, in fact, that she didn't really equate it with programming.
In other words,
Don't mourn for GW-BASIC. Spend time with your kids writing HTML, JavaScript, and Excel macros.
Back in 1998-2000, one of my larger clients was ABC News. If you were in the business in the late 90s, the question on everybody's mind was "where are you going to be at midnight, December 31, 1999?" ABC News ran a 24-hour broadcast following the date rollover around the world--I wrote the electronic script that the show ran on, and spent New Years Eve in the ABC control room.
ABC is a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company--one of the main players in the MPAA. Disney has a unique strategy with their video content: they release a backlist title like "Cinderella" for three months, and then do not distribute it again for years. This is a perfect case for Fair Use copying--because if you damage that tape or DVD, you cannot replace it. Disney will not even send you a replacement if you return the original to them.
My youngest daughter, Annie, has Down Syndrome. She loved Disney movies. She would play a particular movie over and over and over--to the point that the videotape would wear out. (She also, I'll admit, conducted an intensive study of just what sorts of things could be stuffed into a videotape player.)
Can Annie be a test case?
Provoked by an article on SlashDot, I wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Would they be interested in having Annie act as the plaintiff to challenge the DMCA on Fair Use grounds? It would be a textbook Fair Use argument: and the case would have all the right "demographics:" a handicapped child, daughter of a vendor to Disney (who, obv., would be severing ties with the client as soon as they put two and two together), making backups of DVDs to enable the child to continue to see content after destroying the original disc--which cannot be replaced commercially.
The EFF was enthusiastic--they called, we talked, life was good. Except that I happened to mention in an email (because of a comment, I seem to recall, about EFF being characterized as a bunch of "radicals" or something like that) that I'm pretty much of a square. I'm a deacon in my church. I'm a registered Republican.
And I never heard another word from them--even after several attempts to contact them.
You have an interesting conversation thread going--please permit me to chime in.
In the U.S. we typically see three-phase power on the street, with two phases (+/- 120v) provided in residential housing. New construction residences typically have 200 amp panels, with each split on the backplane of the distribution panel--so a 240 volt breaker (for a stove, air conditioner, water heater, etc.) will draw from both phases.
Typical home wiring cable includes two jacketed wires (black for common, white for neutral) and a bare wire for ground. If there is a red wire in the cable it traditionally identifies a switched circuit--sometimes it is a traveler in what we call a three-way circuit (two-way everywhere else in the world).
And underground cables? Actually, they're becoming more commonplace across America, primarily because of zoning requirements. A tangle of utility cables tends to lower property values--zoning boards typically require underground utility access for distribution lines (from substations to local transformers, and thence to customers) to keep property values up.
[OP:] If you're great at what you do, there will always be a market for your skill set.
Tell that to the great buggy-whip manufacturers
Hi!
Sorry, but you happened to trigger one of my pet rants. People DO still make buggy whips--and they make buggies, and carts, and drays, and all sorts of horse-drawn conveyances. And they have web sites.
And since I have some knowledge of how prosperous some buggy manufacturers are, and also recruit and hire electrical and computer engineers, I'd venture to guess that the original poster was correct--if you're good at what you do, you'll succeed at whatever you do. I'd be willing to bet money that the family that owns Smucker's Harness does substantially better than your average electrical engineer.
Cheers!
John Murdoch
(Who spent the late afternoon breaking a pony to drive a carriage, and has two buggy whips on his shopping list.)
I work for an electronics manufacturing company--and develop software. I'd recommend standardizing on a very limited number of development tools, and standardizing on a limited number of fasteners.
First, the development tools
There have been 3.2 zillion posts already arguing whether to use a single language or to use any language anybody wants. That's not really the point: what you need to consider is the number of technologies, or skill sets, that you will support. Competency in a language is a skill set--but so is competency with a database server (in addition to the server's database language, like Transact-SQL or PL/SQL), or competency with different libraries or third-party tools. How you decide which skill sets are important is where you demonstrate your wisdom and skill as a manager--but it is crucial to your long-term survival to keep that number as low as possible.
If you've been around application software long enough, you've probably been on a project that included a bunch of this-will-save-so-much-time tools--custom controls, third-party libraries, etc. And then discovered that your team was totally, utterly, fsck'ed when you went to release version 2, and discovered that the libraries had changed, the custom control vendor had gone out of business (or his mother made him get a real job), etc.
It isn't just the risk that the third-party tool won't change with your product--you are also dependent upon the one or two people on your team who mastered that particular tool. If they're gone, you now have to figure out who to task with taking over responsibility of being the GridDotWhatever guru. The more of these skill sets you have to support, the tougher it is to manage a team--and the more bodies you need to keep on a maintenance staff when it is time to scale the development of that product down.
In short--count up all the skill sets your company uses, and do what you can to reduce the number. That's a good strategy.
Limit the number of fasteners, too
The original post includes a comment that standardizing on a language would be just as silly as standardizing on a particular fastener. Well, guess what: you should.
In the real world of manufacturing there are a zillion bits and pieces that go into a product line. If you can use the same micro-processor across a broad range of products, you can achieve economies of scale in purchasing, and you can achieve economies of scale in other areas, like writing code for that particular micro family.
The same is true in lots of other areas--all the way down to screws. If you standardize on a particular screw (say, for instance, 4mm metric-threaded hex-heads of various lengths) you can achieve substantial economies of scale in purchasing, but in all of your manufacturing operations. Machine tools can be fit with bits to drill appropriate holes, robots can be equipped with nut drivers for the 4mm hex head, and so forth. If you permit the kind of anarchy in your mechanical engineering department that the OP's colleagues think is good for programming, you'd have a disaster on your hands.
There's an engineering point, here
There are people who think that software is a form of engineering. I'm not one of them--and this article is a good example of why. There is lots that we can learn from engineering--and there is oodles of stuff that real engineers have known and practiced for a long, long time that we still don't know enough about to even ask. But that's another rant for another time....
Re:What do people with ruined credit do then? Walk
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High-Tech RepoMan
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What do people with ruined credit do, then? Walk?
In short, yes.
I don't make that as a glib statement. I'm a deacon in my church, and over the past twenty years I have been intimately involved in the finances of families that have faced very hard times. I've worked with families where one or both parents have been laid off--I've worked with families where the sole breadwinner has been sent to prison. I've taken in families from (literally) off the street. I have found people jobs, I have leaned on employers to provide a more generous paycheck, I have worked with (and/or shamed) creditors into patience or forebearance of debts. I have worked to "clean" more than a few credit reports.
I have also developed consumer lending applications for the credit union industry--I am extremely familiar with many of the internals of the consumer credit system in the U.S., and the pitfalls of things like risk-based lending (the worse your credit score, the higher your loan rate).
I don't mean to monologue you--but to emphasize that I'm not some college campus conservative with no knowledge of what I'm saying. And what I'm saying, and have said to people in precisely this position, is that you can do an awful lot of living without a car. Even if you live in an area like ours, where what little public transit there is runs (at best) once per hour.
You have to make choices--and you have to adapt your life to your circumstances. That may mean that you cannot afford to live in the rural countryside--you may have to move into town. That may mean that you can't shop at three different grocery stores--you may have to shop at the store that's within walking distance. If there isn't a store within walking distance, that may mean that you have to budget for a cab, periodically, and perhaps budget for a large chest freezer.
And a job? Again--if you can't drive, you have to adapt. Is your job near a public transit line? No? Perhaps you need to start looking for a new job. Can you carpool with someone else? Is that someone else a truly reliable person--one on whom you're willing to bet your job? Can you make a carpool--when you don't have a car--work for the other person (i.e. he drives, you provide breakfast)?
And--there's no avoiding it--you will spend time walking. Buy a shopping cart with large diameter wheels, get several pairs of very comfortable shoes, get over the "dress to impress" notion, and you'll discover that walking is pretty cheap.
As I wrote earlier, I have worked with a lot of families. A few have disappeared, preferring the help of family or the welfare system; the vast majority have worked through their difficulties and are self-sufficient. One couple has succeeded so well that they are leading the mercy ministry at their church. And despite their vastly improved finances (and their new car) they still walk about a mile and a half each way to the grocery store.
Re:I Developed a Competing System--and learned...
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High-Tech RepoMan
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"Sure, the majority of them do in fact buy junk piles, but the operation I run is quite different...."
The operations my client (for whom I developed a GPS-based vehicle locator system) dealt with also took pains to emphasize how different they were from the run-of-the-mill buy-here, pay-here lots. My criticism isn't based on whether the cars are shiny or rusted--it's based on the fundamental business model: representing a lease-purchase agreement as a sale; accepting money down on a car, but not paying it back when the car is repo'd and resold; repo'ing and reselling the same car over and over, so you're collecting payments for two or three different "buyers" for the same car.
In the most technical of senses, you run a good business: people are willing to buy from you. You sell enough to make a profit. You provide jobs, you pay taxes. In terms of the categorical imperative, however, you fall far short: what would the world be like, if everybody did business the way the buy-here, pay-here car lots do?
Slashdot Mirror
I had cataract surgery in my left eye (which is the dominant eye) four years ago, at age 49. I had cataract surgery in the right eye 18 months later.
Simply put--as your eyes cloud over, your brain has to work substantially harder to compensate. Your brain has to decipher blurred vision, compensate for the "halo" effect cataracts give you around bright lights (the reason why older people don't drive at night is the halo effect of oncoming headlights--completely blinding them).
All of that changes with cataract surgery--you don't just see better. (And you see MUCH better--if you wore corrective lenses beforehand they implant a custom-fit lens that corrects your vision to 20/20 or better.) All of the "clock cycles" that your brain was devoting to countering the effects of cataracts (even things like keeping your balance) are all of a sudden freed up. The change is dramatic--it really is life-transforming.
My mother-in-law is 90--she had cataract surgery last fall. Last summer, before the surgery, her daughters were wondering about "what are we going to do about Mom"--at the time I suggested that they wait till after the cataract surgery; I was sure it would have a big impact. Boy, did it--my mother-in-law is active, alert, far more capable, and busy with plans for an expanded vegetable garden this summer.
Until you go through the experience, you can't really understand how much effort your brain puts into interpreting what you see. The impact of cataract surgery is unbelievable.
Digitizing music has been going on for quite some time--the best of the apps is PhotoScore:
Neuratron PhotoScore
You can find tons of public domain music at the Werner Icking Music Archive, save the PDFs, and open the PDFs in PhotoScore. You can then open them in Sibelius or another music editing application.
The overwhelming majority of lawsuits never go to trial. But the cost of simply responding to a lawsuit can be staggering. Prior to the enactment of the SPEECH Act, the owners of TechDirt could ignore Jeffrey Morris and his U.K. attorney, and not respond to their lawsuit. However, were Morris to actually file suit in a U.K. court, and TechDirt did not respond, the court would more or less automatically find for the plaintiff by "default judgment."
You got that part--the question you're asking is, "so what?"
Read the letter from the lawyer at the TechDirt article: Addlestone (the lawyer) makes plain that he will litigate in the U.K., win a judgment--and then promises to pursue "relief" in the U.S. courts. That's the threat.
Once they win in the U.K., they can file suit in the U.S. to collect on a judgment issued by a court in the U.K. Before the SPEECH Act, a U.S. court would, at the least, hold a hearing to determine whether the suit has merit. That--by itself--would involve major legal fees. Large enough fees that TechDirt would probably be wiser to offer a settlement, paying Morris (and his attorney) cash to go away.
The SPEECH Act changes that: Morris and his attorney can go into court in the U.K., get a judgment, and bring their judgment to the U.S. Where a judge will simply throw them out of court--potentially awarding attorney's fees to TechDirt.
In addition to encouraging you to RTFA, let me strongly encourage you to consider the political position consistently advocated by the paper that published the FA. The Guardian makes no pretense at all of being balanced, centrist, unbiased, or apolitical. This is the British newspaper (and web site) that developed a web site with the names and addresses of registered voters in Ohio, and encouraged their readers to write to them to exhort them to vote for John Kerry rather than George Bush. (Bush won Ohio by a handful of votes--which Ohio politicos attributed to the furious backlash the Guardian created, but that's another story.)
In other words, the Guardian article is an advocacy piece meant to alarm, rather than enlighten. If you're a Brit, this will come as no surprise--if you're as Internet-savvy as a SlashDot reader should be, you shouldn't be surprised, either.
The sun will come up tomorrow, even in Texas...
Despite the panicked anxiety of the writer (and the New York Times, here), it's not terribly controversial to emphasize the strong Christian views of many of America's founders. Which is not to say that America's Constitution is a statement of Christian faith--which is often how this argument is misconstrued. (A standard freshman year American History exam question is to compare and contrast the Christian and Deist views expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.) But it is interesting to know that in most U.S. states you had to be a professing Christian in order to run for political office--it provides a perspective on our First Amendment that is all-too-often missing when discussing what the "separation of church and state" means. (What it meant, then, was that no state could "establish" a church--in the way that the Church of England is established in the U.K., or the Lutheran Church is established in Denmark. They're supported by taxes, their leadership is appointed by government, etc.--they are state religions. Jefferson wrote about a "vast wall separating church and state" to reassure Baptists in New England that they would not face oppression by Congregationalists.).
Isaac Newton vs. military technology:
Well gosh--I can see the insidious hand of Sarah Palin here, too. Or...perhaps, it might be worthwhile to consider that the intentional pursuit of military technology as a means of achieving battlefield superiority has been a hallmark of U.S. strategy since the Civil War. Especially in Texas, home to Ft. Hood, Ft. Sam Houston, Lackland AFB, and most U.S. Air Force pilot training. To me (who majored in Economics and American History) that sounds like a pretty perceptive point to make. I'd include Isaac Newton, too--but presumably they decided something had to give. Oh, well.
Guns
TFA breathlessly tells Brit readers that:
One can understand that this would so shock a Brit that he might drop his second or third pint of Guinness Stout that he'd swilled that day. Which is to say, what a Brit might find commonplace (down two or three pints of Guinness Stout in the U.S. and you're a de facto alcoholic) in the U.S. is seen as entirely normative. Again--given that the entire point of the Second Amendment was a direct reaction to the abuses of British occupation forces prior to American independence--this is a pretty welcome emphasis on the impact of early American history on our constitution and present-day policy. Not to mention, of course, that in Texas even self-avowed liberals emphasize their support for "Second Amendment Rights".
Think critically--read critically
I'm far less bothered by this article (it's the Guardian, for heaven's sake, what would you expect?) than I am by the fact that SlashDot's editors include
This is pretty simple. North Carolina is bluffing, hoping that Amazon will not take this to the federal appellate courts.
There is longstanding legal precedent banning government authorities from requiring bookstores or libraries to disclose information about a customer's interests. This has been litigated repeatedly, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; the rulings have subsequently been applied to videotape/CD rentals as well. There is related case law pertaining to the subscription lists of magazines and newspapers--but that's a slightly different subject.
Brief synopsis of legal history:
A brief synopsis of bookstore and library privacy issues can be found at ReaderPrivacy.org.
But there's a bit more
As the Reader Privacy article notes, the PATRIOT Act (rushed into law immediately after the 9/11 tragedy) specifically gives the FBI the ability to subpoena purchase records from bookstores, as well as borrowing records from libraries. However--that power is limited to the FBI (although it can probably be exercised by other federal law enforcement agencies)--but it requires a federal judge to sign the warrant, based on probable cause, naming a specific individual. That gives no support at all to a state sales tax authority asking for a complete data dump of 7 years worth of purchase transactions.
In short--this will annoy Amazon's management, provide hefty fees for a bunch of lawyers, and produce a grand total of zero revenue for the state of North Carolina.
I did a bunch of work for a dot-com startup in the early 2000s focusing on vehicle-tracking applications. I have a daughter with Down syndrome; Downs kids tend to wander too, so we looked at this issue quite hard. The good news: the technology is pretty straightforward. The bad news: that's about the only good news.
Batteries
A GPS chipset enables a controller embedded in the shoes (or on a device strapped to the person) to know where it is. The second half of the problem is to transmit your location to somebody else. The simplest and cheapest approach is sending the data via the cell phone system--eight years ago we were using the digital control channels of the AMPS (analog) cell system; today you'd use G3. But think of the problems you have keeping your cell phone charged--how often would you recharge the batteries in your patient's (or your child's) shoes?
GPS
GPS is a really cool technology--but it is frequently viewed as the high-tech cure for what ails ya. It is not perfect. In particular, GPS depends upon an extremely weak signal--the GPS chipsets use DSPs to dig the signal out of the ether. GPS chipsets lose "lock" all the time. If the patient is wandering around outside in plain sight, his GPS coordinates are going to be accurate. But when the chipset loses "lock" on the satellites, tracking devices will continue to report the last known good position. This can be disastrous: the patient wanders from a nursing facility out onto the public street--and gets on a bus. Inside that nice, big aluminum box he can ride all the way downtown--and his GPS-enabled sneakers will continue to report that he's out in the nursing home parking lot.
There's a serious challenge to solving problems with technology--you also have to make sure that the people who depend upon that technology know (and act on the knowledge) that it must be maintained, or it will fail. Consider, for just a moment, how many people die of smoke inhalation every year even though they have smoke detectors in their homes. But they didn't change the batteries....
There's a much smarter solution
As I mentioned above, I looked at this issue long and hard with a dot-com startup eight years ago. As we looked at it, we found a substantially better solution than GPS. Project Lifesaver is a not-for-profit organization started in Chesapeake, Virginia that has developed a simple, effective solution targeted at Alzheimers patients, Downs kids, and other "wanderers." The patient has a small bracelet (like a hospital bracelet) attached to his or her wrist: once per minute the bracelet broadcasts a serial value on a digital (i.e. low-power) frequency. If/when a patient goes missing, the people responsible for the patient call the police or the sheriff's office. The cops arrive with two directional antennas tuned to the frequency: they go off in different directions, do a little bit of trigonometry, and Grandpa is back in the facility in less than ten minutes.
The Project Lifesaver solution is not perfect. They have the same battery issue that the "GPS sneakers" approach has (the GPS sneakers approach has been tried again, and again, and again). They also will only work with local law enforcement agencies--in our county the @##$%#^^# sheriff cannot be bothered. They have had a lot of success with local service clubs funding the cost of the bracelets, and (more important) paying for and replacing the batteries.
The GPS sneakers thing sounds like cool technology. Using differential antennas and good ol' trig is much more effective. My daughter still wanders off occasionally (and we live adjacent to a state park)--I wish we could take advantage of the Project Lifesaver program here.
Thanks for your response.
I don't mean to do something contrary to the spirit and ethos of SlashDot--but please allow me to apologize. You're entirely correct--my response to your post was really more of a generalized response to a number of posts I'd read that evinced an attitude of
That's not the point that you made, and I was unfair in teeing off on your post.
Australian standards?
But your response reminds me--you have been involved in defining safety standards for your lab. The practical effect of U.S. liability law is that, in essence, we don't care about safety standards: we are entirely focused on making sure nobody gets hurt. We cannot use "but my product met the safety standard" as a defense in court: the literature is full of examples of people who did stupid things with well-designed products and collected big damage awards when (surprise!) somebody got hurt. (Tractor-trailer driver pulls out onto a two-lane road, oncoming car cannot stop in time, driver of the car is decapitated. The family sues...the trailer manufacturer. And wins.)
Can you use "we met the safety standards" as an affirmative defense in Australia?
Oh, horseshit.
For the record, I'm a software developer. And over the course of my career I have done a lot of software development related to the production, distribution, and use of very hazardous gases and chemicals, including weapons-grade nerve gas agents; I presently work for a large engineering company that makes high-voltage components used on building construction. I am current on lab safety training for handling very high-voltage current (simulating lightning strikes) for UL certification.
First off, let's dispense with the silly notion that nobody is doing experimentation in industry. We're not just trotting out books of alchemy and chanting "bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble" as we stir the cauldron. We're figuring out hard subjects like how to build stuff without a) burning buildings down, or b) kill people. We evaluate issues like that all the time.
The big difference, as TFA plainly states, is that in industry you simply cannot ignore safety. Two of the hazmat producers I have done work for have much the same attitude toward safety: there is no such thing as an accident (corollary: there IS such a thing as a negligent attitude toward safety); and safety failure is inexcusable. (The former client I most respect assesses the cost of any safety violation to the manager with profit-and-loss responsibility for the business unit. He starts the year with a $0 line item for safety violations--he has to explain to the board of directors if he exceeds his line item budget. It tends to focus the manager's attention.)
Ignoring a safety issue (such as the citation of lack of safety equipment by UCLA's in-house safety folks three months before the accident) is manslaughter, pure and simple. The responsible parties should go to prison. The "business unit" (in this case, academic department) should be disbanded. Do that once, somewhere, publicly--you'll be amazed at the impact on everybody else. Somebody gets killed in the Chemistry lab? Fire the professor responsible for the lab, fire the department chair who allowed the professor to permit this kind of gross negligence, and fire everybody else involved. Then turn 'em over to the police.
Think that's unrealistic? It's pretty much the atmosphere in which a lot of industry functions. There used to be a time when a business could figure that an occasional death--and the resulting Workmen's Compensation claim--represented an acceptable cost of doing business. Those days are long gone--get somebody killed, and you can face criminal prosecution. And personally, I think that's a good thing.
Please re-read my post: I'm referring to the setup of a standard-issue PC with high-end video displays for the purpose of reading the mammography after the image was taken. No--it doesn't have to be "certified"--radiologists can read "film" on a notebook if they so choose.
FUD? Not.
I'm guessing that most of your study of the law has come from watching TV. The whole problem of "joint and several liability" in American tort law is that plaintiffs do not have to prove any "chain of causality"--they don't even have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the software you developed did anything wrong. (The "reasonable doubt" standard applies to criminal trials. The standard for civil litigation is demonstrating a "preponderence of evidence".)
In order to win a civil suit the plaintiff has to be able to demonstrate that an actual injury occurred; and that the defendants--jointly and severally, by a preponderence of evidence--caused that injury in whole or in part.
Examples:
Way too many to decide which one to use. Recall that, in my original post, I was the system architect for the claims management system used by a major commercial insurer for handling liability suits. Our design work involved reviewing hundreds of current and former liability claims--mostly those claims that went all the way to trial. I have subsequently been involved professionally in legal and financial systems in the U.S., Canada, and Asia.
Folks,
Posting angry comments here on SlashDot can be recreational--but all the ranting and raving anyone does here won't make a bit of difference in the real world.
What WILL make a difference in the real world, of course, is taking advantage of all of the links so helpfully provided in TFA. All you have to do is send a polite email to some of the people involved, pointing out that the two Loomis employees acted really foolishly; that the REI "loss prevention officer" made REI look...well, like losers; and that the Seattle Police Department really, really needs to send a couple of officers off to Constitution Camp.
Here's the email I just sent to the U.S. headquarters of Loomis (employer of the guards who started this nonsense):
Civil rights are like muscles. If you don't exercise them, they waste away.
I'm a bit mystified about this post--software developers already are liable for damages and/or injury caused by flaws in their work. There's a whole category of liability insurance (and matching case law to boot) around the subject. In the insurance business it's called "software errors and omissions."
If you're not aware of this...
you're either not in the software business, or you probably should be talking to your insurance agent. If you work in the United States, do business in the United States, or can be found to have a "business nexus" within the United States, you can find yourself named as a respondent in a U.S. liability lawsuit. And there's a nasty little element of U.S. liability law known as "joint and several liability" that essentially means that whether you are at fault or not, if the jury finds that the plaintiff was injured--and that some degree of the fault lies with any of the respondents, all of the respondents are jointly responsible to pay damages.
An earlier post in this topic wrote, in essence, "between the developers, the tester, the customer, the business analyst--good luck figuring out who made the mistake." That's the point of joint and several liability--they sue all of you. The jury doesn't have to decide whether it was the tester, the developer, the analyst, or the end user. So long as at least some part of the injury was caused by negligence of some kind--you can be found liable.
The Achilles heel of Open Source
Suppose you join a project on SourceForge--like a nifty project to develop Open Source Linux video drivers for high-end plasma video displays. You produce some really spectacular work--and you draw the applause of a small community of really high-end gamers when you ship your first release.
But, unbeknownst to you, a networking consultant in New Jersey finds your project, and uses it to provide a low(er)-cost solution for a radiologist who uses the same video card/monitor system to read CAT scans. The radiologist is reading mammograms.
Seventeen months later, a woman is diagnosed with an "aggressive" form of breast cancer. Had it been detected earlier, she might not have required a mastectomy, or serious chemotherapy. Now she has lost both breasts, and all of her hair has fallen out. She--and her attorneys--want to know why the radiologist didn't find the problem in the mammogram seventeen months earlier.
Right. The mammogram the radiologist viewed on a high-end plasma display. Using an Open Source video driver. The one you helped to develop.
You are in deep yogurt. And whether the video driver had anything to do with it at all, you can expect to be served notice that you have been sued in federal court. And you will then be staggered to discover just how much it costs just to respond to the lawsuit. And the fact that you didn't get paid a dime--hey, it was Open Source, right?--doesn't make a lick of difference.
Fairness, Justice, and the Law are Three Different Things...
Fifteen years ago I was the system architect on a project to manage liability insurance claims for a very, very large insurance company. A liability claim is a lawsuit--we evaluated all kinds of circumstances (prior history in this jurisdiction, prior history with this judge, who the plaintiff was, who plaintiff's counsel was, who our counsel was, yadda yadda yadda). We went through a bunch of factors, carefully weighing each of them, till we got to the end of the process. The very last questions were--does plaintiff have an injured child to show in the courtroom? Does plaintiff have a disfigured woman to show in the courtroom? Does plaintiff have a dying victim--particularly with soon-to-be-orphaned small children--to show in the courtroom? If so, then all bets were off--it did not matter in the slightest if our
Kutztown, Pennsylvania.
The first (and perhaps still only) municipality in the world to wire every single building in the town with fiber optic. As a municipal service. You pay for it the same way you pay for trash collection, sewer, water, phone, and electricity.
Hometown Utilicom (Kutztown's municipal utility).
I'm sorry that I wasn't more clear. What AIG did was to lay off Americans, and replace them with H1Bs working here, in America. This wasn't off-shoring--this was train-your-replacement-who-is-getting-one-third-what-you-do.
Yes--there has. AIG (the company that got the biggest bailout) tried to lay off almost 90% of their I.T. people back in the early 1990s--and outsource all of their jobs to an Indian company. The backlash was fast and furious--Maurice Greenberg, then the CEO, spent major time in front of Congress explaining.
I'm not particularly afraid of H-1Bs (although they do depress wages)--but just want to point out that there is a factual basis for the complaints.
I've traveled out of the U.S. and back in five or six times so far this year--I have traveled outside the U.S. dozens of times over the past fifteen years.
Every single time I was carrying a notebook or portable PC. I have never, ever been stopped, searched, or seen anyone else get hassled.
That said, though:
One thing I have observed at border control in several countries (most notably Japan) is that if the authorities feel you are being disrepectful, they will become far more inquisitive. And if you get "uppity"--particularly if you start shooting off your mouth about your constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms (while entering another country) you are just begging to get hassled.
My sense of the horror stories about notebook seizures, etc., is that somebody made an ass of himself, and the feds decided to make his life miserable. That's not to excuse what they're doing--but a suggestion that if you make even the slightest effort to act and dress presentably, you're not likely to have a problem.
I'm at a loss trying to decide who I have less sympathy for--T-Mobile for thinking they can charge $10 for a Wi-Fi connection, or Starbucks for thinking that providing the $10 connection is going to bring in the 'Net-savvy customer.
Panera Bread Company and McDonald's are both offering free (as in beer) Wi-Fi access. In my experience McD's Wi-Fi is not terribly consistent--it appears to depend heavily on the technical sophistication of the local franchise owner. Panera Bread, on the other hand, has been uniformly consistent all across the country.
(We're developing a "routinely connected" application that we're deploying on sales reps' notebooks--so we're carefully watching Wi-Fi hotspot deployment. We *love* Panera Bread Company--if they'd give us an updated list of locations each month we'd publish it to our reps.)
John Murdoch
Hi!
Nope--I'm not stoned, and I'm not insane. And while I'm not a patent attorney, I am involved with patents and intellectual property development for an electronics company.
Why patent something this simple?
There are zillions of patents out there for seemingly trivial things. Case in point: Amazon.com's infamous "one-click" shopping patent. Why in the world would anybody want to patent this? The patent application in TFA would seem to fall into the same category--why in the world would Microsoft want to patent something so obvious as an emoticon?
It's not the patent--it's where the patent application is filed
Different countries have different systems of patent application. In the U.S., patents are issued--and litigated--based on the principle of first discovery. If you and I each--independently--discover a method for creating, oh, temporary freckles, the USPTO will award the patent to whichever of us can demonstrate that we reduced our idea to fixed form (in most cases, wrote down a detailed description of the invention) first. It doesn't matter that you filed first--if I came up with the invention months before you, and can prove it, I win.
Many other countries use a different system, named "first to file." This system eliminates the litigation over who wrote down how much when, and at what point was enough written down to have something worthy of a patent. Many Europeans tout this as a feature of their system. But "first to file" has a nasty side effect: you can be the first to file about all sorts of stuff, and thereby prevent anybody else from doing something that seems obvious.
Think of this as the patent equivalent of domain squatting
Remember domain squatting? In the early days of the World Wide Web entrepreneurs were registering the name of every corporation in the world--in the expectation that when Amalgamated Widget came to want a web site, they'd have to buy amalgamatedwidget.com domain. The difference between "first to file" and "first discovery" can be used in the same kind of way: a patent filed for something trivial (like emoticons) can be issued in a "first to file" country. So long as the applicant, or the patent authority, are not aware of a competing patent in existance some place else, the applicant gets the patent.
So what? So suppose a company in the U.S., like Qualcomm (developers of Eudora, which has displayed emoticons to warn you of offensive language since at least version 6) notices that a patent has been issued for emoticons in a "first to file" country like France. That patent is worthless in the U.S.--Qualcomm developed the technology first. But it effectively blocks Qualcomm from selling Eudora in France--because Qualcomm's own invention violates the French poacher's patent.
So what do you do?
If you're working with technology in a "first discovery" country (principally the U.S.) you have to make a point of patenting everything--especially all the teensy-tiny innovations that make your product special. Because if one of those key features is not patented, you can be shut out of a huge market by some wise guy who beats you to the patent office.
How bad is it? Suppose that you're in the electrical devices business--and you come out with a new line of designer outlets. Suppose that you include a useful improvement on the outlet design--you chamfer the edges of the receptacle to make it ever-so-much easier to stick the plug in the wall. A nice little effect--but people have been chamfering edges to make connections easier for decades, so why bother paying the fees to file a patent? Bring out your new line of 240-volt electrical receptacles for Europe--and some joker runs down to the patent office in Vienna, filing a patent on chamfering electrical receptacles. That patent is worthless in the U.S.--but it shuts you out of Austria, which probably means that European electrical distributors and retailers won't carry your line at all. You have to pay off the poacher to "li
Legally, this isn't hard. The parents are not being prosecuted--they are being sued for damages by the assistant principal. The assistant principal claims to have suffered sleepless nights and other forms of injury as a result of this defamatory website, and seeks to recover damages from the parents of the kids who have harmed her.
This is called a "tort."
A tort is an injury--here is a link to the Wikipedia page on torts involving negligence. The assistant principal is claiming that the parents were negiligent in supervising their children, and the assistant principal was harmed as a result. She is suing for damages.
A couple of observations:
First--there's a fundamental rule of litigation: it is one thing to bring a lawsuit--depending upon the jurisdiction (and Texas certainly fits this description), your dog can file a lawsuit. It is something else entirely to bring that lawsuit to trial; it is something else to actually win the case. Second, it's pretty likely that the assistant principal has no expectation of this case ending up in court. She is suing the parents--if the parents own real estate, their homeowners insurance policies will almost certainly include broad form liability protection. That's essentially lawsuit insurance--the parents turn to their insurance companies, and the insurors will likely attempt to settle the case for a couple of bucks to make it go away. Third, the first and second points describe, in glaring detail, some of what is significantly wrong with the American legal system.
Does she have a case?
It seems to me that this is one of those matters where both parties are jerks. The boys were jerks--that's why they attracted the attention of the assistant principal to start with. Then they demonstrated that they were jerks by putting up a web site mocking the assistant principal. Do assistant principals pick on kids in high school? Sure. Do big boys take their punishment without whining? They should. These two are jerks.
On the other hand, it seems pretty clear that the assistant principal is a jerk, too. If she managed to get the job of being assistant principal without noticing that the job includes a fair measure of criticism, she's not just a jerk, she's stupid too. But she is more than just a jerk--or stupid: she is a government employee. She is a government employee with substantial power--typically the assistant principal can issue (or petition a magistrate to issue) a court summons for a truant student; the assistant principal can also bring action to remove a child from home, sending the child to foster care. An assistant principal can suspend a student--within the walls of a school, an assistant principal is a very powerful figure whose authority is generally not subject to any supervision or right of appeal. And that makes this a constitutional issue.
The Constitutional argument
There are parts of the U.S. Constitution that provoke controversy. The right to criticize public officials in the performance of their duties is not one of them. There is a long and rich history of published criticism of public officials that is far, far more injurious than calling a woman a lesbian. (Abraham Lincoln, for example, was routinely described as having sold his soul to the Devil (here, for instance, and his wife's mental illness was frequently characterized as demon possession--and just reward for her husband's opposition to slavery.) The constitutional protection of a free press is well and widely understood to have a very broad reach. The U.S. Supreme Court held unanimously, a couple of years ago, that web pages are precisely the kind of "pamphleteering" that the framers of the Constitution had in mind. The principal focus of the pamphleteers was criticism of public policy and public officials--and they called people names.
From TFA:
Yes.
The writer of TFA is whining that computers no longer ship with a BASIC interpreter. That's been true since Microsoft shipped Windows 95--and at the time (which, er, was 1995) a number of columnists (including me) noted the loss, and wondered what impact it would have.
Eleven years later....
The earth still continues to revolve around the sun, and kids are still learning to write code. They're not learning to write code by typing in exercises from a math book--they're learning to write code to develop macros in Excel (or OpenOffice Calc); they're learning to write JavaScript to enable custom functionality in Adobe Acrobat files; they're learning to write HTML.
Not to get all pedagogical on you, or anything...
But this may be a circumstance where the Education Establishment is doing something right. Typing code into GW-BASIC produces...what? Typically, an output value. Read these input values, produce that output value. That's a CRT-based emulation of a deck of punch cards--and while I believe I benefited enormously from learning to code on punch cards, very very few people in the programming world agree with me. Think about what the newbie programmer's early coding experiences are like:
That experience--being able to compile and run a program in something like real time, was HUGE--in 1974. Nowadays it is so outdated that I'd bet most kids would not see any correlation between that and a computer program that they are familiar with. How do you explain to a ten-year-old that the BASIC exercise from the math book is essentially identical to the internal processes of a video game, a web server, or the embedded micro-processor that drives your microwave oven?
By contrast, a web page is a terrific introduction. Open a simple web page with "View Source", modify the text, and display the new page--it has changed. Iterate several times--add paragraphs, change colors, play with fonts--and the kid gets it. Playing with a text editor (which, incidentally, still does come for free) the student can go a long, long way in HTML. Depending upon his or her interests the student can pursue graphic design, animation, AJAX programming--all sorts of stuff. Key point: the difference between a "Hello World" HTML page and EBay is only a matter of degree--and that is immediately obvious to the student. Making the mental link between an ancient BASIC program and--for instance--a Windows application developed in Visual Basic.Net is not obvious at all.
A case in point...
I have three daughters. Growing up in a house with more computers than people--and a T1 connection to the Internet--they have had more exposure to computers than most kids. The oldest two are in college, and both had summer jobs this year at the electronics company where I work. Daughter #1 worked in customer service role--spending a lot of time with Excel spreadsheets. Somebody asked if she could program--she replied that her dad was a programmer, but she didn't really know how to. As she said this, she was writing Visual Basic macro scripts to automate a lot of manual key-entry for the customer service staff. What she was doing was very similar to the old-fashioned "get input, produce output" coding that punch card decks and BASIC programs performed. But the IDE (in this case, Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications) and the paradigm (a GUI) made it extremely easy to understand and do. So easy, in fact, that she didn't really equate it with programming.
In other words,
Don't mourn for GW-BASIC. Spend time with your kids writing HTML, JavaScript, and Excel macros.
True story....
Back in 1998-2000, one of my larger clients was ABC News. If you were in the business in the late 90s, the question on everybody's mind was "where are you going to be at midnight, December 31, 1999?" ABC News ran a 24-hour broadcast following the date rollover around the world--I wrote the electronic script that the show ran on, and spent New Years Eve in the ABC control room.
ABC is a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company--one of the main players in the MPAA. Disney has a unique strategy with their video content: they release a backlist title like "Cinderella" for three months, and then do not distribute it again for years. This is a perfect case for Fair Use copying--because if you damage that tape or DVD, you cannot replace it. Disney will not even send you a replacement if you return the original to them.
My youngest daughter, Annie, has Down Syndrome. She loved Disney movies. She would play a particular movie over and over and over--to the point that the videotape would wear out. (She also, I'll admit, conducted an intensive study of just what sorts of things could be stuffed into a videotape player.)
Can Annie be a test case?
Provoked by an article on SlashDot, I wrote to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Would they be interested in having Annie act as the plaintiff to challenge the DMCA on Fair Use grounds? It would be a textbook Fair Use argument: and the case would have all the right "demographics:" a handicapped child, daughter of a vendor to Disney (who, obv., would be severing ties with the client as soon as they put two and two together), making backups of DVDs to enable the child to continue to see content after destroying the original disc--which cannot be replaced commercially.
The EFF was enthusiastic--they called, we talked, life was good. Except that I happened to mention in an email (because of a comment, I seem to recall, about EFF being characterized as a bunch of "radicals" or something like that) that I'm pretty much of a square. I'm a deacon in my church. I'm a registered Republican.
And I never heard another word from them--even after several attempts to contact them.
Hi!
You have an interesting conversation thread going--please permit me to chime in.
In the U.S. we typically see three-phase power on the street, with two phases (+/- 120v) provided in residential housing. New construction residences typically have 200 amp panels, with each split on the backplane of the distribution panel--so a 240 volt breaker (for a stove, air conditioner, water heater, etc.) will draw from both phases.
Typical home wiring cable includes two jacketed wires (black for common, white for neutral) and a bare wire for ground. If there is a red wire in the cable it traditionally identifies a switched circuit--sometimes it is a traveler in what we call a three-way circuit (two-way everywhere else in the world).
And underground cables? Actually, they're becoming more commonplace across America, primarily because of zoning requirements. A tangle of utility cables tends to lower property values--zoning boards typically require underground utility access for distribution lines (from substations to local transformers, and thence to customers) to keep property values up.
Hi!
Sorry, but you happened to trigger one of my pet rants. People DO still make buggy whips--and they make buggies, and carts, and drays, and all sorts of horse-drawn conveyances. And they have web sites.
And since I have some knowledge of how prosperous some buggy manufacturers are, and also recruit and hire electrical and computer engineers, I'd venture to guess that the original poster was correct--if you're good at what you do, you'll succeed at whatever you do. I'd be willing to bet money that the family that owns Smucker's Harness does substantially better than your average electrical engineer.
Cheers!
John Murdoch
(Who spent the late afternoon breaking a pony to drive a carriage, and has two buggy whips on his shopping list.)
Hi!
I work for an electronics manufacturing company--and develop software. I'd recommend standardizing on a very limited number of development tools, and standardizing on a limited number of fasteners.
First, the development tools
There have been 3.2 zillion posts already arguing whether to use a single language or to use any language anybody wants. That's not really the point: what you need to consider is the number of technologies, or skill sets, that you will support. Competency in a language is a skill set--but so is competency with a database server (in addition to the server's database language, like Transact-SQL or PL/SQL), or competency with different libraries or third-party tools. How you decide which skill sets are important is where you demonstrate your wisdom and skill as a manager--but it is crucial to your long-term survival to keep that number as low as possible.
If you've been around application software long enough, you've probably been on a project that included a bunch of this-will-save-so-much-time tools--custom controls, third-party libraries, etc. And then discovered that your team was totally, utterly, fsck'ed when you went to release version 2, and discovered that the libraries had changed, the custom control vendor had gone out of business (or his mother made him get a real job), etc.
It isn't just the risk that the third-party tool won't change with your product--you are also dependent upon the one or two people on your team who mastered that particular tool. If they're gone, you now have to figure out who to task with taking over responsibility of being the GridDotWhatever guru. The more of these skill sets you have to support, the tougher it is to manage a team--and the more bodies you need to keep on a maintenance staff when it is time to scale the development of that product down.
In short--count up all the skill sets your company uses, and do what you can to reduce the number. That's a good strategy.
Limit the number of fasteners, too
The original post includes a comment that standardizing on a language would be just as silly as standardizing on a particular fastener. Well, guess what: you should.
In the real world of manufacturing there are a zillion bits and pieces that go into a product line. If you can use the same micro-processor across a broad range of products, you can achieve economies of scale in purchasing, and you can achieve economies of scale in other areas, like writing code for that particular micro family.
The same is true in lots of other areas--all the way down to screws. If you standardize on a particular screw (say, for instance, 4mm metric-threaded hex-heads of various lengths) you can achieve substantial economies of scale in purchasing, but in all of your manufacturing operations. Machine tools can be fit with bits to drill appropriate holes, robots can be equipped with nut drivers for the 4mm hex head, and so forth. If you permit the kind of anarchy in your mechanical engineering department that the OP's colleagues think is good for programming, you'd have a disaster on your hands.
There's an engineering point, here
There are people who think that software is a form of engineering. I'm not one of them--and this article is a good example of why. There is lots that we can learn from engineering--and there is oodles of stuff that real engineers have known and practiced for a long, long time that we still don't know enough about to even ask. But that's another rant for another time....
In short, yes.
I don't make that as a glib statement. I'm a deacon in my church, and over the past twenty years I have been intimately involved in the finances of families that have faced very hard times. I've worked with families where one or both parents have been laid off--I've worked with families where the sole breadwinner has been sent to prison. I've taken in families from (literally) off the street. I have found people jobs, I have leaned on employers to provide a more generous paycheck, I have worked with (and/or shamed) creditors into patience or forebearance of debts. I have worked to "clean" more than a few credit reports.
I have also developed consumer lending applications for the credit union industry--I am extremely familiar with many of the internals of the consumer credit system in the U.S., and the pitfalls of things like risk-based lending (the worse your credit score, the higher your loan rate).
I don't mean to monologue you--but to emphasize that I'm not some college campus conservative with no knowledge of what I'm saying. And what I'm saying, and have said to people in precisely this position, is that you can do an awful lot of living without a car. Even if you live in an area like ours, where what little public transit there is runs (at best) once per hour.
You have to make choices--and you have to adapt your life to your circumstances. That may mean that you cannot afford to live in the rural countryside--you may have to move into town. That may mean that you can't shop at three different grocery stores--you may have to shop at the store that's within walking distance. If there isn't a store within walking distance, that may mean that you have to budget for a cab, periodically, and perhaps budget for a large chest freezer.
And a job? Again--if you can't drive, you have to adapt. Is your job near a public transit line? No? Perhaps you need to start looking for a new job. Can you carpool with someone else? Is that someone else a truly reliable person--one on whom you're willing to bet your job? Can you make a carpool--when you don't have a car--work for the other person (i.e. he drives, you provide breakfast)?
And--there's no avoiding it--you will spend time walking. Buy a shopping cart with large diameter wheels, get several pairs of very comfortable shoes, get over the "dress to impress" notion, and you'll discover that walking is pretty cheap.
As I wrote earlier, I have worked with a lot of families. A few have disappeared, preferring the help of family or the welfare system; the vast majority have worked through their difficulties and are self-sufficient. One couple has succeeded so well that they are leading the mercy ministry at their church. And despite their vastly improved finances (and their new car) they still walk about a mile and a half each way to the grocery store.
The operations my client (for whom I developed a GPS-based vehicle locator system) dealt with also took pains to emphasize how different they were from the run-of-the-mill buy-here, pay-here lots. My criticism isn't based on whether the cars are shiny or rusted--it's based on the fundamental business model: representing a lease-purchase agreement as a sale; accepting money down on a car, but not paying it back when the car is repo'd and resold; repo'ing and reselling the same car over and over, so you're collecting payments for two or three different "buyers" for the same car.
In the most technical of senses, you run a good business: people are willing to buy from you. You sell enough to make a profit. You provide jobs, you pay taxes. In terms of the categorical imperative, however, you fall far short: what would the world be like, if everybody did business the way the buy-here, pay-here car lots do?