What I find interesting is there's no mention of ClearCase. Maybe the author is unaware of it, or considers it obsolete? Then again, the author didn't seem that experienced with the debacles into which one can get with revision control SW. The example he posits is the least of the problems which can crop up.
I've used both ClearCase and CVS. First, CVS:
I instinctively save files. And this is a bad thing to do with CVS; when I do a commit, my otherwise unchanged file can overwrite another engineer's more recent changes because I happened to save the file at a later date than him. The interesting thing is that this is not immediately apparent to either of us until we check out a fresh copy of the repository and he notices his changes are gone. And then I'm listed as the last modifier, and he comes to me...
You can't (or shouldn't) copy one directory to another within a source tree. Nor should you do it between repositories. CVS will commit your changes to the copied directory back to the original repository, unless you delete all of the CVS folders. This little quirk cost a few of my colleagues a few hours of debugging to figure out why their changes kept disappearing...
CVS does not (or did not when I used it) enforce strict version control protocol. I can commit an entire repository back to mainline even if I have outdated files. Even if others have made more recent updates. I didn't know this was happening for a good few months of use...
Now for ClearCase
ClearCase can manage extraordinarily large codebases spread across several geographical locations.
It can be integrated with version control and bug tracking databases.
It allows two or more developers to work on the same file at the same time, with the last one to commit having to perform a manual merge *only when there are conflicts*. Most of the time, it gets the merges right.
With proper tagging procedures, I can always reproduce the last build bit-exact. No matter how badly an engineer subsequently mangles the codebase, I can always build from the last tag. My impending release can't be sabotaged by another developer committing code-breaking-but-it-compiles-on-my-machine-oh-silly-me-I-forgot-the-headers kind of changes.
It does have problems with cache-coherency. Modifying files on machines other than the build machine may end up with stale files being linked...
It has dynamic views, which don't require a full copy of the source tree on the local machine. There are some big advantages to this, among them being not having to worry so much about the theft of a developer's laptop, and using the server's storage pool for building, rather than the local hard disk. From a developer perspective, it is nice not to have to wait an hour or so for the repository download should I need to make a change to an older codebase. I can work on multiple versions of the same code base at the same time, without having to maintain a separate local copy of the entire tree for each of them.
Managing ClearCase is an administrative position. Yes, it is exceedingly complex.
Suppose I merge several bug fixes for a build. And later, one of those fixes needs to be backed out (didn't fix the problem, conflicts with other SW, etc...). I can do that with ClearCase rather easily, without having to reconstruct all of the interim versions between the two.
I can apply the same bugfix to two different branches of a source tree without checking out and modifying both branches. That is, I can check the changes into one branch, and merge them into another branch (or just pick them up) without having to checkout the repository from the other branch.
Now, granted, a lot of FOSS products are not trying to be SEI level 5*. They don't have to demonstrate a repeatable process. The often don't incorporate bug fixes into older releases, or maintain several concurrent branches of the same codebase. It is also important to show which
TFA says nothing about the OS involved, which usually means a Microsoft Windows PC. I suppose the NYT is able to sell more advertising if they keep it ambiguous.
Now, to be fair, Linux recently patched a root-privilege bug that went unnoticed for EIGHT years. But, to be just as fair, there are several orders of magnitude more compromises available courtesy Redmond, and due largely in part (as Djikstra quipped...) to their poor reinvention of UNIX.
I have family that use Windows. What am I supposed to do? This is getting ridiculous. Sure, they get the OS they deserve. Sure, my employer gets the security compromises they deserve. But some part of the blame has to be shared by the company which made all of this possible.
Programmers have always written buggy software. But it took Microsoft to create security flaws *by design* - that is, to deliberately architect software in an insecure an unreliable manner. It took Microsoft to disregard the lessons learned in UNIX, (as Djikstra would say) "To reinvent it poorly."
I know, I know,./ers will say, "Don't use Windows". Okay, I don't. But you have to understand that not everyone is a geek. The folks at corporate *BUY* Windows licenses because they don't know any better. My relatives use it because it came with their computer, or, their department at the university uses word, or they want to play games, or they want something familiar.
What about them?
Is it really acceptable for us to ignore the needs of the average user? Is it really acceptable to blame the victims?
Or, should we hold Microsoft accountable to the same standards adhered to by everyone else in the industry?
Yes, but they can get a judgement against you in another state - say, New Jersey - and use that to garnish your wages in Texas. I know of at least one case in which a default judgement in a California court was used to garnish wages in Illinois. The person in question had to fly to California to dispute the judgement and reopen the case.
I don't know how it all played out, but he was out a few thousand dollars in expenses before his name was cleared.
When I was younger, I developed the habit of answering the phone, "Mort's morgue - you stab 'em, we slab 'em!" and other sophomoric phrases. After a while, I made a conscious effort to come up with new and interesting tag lines when answering the phone.
My friends and family expected wierd responses when they called. Debt collectors didn't. Sometimes they'd just hang up. Other times they'd apologize for the wrong number. But then some got downright nasty.
Having a relative run into debt problems, there was a period of time of about 6 months when I would receive calls from debt collectors on a regular basis. They always pretended to be someone else - usually someone with authority. In some cases, they impersonated the police, which was illegal.
But it just so happens that one time, I answered, "Dominoes Pizza..." And instead of a familiar family member's voice, it's the debt collector, impersonating a Chicago police officer. So I played along, taking his order (I had worked at pizza places before).
Now, this was after the invention of caller ID. And reverse-lookups on the Internet. And I happened to know that pizza stores routinely re-route orders to another store if the address doesn't fall within their delivery area. I'll leave as an exercise for the reader just what happened next.
Needless to say, they stopped calling.
I can't help but think that at least once, the sweatshop employees at a debt collection agency got a much needed pizza party, courtesy the employee who had the balls to impersonate a Chicago cop.
The Russian dipshit who put the transformer in a place where it could destroy a water bearing wall and kill 12 people is probably feeling pretty bad about himself right now.
Perhaps you have more information than I, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the structural failure of the water bearing wall was created by a massive turbine ripping itself apart. If you watch the video, you hear the explosion some time after the water starts spraying everywhere. So apparently the concrete was compromised before the transformer exploded.
If I had to speculate, I'd say a structural failure of the concrete allowed much more water past the turbine blades; the corresponding increase in speed overloaded the transformer, causing it to explode. After the explosion, the lack of load on the turbine allowed it to exceed its rated speed, at which point it ripped itself apart causing even further damage.
It's a well known fact that concrete cracks. Perhaps the original engineers designed the spillway so that even with a fully open sluice and no load, the turbine speed would not destroy itself. I wonder if they considered the possibility of a large concrete failure allowing an essentially unlimited amount of water past the turbines.
One of the things which I've always wondered is how hackers know they've broken into the real-deal versus a honeypot.
Faking CC numbers, names and addresses, etc... isn't that difficult. Suppose, for example, the feds impersonated a bank server, complete with fake Credit Card numbers, names, addresses, etc...
Hacker downloads the database, and then sells the info.
Credit card companies issue "provisional credit" to vendors when the fake card number is used. Vendor sees "provisional credit" code on approval and recognizes this is fraud, and alerts the feds. From the buyer's perspective, everything looks legit, but...
A day or so later the Feds show up at the receiving addresses, busting far more than just a single hacker.
I wonder if it even occurs to most hacker/cracker types that the logon banner and machine name are completely arbitrary. I recently setup servers on a private section of the network with a banner which states, "You are not authorized to access this server; this incident will be reported..." (Now, granted, there's nothing of great importance on that particular machine, and it has not been "properly" secured.) But I could just as easily have used, "Bank of America Federal Clearing House" Had I done so, (and if this machine was internet-accessible), I would not at all be surprised to hear of a hacker group claiming to have compromised Bank of America.
How does a hacker know the machine to which he's gained access is doing anything more than merely logging his actions? How does he know if the data he's got is any good?
Why not - and I mean this seriously - sue them for libel when they bring action for identity theft against you?
You can very easily demonstrate that the SSN is not a proof of identity (authentication). You can (or should be able to) easily demonstrate that a company which relies on SSN for identity authentication is negligent of its fiduciary duty to protect the assets of its stockholders. Toward the libel charge, you should be able to demonstrate that the company *should have known* there was strong possibility the person who stole your identity was not you, and yet continued to blame you for what was ultimately *their failure* to properly identify the person to whom they extended credit.
A simple case of this nature - one which establishes precedent and carries high punitive damages - should be enough to get the industry to reform. Without that case, it's just a matter of bickering between consumers and corporations, and guess who controls the media....
Second point, who is going to sue some no-name contributor who doesn't have any money anyway, especially if you have to prove that that particular developer knew there were bugs?
Microsoft. That's who.
If it is possible to sue OSS for bugs, any vendor who feels they've lost business to OSS will be prone to suing OSS maintainers, if for no other reason than to cast FUD on free software, i.e. "Didn't they (the OSS developers) get sued for writing buggy software?"
Without the proposed legislation, such lawsuits are much more likely to be dismissed.
Me sharing something of mine with yourself and others is good.
You sharing something of mine with yourself and others is bad.
Or, more succinctly, you don't take what belongs to someone else without permission.
The problem with the filesharers is they are confusing sharing with taking. Sharing is when you give to others what rightfully belongs to you. Taking is when you give to yourself (and possibly others) what rightfully belongs to someone else, against their wishes. Lending your CDs to your friends is much different than giving the *entire world* a copy of the music for *free*. Your friend expects to return your CD and the favor someday. The rest of the world does not.
As long as people put significant amount of work and labor into the creative arts, they will expect to receive something in return from society for their efforts. Contrary to what some may believe, providing a living for an artist *is* in the best interest of society, because the financial incentive means a greater number of creative people can quit their day jobs and work full time creating music, movies, art, etc... Whether that occurs through patronage or copyright is largely a matter of the details. However, given Americans' aversion to greater taxes (to support the artists, of course), it isn't likely that copyright is going to change soon.
I've never understood why people would pay Amazon to *rent* what they can already borrow from the Library for *free*.
Oh, you thought you bought Orwell's 1984? Silly reader, haven't you heard of DRM? The only books you buy from Amazon are the dead-tree variety with shipping charges.
It isn't that smart people _can't_ make good decisions. The problem is that, more often than not, smart people forget that rational decisions often have emotional and moral consequences. A completely rational and unemotional overlord would see nothing wrong with killing people at the point where their economic contribution to society fell below the cost of benefits they consumed.
For an example of this on a smaller scale, just consider the UK health situation. The high cost of treating macular degeneration (which leads to blindness) means that in the UK, an elderly patient must be at risk of total blindness before treatment is approved. That is, you don't get treatment for the second eye until you're already blind in the first.
Consider then, where a cost-benefit analysis of human beings would lead. Who would determine the criteria? Probably the machine. And how would humans compare to machines in terms of productivity? If machines made the decisions, based on cold, hard, logic, humanity is doomed. It's that simple.
The native Americans used to ask. To them, the land was so fundamentally free that to own a piece of it seemed a sacrilege (sp?) against nature.
But then, along came Europeans, and land the Indians had used for centuries was suddenly denied them. You see, Europeans had this notion of property rights extending to the very stuff you put your feet on. You might think it's absurd to lay claim to the internet, but believe me, someone is already thinking about ways of divvying it up and making ordinary people pay for what they used to get for free. You'll pay to transmit, and your recipient will pay to receive. And somewhere, somehow, if the telecoms can manage it, you'll pay a monthly fee to them to *store* the content you received from the internet. Let's not forget Time Warner, who wanted to triple bill YouTube - once for the priviledge of connecting to the Net, a second time for the priviledge of providing *premium* content, and the third time is the user who pays for the bandwidth of downloading it from YouTube.
Freedom isn't free, after all - as the saying goes. If you think the internet can't be owned, you've obviously never met a US legislator.
Doesn't it occur to you that Dish has their DVRs manufactured by someone else, and that these guys might have wanted to be that someone?
Look - Dish encryption has been broken repeatedly throughout the last decade. Which means that someone who can explain the flaws and failures of the last designs, and offer something provably more secure would have an offering very compelling to Dish. Doing so requires demonstrating the ease with which their existing system can be broken.
I'm thinking that if a security researcher had done the same thing, he would not be in jail. Nor would a large corporation.
But a set top box importer does it, and suddenly it's a federal crime.
The most troublesome part about this is that engineers routinely reverse engineer the work of others for the sake of creating compatible products - an exemption the DMCA explicitly allows. Perhaps the company wanted to offer a cheaper STB to Dish, and undercut the competition. Or perhaps they planned to sell directly to the black market, engaging in fraud. The act of reverse engineering a component tells us nothing about the company's intentions.
I mention this because this very thing was done to Lexmark printers a few years ago. Instead of getting arrested, the manufacturer of competing cartridges was sued under the DMCA; the case went all the way to the SCOTUS, and Lexmark lost. It would appear this would set precedent regarding the legality of reverse engineering for the sake of creating interoperable products, but strangely, the FBI seems not to follow precedent. I find it odd that an activity which was legal and sanctioned by the DMCA - and even supported by the Supreme Court, is now interpreted as being illegal according to the very same law.
If anything, this shows the illegality of an action depends more upon who you are than what you do. Best not to offend our corporate overlords, lest they have the FBI arrest you.
I'm actually impressed by the trollishness of your post. And you managed to fool the moderators! You are quite the master troll. Let's take a look at your post:
Just because you are jealous of someone elses assets and position in life doesn't mean your life sucks, it just means your perspective sucks and you're a whiney little bitch.
Ah, the hook. Infer jealousy and call someone names in the first paragraph. Normally, this would be a sure sign that you're a troll, but you managed to do it with such elegance that you fooled the moderators. Good job! I'd give you +2 for overgeneralization and stupid platitudes. You deftly transformed the GP's concern for his family into a matter of jealousy and whining. A good turn, perhaps not as subtle as it could have been, but good nonetheless.
No Americans life is hard...
Now this is a little disappointing. You pull out the straw man, "You wouldn't be comparing yourself to someone with real issues..." instead of going for the throat. You could have gone on for a bit longer, and perhaps suggested that the GP had never worked a day in his life, never had to suffer loss like ${FAMOUS DEAD PERSON}, never had to overcome obstacles like [Normandy|Bataan|Auschwitz|Paralysis|Blindness| etc...], but you didn't. I must admit, I'm rather disappointed, and somewhat confused that you forfeited this paragraph. So it's -1 for this bit, and perhaps you can do better later.
Your father enjoyed a better life because he had perspective, which you do not
Okay, so you're starting to recover. Again, the name calling. This is classic troll, not a lot of originality here. I must say, you started off good, and then faltered - next time, try using an implication of something undesirable, rather than an outright attack.
Try managing your money better...
Now you're really getting going here. You've deftly obscured the argument here - you've transformed an argument about economic conditions into one about money management, personal character, and managed to blame the victim, all in one paragraph. This is truly a work of art - it requires a certain ignorance of the world to get this part of a troll correct. To keep creating work like this, you're going to have to avoid anything, however slight, that suggests the world is more complicated than a set of over-generalized, good-sounding platitudes. For reducing an otherwise intellectual argument to a mundane question of the personal fitness of the poster, I grant you +5. Truly remarkable.
STOP BUYING...
Now this part is required for every troll. You suggest the solution to the problem is so simple that only a moron could have missed it. I'm personally not impressed by this; you didn't execute it well (CAPS? - what were you thinking?!), and there's nothing particularly spectacular about it. Yes, it contains the implications of incompetence, and the inevitable name calling, but is otherwise lackluster in execution. Experienced trolls would scoff as such a poorly executed invective. -1, bad form.
The problem here is you, sorry.
Gah! What was that?! You had such a good troll going, and then you blew it! There's no subtlety here. It's plain as day you're just trolling. Seriously, spend some time with the masters. Learn the Apple troll. No, wait - that's too advanced for you. Go with the Steven King is Dead troll, and start from there. Be patient. Let the feelings flow. But - learn self control; learn subtlety. S-U-B-T-L-E-T-Y. -10, giving up without a fight. You're 13 down by now.
You finally grew up and had to start dealing with responsibility...
And the recovery is slow, and painful. At this point, your best bet is to convince the reader that you are really sincere. You go on like this for a few more paragraphs, a few more straw men, a few more conflations. After this point, you're about even. And then:
Honestly, think about your post for a moment. That laptop you want: $400. Your mortgage: $1600. So you forego your laptop, in order to save a week's worth of mortgage, and close the door on future employment, career advancement, etc...?
The point is that foregoing those electronic toys won't make enough of a difference to afford the housing I need for a family. A $400 laptop is only two weeks worth of groceries for a family of six. It's not like I'm buying a laptop every two weeks, and can just stop it so I can afford a larger family. To help you out, here are some cost comparisons:
A "normal" pregnancy through delivery, where *NOTHING* goes wrong, no complications, etc... : $5,000.
Food for a growing child for a year: (in US dollars) $1000 infant*, $2,500 toddler+.
Additional health insurance cost for a family plan, vs individual: $5,000
Difference between mortgage on a 4 bedroom house and a single bedroom apartment: $12,000 per year*.
So, to prepare for raising a family, you need about $19k-20k of additional income, the FIRST YEAR. I doubt I've spent that much on electronic toys over the course of my entire life, let alone the few years I've been married. So where is the money going to come from? Pinching pennies at the valu-mart isn't going to provide the savings necessary to support a family.
* - One can actually get away with less than this if one is willing to forego the use of formula and breastfeed instead. However, be prepared for allegations of negligence because your child will be "underweight" compared to his formula-fed peers.
Okay, I'll try to say this is in the least trollish way possible: you completely missed the point of my post. The problem is not that I don't have enough toys. I could honestly care less - a $30 microcontroller kit is more entertaining to me than the big-screen plasma tvs everyone seems to think they need. The problem is that children are far more expensive from a resource perspective than that iPhone or new laptop you've got your eye on. Sure, I could forego a new laptop this year. But I'd have to forego a laptop upgrade for 2 decades to make up the cost of a normal childbirth. And that's after insurance pays! And I haven't even begun to talk about the cost of a four bedroom place in the Chicago area. But I'm lucky, compared to some; I've heard of the 50 year mortgages people are taking in California; of making $100,000 a year and being able to afford nothing more than a single bedroom apartment.
Some people just don't get it. My father did have a higher standard of living than I did. He didn't *have* to spend half his income on housing, and yes, he was frugal. He didn't have to enlist in the Army to pay for college - in fact, he didn't even have to finish his degree. He had the resources to start a family when he was young; I didn't.
But here I am, having served my country, having made the grade in college, having done all of the things my parents' generation thought necessary to have a successful life, and yet, I have a lower standard of living than they. My parents bought food at the national chain stores; I buy mine at the discount stores (Aldi). My parents bought a new car every few years; I still drive a 10 year old truck. And the worst of it? I cannot afford to buy the very house in which I was raised.
I can understand the suburbanite college kid whining about how he can't afford his a Lexus. But I'm not that person. Instead, I'm trying to provide the same lifestyle for my children that I grew up with, and finding that it is difficult, if not impossible. Not being able to provide for your family is a much different position than not having the toys you'd like, and there's nothing spoiled or unseemly about wanting to give your children what you have received yourself. But I can't even do that, unfortunately.
The fact that I can afford a new laptop every year is little consolation when I can't afford the basic necessities of life. What is oddest about my situation is that I learned to be frugal - to forgo the things I wanted so as to afford the things I need. But now, the things I want are of such little expense compared to the needs of my family that it hardly makes a difference, if it all.
I agree with the problems of a credit based society. The willingness of others to buy on credit, thereby paying more for an item than it is actually worth, affects the ability of others to buy said item. For example, in a cash-based society, most houses would sell for the value of the time and materials used to build them, and the nominal cost of the lot. In such a system, a house would cost about $75k + lot. In reality, however, the fact that my neighbor is willing to take a 30 or even 50 year mortgage means that $75k worth of labor and materials turns into $250k worth of housing. Why would anyone sell a house to me at just over cost, when my stupid, compulsive neighbor is willing to pay them more than three times what it is worth? A price he can afford only because the bank is willing to lend him such obscene amounts of money.
And then there is corporate greed. The first is more apparent now that the housing bubble burst. Corporate lenders were using loans to make a short term profit, at the expense of long term viability. They found a sucker - Corporate America - and the rest is history. The second kind of corporate greed is more insidious: at large firms, they actually pay people to study the labor market and figure out strategies for paying the least for labor. I've actually witnessed this. For example, last year, as IBM reward its shareholders with a better than expected profit. For their part in the success, its employees were rewarded with layoffs. This works to IBM's advantage: in the first place, the influx of unemployed workers reduces the hiring wage; in the second place, the threat of layoffs "encourages" a competitive atmosphere where every employee tries to outdo the others, out of fear of being laid off. IBM, will, no doubt, use the reduced median salaries across the economy to justify reducing or eliminating benefits, promotions, etc... Long story short, a large employer is able to manipulate the market cost of labor through periodic layoffs and hiring during economic downturns. Typically, a large corporation will replace experienced employees with younger, less expensive ones.
I have no doubt that Apple will continue should Jobs leave.
The problem is that this has happened before, and the company tanked. An Apple without Jobs is just another electronics company.
There is no shortage of visionaries in the world who could replace Jobs. The problem, however, is that venture capitalists tend to be incapable of differentiating between someone with vision, purpose, and the pragmatism required to get things done, and the inevitable pie-in-the-sky salesman/dreamer who will only bankrupt the company with crazy, unworkable schemes. Jobs is important because he's a known, good bet. There's very little risk that he would bankrupt the company.
Things will never be completely fair, but the way to make them more fair is to help everyone become more rich and powerful. The only way that can happen is if everyone is more productive: imagine if everyone accomplished in their life things similar to what Steve Jobs has done.
Disclaimer: I am a conservative. So I recognize the above as a variation on "the free market cures all ills" and the conservative notion that more wealth will make all of society better.
It won't.
The reason is basic economics. If everyone were rich and powerful; if everyone could create cool things like Steve Jobs does, then being a CEO would pay minimum wage. Compared to the rest of the world, America is rich on a GDP basis. However, compared to the rest of the world on a quality of life basis, America does little better than some third world countries. Consider:
Even though I have a "good" job as an engineer, making close to the median salary in the field, I:
Cannot afford to buy a house in the same community I where work.
Had my first child at a decade older than my father.
Have no real, viable retirement plan. No, a 401k is not a retirement plan; it is a retirement gamble. Some people win, some don't (like my mother, who was forced into retirement after her 401 lost half its value.)
If I lose my job, I can lose both my home and my healthcare. Compare this with some of the poorer socialist countries where this is not even a possibility. One would think that making hundreds of times what my third world counterparts do would afford me a greater degree of social security, but sadly it does not.
The fact that urban America has transitioned from single-earner households to dual-earner households makes it much more difficult to live in urban areas. Families with only a single income find that they cannot afford the house they need. Sure, I could move to a less expensive rural area - that is, if I could find a job there.
I went to college. I made the grade. But so did millions of others. Every three years, the US University system grants college degrees to the equivalent of the population of Chicago. These are the people with whom I compete for jobs. Even though my father was an unskilled laborer, he had far less competition and enjoyed a far greater standard of living than I do. Yes, we're all educated now. Did our education solve the problem of limited resources? No, it just allows us a greater understanding of economics, of why, after decade of career preparation, we are now worse off than our parents' generation.
Does the rising tide lift all boats? Sure, to some degree. I can afford gadgets that would have amazed my parents' generation. But yet, for all my education - for changing careers from programming to engineering to get a better salary; in spite of doubling my net worth in the last decade - I am still struggling to afford the basic necessities of life. It means little to be able to buy that killer laptop when I can't afford to put a roof over my head. This isn't an education problem; it isn't a problem of productivity. It is a problem of economics and of corporate greed.
In the 90's, the conservative harping about the loss of morality fell on deaf ears. Who cared if couples opted not to marry and have children? Who cared if corporations became greedy? (Greed was good, right?) Now we reap the harvest we've sown: corporate greed has reduced the effective wages to poverty level, and we're now finding that the economic boom dependent on an ever increasing consumer base is unsustainable, largely in part because the necessary consumers were never born.
I find myself in the oddest of paradoxes: I can afford whatever electronic toys I wish, yet cannot afford the basic necessities of family life.
With false humility: "I don't think I'm better than anyone else, but..." Where the but clause is an attempt to justify some otherwise objectionable behavior.
Which, if taken to its logical conclusion means the speaker is no better than you, and quite possibly much worse.
It's an attempt to convince the hearer that the person speaking is not arrogant; a humble person would readily admit that he is better than others, about the same as many, and worse than a few. Usually, though, I find someone who makes it a point to claim false humility is either intentionally blind to their own imperfections, or trying to hide or justify them. The natural consequence of such an attitude usually results in said person having many more character flaws person than his peers.
Ever increasingly vindictive society with its everlasting memory.
Not.
American culture is replete with stories of the rebellion of youth. Yet, for some reason, even though our forebears boast of their misdeeds, actually getting caught leaves a permanent scar on one's career.
And this from the generation that was going to change the world.
The world has changed. Either we've all become far more paranoid about the rest of society, or that generation who fomented the sexual revolution has had a change of heart, or perhaps merely become hypocrites.
I have a hard time understanding how a society which makes discrimination against homosexuals illegal (however immoral homosexual acts may be), finds in its purview the audacity to discriminate against people based on decades-old moral infractions. Perhaps it is not a matter of morality, but rather anarchy in law; the homosexuals simply have a better lobby than the former pranksters and drug users.
Instead of worrying about someone finding out what you did years ago, perhaps we should be more concerned that our society is becoming less forgiving, more vindictive, with respect to others. The problem isn't that you had youthful indiscretions; the problem is that your employer thinks they are relevant five, ten, or twenty years later.
Could get a drunk convicted without even using a breathalyzer. Things like field sobriety tests, walking a straight line, etc... go a long way. Believe me, in most cases, juries believe whatever an officer says. Take those guys in NY who shot Shawn Bell, on the eve of his wedding: multiple police officers shoot an unarmed man, and no one goes to jail. The cops don't need a breathalyzer. Heck, they don't even need a blood test.
Sure, there are probably marginal cases, but who cares if someone is 0.01 over the limit? The majority of drunken driving accidents involve people *WELL* over the limit -.15,.28, etc... I'm not so much concerned about the guy who's had a little too much and is just driving back from the bar as the guy who's bombed out of his mind joy riding at 95 miles an hour.
The problem here is that this device could have sent innocent people to jail, ruined their career prospects, etc... Think about that: simple carelessness on the part of an engineer (really, a programmer, and lousy one at that!), or greed on part of the company that made this device, ("I don't care if it works, we're losing money by the day. Ship it!") sent honest people to jail.
But, of course, even in the worst case, the only thing which happens to the company is they lose a little income. If any. The cost of their malfeasance is borne by those wrongly convicted, by the taxpayers who must now fund the appeals process, by those whose lives were altered by the drunk drivers this device *didn't* catch.
The executives of the company should have their licenses revoked, and a felony DUI attached to their record. Only when executives are held (personally) accountable for the actions of their companies will we see the situation improve.
It's called DOS, and it was done a long time ago..
on
Phoenix BIOSOS?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
DOS was a BIOS based OS. It passed a large number of its calls directly to the BIOS. We all know how well that worked out.
That said, I would rather have a read-only, default, fallback, usable OS in the system firmware. You know, something that could be used for:
OS installation.
Basic networking.
Backup and recovery operations.
Performing basic system utilities.
The PC is one of the few platforms where the hardware is actually useless to the end user without an installed operating system. Reflashable BIOSes further compound the problem by allowing a software command to render the hardware unbootable and unrecoverable (that is, unless you happen to have a FLASH programmer and another computer lying around...). The PC has perhaps the worst architure and implementation of any major platform, and it's about time they did something to fix that.
In fact, with the falling prices of flash, why not just flash a Linux kernel into the BIOS?
A bootable, usable Linux system with BusyBox can fit into 4 MB of flash.
A 64MB flash (possibly much less) could support the above, plus MicroWindows or similar.
Why bother having a separate OS when the kernel could fit on the firmware?
Let the rest of the system - libraries, apps, configuration, etc... reside on the disk, but keep the hardware related parts (i.e. drivers, etc...) on the firmware itself.
With kernel drivers *in the hardware itself*, one would never have to worry about getting the correct driver, etc...
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What I find interesting is there's no mention of ClearCase. Maybe the author is unaware of it, or considers it obsolete? Then again, the author didn't seem that experienced with the debacles into which one can get with revision control SW. The example he posits is the least of the problems which can crop up.
I've used both ClearCase and CVS. First, CVS:
Now for ClearCase
Now, granted, a lot of FOSS products are not trying to be SEI level 5*. They don't have to demonstrate a repeatable process. The often don't incorporate bug fixes into older releases, or maintain several concurrent branches of the same codebase. It is also important to show which
"Made possible by Microsoft(TM)"
Right?
TFA says nothing about the OS involved, which usually means a Microsoft Windows PC. I suppose the NYT is able to sell more advertising if they keep it ambiguous.
Now, to be fair, Linux recently patched a root-privilege bug that went unnoticed for EIGHT years. But, to be just as fair, there are several orders of magnitude more compromises available courtesy Redmond, and due largely in part (as Djikstra quipped...) to their poor reinvention of UNIX.
I have family that use Windows. What am I supposed to do? This is getting ridiculous. Sure, they get the OS they deserve. Sure, my employer gets the security compromises they deserve. But some part of the blame has to be shared by the company which made all of this possible.
Programmers have always written buggy software. But it took Microsoft to create security flaws *by design* - that is, to deliberately architect software in an insecure an unreliable manner. It took Microsoft to disregard the lessons learned in UNIX, (as Djikstra would say) "To reinvent it poorly."
I know, I know, ./ers will say, "Don't use Windows". Okay, I don't. But you have to understand that not everyone is a geek. The folks at corporate *BUY* Windows licenses because they don't know any better. My relatives use it because it came with their computer, or, their department at the university uses word, or they want to play games, or they want something familiar.
What about them?
Is it really acceptable for us to ignore the needs of the average user? Is it really acceptable to blame the victims?
Or, should we hold Microsoft accountable to the same standards adhered to by everyone else in the industry?
Yes, but they can get a judgement against you in another state - say, New Jersey - and use that to garnish your wages in Texas. I know of at least one case in which a default judgement in a California court was used to garnish wages in Illinois. The person in question had to fly to California to dispute the judgement and reopen the case.
I don't know how it all played out, but he was out a few thousand dollars in expenses before his name was cleared.
When I was younger, I developed the habit of answering the phone, "Mort's morgue - you stab 'em, we slab 'em!" and other sophomoric phrases. After a while, I made a conscious effort to come up with new and interesting tag lines when answering the phone.
My friends and family expected wierd responses when they called. Debt collectors didn't. Sometimes they'd just hang up. Other times they'd apologize for the wrong number. But then some got downright nasty.
Having a relative run into debt problems, there was a period of time of about 6 months when I would receive calls from debt collectors on a regular basis. They always pretended to be someone else - usually someone with authority. In some cases, they impersonated the police, which was illegal.
But it just so happens that one time, I answered, "Dominoes Pizza..." And instead of a familiar family member's voice, it's the debt collector, impersonating a Chicago police officer. So I played along, taking his order (I had worked at pizza places before).
Now, this was after the invention of caller ID. And reverse-lookups on the Internet. And I happened to know that pizza stores routinely re-route orders to another store if the address doesn't fall within their delivery area. I'll leave as an exercise for the reader just what happened next.
Needless to say, they stopped calling.
I can't help but think that at least once, the sweatshop employees at a debt collection agency got a much needed pizza party, courtesy the employee who had the balls to impersonate a Chicago cop.
The Russian dipshit who put the transformer in a place where it could destroy a water bearing wall and kill 12 people is probably feeling pretty bad about himself right now.
Perhaps you have more information than I, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the structural failure of the water bearing wall was created by a massive turbine ripping itself apart. If you watch the video, you hear the explosion some time after the water starts spraying everywhere. So apparently the concrete was compromised before the transformer exploded.
If I had to speculate, I'd say a structural failure of the concrete allowed much more water past the turbine blades; the corresponding increase in speed overloaded the transformer, causing it to explode. After the explosion, the lack of load on the turbine allowed it to exceed its rated speed, at which point it ripped itself apart causing even further damage.
It's a well known fact that concrete cracks. Perhaps the original engineers designed the spillway so that even with a fully open sluice and no load, the turbine speed would not destroy itself. I wonder if they considered the possibility of a large concrete failure allowing an essentially unlimited amount of water past the turbines.
One of the things which I've always wondered is how hackers know they've broken into the real-deal versus a honeypot.
I wonder if it even occurs to most hacker/cracker types that the logon banner and machine name are completely arbitrary. I recently setup servers on a private section of the network with a banner which states, "You are not authorized to access this server; this incident will be reported..." (Now, granted, there's nothing of great importance on that particular machine, and it has not been "properly" secured.) But I could just as easily have used, "Bank of America Federal Clearing House" Had I done so, (and if this machine was internet-accessible), I would not at all be surprised to hear of a hacker group claiming to have compromised Bank of America.
How does a hacker know the machine to which he's gained access is doing anything more than merely logging his actions? How does he know if the data he's got is any good?
Why?
Why not - and I mean this seriously - sue them for libel when they bring action for identity theft against you?
You can very easily demonstrate that the SSN is not a proof of identity (authentication). You can (or should be able to) easily demonstrate that a company which relies on SSN for identity authentication is negligent of its fiduciary duty to protect the assets of its stockholders. Toward the libel charge, you should be able to demonstrate that the company *should have known* there was strong possibility the person who stole your identity was not you, and yet continued to blame you for what was ultimately *their failure* to properly identify the person to whom they extended credit.
A simple case of this nature - one which establishes precedent and carries high punitive damages - should be enough to get the industry to reform. Without that case, it's just a matter of bickering between consumers and corporations, and guess who controls the media....
Second point, who is going to sue some no-name contributor who doesn't have any money anyway, especially if you have to prove that that particular developer knew there were bugs?
Microsoft. That's who.
If it is possible to sue OSS for bugs, any vendor who feels they've lost business to OSS will be prone to suing OSS maintainers, if for no other reason than to cast FUD on free software, i.e. "Didn't they (the OSS developers) get sued for writing buggy software?"
Without the proposed legislation, such lawsuits are much more likely to be dismissed.
Even as a child, I knew:
The problem with the filesharers is they are confusing sharing with taking. Sharing is when you give to others what rightfully belongs to you. Taking is when you give to yourself (and possibly others) what rightfully belongs to someone else, against their wishes. Lending your CDs to your friends is much different than giving the *entire world* a copy of the music for *free*. Your friend expects to return your CD and the favor someday. The rest of the world does not.
As long as people put significant amount of work and labor into the creative arts, they will expect to receive something in return from society for their efforts. Contrary to what some may believe, providing a living for an artist *is* in the best interest of society, because the financial incentive means a greater number of creative people can quit their day jobs and work full time creating music, movies, art, etc... Whether that occurs through patronage or copyright is largely a matter of the details. However, given Americans' aversion to greater taxes (to support the artists, of course), it isn't likely that copyright is going to change soon.
I've never understood why people would pay Amazon to *rent* what they can already borrow from the Library for *free*.
Oh, you thought you bought Orwell's 1984? Silly reader, haven't you heard of DRM? The only books you buy from Amazon are the dead-tree variety with shipping charges.
It isn't that smart people _can't_ make good decisions. The problem is that, more often than not, smart people forget that rational decisions often have emotional and moral consequences. A completely rational and unemotional overlord would see nothing wrong with killing people at the point where their economic contribution to society fell below the cost of benefits they consumed.
For an example of this on a smaller scale, just consider the UK health situation. The high cost of treating macular degeneration (which leads to blindness) means that in the UK, an elderly patient must be at risk of total blindness before treatment is approved. That is, you don't get treatment for the second eye until you're already blind in the first.
Consider then, where a cost-benefit analysis of human beings would lead. Who would determine the criteria? Probably the machine. And how would humans compare to machines in terms of productivity? If machines made the decisions, based on cold, hard, logic, humanity is doomed. It's that simple.
The native Americans used to ask. To them, the land was so fundamentally free that to own a piece of it seemed a sacrilege (sp?) against nature.
But then, along came Europeans, and land the Indians had used for centuries was suddenly denied them. You see, Europeans had this notion of property rights extending to the very stuff you put your feet on. You might think it's absurd to lay claim to the internet, but believe me, someone is already thinking about ways of divvying it up and making ordinary people pay for what they used to get for free. You'll pay to transmit, and your recipient will pay to receive. And somewhere, somehow, if the telecoms can manage it, you'll pay a monthly fee to them to *store* the content you received from the internet. Let's not forget Time Warner, who wanted to triple bill YouTube - once for the priviledge of connecting to the Net, a second time for the priviledge of providing *premium* content, and the third time is the user who pays for the bandwidth of downloading it from YouTube.
Freedom isn't free, after all - as the saying goes. If you think the internet can't be owned, you've obviously never met a US legislator.
Doesn't it occur to you that Dish has their DVRs manufactured by someone else, and that these guys might have wanted to be that someone?
Look - Dish encryption has been broken repeatedly throughout the last decade. Which means that someone who can explain the flaws and failures of the last designs, and offer something provably more secure would have an offering very compelling to Dish. Doing so requires demonstrating the ease with which their existing system can be broken.
I'm thinking that if a security researcher had done the same thing, he would not be in jail. Nor would a large corporation.
But a set top box importer does it, and suddenly it's a federal crime.
The most troublesome part about this is that engineers routinely reverse engineer the work of others for the sake of creating compatible products - an exemption the DMCA explicitly allows. Perhaps the company wanted to offer a cheaper STB to Dish, and undercut the competition. Or perhaps they planned to sell directly to the black market, engaging in fraud. The act of reverse engineering a component tells us nothing about the company's intentions.
I mention this because this very thing was done to Lexmark printers a few years ago. Instead of getting arrested, the manufacturer of competing cartridges was sued under the DMCA; the case went all the way to the SCOTUS, and Lexmark lost. It would appear this would set precedent regarding the legality of reverse engineering for the sake of creating interoperable products, but strangely, the FBI seems not to follow precedent. I find it odd that an activity which was legal and sanctioned by the DMCA - and even supported by the Supreme Court, is now interpreted as being illegal according to the very same law.
If anything, this shows the illegality of an action depends more upon who you are than what you do. Best not to offend our corporate overlords, lest they have the FBI arrest you.
I'm actually impressed by the trollishness of your post. And you managed to fool the moderators! You are quite the master troll. Let's take a look at your post:
Just because you are jealous of someone elses assets and position in life doesn't mean your life sucks, it just means your perspective sucks and you're a whiney little bitch.
Ah, the hook. Infer jealousy and call someone names in the first paragraph. Normally, this would be a sure sign that you're a troll, but you managed to do it with such elegance that you fooled the moderators. Good job! I'd give you +2 for overgeneralization and stupid platitudes. You deftly transformed the GP's concern for his family into a matter of jealousy and whining. A good turn, perhaps not as subtle as it could have been, but good nonetheless.
No Americans life is hard...
Now this is a little disappointing. You pull out the straw man, "You wouldn't be comparing yourself to someone with real issues..." instead of going for the throat. You could have gone on for a bit longer, and perhaps suggested that the GP had never worked a day in his life, never had to suffer loss like ${FAMOUS DEAD PERSON}, never had to overcome obstacles like [Normandy|Bataan|Auschwitz|Paralysis|Blindness| etc...], but you didn't. I must admit, I'm rather disappointed, and somewhat confused that you forfeited this paragraph. So it's -1 for this bit, and perhaps you can do better later.
Your father enjoyed a better life because he had perspective, which you do not
Okay, so you're starting to recover. Again, the name calling. This is classic troll, not a lot of originality here. I must say, you started off good, and then faltered - next time, try using an implication of something undesirable, rather than an outright attack.
Try managing your money better...
Now you're really getting going here. You've deftly obscured the argument here - you've transformed an argument about economic conditions into one about money management, personal character, and managed to blame the victim, all in one paragraph. This is truly a work of art - it requires a certain ignorance of the world to get this part of a troll correct. To keep creating work like this, you're going to have to avoid anything, however slight, that suggests the world is more complicated than a set of over-generalized, good-sounding platitudes. For reducing an otherwise intellectual argument to a mundane question of the personal fitness of the poster, I grant you +5. Truly remarkable.
STOP BUYING...
Now this part is required for every troll. You suggest the solution to the problem is so simple that only a moron could have missed it. I'm personally not impressed by this; you didn't execute it well (CAPS? - what were you thinking?!), and there's nothing particularly spectacular about it. Yes, it contains the implications of incompetence, and the inevitable name calling, but is otherwise lackluster in execution. Experienced trolls would scoff as such a poorly executed invective. -1, bad form.
The problem here is you, sorry.
Gah! What was that?! You had such a good troll going, and then you blew it! There's no subtlety here. It's plain as day you're just trolling. Seriously, spend some time with the masters. Learn the Apple troll. No, wait - that's too advanced for you. Go with the Steven King is Dead troll, and start from there. Be patient. Let the feelings flow. But - learn self control; learn subtlety. S-U-B-T-L-E-T-Y. -10, giving up without a fight. You're 13 down by now.
You finally grew up and had to start dealing with responsibility...
And the recovery is slow, and painful. At this point, your best bet is to convince the reader that you are really sincere. You go on like this for a few more paragraphs, a few more straw men, a few more conflations. After this point, you're about even. And then:
The fact that urban America has transitio
Honestly, think about your post for a moment. That laptop you want: $400. Your mortgage: $1600. So you forego your laptop, in order to save a week's worth of mortgage, and close the door on future employment, career advancement, etc...?
The point is that foregoing those electronic toys won't make enough of a difference to afford the housing I need for a family. A $400 laptop is only two weeks worth of groceries for a family of six. It's not like I'm buying a laptop every two weeks, and can just stop it so I can afford a larger family. To help you out, here are some cost comparisons:
So, to prepare for raising a family, you need about $19k-20k of additional income, the FIRST YEAR. I doubt I've spent that much on electronic toys over the course of my entire life, let alone the few years I've been married. So where is the money going to come from? Pinching pennies at the valu-mart isn't going to provide the savings necessary to support a family.
* - One can actually get away with less than this if one is willing to forego the use of formula and breastfeed instead. However, be prepared for allegations of negligence because your child will be "underweight" compared to his formula-fed peers.
Okay, I'll try to say this is in the least trollish way possible: you completely missed the point of my post. The problem is not that I don't have enough toys. I could honestly care less - a $30 microcontroller kit is more entertaining to me than the big-screen plasma tvs everyone seems to think they need. The problem is that children are far more expensive from a resource perspective than that iPhone or new laptop you've got your eye on. Sure, I could forego a new laptop this year. But I'd have to forego a laptop upgrade for 2 decades to make up the cost of a normal childbirth. And that's after insurance pays! And I haven't even begun to talk about the cost of a four bedroom place in the Chicago area. But I'm lucky, compared to some; I've heard of the 50 year mortgages people are taking in California; of making $100,000 a year and being able to afford nothing more than a single bedroom apartment.
Some people just don't get it. My father did have a higher standard of living than I did. He didn't *have* to spend half his income on housing, and yes, he was frugal. He didn't have to enlist in the Army to pay for college - in fact, he didn't even have to finish his degree. He had the resources to start a family when he was young; I didn't.
But here I am, having served my country, having made the grade in college, having done all of the things my parents' generation thought necessary to have a successful life, and yet, I have a lower standard of living than they. My parents bought food at the national chain stores; I buy mine at the discount stores (Aldi). My parents bought a new car every few years; I still drive a 10 year old truck. And the worst of it? I cannot afford to buy the very house in which I was raised.
I can understand the suburbanite college kid whining about how he can't afford his a Lexus. But I'm not that person. Instead, I'm trying to provide the same lifestyle for my children that I grew up with, and finding that it is difficult, if not impossible. Not being able to provide for your family is a much different position than not having the toys you'd like, and there's nothing spoiled or unseemly about wanting to give your children what you have received yourself. But I can't even do that, unfortunately.
The fact that I can afford a new laptop every year is little consolation when I can't afford the basic necessities of life. What is oddest about my situation is that I learned to be frugal - to forgo the things I wanted so as to afford the things I need. But now, the things I want are of such little expense compared to the needs of my family that it hardly makes a difference, if it all.
I agree with the problems of a credit based society. The willingness of others to buy on credit, thereby paying more for an item than it is actually worth, affects the ability of others to buy said item. For example, in a cash-based society, most houses would sell for the value of the time and materials used to build them, and the nominal cost of the lot. In such a system, a house would cost about $75k + lot. In reality, however, the fact that my neighbor is willing to take a 30 or even 50 year mortgage means that $75k worth of labor and materials turns into $250k worth of housing. Why would anyone sell a house to me at just over cost, when my stupid, compulsive neighbor is willing to pay them more than three times what it is worth? A price he can afford only because the bank is willing to lend him such obscene amounts of money.
And then there is corporate greed. The first is more apparent now that the housing bubble burst. Corporate lenders were using loans to make a short term profit, at the expense of long term viability. They found a sucker - Corporate America - and the rest is history. The second kind of corporate greed is more insidious: at large firms, they actually pay people to study the labor market and figure out strategies for paying the least for labor. I've actually witnessed this. For example, last year, as IBM reward its shareholders with a better than expected profit. For their part in the success, its employees were rewarded with layoffs. This works to IBM's advantage: in the first place, the influx of unemployed workers reduces the hiring wage; in the second place, the threat of layoffs "encourages" a competitive atmosphere where every employee tries to outdo the others, out of fear of being laid off. IBM, will, no doubt, use the reduced median salaries across the economy to justify reducing or eliminating benefits, promotions, etc... Long story short, a large employer is able to manipulate the market cost of labor through periodic layoffs and hiring during economic downturns. Typically, a large corporation will replace experienced employees with younger, less expensive ones.
I have no doubt that Apple will continue should Jobs leave.
The problem is that this has happened before, and the company tanked. An Apple without Jobs is just another electronics company.
There is no shortage of visionaries in the world who could replace Jobs. The problem, however, is that venture capitalists tend to be incapable of differentiating between someone with vision, purpose, and the pragmatism required to get things done, and the inevitable pie-in-the-sky salesman/dreamer who will only bankrupt the company with crazy, unworkable schemes. Jobs is important because he's a known, good bet. There's very little risk that he would bankrupt the company.
Things will never be completely fair, but the way to make them more fair is to help everyone become more rich and powerful. The only way that can happen is if everyone is more productive: imagine if everyone accomplished in their life things similar to what Steve Jobs has done.
Disclaimer: I am a conservative. So I recognize the above as a variation on "the free market cures all ills" and the conservative notion that more wealth will make all of society better.
It won't.
The reason is basic economics. If everyone were rich and powerful; if everyone could create cool things like Steve Jobs does, then being a CEO would pay minimum wage. Compared to the rest of the world, America is rich on a GDP basis. However, compared to the rest of the world on a quality of life basis, America does little better than some third world countries. Consider:
I went to college. I made the grade. But so did millions of others. Every three years, the US University system grants college degrees to the equivalent of the population of Chicago. These are the people with whom I compete for jobs. Even though my father was an unskilled laborer, he had far less competition and enjoyed a far greater standard of living than I do. Yes, we're all educated now. Did our education solve the problem of limited resources? No, it just allows us a greater understanding of economics, of why, after decade of career preparation, we are now worse off than our parents' generation.
Does the rising tide lift all boats? Sure, to some degree. I can afford gadgets that would have amazed my parents' generation. But yet, for all my education - for changing careers from programming to engineering to get a better salary; in spite of doubling my net worth in the last decade - I am still struggling to afford the basic necessities of life. It means little to be able to buy that killer laptop when I can't afford to put a roof over my head. This isn't an education problem; it isn't a problem of productivity. It is a problem of economics and of corporate greed.
In the 90's, the conservative harping about the loss of morality fell on deaf ears. Who cared if couples opted not to marry and have children? Who cared if corporations became greedy? (Greed was good, right?) Now we reap the harvest we've sown: corporate greed has reduced the effective wages to poverty level, and we're now finding that the economic boom dependent on an ever increasing consumer base is unsustainable, largely in part because the necessary consumers were never born.
I find myself in the oddest of paradoxes: I can afford whatever electronic toys I wish, yet cannot afford the basic necessities of family life.
With false humility: "I don't think I'm better than anyone else, but..." Where the but clause is an attempt to justify some otherwise objectionable behavior.
Which, if taken to its logical conclusion means the speaker is no better than you, and quite possibly much worse.
It's an attempt to convince the hearer that the person speaking is not arrogant; a humble person would readily admit that he is better than others, about the same as many, and worse than a few. Usually, though, I find someone who makes it a point to claim false humility is either intentionally blind to their own imperfections, or trying to hide or justify them. The natural consequence of such an attitude usually results in said person having many more character flaws person than his peers.
In Soviet Microsoft, Russia investigates you!
Ever increasingly vindictive society with its everlasting memory.
Not.
American culture is replete with stories of the rebellion of youth. Yet, for some reason, even though our forebears boast of their misdeeds, actually getting caught leaves a permanent scar on one's career.
And this from the generation that was going to change the world.
The world has changed. Either we've all become far more paranoid about the rest of society, or that generation who fomented the sexual revolution has had a change of heart, or perhaps merely become hypocrites.
I have a hard time understanding how a society which makes discrimination against homosexuals illegal (however immoral homosexual acts may be), finds in its purview the audacity to discriminate against people based on decades-old moral infractions. Perhaps it is not a matter of morality, but rather anarchy in law; the homosexuals simply have a better lobby than the former pranksters and drug users.
Instead of worrying about someone finding out what you did years ago, perhaps we should be more concerned that our society is becoming less forgiving, more vindictive, with respect to others. The problem isn't that you had youthful indiscretions; the problem is that your employer thinks they are relevant five, ten, or twenty years later.
Could get a drunk convicted without even using a breathalyzer. Things like field sobriety tests, walking a straight line, etc... go a long way. Believe me, in most cases, juries believe whatever an officer says. Take those guys in NY who shot Shawn Bell, on the eve of his wedding: multiple police officers shoot an unarmed man, and no one goes to jail. The cops don't need a breathalyzer. Heck, they don't even need a blood test.
Sure, there are probably marginal cases, but who cares if someone is 0.01 over the limit? The majority of drunken driving accidents involve people *WELL* over the limit - .15, .28, etc... I'm not so much concerned about the guy who's had a little too much and is just driving back from the bar as the guy who's bombed out of his mind joy riding at 95 miles an hour.
The problem here is that this device could have sent innocent people to jail, ruined their career prospects, etc... Think about that: simple carelessness on the part of an engineer (really, a programmer, and lousy one at that!), or greed on part of the company that made this device, ("I don't care if it works, we're losing money by the day. Ship it!") sent honest people to jail.
But, of course, even in the worst case, the only thing which happens to the company is they lose a little income. If any. The cost of their malfeasance is borne by those wrongly convicted, by the taxpayers who must now fund the appeals process, by those whose lives were altered by the drunk drivers this device *didn't* catch.
The executives of the company should have their licenses revoked, and a felony DUI attached to their record. Only when executives are held (personally) accountable for the actions of their companies will we see the situation improve.
DOS was a BIOS based OS. It passed a large number of its calls directly to the BIOS. We all know how well that worked out.
That said, I would rather have a read-only, default, fallback, usable OS in the system firmware. You know, something that could be used for:
The PC is one of the few platforms where the hardware is actually useless to the end user without an installed operating system. Reflashable BIOSes further compound the problem by allowing a software command to render the hardware unbootable and unrecoverable (that is, unless you happen to have a FLASH programmer and another computer lying around...). The PC has perhaps the worst architure and implementation of any major platform, and it's about time they did something to fix that.
In fact, with the falling prices of flash, why not just flash a Linux kernel into the BIOS?