Yeah, and then the terrorist transmits a message: accede to our demands or we continue to fry a passenger at random every three minutes. Old women, old men, little kids... The passenger compartment melts down into a mass of screaming, sobbing hysterical people who have no idea what's happening or who's doing this to them. They start killing any passengers who look a little bit Arabic, or seem suspicious, or have foreign names. The stewardesses get attacked because they're trying to tell people what to do, and they're the only people not wearing the bracelets.
After a little while, it'd be the terrified passengers who'd be smashing down the cockpit doors and taking over the plane.
I think that part of the cultural difference is that the American mainland was never subjected to a major attack during WW1 and WW2.
In Europe we had regular aerial bombardment that turned some cites into rubble. It kinda gives one a sense of perspective when a few people get killed by terrorists. It's small stuff. Far more people get killed by cars, or bad hospital hygiene, or rotten diet. Terrorism's way down the list.
One of the problems we started having towards the end of the period when the IRA were active, was that when a member of the public found a bomb, they'd have this tendency to pick it up and carry it to the local police station, which didn't exactly impress the desk sergeants. One of the cases that I thought was funniest was when some people discovered a ticking nail bomb in a sports bag in Brixton. They gathered around the nail bomb wondering what to do. Then one of them decided to take action. He decided that it was quite a nice sports bag, and it was going to be destroyed when the bomb went off, so if nobody else minded, he was having the bag. So this guy walks up to the ticking bomb, carefully lifts it out of the bag, sets the bomb down on the pavement, and goes off with the bag.
You hear stories about people stealing the wheels off parked cars, but stealing stuff off a bomb... I can't work out whether that's stupidity, or sang-froid.
--
I was in the US in '94, and even back then the levels of public anxiety when anything happened were intense. Extreme levels of public politeness compared to Europe. People seemed to have this fear that if you insulted someone they might pull a gun and start shooting. I once told someone politely and firmly to f*** off in a major Greyhound Bus station, and suddenly you could hear a pin drop.
I actually saw one guy get taken to hospital in shock because he thought he'd been shot. A car backfired or something and he fell and hurt his shin on a high curbstone alongside another Greyhound Bus station. Blood coming out of his leg, he was pale and shaking and unable to move. Total shock. Everyone else on the bus was worked up and convinced we'd all just been involved in a driveby shooting. I was there saying, er, I don't think so, the guy's leg is straight, and its kinda difficult to get shot in the shin without breaking a bone. The silly plonker has panicked, fallen over, and scraped his leg. And he thinks he's dying.
Maybe the US gun culture is another part of the problem -- the idea that you're supposed to walk around on tippy-toe all the time because if you get into an argument, the other guy might pull a gun and shoot you dead. Maybe people growing up in that sort of society are more prone to anxiety over violent acts that they can't control. Dunno.
--
Another difference between the US and Europe is that to us, the biggest bogeyman before the Cold War wasn't terrorism (although there was a lot of that about), it was the Nazis. Those were the guys who seized power in Germany on the basis that society had to be protected from the terrorist/communist/whateverist threat (look up the "Reichstag Fire Decree"), and proceeded to slaughter millions.
The memory's fading now, but when we hear the US government using phrases and arguments that were previously used by the Nazis, and see their security forces kidnapping and torturing people abroad, applying an ethos that we in most of Western Europe haven't seen since the Gestapo, we tend not to consider the guys using those arguments and methods to be the good guys.
We also tend to remember that when the WW2 German government used the same basic logic as the current Bush administration -- that the important thing is to set aside ethics and win at all costs -- that they actually lost.
So the European and US attitudes to terrorism are different (although they're probably converging). If we say that a terrorist is someone who leverages a magnified fear of personal violence against the population for political ends, then t
Dear Passengers, you will find that you have just been fitted with a shock bracelet designed to inflict disabling levels of intense traumatic pain. This is for your own protection.
Should the system be triggered accidentally or maliciously, you may experience voiding of the bladder and bowels, muscle convulsions, heart failure or death. Please be assured that his behaviour is normal.
If you are a terrorist, please do not remove this bracelet before attempting to take over the aircraft, as this is strictly against regulations. Please also ensure that you have not accidentally disabled your bracelet by placing a piece of foil-backed chewing-gum wrapper under the bracelet to short-circuit the contacts, and/or inadvertently slipping a section of insulating sheet between the contacts and your skin, rendering it ineffective.
If you intend to hijack the aircraft, please ensure that your bracelet is in place and functioning properly before stating your passenger ID clearly to the stewardess, who will relay it to the pilot, along with your demands.
Please do not remove your bracelet and attach it to the stewardess's neck.
Please do not abuse the bracelet's command system by using it to incapacitate your fellow travelers.
Please also refrain from connecting your bracelet's electronics to the aircraft power subsystems, as this may damage the aircraft's power, control and communications subsystems should the bracelet be activated.
Please be aware that you have been issued with this personal high-voltage system for the duration of the flight on the strict understanding that it is not to be used as a weapon, to inflict damage on the airplane's power systems or electronics, or to threaten or hurt your fellow passengers or air crew. The devices should not under any circumstances be used to aid the takeover of an aircraft, and any such use will be prosecuted to the full extent under the law.
Thank you for your cooperation, and enjoy your flight.
So how does viacom know that there are videos on YouTube that definitely copyright vios?
Presumably they'll have checked a few of them out, to make sure.
So does that mean that we have a reasonable belief that viacom have themselves been illegally downloading unauthorised copyrighted material, fully believing that their own actions are illegal?
Hmmm.
Perhaps we should subpoena viacom for full records of all their allegedly-illegal downloading activities. They do keep full records, right? They do have a company rule that says that none of their employees must knowingly download copyvio material at work without logging it?
Because, otherwise, if they're encouraging their employees to illegally download, and aren't keeping track of what's downloaded and why...
"Surely they need some kind of special equipment?"
The presenter makes a good point. Airspeeds that high usually require special hi-tech transparent deflector plates to be attached ahead and around the pilot's location.
The "music keyboard" demo in that video seems to be multi-focus... I'm not sure how the "picture resizing" demo is implemented, I'm sure that you could do something like that by only paying attention to one finger ("click to select, initial movement selects a corner, further movement scales whole picture around initial click-position centre").
Most of the rest of it (like spinning that globe) would seem to be already implementable right now only using single-finger stuff.
MS's mouse-handling features have been annoyingly primitive for years. Multi-focus means that if you're doing music production, you can use a touch-screen to select and move multiple faders at the same time without needing to drop a load of cash on automated control-surface hardware.
personally, I have yet to see one FF addon that excites me
If you do academic research (and use lots of citations), Zotero is pretty cool. It's a specialised database that embeds itself in Firefox, and any time a web page contains recognisable research citations, little icons appear (research paper, book, etc.) that you can click on to add that citation and notes to the db. Also does page snapshots for offline reading. It's like a bookmarking app on steroids for people who write research papers.
Please don't mention Matt Ridley to anyone from the UK.
He was the overpriveleged, aristocratic-background free-market, governments-only-screw-things-up, good-genes-rise-to-the-top guy who used to lecture us in the Economist about how we ought to rein back government regulation of stuff like banking.
Well, he landed a nice job as Chairman of a place called Northern Rock (where his daddy had previously been Chairman), where he got to see how real economics and market forces work.
He crashed it.
In an act of supreme irony, the UK government then had to bail the company out to prevent a national disaster, and clean up Ridley's mess. The taxpayer got saddled with a bill strongly into the double-digit billions, and potential liabilities also in the double-digit billions.
So this rather sours the suggestion that we might like to buy his book. He doesn't need the money. We do.
"The figure is the equivalent of GBP 3,000 for every family in Britain"
Part of me really wants ReactOS to be really, really good when it's finally finished.
Another part of me is worried that if ReactOS is too good, and if their own Win7 development is going badly, Microsoft might pull some last-minute legal stunt to shut ReactOS down and take it over, or pay the ReactOS developer group an obscene amount of money to buy it outright.
If I was an Evil Corporate Executiveâ at Microsoft, that'd be one of my possible emergency plans, in the eventuality of another looming disaster like the Vista launch.
What the Win7 announcement means is that Microsoft aren't planning on fixing the issues with Vista that everyone's complaining about. If you want a faster, leaner version of Vista, you won't get it by buying Vista and waiting for a magical fix-all service pack. The plan is for those improvements to be held back for Win7, to be the "unique selling point" that encourages Vista owners to buy another upgrade, this time to Win7.0 .
So Vista, as a product, probably isn't going to be fixed. The "fix" is going to be to buy the next product.
This sounds rather like the situation with the infamously bad "Windows ME". ME never got fixed. The "fix" was to throw it away and upgrade to XP.
If the situation with Vista compares to that with ME, then the correct thing to do is to say, "Oh well, never mind", and skip past this particular product. That's certainly what a lot of people wished they'd done with ME.
At this point, I think the head of IT goes to the Board and says,
"Sorry guys, it seems that Microsoft aren't a reliable supplier any longer. We like XP, but Vista is unsuitable, and there won't be any proper fixes for Vista until Windows 7, which is going to need a second upgrade license and another bedding-in period, and might introduce new problems. Meanwhile we don't have the option of standing still, because in a few weeks MS are going to be refusing to sell us any more copies of XP, because they want us to switch to this crappy Vista thing. Which we can't afford to do. Could we just continue using the copies of XP that we have? Snag is, by announcing Windows 7 now, MS are setting a timetable for shutting down support for XP as an "obsolete" system, so no, if we want support for our existing XP installations in a few years time, we won't be able to get it from MS, it'd have to be third-party.
I'm sorry about this, I know it's a PITA, but it looks like we're going to have to draw up a plan for migrating to open source. We won't have to implement it immediately, but there's no way we can continue like this. Our business relies on this stuff, we need a system with a guaranteed continuity of supply, and MS obviously aren't willing to provide that continuity. That means we can't build MS-dependence into our future plans."
When you say "multi-touch", you you mean multiple independent object selection and control ("multi-mouse"/"multifocus"), the sort of thing that would let you select multiple screen faders on a virtual mixer console and move them independently at the same time?
Or are we just talking about multi-finger gesture support?
Cos AFAIK, the "new" Apple multifinger stuff was neither particularly new nor particularly Appley. When I got my old Sony laptop years ago, with XP Pro, it came with Synaptics Touchpad pre-installed, and that supported multi-finger things. (puzzled)
Lots of people also watch TV. It doesn't necessarily mean that most of them are interested in TV electronics, or in becoming TV engineers.
The TV (like the internet) is a window. What's interesting is what's on the other side. It's the content that interests, not the enabling mechanism. If you spend a lot of time with your eyes trained at a window, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are fascinated by glass.
There was a quote in New Scientist (which I'm paraphrasing from memory) after the last successful round of HF grants, where someone was asked if the HF community had really, truly believed the rather optimistic-sounding estimates that they'd just given the government.
"We had to", was the answer, "Otherwise we wouldn't have got the money".
"I pledge to face the truth and report it bluntly."
.
I like that!:)
I think that an oath of some sort may be a good idea, for the benefit of newbie graduates and undergrads who haven't yet worked out which way is "up", and are looking for guidance. If there's no ethical lead being given as part of their education, they'll try to soak up the prevailing local cultural norms... and that can lead very quickly to newbies entering culturally-corrupt communities being sucked in, and not having any real ammunition to resist.
You've gotta give people some sort of excuse for doing the right thing, even if it's not in their immediate interests. There'll be people teetering on the edge who want to resist being sucked into institutionalised corruption, but who don't have any argument that they can quote at themselves to explain to their own satisfaction why they shouldn't just do what makes their supervisors and immediate colleagues happy. An oath would provide that "excuse" to do the right thing.
Sure, it won't stop the bastards, but it mught help "damp down" group misbehaviour somewhat.
FWIW, I think that the public perception of corruption in science isn't that it happens because scientists want to harm other scientists... the reason why people often don't trust scientists is because they feel that scientists have excessive loyalty to their bosses and friends and projects and colleagues (and pay packets).
An oath that forbids scientists from doing anything that might harm their colleagues or their superiors would just underline the public perception that scientists are "bent". Swearing an oath that prevents scientists from telling the truth where that truth might portray their group in a bad light... that just feeds the public's belief in conspiracy theories and cover-ups.
Imagine a debate between a creationist and a scientist, where the scientist declares that science is superior to creationism, because science is about the quest for pure truth.
The creationist would be able to cite the oath and say,
"No, you guys aren't interested in any 'truth' that makes you look bad. You promise not to tell people things that might hurt you or your group. You pretend to be interested in truth, but actually you're just an industry that feeds off public money and makes your members swear not to reveal anything that might hurt that relationship. You guys are just another self-serving industry cartel, and the public has no reason to trust that what you say on these sorts of subjects is fair or accurate, because your sworn primary allegiance is to yourselves and each other. Your 'scientists' are part of a sworn conspiracy to suppress any information that might help the Creationist cause, and I cite this oath as hard evidence that you guys aren't for real, and that your 'word' on any subject that might make you look bad is worthless."
And they'd have a point.:(
A culture of excessive group loyalty is often a feature of corrupt organisations, it destroyed Enron, it encouraged the RC church's coverups over child-abusing priests, and the suspicion that scientists do this too is part of why the public eyes arguments between scientists and other groups with suspicion.
People who peddle "woo" can play on that distrust, and use it to steer people away form scientific opinion and towards "woo".
Scientists can argue that that mistrust is displaced, because "proper" scientists would never selfishly put their own community's interests above the truth... but when you have a document that scientists are being asked to swear to, that insists that they must do exactly that... well, it doesn't look too good.
But the proposed oath itself is already deeply corrupt!
I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member. See, it proposes a loyalty to colleagues that overrides loyalty to scientific accuracy and openness, and also overrides loyalty to wider society.
It effectively says that "I will never pursue knowledge to the detriment of the other people in my club". If my supervisors and colleagues are crooks, I must never[/u] pursue knowledge that may harm them. That's corruption.
Why do "supervisors" get a special mention? Could it be that some people involved in drafting this oath are nervous about the idea that some of the "green and idealistic" intake that they are in charge of might be horrified when they find out what their supervisors are up to, and might try to shop them?
It means, that if you uncovered widespread criminal corruption in your community, and wanted to bring that information to the relevant authorities, the oath would prevent it. If you wanted to conduct a scientific study of fraud and misbehaviour within the scientific community, and the results started to come out badly, you'd be prevented from continuing. If your community had been involved in "cheerleading" a Big Science project in order to get funding, and you found that the claims made ot get that funding were exagerrated to the point of fraudulence, the oath would prevent you from conducting a proper factual study that revealed it.
The proposed oath as it currently stands supports a culture of institutionalised corruption, and turns the whistleblowers and the honest scientists who stumble across facts that might not be "helpful" to their colleagues into the bad guys.
It's rotten.
Yeah, when you're assembling irregular-thickness glass for stained glass windows, you put the thicker (heavier) end at the bottom. It makes the glass mounting more stable, and the glass less likely to fall out.
For larger sheets, you put the thicker (stronger) end of the glass sheet at the bottom, because the bottom of the sheet has to carry the weight.
Copyright is only one of the range of various intellectual property rights that are supported by law.
There are also design rights. If you try to produce and sell perfect replacement parts for recent cars, you're going to get sued. The company is almost certainly still going to have the unique manufacturing rights to those designs.
For the case of the Coca Cola bottle shape, the company would probably have design rights (preventing you from manufacturing), plus trademark rights (they use the shape as a distinctive trading identification, like a logo or a trading name), and might also be able to sue you for "passing off", that is, making a product that would be liable to make buyers reasonably expect that it came from a manufacturer other than yourself. If you try to sell cola in a bottle that looks too much like an existing "Coke" bottle, or even if you create a new "Coke-ish" bottle design for your cola that might look to buyers like it's an "official" variation on the design, then you're liable to end up in court under the "passing off" rule.
An organisation disrupts US IT infrastructure... probably illegally, possibly maliciously... and seems to be making their growing ability to cause this sort of disruption part of their business growth plan.
National security implications, anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and then the terrorist transmits a message: accede to our demands or we continue to fry a passenger at random every three minutes. Old women, old men, little kids ... The passenger compartment melts down into a mass of screaming, sobbing hysterical people who have no idea what's happening or who's doing this to them. They start killing any passengers who look a little bit Arabic, or seem suspicious, or have foreign names. The stewardesses get attacked because they're trying to tell people what to do, and they're the only people not wearing the bracelets.
After a little while, it'd be the terrified passengers who'd be smashing down the cockpit doors and taking over the plane.
In Europe we had regular aerial bombardment that turned some cites into rubble. It kinda gives one a sense of perspective when a few people get killed by terrorists. It's small stuff. Far more people get killed by cars, or bad hospital hygiene, or rotten diet. Terrorism's way down the list.
One of the problems we started having towards the end of the period when the IRA were active, was that when a member of the public found a bomb, they'd have this tendency to pick it up and carry it to the local police station, which didn't exactly impress the desk sergeants. One of the cases that I thought was funniest was when some people discovered a ticking nail bomb in a sports bag in Brixton. They gathered around the nail bomb wondering what to do. Then one of them decided to take action. He decided that it was quite a nice sports bag, and it was going to be destroyed when the bomb went off, so if nobody else minded, he was having the bag. So this guy walks up to the ticking bomb, carefully lifts it out of the bag, sets the bomb down on the pavement, and goes off with the bag.
You hear stories about people stealing the wheels off parked cars, but stealing stuff off a bomb ... I can't work out whether that's stupidity, or sang-froid.
--
I was in the US in '94, and even back then the levels of public anxiety when anything happened were intense. Extreme levels of public politeness compared to Europe. People seemed to have this fear that if you insulted someone they might pull a gun and start shooting. I once told someone politely and firmly to f*** off in a major Greyhound Bus station, and suddenly you could hear a pin drop.
I actually saw one guy get taken to hospital in shock because he thought he'd been shot. A car backfired or something and he fell and hurt his shin on a high curbstone alongside another Greyhound Bus station. Blood coming out of his leg, he was pale and shaking and unable to move. Total shock. Everyone else on the bus was worked up and convinced we'd all just been involved in a driveby shooting. I was there saying, er, I don't think so, the guy's leg is straight, and its kinda difficult to get shot in the shin without breaking a bone. The silly plonker has panicked, fallen over, and scraped his leg. And he thinks he's dying.
Maybe the US gun culture is another part of the problem -- the idea that you're supposed to walk around on tippy-toe all the time because if you get into an argument, the other guy might pull a gun and shoot you dead. Maybe people growing up in that sort of society are more prone to anxiety over violent acts that they can't control. Dunno.
--
Another difference between the US and Europe is that to us, the biggest bogeyman before the Cold War wasn't terrorism (although there was a lot of that about), it was the Nazis. Those were the guys who seized power in Germany on the basis that society had to be protected from the terrorist/communist/whateverist threat (look up the "Reichstag Fire Decree"), and proceeded to slaughter millions.
The memory's fading now, but when we hear the US government using phrases and arguments that were previously used by the Nazis, and see their security forces kidnapping and torturing people abroad, applying an ethos that we in most of Western Europe haven't seen since the Gestapo, we tend not to consider the guys using those arguments and methods to be the good guys.
We also tend to remember that when the WW2 German government used the same basic logic as the current Bush administration -- that the important thing is to set aside ethics and win at all costs -- that they actually lost.
So the European and US attitudes to terrorism are different (although they're probably converging). If we say that a terrorist is someone who leverages a magnified fear of personal violence against the population for political ends, then t
Should the system be triggered accidentally or maliciously, you may experience voiding of the bladder and bowels, muscle convulsions, heart failure or death. Please be assured that his behaviour is normal.
If you are a terrorist, please do not remove this bracelet before attempting to take over the aircraft, as this is strictly against regulations. Please also ensure that you have not accidentally disabled your bracelet by placing a piece of foil-backed chewing-gum wrapper under the bracelet to short-circuit the contacts, and/or inadvertently slipping a section of insulating sheet between the contacts and your skin, rendering it ineffective.
If you intend to hijack the aircraft, please ensure that your bracelet is in place and functioning properly before stating your passenger ID clearly to the stewardess, who will relay it to the pilot, along with your demands.
Please do not remove your bracelet and attach it to the stewardess's neck.
Please do not abuse the bracelet's command system by using it to incapacitate your fellow travelers.
Please also refrain from connecting your bracelet's electronics to the aircraft power subsystems, as this may damage the aircraft's power, control and communications subsystems should the bracelet be activated.
Please be aware that you have been issued with this personal high-voltage system for the duration of the flight on the strict understanding that it is not to be used as a weapon, to inflict damage on the airplane's power systems or electronics, or to threaten or hurt your fellow passengers or air crew. The devices should not under any circumstances be used to aid the takeover of an aircraft, and any such use will be prosecuted to the full extent under the law.
Thank you for your cooperation, and enjoy your flight.
So how does viacom know that there are videos on YouTube that definitely copyright vios? Presumably they'll have checked a few of them out, to make sure. So does that mean that we have a reasonable belief that viacom have themselves been illegally downloading unauthorised copyrighted material, fully believing that their own actions are illegal? Hmmm. Perhaps we should subpoena viacom for full records of all their allegedly-illegal downloading activities. They do keep full records, right? They do have a company rule that says that none of their employees must knowingly download copyvio material at work without logging it? Because, otherwise, if they're encouraging their employees to illegally download, and aren't keeping track of what's downloaded and why ...
That's because it's easier to train the spaceborne male African elephant to carry out difficult satellite retrieval tasks. It has the longer trunk.
I want video of the elephant wearing a spacesuit.
That was before they started giving them space rockets.
The presenter makes a good point. Airspeeds that high usually require special hi-tech transparent deflector plates to be attached ahead and around the pilot's location.
Otherwise it gets very windy inside the cockpit.
Most of the rest of it (like spinning that globe) would seem to be already implementable right now only using single-finger stuff.
MS's mouse-handling features have been annoyingly primitive for years. Multi-focus means that if you're doing music production, you can use a touch-screen to select and move multiple faders at the same time without needing to drop a load of cash on automated control-surface hardware.
Mine are now showing FF ahead of IE, but that's for a fairly specialised website that's had a lot of hits off Slashdot.
If you do academic research (and use lots of citations), Zotero is pretty cool. It's a specialised database that embeds itself in Firefox, and any time a web page contains recognisable research citations, little icons appear (research paper, book, etc.) that you can click on to add that citation and notes to the db. Also does page snapshots for offline reading. It's like a bookmarking app on steroids for people who write research papers.
I don't think there's an IE equivalent.
I really do.
www.chocolatetreebooks.com/treepics.html
He was the overpriveleged, aristocratic-background free-market, governments-only-screw-things-up, good-genes-rise-to-the-top guy who used to lecture us in the Economist about how we ought to rein back government regulation of stuff like banking.
Well, he landed a nice job as Chairman of a place called Northern Rock (where his daddy had previously been Chairman), where he got to see how real economics and market forces work.
He crashed it.
In an act of supreme irony, the UK government then had to bail the company out to prevent a national disaster, and clean up Ridley's mess. The taxpayer got saddled with a bill strongly into the double-digit billions, and potential liabilities also in the double-digit billions. So this rather sours the suggestion that we might like to buy his book. He doesn't need the money. We do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_rockAnother part of me is worried that if ReactOS is too good, and if their own Win7 development is going badly, Microsoft might pull some last-minute legal stunt to shut ReactOS down and take it over, or pay the ReactOS developer group an obscene amount of money to buy it outright.
If I was an Evil Corporate Executiveâ at Microsoft, that'd be one of my possible emergency plans, in the eventuality of another looming disaster like the Vista launch.
So Vista, as a product, probably isn't going to be fixed. The "fix" is going to be to buy the next product.
This sounds rather like the situation with the infamously bad "Windows ME". ME never got fixed. The "fix" was to throw it away and upgrade to XP.
If the situation with Vista compares to that with ME, then the correct thing to do is to say, "Oh well, never mind", and skip past this particular product. That's certainly what a lot of people wished they'd done with ME.
Or are we just talking about multi-finger gesture support?
Cos AFAIK, the "new" Apple multifinger stuff was neither particularly new nor particularly Appley. When I got my old Sony laptop years ago, with XP Pro, it came with Synaptics Touchpad pre-installed, and that supported multi-finger things. (puzzled)
The TV (like the internet) is a window. What's interesting is what's on the other side. It's the content that interests, not the enabling mechanism. If you spend a lot of time with your eyes trained at a window, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are fascinated by glass.
"We had to", was the answer, "Otherwise we wouldn't have got the money".
I like that! :)
I think that an oath of some sort may be a good idea, for the benefit of newbie graduates and undergrads who haven't yet worked out which way is "up", and are looking for guidance. If there's no ethical lead being given as part of their education, they'll try to soak up the prevailing local cultural norms ... and that can lead very quickly to newbies entering culturally-corrupt communities being sucked in, and not having any real ammunition to resist.
You've gotta give people some sort of excuse for doing the right thing, even if it's not in their immediate interests. There'll be people teetering on the edge who want to resist being sucked into institutionalised corruption, but who don't have any argument that they can quote at themselves to explain to their own satisfaction why they shouldn't just do what makes their supervisors and immediate colleagues happy. An oath would provide that "excuse" to do the right thing.
Sure, it won't stop the bastards, but it mught help "damp down" group misbehaviour somewhat.
FWIW, I think that the public perception of corruption in science isn't that it happens because scientists want to harm other scientists ... the reason why people often don't trust scientists is because they feel that scientists have excessive loyalty to their bosses and friends and projects and colleagues (and pay packets).
An oath that forbids scientists from doing anything that might harm their colleagues or their superiors would just underline the public perception that scientists are "bent". Swearing an oath that prevents scientists from telling the truth where that truth might portray their group in a bad light ... that just feeds the public's belief in conspiracy theories and cover-ups.
Imagine a debate between a creationist and a scientist, where the scientist declares that science is superior to creationism, because science is about the quest for pure truth.
The creationist would be able to cite the oath and say,
And they'd have a point. :(
A culture of excessive group loyalty is often a feature of corrupt organisations, it destroyed Enron, it encouraged the RC church's coverups over child-abusing priests, and the suspicion that scientists do this too is part of why the public eyes arguments between scientists and other groups with suspicion.
People who peddle "woo" can play on that distrust, and use it to steer people away form scientific opinion and towards "woo". Scientists can argue that that mistrust is displaced, because "proper" scientists would never selfishly put their own community's interests above the truth ... but when you have a document that scientists are being asked to swear to, that insists that they must do exactly that ... well, it doesn't look too good.
For larger sheets, you put the thicker (stronger) end of the glass sheet at the bottom, because the bottom of the sheet has to carry the weight.
There are also design rights. If you try to produce and sell perfect replacement parts for recent cars, you're going to get sued. The company is almost certainly still going to have the unique manufacturing rights to those designs.
For the case of the Coca Cola bottle shape, the company would probably have design rights (preventing you from manufacturing), plus trademark rights (they use the shape as a distinctive trading identification, like a logo or a trading name), and might also be able to sue you for "passing off", that is, making a product that would be liable to make buyers reasonably expect that it came from a manufacturer other than yourself. If you try to sell cola in a bottle that looks too much like an existing "Coke" bottle, or even if you create a new "Coke-ish" bottle design for your cola that might look to buyers like it's an "official" variation on the design, then you're liable to end up in court under the "passing off" rule.
Maybe they //think// they're the market leaders, because they Googled "quantum crytograhy" and couldn't find anyone else doing it.
An organisation disrupts US IT infrastructure ... probably illegally, possibly maliciously ... and seems to be making their growing ability to cause this sort of disruption part of their business growth plan.
National security implications, anyone?