Re:Promoting progress through copyright extension
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 1
Clearly not. An ex post facto law is one that makes an act illegal after it's already happened. If I extend the copyright on a work that's currently under copyright, I haven't done that. Any copying that happens at the time that the extension is granted would already be illegal (since the work was still under copyright) and copying of the work at a later time (while the extension was in effect) would take place after the law was passed. Thus no ex post facto. The only way that you could claim that the law was ex post facto is if it returned copyright to some things that were out of copyright and punished people who had copied them between the time that the copyright lapsed and when it was reinstated.
Re:Whats wrong with this law?
on
Eldred vs. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It extended the law by set amount of time, not indefinately, which means that the "limited time" clause is still literally true.
Lessig actually had a very interesting counter-argument for this point. His argument was that in a legal sense, limited means not only finite but also for a fixed time. If you allow retrospective extensions, the time is no longer limited because it can be extended indefinitely. He argues from a standard legal position, that when a lawyer is given an extension for his case, the time is no longer limited. I'm not sure if that's actually a standard usage, but if it is then it's a very strong counterargument.
The issue with a company like Sony is that they're much less monolithic than you probably think. Remember, for instance, that their entertainment arm is something that they bought as a chunk, and it still has a lot of American management and an American outlook. Meanwhile, the hardware business is based in Japan and run by a completely different group of people with a different outlook. They're more like two separate companies that happen to be owned by the same big capital fund than they are like one tightly integrated whole. It's only natural that each half would wind up pursuing its own interests first.
Also bear in mind that Sony seems to be more committed to including DRM and the like in its products than other makers. I'm sure that they'd be happy to have only DRM capable players available. But they also understand that consumers don't want DRM unless it's wrapped up with some kind of added benefit that makes the whole package resonably attractive. As long as there are companies out there that are willing and legally able to sell non-DRM equipment, though, Sony will be forced to provide non-DRM stuff or lose a big chunk of their market (and not get the DRM widespread anyway).
Optimization is still an issue, because it seems solutions today only get more and more bloated.
But bloat doesn't necessarily mean that something is not well optimized. Some kinds of optimization- like unrolling loops- can wind up getting improved performance at the cost of increased binary size. That's not always the case, since bloating the binary beyond a certain point can have diminishing returns as it prevents the whole thing from being able to reside in the fastest cache, but it is an important example of how big doesn't neccessarily mean bad.
Honestly, is bloat really that big of a problem for a typical computer, anyway? RAM and disk memory seem to be growing even faster than processor speed, so that bloat really shouldn't be a serious issue. When was the last time you had to clear out your hard drive because it was getting too full? And when you did, was it because the binaries were too big, or because there were too many data files taking up space?
The idea that he with the most money wins is partially true, but it doesn't cover everything. Yes, it's true that if one side has deep pockets and the other doesn't, the side with deep pockets can frequently bury the other in piles of procedural crap until they run out of cash. And it's also true that having a good (i.e. expensive) lawyer can help a lot. But there are limits to what money can get you. If the facts are clearly in the favor of the little guy, all of the lawyering in the world may not be enough to save the big guy. You see this from time to time when somebody wins a big punative damage award from a large company. Think Erin Brockovich, the lady who scalded herself on McDonalds coffee, the people who sued GM over pickup truck safety, etc.
The other thing to understand is that having lots of money seems to help more if you're the plaintiff than if you're the defendant. That's largely because the plaintiff stands to get damages if he wins, while the defendant only avoids them. That makes it a lot easier for a little guy to get a good lawyer as the plaintiff, since there are plenty of lawyers out there willing to work on contingency. IOW, if you want to tangle with Scientology, you're better off attacking them with a lawsuit (provided you actually have a case) rather than waiting for them to attack you with one.
Besides, while evolution runs fine, it renders terribly with too many 'assumed' window/font sizes, i.e., does not scale well to power users with 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 screen sizes.
Where did you get that idea? I run my system at 1280x1024, and Evolution looks just fine. I certainly don't see any problems with assumed window and font sizes. AFAIK, there aren't any assumed window or font sizes anyway; everything is adjustable either through the gtkhtml control or (in the latest betas) through Evolution itself. (Adjusting through gtkhtml isn't as bad as it sounds, BTW, since it corrects things for all applications that use gtkhtml.)
The USPS customer service is better than most people give them credit for, too. For one thing, they have far more local offices than either UPS or FedEx, so you're likely to be closer to your local post office than your local UPS place. The Post Office also keeps pretty reasonable hours, too.
The thing that I hate the most about receiving anything UPS is that they don't want to leave it without me receiving it in person, and they only deliver when I'm at work. That means that I have to go to their "local" service center, which is 10 miles from my work and 20 miles from my home. The local post office is a block and a half away, and they're open early enough that I can pick up my package first thing in the morning and still get to work on time. If worst comes to worst, I can go in on Saturday, which UPS doesn't let me do.
It's not so much that the people don't necessarily have the understanding of the technology as it is that they don't have a use for it or the support network to take advantage of it. Columbus's discovery of America was significant not because he was the first person to do it but because it was the first time that America was discovered by a society that could exploit the discovery. Similarly, movable metal type printing developed when it did because there was finally a set of enabling technologies that let it work- comparatively cheap paper, appropriate inks, metalury that could make movable type, presses that could be adapted to printing, etc. Many discoveries and inventions are like that; people made false starts toward them a number of times but they didn't catch on until there was an appropriate technological network surrounding them.
So I have yet to meet someone who likes or is interested in Anime who isn't also deeply involved in computers, comic books, or both.
Maybe you're not sampling the right population. I have several friends who are also into anime, but they seem to be split on whether they're interested in computers and/or comic books. Interestingly, my two female friends who like anime are the ones who are not into computers or comics, while my male friends who are interested in anime are both very computer savvy. There may be a correlation there, or it may just be that the men are people I know from my work (which tends to involve a fair bit of computing) while the women are not from work and thus come from a less computer-centric background.
The theme of progressing technology causing nature to revolt is very very common in anime.
Of course it's very common in anime. And if you'll look, you'll discover that most of the anime on that topic just happen to have been released after Nausicaa. It's hardly fair to criticize Miazaki for using a common theme when the main reason that it's so common is that other people were copying him.
Adding an NDA is directly incompatible with the GPL. Just read it:
6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.
Tacking an NDA onto the program would clearly classify as adding a "further restriction on the recipients' excercise of the rights granted herein." That makes requiring one a violation of the GPL. I'm not sure whether that's a violation that would actually void the NDA requirer's rights under the GPL, or if the NDA would just be considered to be void and unenforcable.
windows isn't user friendly. its just never changes.
Obviously written by somebody who wasn't forced to move to a new version of Windows. My work upgraded from NT to 2000, and it was very annoying. There were dozens of small changes to the way that things worked. They didn't actually make anything work better, they just made you learn things over again. That and add new eye candy that looks cool for about three minutes and then gets annoying because it makes the computer less responsive. Now the first thing I do when logging on to a Win2000 computer is to turn off the fade-in menus. I hated it in the bad old days when computers were so slow that it took them a noticable amount of time to draw menus. Why did MS have to add a "feature" that made all menus take an extra 200ms to draw?
I also made the mistake of getting XP for my new computer. (It's mostly a Redhat box, but I have Windows for games and doing my taxes.) Everything changed again with XP, though at least they give you the option of returning to the Win2000 look. I have no doubt that the next version of Windows will add even more stupid changes that add no functionality but just force you to learn to do things a new way in their next version, too.
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers. (A definite Slashdot favorite. How many quotes from AotC fit into that category?)
Who's the more foolish, the fool, or the fool who follows him?
So what? Brin is most definitely not in the "can't do" category. He's a fantastic author who's won a stack of awards for his Science Fiction writing. I'll admit that the one movie made from one of his books was awful, but the blame for that lies clearly on Kevin Costner's shoulders, not Brin's.
Re:Guardian Interview with Christopher Reeve
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 1
If the Declaration uses terms like God, it is because one must speak in the people's terms when talking to the people.
Actually, the only reference to God in the Declaration of Independence is secondary, in "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God". In at least one other instance where it would have been natural to mention God, the Declaration substitutes a more general term ("are endowed by their Creator" rather than "are endowed by God"). Those words were clearly not written by a conventional Christian.
If you don't let your religious beliefs guide your life, and your daily actions, why do you have those beliefs?
As you state later, there's an important difference between letting your personal beliefs guide your daily life and shoving them down other people's throats in the form of legislation. Setting research priorities based on your personal religious beliefs is a form of shoving them down other people's throats. Opposing reproductive cloning because we don't know enough about it to be sure that it's safe is a rational, scientifically supportable reason to oppose it. (I personally support a moratorium on human reproductive cloning for exactly this reason.) Opposing reproductive cloning because you believe that God doesn't want us to do that is imposing your religious beliefs on others.
Re:Do you trust your politicians ?
on
Politicizing Science
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
No. Research should not be political; the decisions that our government makes about research are political. There are two basic ways that research and politics should interact:
Politicians decide how much money we should be spending on research of different types.
Politicians listen to researchers to get advice about matters of public policy where the research is relevant.
I don't have a big problem with changes in the first one. I don't think that our leaders should let their personal religious beliefs guide what kind of research they support, but ultimately that's why we have checks and balances and elections. If one group of politicians makes a stupid choice that way, I have confidence that another group will disagree and the second group will eventually get a chance to reverse the decision. That may take a while, but it's all part of the democatic process.
What really stinks is when people try to undermine the advisory function. I want my legislators and government regulators to be making decisions based on the best scientific advice they can get. If one or a small number of people can set up the committees so that they'll give the advice that those people want rather than the advice that the latest science suggests is correct, that undermines their purpose and the democratic process. That would allow a handful of people to define the agenda and bias the decision making process, which is exactly contrary to the advisory committees intended purpose.
The funniest part about this is that the killer application that would drive people to buy new processors is multimedia sharing. Encoding and decoding multimedia sucks down cycles like crazy. Instead of making it easy for people to share multimedia files Intel and AMD are busy making it as hard as possible.
Wrong. Multimedia encoding takes lots of processor power, but multimedia sharing takes comparatiely little. Just think about it. How many of the people on the net are actually ripping and encoding the files they're sharing, and how many are just downloading them and passing them along? I'd guess that there are dozens or hundreds of people who only copy for every one who actually encodes something.
This can't possibly be right, can it? What if I look at Apache code?
Nothing. Apache is released under a license similar to the original BSD license (i.e. free reuse without need to include the source code, but with an advertizing clause).
The programmer with the serious experience who would be most valuable on the project must avoid it, because they could be sued for copyright infringement.
Of course the flip situation is also quite likely. If you work on a Free Software program that's similar to the proprietary software you write at work, you're opening up that Free Software project to charges that they're stealing code from your employer. That's likely to be true no matter what license the Free Software uses. This is an inherent problem with our Copyright system, not something that's in any way restricted to Free Software.
If I produce a Windows application that looks just like KMail, would I not be in violation of at least the spirt of the GPL?
No. Certainly if you released your mail program under the GPL you would not at all be violating the spirit of the GPL. There's nothing in the GPL at all that suggests that it is bad or wrong to distribute software for proprietary operating systems. In fact, the FSF releases ports of much of its software for Windows; I use GNU EMACS for Windows all the time. But even if you didn't release your software under the GPL you still wouldn't be violating it in either letter or spirit, provided that you didn't actually use any of the code that's under the GPL.
Re:Physics has always been ethically compromised
on
Ununoctium Wrapup
·
· Score: 1
Unrelated but perhaps relevant, Goodstein also has an article titled
Conduct and Misconduct in Science online.
It's not unconnected at all. In addition to teaching physics, Goodstein teaches (or taught, I'm not sure since I took it 10 years ago) an outstanding class on ethics in research. It's something that more schools should include in their curriculum. I argued in favor of making the class a part of the Core curriculum; it didn't happen, but it was (and probably still is) a popular class.
Sheesh, you're saying that companies and/or the government (PARTICULARLY the latter) should everyone run different software?
No, he's not saying that at all. He's saying that my company shouldn't be forced to use a specific program just because other people who we work with- and may be forced to work with for regulatory reasons- choose to use that software. For example, if OSHA requires that information be sent to them in MS Excel format, my company has no choice but to buy a copy of Excel. We can't decide not to deal with OSHA, and we have to use Excel in order to generate files that we know will work with Excel. OTOH, if OSHA specified that data had to be sent in CSV format, we would be free to use whichever spreadsheet we wanted, since all of them can export into CSV format. If we felt like it we could generate all of the files using EMACS. We could even make them using a custom INTERCAL program, if somebody were insane enough to write such a thing. But at that point the choice of which software to use is ours, not theirs.
It's nowhere near as imponderable as the pyramid itself.
The pyramid itself isn't even that imponderable. It is, after all, just a really big stack of rocks. Getting all of the stone blocks and moving them into position was a tremendous amount of work, but it's not some inconceivable feat. It just requires a huge amount of labor- which the records suggest the Egyptians had access to. The pyramids represent a tremendous organizational accomplishment- getting all of those workers in one place and paying and feeding them all was incredible- but are not the unbelievable engineering challenge that they're made out to be.
I am sure no matter how hard they try, today's technobabble will sound dated many decades from now.
That may be true, but it's really irrelevant. Most fiction isn't written with that kind of staying power in mind, and when it does achieve some staying power audiences are frequently willing to give it some leeway because of its age. But when the technobabble sounds ignorant to a contemporary- when they don't even bother to check and see if what they're saying makes sense WRT what we know today- it's just inexcusable.
It doesn't hurt that there's some actual factual basis for the technobabble in that scene. The people who were writing it apparently knew at least a little bit about biological techniques, because a lot of the things Tyrell was saying have a basis in real technology. This is a useful hint that the Trek scriptwriters should have paid attention to. If you start out with something that we actually know something about today, it's more likely to hang together well. I got completely fed up with Voyager when I noticed them using terms from modern science wrong in a way that nobody with a basic undergraduate science education could miss.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly not. An ex post facto law is one that makes an act illegal after it's already happened. If I extend the copyright on a work that's currently under copyright, I haven't done that. Any copying that happens at the time that the extension is granted would already be illegal (since the work was still under copyright) and copying of the work at a later time (while the extension was in effect) would take place after the law was passed. Thus no ex post facto. The only way that you could claim that the law was ex post facto is if it returned copyright to some things that were out of copyright and punished people who had copied them between the time that the copyright lapsed and when it was reinstated.
Lessig actually had a very interesting counter-argument for this point. His argument was that in a legal sense, limited means not only finite but also for a fixed time. If you allow retrospective extensions, the time is no longer limited because it can be extended indefinitely. He argues from a standard legal position, that when a lawyer is given an extension for his case, the time is no longer limited. I'm not sure if that's actually a standard usage, but if it is then it's a very strong counterargument.
The issue with a company like Sony is that they're much less monolithic than you probably think. Remember, for instance, that their entertainment arm is something that they bought as a chunk, and it still has a lot of American management and an American outlook. Meanwhile, the hardware business is based in Japan and run by a completely different group of people with a different outlook. They're more like two separate companies that happen to be owned by the same big capital fund than they are like one tightly integrated whole. It's only natural that each half would wind up pursuing its own interests first.
Also bear in mind that Sony seems to be more committed to including DRM and the like in its products than other makers. I'm sure that they'd be happy to have only DRM capable players available. But they also understand that consumers don't want DRM unless it's wrapped up with some kind of added benefit that makes the whole package resonably attractive. As long as there are companies out there that are willing and legally able to sell non-DRM equipment, though, Sony will be forced to provide non-DRM stuff or lose a big chunk of their market (and not get the DRM widespread anyway).
But bloat doesn't necessarily mean that something is not well optimized. Some kinds of optimization- like unrolling loops- can wind up getting improved performance at the cost of increased binary size. That's not always the case, since bloating the binary beyond a certain point can have diminishing returns as it prevents the whole thing from being able to reside in the fastest cache, but it is an important example of how big doesn't neccessarily mean bad.
Honestly, is bloat really that big of a problem for a typical computer, anyway? RAM and disk memory seem to be growing even faster than processor speed, so that bloat really shouldn't be a serious issue. When was the last time you had to clear out your hard drive because it was getting too full? And when you did, was it because the binaries were too big, or because there were too many data files taking up space?
The idea that he with the most money wins is partially true, but it doesn't cover everything. Yes, it's true that if one side has deep pockets and the other doesn't, the side with deep pockets can frequently bury the other in piles of procedural crap until they run out of cash. And it's also true that having a good (i.e. expensive) lawyer can help a lot. But there are limits to what money can get you. If the facts are clearly in the favor of the little guy, all of the lawyering in the world may not be enough to save the big guy. You see this from time to time when somebody wins a big punative damage award from a large company. Think Erin Brockovich, the lady who scalded herself on McDonalds coffee, the people who sued GM over pickup truck safety, etc.
The other thing to understand is that having lots of money seems to help more if you're the plaintiff than if you're the defendant. That's largely because the plaintiff stands to get damages if he wins, while the defendant only avoids them. That makes it a lot easier for a little guy to get a good lawyer as the plaintiff, since there are plenty of lawyers out there willing to work on contingency. IOW, if you want to tangle with Scientology, you're better off attacking them with a lawsuit (provided you actually have a case) rather than waiting for them to attack you with one.
Where did you get that idea? I run my system at 1280x1024, and Evolution looks just fine. I certainly don't see any problems with assumed window and font sizes. AFAIK, there aren't any assumed window or font sizes anyway; everything is adjustable either through the gtkhtml control or (in the latest betas) through Evolution itself. (Adjusting through gtkhtml isn't as bad as it sounds, BTW, since it corrects things for all applications that use gtkhtml.)
The USPS customer service is better than most people give them credit for, too. For one thing, they have far more local offices than either UPS or FedEx, so you're likely to be closer to your local post office than your local UPS place. The Post Office also keeps pretty reasonable hours, too.
The thing that I hate the most about receiving anything UPS is that they don't want to leave it without me receiving it in person, and they only deliver when I'm at work. That means that I have to go to their "local" service center, which is 10 miles from my work and 20 miles from my home. The local post office is a block and a half away, and they're open early enough that I can pick up my package first thing in the morning and still get to work on time. If worst comes to worst, I can go in on Saturday, which UPS doesn't let me do.
It's not so much that the people don't necessarily have the understanding of the technology as it is that they don't have a use for it or the support network to take advantage of it. Columbus's discovery of America was significant not because he was the first person to do it but because it was the first time that America was discovered by a society that could exploit the discovery. Similarly, movable metal type printing developed when it did because there was finally a set of enabling technologies that let it work- comparatively cheap paper, appropriate inks, metalury that could make movable type, presses that could be adapted to printing, etc. Many discoveries and inventions are like that; people made false starts toward them a number of times but they didn't catch on until there was an appropriate technological network surrounding them.
Maybe you're not sampling the right population. I have several friends who are also into anime, but they seem to be split on whether they're interested in computers and/or comic books. Interestingly, my two female friends who like anime are the ones who are not into computers or comics, while my male friends who are interested in anime are both very computer savvy. There may be a correlation there, or it may just be that the men are people I know from my work (which tends to involve a fair bit of computing) while the women are not from work and thus come from a less computer-centric background.
Of course it's very common in anime. And if you'll look, you'll discover that most of the anime on that topic just happen to have been released after Nausicaa. It's hardly fair to criticize Miazaki for using a common theme when the main reason that it's so common is that other people were copying him.
Adding an NDA is directly incompatible with the GPL. Just read it:
Tacking an NDA onto the program would clearly classify as adding a "further restriction on the recipients' excercise of the rights granted herein." That makes requiring one a violation of the GPL. I'm not sure whether that's a violation that would actually void the NDA requirer's rights under the GPL, or if the NDA would just be considered to be void and unenforcable.
Obviously written by somebody who wasn't forced to move to a new version of Windows. My work upgraded from NT to 2000, and it was very annoying. There were dozens of small changes to the way that things worked. They didn't actually make anything work better, they just made you learn things over again. That and add new eye candy that looks cool for about three minutes and then gets annoying because it makes the computer less responsive. Now the first thing I do when logging on to a Win2000 computer is to turn off the fade-in menus. I hated it in the bad old days when computers were so slow that it took them a noticable amount of time to draw menus. Why did MS have to add a "feature" that made all menus take an extra 200ms to draw?
I also made the mistake of getting XP for my new computer. (It's mostly a Redhat box, but I have Windows for games and doing my taxes.) Everything changed again with XP, though at least they give you the option of returning to the Win2000 look. I have no doubt that the next version of Windows will add even more stupid changes that add no functionality but just force you to learn to do things a new way in their next version, too.
Adding to the list:
So what? Brin is most definitely not in the "can't do" category. He's a fantastic author who's won a stack of awards for his Science Fiction writing. I'll admit that the one movie made from one of his books was awful, but the blame for that lies clearly on Kevin Costner's shoulders, not Brin's.
Actually, the only reference to God in the Declaration of Independence is secondary, in "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God". In at least one other instance where it would have been natural to mention God, the Declaration substitutes a more general term ("are endowed by their Creator" rather than "are endowed by God"). Those words were clearly not written by a conventional Christian.
As you state later, there's an important difference between letting your personal beliefs guide your daily life and shoving them down other people's throats in the form of legislation. Setting research priorities based on your personal religious beliefs is a form of shoving them down other people's throats. Opposing reproductive cloning because we don't know enough about it to be sure that it's safe is a rational, scientifically supportable reason to oppose it. (I personally support a moratorium on human reproductive cloning for exactly this reason.) Opposing reproductive cloning because you believe that God doesn't want us to do that is imposing your religious beliefs on others.
No. Research should not be political; the decisions that our government makes about research are political. There are two basic ways that research and politics should interact:
I don't have a big problem with changes in the first one. I don't think that our leaders should let their personal religious beliefs guide what kind of research they support, but ultimately that's why we have checks and balances and elections. If one group of politicians makes a stupid choice that way, I have confidence that another group will disagree and the second group will eventually get a chance to reverse the decision. That may take a while, but it's all part of the democatic process.
What really stinks is when people try to undermine the advisory function. I want my legislators and government regulators to be making decisions based on the best scientific advice they can get. If one or a small number of people can set up the committees so that they'll give the advice that those people want rather than the advice that the latest science suggests is correct, that undermines their purpose and the democratic process. That would allow a handful of people to define the agenda and bias the decision making process, which is exactly contrary to the advisory committees intended purpose.
Wrong. Multimedia encoding takes lots of processor power, but multimedia sharing takes comparatiely little. Just think about it. How many of the people on the net are actually ripping and encoding the files they're sharing, and how many are just downloading them and passing them along? I'd guess that there are dozens or hundreds of people who only copy for every one who actually encodes something.
Nothing. Apache is released under a license similar to the original BSD license (i.e. free reuse without need to include the source code, but with an advertizing clause).
Of course the flip situation is also quite likely. If you work on a Free Software program that's similar to the proprietary software you write at work, you're opening up that Free Software project to charges that they're stealing code from your employer. That's likely to be true no matter what license the Free Software uses. This is an inherent problem with our Copyright system, not something that's in any way restricted to Free Software.
No. Certainly if you released your mail program under the GPL you would not at all be violating the spirit of the GPL. There's nothing in the GPL at all that suggests that it is bad or wrong to distribute software for proprietary operating systems. In fact, the FSF releases ports of much of its software for Windows; I use GNU EMACS for Windows all the time. But even if you didn't release your software under the GPL you still wouldn't be violating it in either letter or spirit, provided that you didn't actually use any of the code that's under the GPL.
It's not unconnected at all. In addition to teaching physics, Goodstein teaches (or taught, I'm not sure since I took it 10 years ago) an outstanding class on ethics in research. It's something that more schools should include in their curriculum. I argued in favor of making the class a part of the Core curriculum; it didn't happen, but it was (and probably still is) a popular class.
No, he's not saying that at all. He's saying that my company shouldn't be forced to use a specific program just because other people who we work with- and may be forced to work with for regulatory reasons- choose to use that software. For example, if OSHA requires that information be sent to them in MS Excel format, my company has no choice but to buy a copy of Excel. We can't decide not to deal with OSHA, and we have to use Excel in order to generate files that we know will work with Excel. OTOH, if OSHA specified that data had to be sent in CSV format, we would be free to use whichever spreadsheet we wanted, since all of them can export into CSV format. If we felt like it we could generate all of the files using EMACS. We could even make them using a custom INTERCAL program, if somebody were insane enough to write such a thing. But at that point the choice of which software to use is ours, not theirs.
The pyramid itself isn't even that imponderable. It is, after all, just a really big stack of rocks. Getting all of the stone blocks and moving them into position was a tremendous amount of work, but it's not some inconceivable feat. It just requires a huge amount of labor- which the records suggest the Egyptians had access to. The pyramids represent a tremendous organizational accomplishment- getting all of those workers in one place and paying and feeding them all was incredible- but are not the unbelievable engineering challenge that they're made out to be.
That may be true, but it's really irrelevant. Most fiction isn't written with that kind of staying power in mind, and when it does achieve some staying power audiences are frequently willing to give it some leeway because of its age. But when the technobabble sounds ignorant to a contemporary- when they don't even bother to check and see if what they're saying makes sense WRT what we know today- it's just inexcusable.
It doesn't hurt that there's some actual factual basis for the technobabble in that scene. The people who were writing it apparently knew at least a little bit about biological techniques, because a lot of the things Tyrell was saying have a basis in real technology. This is a useful hint that the Trek scriptwriters should have paid attention to. If you start out with something that we actually know something about today, it's more likely to hang together well. I got completely fed up with Voyager when I noticed them using terms from modern science wrong in a way that nobody with a basic undergraduate science education could miss.