Tacoma Narrows is exactly the sort of disaster he wasn't putting on the list. Just about everybody has seen the film, and in fact it's mostly well known because of the film.
But in fact, I don't believe anybody was killed or injured, making it trivial compared to many other bridge collapses and disasters. The bridge was new so it didn't even disrupt life that much. It's an an interesting failure and a cool film, but was not a disaster nor is it unknown.
Things that are much greater omissions include things in this thread, like Halifax, the Chinese dams, Tenerife etc.
A story that claims to be reporting on the greatest tech disasters, in particular the lesser known ones, and it fails to mention Banqiao and Shimantan in 1975?
I mean, not only was this the greatest technological disaster in human history with 80,000 to 230,000 dead depending on whose numbers you believe, but it also is sufficiently unknown that the author of an article on disasters doesn't appear to know of it!
The analogy of the automotive lemon refers to a specific instance of a car that has faults. When ever single car of that type has a fault it is a design flaw, and can lead to a recall in the extreme cases. Of course in software, there are only global design flaws.
But software systems are complex, and they will always have bugs. And the industry is too powerful to permit a law that would not recognize this and regulate it the same way simpler products are regulated.
All of us who have written software know why we want to disclaim liability, and people who use it know why they accept those disclaimers. It's a hard problem to figure out if there is a middle ground that will satisfy both user and author.
True enough, so let's get to the real meat of the issue. <P>
Doctors take this oath, and follow other rules, as part of being a <b>certified</b> profession. To be a certified profession means there is a governing body, and often the government, which defines whether you are a doctor or not, and defines whether you can practice medicine. <P> Certification makes sense in a very limited set of professions where the practicioner will be doing something life-critical like cutting you open, or defending your freedom in court, or designing a bridge for you -- and just as importantly, in cases where you have a consulting relationship with the professional rather than an employment one. <P> If you're going to trust somebody you barely know with your life for a short-term contract, you bet you want some external means of certifying that they are capable of the job. <P> But with a very few exceptions, programming and sysadmin are not like this. THere are of course many consultants, but most are actually employees. Instead of the government defining who is a programmer, the employer decides who they want to hire. <P> What would an oath for programmers mean? Would there be a certifying body checking things? Would it get to define who was a programmer? Would somebody not be allowed to be a programmer if they didn't take the oath? <P> That's not what we want.
In spite of claims, biometric systems are vulnerable to attack. People can find ways to forge biometric information at automatic terminals, even at manned terminals. For example, some iris scanners can be fooled by contact lenses.
This presents a problem. Right now, if somebody steals my password, I can just cancel the old one and make up a new one.
However, I think it would be more difficult to get a new retina.
Copyright law only governs copying and performance. You are correct that there is no contract with you just watching the show.
The reason they hand grounds to sue the Betamax, and now the Replay, is that those devices made copies of their shows. Copyright law starts by saying that you can't do that at all, then statute and courts have marked out exceptions.
As noted "making a copy to watch it later" was one of those exceptions the court defined.
All of this has no bearing on what you do watching live TV.
The issue is of course that the TV studios have little use for you if you're not going to either pay or watch the commercials. They have to get money one way or another. So if you don't wish to do either, they won't care a lot that you turn off your TV.
Well, to get technical, this is how it works. Recording a program off the air is, the court agreed, covered by copyright. If you recorded tapes off the air and tried to sell 'em (normally a right you have under first sale doctrine) you would definitely get nailed, and the court would agree about it.
So what they said was that the reason you made the copy made a difference in whether you needed permission or not. They said, quite reasonably, that if the reason you made the copy was to watch it later, that was cool, and you don't need the permisison of the studio. Because this was ruled a fair use, it meant the VCR was not an illegal device, the way the studios wanted it to be. It has other uses, such as recording Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers, a big believer in sharing, came into the court and said he didn't mind if people taped his shows. Again, this meant to the court that the VCR must be legal.
That created a good standard that said that even though you could make infringing copies of movies with the VCR, it was still legal as a device because you could also do totally legal things with it. All good news.
The bad news comes when you read why they said it was OK to time-shift. Back in 1978, studies showed few people fast forwarded over commercials. No surprise, it was a pain to do it with a 1978 model VCR. Thus, the court said, people are just watching the shows at other times, and still seeing the commercials, so what are you studios complaining about? This box is getting you more viewers.
But if the court had decided that those viewers were skipping the commercials, they might have not ruled the same way. With newer tech, the story could have been different. The vote was only 5 to 4 -- just one judge changing his mind and the VCR would have been illegal, along with a lot of other tech.
And yes, leading the dissenters was our current chief justice.
Nobody knows how the modern court would rule. But you can't take out protection for automatic commercial skip from the older decision.
Of course, going to the bathroom during a live show doesn't have anything to do with copying, so it doesn't even come up. The law is all about copying, not about the commercials. Normally you can't copy at all, other than for the fair uses. The court said watching it later was a fair use. More recently, a lower court ruled that watching it on another device is a fair use too.
(This was a bit of an expansion of what fair use is, since most of the time it referred to republishing, not personal copying.)
The fight to protect technology will not be an easy one, unfortunately. This decision is more narrow than we might hope. However, the current court is a pretty good free speech court, and we have hope that they will approve free speech arguments.
The bad news is the Supreme Court betamax decision, if you read it in detail, may not protect automatic commercial skipping, though it would probably protect manual skipping like the 30 second button or 60x FF.
I've written up an essay of one possible result of the conflict between commercial TV, PVRs, commercial skip and DRM.
At the EFF, we've been looking hard for solutions, since we know that DRM and the DMCA won't work but artists should be compensated.
One solution I've been playing with is the idea of a "Don't Pay" button. Instead of a Pay Lars button (micropayments), change things so that the default is to pay but you can not pay if you wish to.
I call this microrefunds, a reversal of micropayments.
Folks, this is mostly an amusement patent. The inventor was a seven year old, and of course he's not the first to invent it. But his dad's a patent lawyer and wrote it up for him on a lark.
Like the laser cat-exerciser patent, nothing will ever come of this. It's just there to be silly. Nobody will ever be sued for infringement. Can't there be a sense of humour in this?
The users are independent. Each program seems to have its own personal user, and appears to us as looking like that user. In addition, we have evil users of equal power to Flynn.
And of course we have MCP. MCP has no user. Sark is the character with an evil user. MCP has power in the real world as well as the system. There's nothing like this in the Christ story, but there are such beings in other mythologies.
In the Christ story, Jesus is the incarnation of the soul of god on our plane. Flynn however is just an ordinary mortal on our plane, if a smart one.
It's even deeper than that, but it's a mishmash of some other religions too. For example, it is panthiestic, and there are many users, both good and bad, who are equal in the higher world.
TRON is sort of a John the Baptist predicting the coming of Flynn, but he has his own user, and provides a key tool in the defeat of the evil one.
Also particularly telling is the scene where Flynn "dies" after performing a miracle and then comes back to life.
But the theme of the gods, who created the world, incarnating and acting in it, performing miracles etc., is certainly a deliberate religious theme. Not that the writers were trying to push a religion, I think, it's just a classic story.
Who decides which question? Most answers should be on my web site, and I've expanded some.
Of course the courts decide questions of law (such as trademark.) Not only should they decide this you can't stop them from deciding it. How can that be way off track?
Well, if your vision is to have sole control over a generic word or phrase, then yes, that's one vision that can't be fulfilled. At least not in a fair system.
Trademark law figured that out, with centuries to do it. You don't give anybody a monopoloy on an ordinary word.
And yes, that means in any language. That doesn't mean you can't use real words as TLDs, it just means you can't use them in their generic sense.
For example, "Apple directories Inc." might want to run the TLD.apple, and they would be allowed to do so, but they would not be allowed to register lower level domains which are generic pertaining to real apples, the kind that grow on trees. Any other domain would be fine.
Thus nobody can have "delicious.apple" -- that's generic, and trademark law (and this system) would quite rightly refuse to give ownership of it to anybody. "Freds-delicious.us.apple" is not generic so it could be OK.
Of course the TLDs would not check for this status. They would tell the registrants, "don't reigster a generic term, because you will lose it." Losing it is sufficient deterrent.
If somebody goes and registers delicious.apple in order to sell apples, somebody else could file a complaint. When they did, if it turned out you were trying to do this, you would lose the domain. No reason to risk that. (They wouldn't get the domain, you would just lose it.)
So yes, this prohibits one vision -- the idea of people getting monopoly ownership on generic names. Can you tell me how that vision can be accomodated in a fair system? If you can I am happy to accomodate it!
The EFF has been wrestling with this issue and come to the conclusion that trespass is a risky doctrine to use in the fight against spam.
The problem is that the internet runs entirely on private property. It's not really possible to use the internet without using the private property of others.
The norm on the internet was "I pay for my half of the connection, you pay for yours" and it works pretty well.
If we define the use of somebody else's property with packets to be potentially trespass, what does that mean? All internet traffic can be considered trespass. Is this how we would want to regulate communications -- speech -- one of the most precious rights we have?
Since all traffic flows on somebody else's private property, to define unwanted traffic as trespass is to say all traffic must be consensual. Is that how we regulate communications in the real world? Is that the tradition of speech regulation?
If I send you a message that annoys you -- not a spam, but say a flame because I don't like what you said on slashdot -- should we risk that you can define that as trespass because you didn't want it, you didn't put your machine on the net so people could flame you?
It seems like a dangerous path. There are other solutions to spam that don't involve it.
Sure they would do it, it's the easy way out. The net is global, so does this solution really meet the needs of users?
Will the countries manage their own domains well, is that the best thing for the users in those countries?
And who owns the country's domain? In the USA, the national symbols and names belong not to the government, but to the people. The US government does not have the power to control who uses the name "U.S." or "USA" -- in some ways the constitution makes that clear.
People want simple names they can tell people and then have them used to reach them reliably. We don't want to go back to the geography based system -- we built a logical net to get away from geography, in some respects.
Actually, my point was to design a system that would allow everybody's vision. Give nobody a monopoly on a generic term, because that means only one vision at least in the space described by the generic term. Instead let a thousand visions flourish.
That's what's wrong with generic TLDs. Non-generic TLDS can be handled almost entirely over to their owners, to allow innovation and competition.
Of course I have and love one. You need to re-read this topic to be clear on what the studios propose. Encryption all the way to the display device. Short of breaking the encryption, you can't alter an encrypted stream. If you record it, you have to play it exactly as is, no pausing, no skipping commercials, no rewind or FF of any kind, or the decryptor can be set to not decrypt it.
(In fact other than pausing you must be able to fully decrypt it to do any of these things.)
The problem is not giving the government a role in ICANN. ICANN should barely exist. We have an infinite space, and dividing it up isn't nearly so hard as people imagine.
With an encypted to the monitor standard, it is possible to make a PVR impossible, and easy to make it very limited. Even if you can record the encrypted stream, you would have to play it back exactly as recorded, ie. no fast forward or other non-linear viewing, no avoiding commercials. You can't alter an encrypted stream, as you know.
If they wanted to get picky they could broadcast it with timestamps and bits that tell the TVs not to play it back at any other time than live. While the supreme court ruled that timeshifting is legal, it's uncertain if that means they are required to make it easy or possible.
That leaves you with opening up your sealed decrypting TV and decoding the analog signals going into the CRT, or putting a camera at the screen. Not going to be very common.
There is another solution, however, which is to change the nature of how advertising integrates into TV. Make TV pay TV but give people a discount, all the way to free, every time they really watch a commercial. Then you don't need to put the decryption in the monitor, which is good, but you still need DRM to make the pay TV work.
Sorry if this was not clear in the original post, but I was talking about doing SSL over the new "channels" I/O package just introduced in 1.4.
Java has been poor for servers in the past because you had to have one thread per open socket, and the JVMs did not handle very large numbers of threads well.
The answer was to support "select" for I/O on multiple channels without a a lot of thread overhead, but they did not support security with it.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer is to break up ICANN and allow a lot of competing systems on a level playing field.
Tacoma Narrows is exactly the sort of disaster he wasn't putting on the list. Just about everybody has seen the film, and in fact it's mostly well known because of the film.
But in fact, I don't believe anybody was killed or injured, making it trivial compared to many other bridge collapses and disasters. The bridge was new so it didn't even disrupt life that much. It's an an interesting failure and a cool film, but was not a disaster nor is it unknown.
Things that are much greater omissions include things in this thread, like Halifax, the Chinese dams, Tenerife etc.
A story that claims to be reporting on the greatest tech disasters, in particular the lesser known ones, and it fails to mention Banqiao and Shimantan in 1975?
I mean, not only was this the greatest technological disaster in human history with 80,000 to 230,000 dead depending on whose numbers you believe, but it also is sufficiently unknown that the author of an article on disasters doesn't appear to know of it!
The analogy of the automotive lemon refers to a specific instance of a car that has faults. When ever single car of that type has a fault it is a design flaw, and can lead to a recall in the extreme cases. Of course in software, there are only global design flaws.
But software systems are complex, and they will always have bugs. And the industry is too powerful to permit a law that would not recognize this and regulate it the same way simpler products are regulated.
All of us who have written software know why we want to disclaim liability, and people who use it know why they accept those disclaimers. It's a hard problem to figure out if there is a middle ground that will satisfy both user and author.
Was the display of professional wrestling as something real, with actual physical blows etc.!
I mean what are they expecting us to believe here?
True enough, so let's get to the real meat of the issue.
<P>
Doctors take this oath, and follow other rules, as part of being a <b>certified</b> profession. To be a certified profession means there is a governing body, and often the government, which defines whether you are a doctor or not, and defines whether you can practice medicine.
<P>
Certification makes sense in a very limited set of professions where the practicioner will be doing something life-critical like cutting you open, or defending your freedom in court, or designing a bridge for you -- and just as importantly, in cases where you have a consulting relationship with the professional rather than an employment one.
<P>
If you're going to trust somebody you barely know with your life for a short-term contract, you bet you want some external means of certifying that they are capable of the job.
<P>
But with a very few exceptions, programming and sysadmin are not like this. THere are of course many consultants, but most are actually employees. Instead of the government defining who is a programmer, the employer decides who they want to hire.
<P>
What would an oath for programmers mean? Would there be a certifying body checking things? Would it get to define who was a programmer? Would somebody not be allowed to be a programmer if they didn't take the oath?
<P>
That's not what we want.
In obvious ways when it comes to assisted suicide, but in many other eways.
For example, the oath requires you treat your teacher as your father, his children as your siblings.
It forbids surgery!
It forbids charging for medical education.
So it may not be the best model..
In spite of claims, biometric systems are vulnerable to attack. People can find ways to forge biometric information at automatic terminals, even at manned terminals. For example, some iris scanners can be fooled by contact lenses.
This presents a problem. Right now, if somebody steals my password, I can just cancel the old one and make up a new one.
However, I think it would be more difficult to get a new retina.
Copyright law only governs copying and performance. You are correct that there is no contract with you just watching the show.
The reason they hand grounds to sue the Betamax, and now the Replay, is that those devices made copies of their shows. Copyright law starts by saying that you can't do that at all, then statute and courts have marked out exceptions.
As noted "making a copy to watch it later" was one of those exceptions the court defined.
All of this has no bearing on what you do watching live TV.
The issue is of course that the TV studios have little use for you if you're not going to either pay or watch the commercials. They have to get money one way or another. So if you don't wish to do either, they won't care a lot that you turn off your TV.
Well, to get technical, this is how it works. Recording a program off the air is, the court agreed, covered by copyright. If you recorded tapes off the air and tried to sell 'em (normally a right you have under first sale doctrine) you would definitely get nailed, and the court would agree about it.
So what they said was that the reason you made the copy made a difference in whether you needed permission or not. They said, quite reasonably, that if the reason you made the copy was to watch it later, that was cool, and you don't need the permisison of the studio. Because this was ruled a fair use, it meant the VCR was not an illegal device, the way the studios wanted it to be. It has other uses, such as recording Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers, a big believer in sharing, came into the court and said he didn't mind if people taped his shows. Again, this meant to the court that the VCR must be legal.
That created a good standard that said that even though you could make infringing copies of movies with the VCR, it was still legal as a device because you could also do totally legal things with it. All good news.
The bad news comes when you read why they said it was OK to time-shift. Back in 1978, studies showed few people fast forwarded over commercials. No surprise, it was a pain to do it with a 1978 model VCR. Thus, the court said, people are just watching the shows at other times, and still seeing the commercials, so what are you studios complaining about? This box is getting you more viewers.
But if the court had decided that those viewers were skipping the commercials, they might have not ruled the same way. With newer tech, the story could have been different. The vote was only 5 to 4 -- just one judge changing his mind and the VCR would have been illegal, along with a lot of other tech.
And yes, leading the dissenters was our current chief justice.
Nobody knows how the modern court would rule. But you can't take out protection for automatic commercial skip from the older decision.
Of course, going to the bathroom during a live show doesn't have anything to do with copying, so it doesn't even come up. The law is all about copying, not about the commercials. Normally you can't copy at all, other than for the fair uses. The court said watching it later was a fair use. More recently, a lower court ruled that watching it on another device is a fair use too.
(This was a bit of an expansion of what fair use is, since most of the time it referred to republishing, not personal copying.)
The fight to protect technology will not be an easy one, unfortunately. This decision is more narrow than we might hope. However, the current court is a pretty good free speech court, and we have hope that they will approve free speech arguments.
I've written up an essay of one possible result of the conflict between commercial TV, PVRs, commercial skip and DRM.
You can read about The future of TV in the essay.
One solution I've been playing with is the idea of a "Don't Pay" button. Instead of a Pay Lars button (micropayments), change things so that the default is to pay but you can not pay if you wish to.
I call this microrefunds, a reversal of micropayments.
I have put an essay on microrefunds on my web site to explain this.
It's just a draft idea at present, not endorsed byt the rest of the folks at the EFF yet.
Folks, this is mostly an amusement patent. The inventor was a seven year old, and of course he's not the first to invent it. But his dad's a patent lawyer and wrote it up for him on a lark.
Like the laser cat-exerciser patent, nothing will ever come of this. It's just there to be silly. Nobody will ever be sued for infringement. Can't there be a sense of humour in this?
The users are independent. Each program seems to have its own personal user, and appears to us as looking like that user. In addition, we have evil users of equal power to Flynn.
And of course we have MCP. MCP has no user. Sark is the character with an evil user. MCP has power in the real world as well as the system. There's nothing like this in the Christ story, but there are such beings in other mythologies.
In the Christ story, Jesus is the incarnation of the soul of god on our plane. Flynn however is just an ordinary mortal on our plane, if a smart one.
It's even deeper than that, but it's a mishmash of some other religions too. For example, it is panthiestic, and there are many users, both good and bad, who are equal in the higher world.
TRON is sort of a John the Baptist predicting the coming of Flynn, but he has his own user, and provides a key tool in the defeat of the evil one.
Also particularly telling is the scene where Flynn "dies" after performing a miracle and then comes back to life.
But the theme of the gods, who created the world, incarnating and acting in it, performing miracles etc., is certainly a deliberate religious theme. Not that the writers were trying to push a religion, I think, it's just a classic story.
Who decides which question? Most answers should be on my web site, and I've expanded some.
Of course the courts decide questions of law (such as trademark.) Not only should they decide this you can't stop them from deciding it. How can that be way off track?
Well, if your vision is to have sole control over a generic word or phrase, then yes, that's one vision that can't be fulfilled. At least not in a fair system.
.apple, and they would be allowed to do so, but they would not be allowed to register lower level domains which are generic pertaining to real apples, the kind that grow on trees. Any other domain would be fine.
Trademark law figured that out, with centuries to do it. You don't give anybody a monopoloy on an ordinary word.
And yes, that means in any language. That doesn't mean you can't use real words as TLDs, it just means you can't use them in their generic sense.
For example, "Apple directories Inc." might want to run the TLD
Thus nobody can have "delicious.apple" -- that's generic, and trademark law (and this system) would quite rightly refuse to give ownership of it to anybody. "Freds-delicious.us.apple" is
not generic so it could be OK.
Of course the TLDs would not check for this status. They would tell the registrants, "don't reigster a generic term, because you will lose it." Losing it is sufficient deterrent.
If somebody goes and registers delicious.apple in order to sell apples, somebody else could file a complaint. When they did, if it turned out you were trying to do this, you would lose the domain. No reason to risk that. (They wouldn't get the domain, you would just lose it.)
So yes, this prohibits one vision -- the idea of people getting monopoly ownership on generic names. Can you tell me how that vision can be accomodated in a fair system? If you can I am happy to accomodate it!
The EFF has been wrestling with this issue and come to the conclusion that trespass is a risky doctrine to use in the fight against spam.
The problem is that the internet runs entirely on private property. It's not really possible to use the internet without using the private property of others.
The norm on the internet was "I pay for my half of the connection, you pay for yours" and it works pretty well.
If we define the use of somebody else's property with packets to be potentially trespass, what does that mean? All internet traffic can be considered trespass. Is this how we would want to regulate communications -- speech -- one of the most precious rights we have?
Since all traffic flows on somebody else's private property, to define unwanted traffic as trespass is to say all traffic must be consensual. Is that how we regulate communications in the real world? Is that the tradition of speech regulation?
If I send you a message that annoys you -- not a spam, but say a flame because I don't like what you said on slashdot -- should we risk that you can define that as trespass because you didn't want it, you didn't put your machine on the net so people could flame you?
It seems like a dangerous path. There are other solutions to spam that don't involve it.
Sure they would do it, it's the easy way out. The net is global, so does this solution really meet the needs of users?
Will the countries manage their own domains well, is that the best thing for the users in those countries?
And who owns the country's domain? In the USA, the national symbols and names belong not to the government, but to the people. The US government does not have the power to control who uses the name "U.S." or "USA" -- in some ways the constitution makes that clear.
People want simple names they can tell people and then have them used to reach them reliably. We don't want to go back to the geography based system -- we built a logical net to get away from geography, in some respects.
Actually, my point was to design a system that would allow everybody's vision. Give nobody a monopoly on a generic term, because that means only one vision at least in the space described by the generic term. Instead let a thousand visions flourish.
That's what's wrong with generic TLDs. Non-generic TLDS can be handled almost entirely over to their owners, to allow innovation and competition.
Of course I have and love one. You need to re-read this topic to be clear on what the studios propose. Encryption all the way to the display device. Short of breaking the encryption, you can't alter an encrypted stream. If you record it, you have to play it exactly as is, no pausing, no skipping commercials, no rewind or FF of any kind, or the decryptor can be set to not decrypt it.
(In fact other than pausing you must be able to fully decrypt it to do any of these things.)
Rather, I would advocate simply having lots of privately run non-generic TLDs and hardly any ICANN at all
If they wanted to get picky they could broadcast it with timestamps and bits that tell the TVs not to play it back at any other time than live. While the supreme court ruled that timeshifting is legal, it's uncertain if that means they are required to make it easy or possible.
That leaves you with opening up your sealed decrypting TV and decoding the analog signals going into the CRT, or putting a camera at the screen. Not going to be very common.
There is another solution, however, which is to change the nature of how advertising integrates into TV. Make TV pay TV but give people a discount, all the way to free, every time they really watch a commercial. Then you don't need to put the decryption in the monitor, which is good, but you still need DRM to make the pay TV work.
Details on my page on the future of tv
Sorry if this was not clear in the original post, but I was talking about doing SSL over the new "channels" I/O package just introduced in 1.4.
Java has been poor for servers in the past because you had to have one thread per open socket, and the JVMs did not handle very large numbers of threads well.
The answer was to support "select" for I/O on multiple channels without a a lot of thread overhead, but they did not support security with it.