If you have some IP that you don't want to be selfish with, it makes more sense to do what Volvo did then to simply refused to patent or copyright your work. Consider RMS, who believes that not sharing software is immoral. Yet he copyrights all his work -- not to prevent others from using it, but to make sure they use it in the same spirit in which he distributes it.
My favorite example is the standard audio cassette, which is patented by Philips. They licensed it for almost nothing, because they knew that the format wouldn't catch on unless a lot of different companies made it, and they'd make more money competing in an open market than dominating a limited one. But they still had to hold on to the patent itself, to prevent substandard knockoffs and incompatible "improvements".
Yeah, that's even more of an issue in the U.S. than in the U.K. Some drugs that are widely used in Europe are unavailable in the U.S. because they're public domain, so nobody wants to spend the money needed to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration. On the other hand, it's easy to get alternative remedies, as long as there are no known dangers to them and the makers don't make any "hard" claims about their efficacy. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous companies have used this opening to distribute all kinds of useless crap.
Do you even understand the concept of "profit"? It isn't just getting money from people in exchange for goods or services. It's getting more money than it cost you to provide those goods or services. If you get less money, you don't have a profit, you have a loss.
Flemming just discovered Penicillin. He didn't invent a magical way to manufacture it in useful quantities. Inventing that process took a lot of expensive research. But once that research was done, anybody could use it to make the actual drug. Which makes it very unlikely that whoever developed the process would make enough money to cover their development costs, since they'd be competting agains companies that didn't have this expense. So nobody spent the development money, until the U.S. government, which wanted Penicillin for the impending war, stepped in.
Nowadays, they'd be able to patent the process independently of the drug itself, something that wasn't done in 1928. Which would have been a handy way of reversing Flemming's mistake. But a lot of people (including me) think that process patents are a really bad idea.
Amazon.com probably honestly believes that "one-click shopping" is a unique idea, and that they deserved their patent on it.
Actually, I've heard Jeff Bezos say that he thinks OCS should not be patentable. But as long as it is, he has no choice but to patent it. If he doesn't, he's opening himself up for a minority stockholder suit, for not exercising "due diligence".
There are plenty of companies out there making people sign NDAs to protect ideas that aren't worth protecting. Such companies will probably fail, but they'll fail because their ideas are crap, not because they made people sign NDAs.
And before you say, "If they weren't so secretive, someone would have told them their ideas were crap," ask yourself this: when was the last time you saw anybody who thinks they have an idea they think will make them rich listen to anybody trying to tell them otherwise?
Five different moderators thought you were being funny. And maybe you were, but you make a serious point: why does anybody need a fancy client to play a text-mode game?
Why is it greedy to decline spending huge amounts of money developming a product you won't make any profit on? Uncharitable perhaps. But unless you give away huge amounts money, you shouldn't criticize.
Well, even if Rontgen had gotten rich off of X rays, hyperinflation still would have wiped him out. I read a story once, set in that period, about a woman who had inherited a small fortune from her father, something like half a million marks. She made the mistake of leaving it in the bank, and when inflation set in, it quickly lost any value. They finally wrote her and told her that they had to close her account, and enclosed a refund. The apologized for making the refund in the form of a million-mark bill, but it was the smallest denomination they had. Postage on the letter was a billion marks.
You what!? A job interview (certainly a first or second interview rather than a hiring interview) is absolutely not the place to be disclosing information under NDA. No way, no how.
Well, to be precise, they didn't refuse to interview me without the NDA. But they told me we'd have to talk around the product if I didn't sign. I wanted to hear about the product, and (as I said) I consider discretion a matter of ethics anyway. So what's the big deal.
A small startup may not be the NSA, but why shouldn't they want to keep their plans secret? If they did other things the NSA does, like tempest-harden their computers and impose lifestyle polygraphs on their employees I might think they were paranoid idiots. (Actually I think anybody who uses lifestyle polygraphs is a paranoid idiot, but that's another issue.) But asking potential employees not to talk about what their product plans is hardly in the same ballpark as anything the NSA does.
But you've gone and given me an excuse to tell my favorite NSA story. Back in the 60s, there was this Baltimore-area realtor who wanted to know how many people worked at NSA headquarters. Nowadays you can get this info from nsa.gov, but in those days it was a national secret and they wouldn't tell him. He needed to finish his report, so he called the only other possible source. The Soviet embassy was quite helpful.
You know, I have no problems with Hollywood demanding that I pay for my entertainment. They have every right to expect a profit. No profits, no movies, and who wants that?
But your post tells us something important about their priorities. This isn't just about compensating creative people. This is about controlling access to the content. If all they wanted to do was prevent piracy, they'd just flood the market with legitimate copies, which would make piracy unprofitable. But it would also canibalize theater revenues, reducing front-end profits on a picture.
Maximizing profits is what business is all about, and I guess it's reasonable that theaters have a temporary monopoly on a new movie. But Hollywood has been able to put its profit agenda ahead of everything. For example, those of us who will never buy a plasma display would love to have access to to small neighborhood theaters that would show any movie on big screen on a demand basis. People actually tried to start such theaters back when VCRs first came out. The studios soon put a stop to that. But there's no equitable reason they should be able to. Demand royalties for the showing of the material, yes. But prevent the showing? The only purpose of such prevention is for the studios to retain control of how the content is distributed, never mind whether they get their cut or not. It's just not fair that they can do this.
Re:Open-source startups, anyone?
on
The Cult of the NDA
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· Score: 4, Insightful
This has actually happened. Alexander Flemming refused to patent penicillin, because he didn't care to exploit people's suffering. (There's some evidence that he couldn't have patented the drug anyway, but that would have changed the motivation, not the actual act.) The result was that nobody worked on making penicillin available in commercial quantities, because there was no money to be made doing so. This only changed when the military funded development in the early days of WW II. So Flemming's life-saving discovery went unused for more than a decade, because he wasn't greedy.
I don't agree that greed is good, not in and of itself. But it does have its uses.
Yeah, I know, we see too many patents that are not for any real innovation. But these are just people trying to game the system. The answer to that is to fix the system, not to discard a very important process for rewarding and encouraging innovation.
believe that the shopping mall analogy falls down in one key respect: There is no direct cost to the shopping mall if I hand out leaflets.
Few shopping mall owners would agree with you.
But that's neither here nor there. If property rights trump leafletting rights, then mall owners don't have to have a good reason for forbidding leafletting. Or any reason.
But the free market will stop them from doing that. If AOL, Earthlink, and MSN all entered into a censorship pact, then other ISPs would capitalize on offering the "Internet uncensored."
Yes, that's a reasonable safeguard as long as there's lots of competition. And I don't mean ISP competition, because ISPs just retail bandwidth that they buy from backbone wholesalers. If you're reduced to 3 or 4 backbone providers (which was the situation 5 years ago), that's a real threat. Nowadays less so.
Which I suppose support your basic argument: that the free market has a healthy ability to create alternate avenues of communication. Which would seem to make serious internet censorship more and more difficult. But by the same token, it also make spam harder and harder to control. In the end "free speech", whether it's "we hold these truths to be self-evident" or "i'm a nigerian banker with money to give away", seems not so much a right as a law of nature.
If you start a company that just wants to meet some kind of well-known need, then sure, there's no need to keep your work secret. But suppose you're targeting a new market? Or, in Henry Ford fashion, trying to create a market with some kind of fundamental innovation. Your technology might or might not be ground-breaking, but that's not the point. It's your plans that you don't want people to know about, because as soon as they become public, you'll be joined by "me too" competitors. Of course, competitors will appear eventually, but if you throw away your head start, you lose that early dominance that compensates you for all the risks you took.
I often have to sign an NDA, sometimes just to get a job interview. If the terms are reasonable, I have no qualms about this: the agreement is just a written form of an implicit agreement I see as part of my professional ethics. If somebody trusts you with sensitive information, it is simply wrong to be careless about passing that information on.
It occurs to me this argument is partially about the attitude gap between the open-source (or "free") software community and the closed-source (or "commercial") software community. Thing is, these two communities don't have to be enemies. Yeah, some OS people think that commercial software is evil, and some commercial software people think that the OS movement is economically clueless. But the reality is that no one model is the best possible one for all kinds of software. Some projects will prosper if they're driven by volunteers who just want to advance the state of the art. Others will only succeed if they're driven by well-capitalized entrepeneurs out to make a buck. Neither model is likely to go away, and I predict that more and more companies will come to rely on both.
If you want to try finding every rock the size of a beach ball in the entire volume of the solar system, be my guest.
Some numbers might be helpful. The official NASA estimate for asteroids 300 feet or bigger is 160,000. About 1,000 of these exceed 2 miles in diameter. That doesn't count comets, which zap in and out of the inner system, and thus are basically invisible most of the time. Nor does it count smaller objects. I couldn't find figures for these, but it must be in the millions.
There's actually not much point in trying to track all these objects. A lot of them are in eccentric orbits (like comets) and thus untrackable most of the time. The rest are no threat because they're in regular orbits that don't interesect ours. The ones that were in intersection orbits got swept up a very long time ago -- that's how planets are formed. The danger comes when these orbits change, after being disturbed by interaction with another object. So if we every get serious about looking out for killer asteroids, we won't try to track every one we already know about -- we'll just keep a general watch for new objects or old objects in new orbits.
Also, really small objects are no threat, because they burn up in the atmosphere. Objects big enough to punch through do hit pretty often, but I've never heard of anybody getting hurt by one. Which I guess indicates that we're not as big a planetary feature as we like to think, and also explains why there's such a short memory for these events. As indicated by the attention the Indian impacts are getting.
More common is damage to buildings and machinery. Speaking of which, if you find that your car has had a hole punched in it by something falling from the sky, do not get it repaired until you've determined the cause -- here are collectors who pay good money for cars with meteorite damage. But don't plan your retirement before you've made sure it's not just blue ice.
Secondly, we got swamped with that news because the media is stupid.
Not quite fair. It's not the media's fault that most people know jack about astronomy, and can't distinguish a harmless rock from a killer asteroid. Which is pretty important. Armageddon-style planet killers are rarer than intelligent Hollywood movies, but some scientists think that rocks big enough to wipe out a city happen every 100 years. And in fact, it's been almost that long since the Tunguska event. Which, alas, most people know about mainly from watching The X Files.
I've seen a little of this show. It does seem to be mostly pretty bad, but I don't quite see how we can blame GR for it. Yeah, they put his name on it, but that's just an example of using the name of a retired or dead SF person as a kind of brand name. One of SF's moredepressingtrends.
Which is only fair. If nobody ripped off Michael Moore's DVDs then he'd lose his status as Righteous Outsider. It makes up for the fact that he makes all his money from the same corporate establishment he loves to criticize.
Blacklists don't suppress speech. No one forces you or your ISP to use the blacklists or to refuse e-mail from IP addresses listed on them. I use blacklists and my server may reject messages from you. So what? You have no Constitutionally guaranteed right to use my server to deliver your message. It's my private property, just as your ISP's server is their property.
It's not quite that simple. It's true that the first amendment mainly serves to keep the government from supressing speech. But private entities have a certain responsibility to tolerate free speech as well, and the courts have always recognized this. If you own a large shopping mall, you can't arbitrarily restrict what people say and do there. If it's large and diverse enough to be considered a "public forum" you may just have to put up with people with people collecting signatures or passing out leaflets, as long they don't interfere with the operation of the mall. Or not, depending on how broadly your state courts interpret the first amendment. But in any case, you're wrong to assume that private property rights always trump free speech rights.
But never mind all that, just suppose that we do allow owners of networks and servers absolute control of what passes over their wires. Is that something you really want? Sure, it gives them the power to shut down spam. But it also gives them the power to control what web sites their users can access. Or what their users can put on their own web sites. Now, if hardware is owned by a private company and all its users are employees who are supposed to be using the internet to do their jobs, I suppose you have to grant that company a large measure of control. But if we're talking about public ISPs, then we're talking about something very scary. These ISPs, if they coordinated their efforts, and were allowed to totally control whatever passes over their wires, could do something that governments have repeatedly tried and failed to do: censor the internet.
A few years ago, there was a site called blackdeath.org that offended certain parties with its anti-Christian rants. Who demanded that their ISP pull the plug. When the ISP declined, they went to the ISP's backbone provider. Which happened to be owned by a major media company. Now, media companies are not fans of censorship, but they like offending people even less -- they might complain to the FCC, or worse, stop watching TV. So the backbone provider told the ISP to pull the plug on blackdeath.org, or else they'd lose their own internet service, and be forced out of business. Naturally they complied. Blackdeath.org went dark, briefly came back with a low-bandwidth provider, then finally disappeared forever.
This really scared me at the time, since the internet backbone had been consolidated into just a few big companies, most of them with the same censorship-prone connections as the Time Warner backbone. Since then, the backbone situation has gotten a little more competitive. But with the trend to consolidate more and more communications into fewer and fewer companies, I wouldn't get to sanguine. And I'd look for solutions to the spam problem that emphasizes individual, not central, control over network traffic.
Bah. One thing that separates a really good scientist, engineer, or inventor is that they're really good at communicating and explaining. The late Richard Feynman was the most extreme example -- he always refused to accept any job that didn't include teaching duties. He did this because he understood that being able to explain what you're creating is an essential part of creating new science and technology.
Probably any intelligent person could figure out this convoluted explanation of aerospike engines. But few will bother, because it is convoluted. Perhaps you need all the history and technical background to understand the fine detail. But a good writer would start out with some kind of superficial explanation, so the reader can get some sense of why this material is important and acquire some kind of mental handle before plunging into the hard stuff.
The links in the ScottKin's original submission are even less impressive. Garvey just issues a press release talking about how cool their aerospike engine is, without the tiniest hint as to WTF an aerospike engine is. (Yeah, that will make people take notice!) The "California Space Authority" (someone's read too much Jerry Pournelle) site tries to explain, but utterly fails. And the Boeing site is most pathetic of all, with its pound-feet and square inches. I mean, I can understand that its politically impossible to metricize the U.S. consumer. But these guys are supposed to be the world's leading aerospace engineers! Yet decades after the rest of the world has gone metric, and after screwup after screwup after screwup in metric-English conversion, these "rocket scientists" refuse to modernize their measurements. Is it any wonder the rest of the world thinks we're a bunch of arrogant assholes?
I think it was always acknowledged that Planet Earth was just a remake of Genesis II. But you're right, GR was shameless when it came to recycling material. Did he think nobody would notice?
Although this habit actually served him well in TOS. Any fan of WW II movies will notice that Balance of Terror was an unabashed ripoff of The Enemy Below. But it's a different audience, so what the heck.
That's dangerous thinking, buster. Seditious, even. Next you'll be questioning the basic social principle of the Bush Era: buying lots of useless crap is patriotic!
You have some very quaint notions as to how easy it is to prove a crime. Maybe you think they concoted their evidence, and maybe I even agree with you. But where's the proof? You have to show not only that the evidence is bogus (and even that's controversial) -- you have to show that they know it's bogus.
Re:Lack Of Continuity Explanation pop-ups...
on
The Borg MegaCube
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· Score: 1
Nonsense! As Q explains so well in the last episode, really great minds don't need logical consistency!
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite example is the standard audio cassette, which is patented by Philips. They licensed it for almost nothing, because they knew that the format wouldn't catch on unless a lot of different companies made it, and they'd make more money competing in an open market than dominating a limited one. But they still had to hold on to the patent itself, to prevent substandard knockoffs and incompatible "improvements".
Yeah, that's even more of an issue in the U.S. than in the U.K. Some drugs that are widely used in Europe are unavailable in the U.S. because they're public domain, so nobody wants to spend the money needed to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration. On the other hand, it's easy to get alternative remedies, as long as there are no known dangers to them and the makers don't make any "hard" claims about their efficacy. Unfortunately, some unscrupulous companies have used this opening to distribute all kinds of useless crap.
Flemming just discovered Penicillin. He didn't invent a magical way to manufacture it in useful quantities. Inventing that process took a lot of expensive research. But once that research was done, anybody could use it to make the actual drug. Which makes it very unlikely that whoever developed the process would make enough money to cover their development costs, since they'd be competting agains companies that didn't have this expense. So nobody spent the development money, until the U.S. government, which wanted Penicillin for the impending war, stepped in.
Nowadays, they'd be able to patent the process independently of the drug itself, something that wasn't done in 1928. Which would have been a handy way of reversing Flemming's mistake. But a lot of people (including me) think that process patents are a really bad idea.
There are plenty of companies out there making people sign NDAs to protect ideas that aren't worth protecting. Such companies will probably fail, but they'll fail because their ideas are crap, not because they made people sign NDAs.
And before you say, "If they weren't so secretive, someone would have told them their ideas were crap," ask yourself this: when was the last time you saw anybody who thinks they have an idea they think will make them rich listen to anybody trying to tell them otherwise?
Five different moderators thought you were being funny. And maybe you were, but you make a serious point: why does anybody need a fancy client to play a text-mode game?
Why is it greedy to decline spending huge amounts of money developming a product you won't make any profit on? Uncharitable perhaps. But unless you give away huge amounts money, you shouldn't criticize.
Well, even if Rontgen had gotten rich off of X rays, hyperinflation still would have wiped him out. I read a story once, set in that period, about a woman who had inherited a small fortune from her father, something like half a million marks. She made the mistake of leaving it in the bank, and when inflation set in, it quickly lost any value. They finally wrote her and told her that they had to close her account, and enclosed a refund. The apologized for making the refund in the form of a million-mark bill, but it was the smallest denomination they had. Postage on the letter was a billion marks.
A small startup may not be the NSA, but why shouldn't they want to keep their plans secret? If they did other things the NSA does, like tempest-harden their computers and impose lifestyle polygraphs on their employees I might think they were paranoid idiots. (Actually I think anybody who uses lifestyle polygraphs is a paranoid idiot, but that's another issue.) But asking potential employees not to talk about what their product plans is hardly in the same ballpark as anything the NSA does.
But you've gone and given me an excuse to tell my favorite NSA story. Back in the 60s, there was this Baltimore-area realtor who wanted to know how many people worked at NSA headquarters. Nowadays you can get this info from nsa.gov, but in those days it was a national secret and they wouldn't tell him. He needed to finish his report, so he called the only other possible source. The Soviet embassy was quite helpful.
But your post tells us something important about their priorities. This isn't just about compensating creative people. This is about controlling access to the content. If all they wanted to do was prevent piracy, they'd just flood the market with legitimate copies, which would make piracy unprofitable. But it would also canibalize theater revenues, reducing front-end profits on a picture.
Maximizing profits is what business is all about, and I guess it's reasonable that theaters have a temporary monopoly on a new movie. But Hollywood has been able to put its profit agenda ahead of everything. For example, those of us who will never buy a plasma display would love to have access to to small neighborhood theaters that would show any movie on big screen on a demand basis. People actually tried to start such theaters back when VCRs first came out. The studios soon put a stop to that. But there's no equitable reason they should be able to. Demand royalties for the showing of the material, yes. But prevent the showing? The only purpose of such prevention is for the studios to retain control of how the content is distributed, never mind whether they get their cut or not. It's just not fair that they can do this.
I don't agree that greed is good, not in and of itself. But it does have its uses.
Yeah, I know, we see too many patents that are not for any real innovation. But these are just people trying to game the system. The answer to that is to fix the system, not to discard a very important process for rewarding and encouraging innovation.
Which I suppose support your basic argument: that the free market has a healthy ability to create alternate avenues of communication. Which would seem to make serious internet censorship more and more difficult. But by the same token, it also make spam harder and harder to control. In the end "free speech", whether it's "we hold these truths to be self-evident" or "i'm a nigerian banker with money to give away", seems not so much a right as a law of nature.
I often have to sign an NDA, sometimes just to get a job interview. If the terms are reasonable, I have no qualms about this: the agreement is just a written form of an implicit agreement I see as part of my professional ethics. If somebody trusts you with sensitive information, it is simply wrong to be careless about passing that information on.
It occurs to me this argument is partially about the attitude gap between the open-source (or "free") software community and the closed-source (or "commercial") software community. Thing is, these two communities don't have to be enemies. Yeah, some OS people think that commercial software is evil, and some commercial software people think that the OS movement is economically clueless. But the reality is that no one model is the best possible one for all kinds of software. Some projects will prosper if they're driven by volunteers who just want to advance the state of the art. Others will only succeed if they're driven by well-capitalized entrepeneurs out to make a buck. Neither model is likely to go away, and I predict that more and more companies will come to rely on both.
There's actually not much point in trying to track all these objects. A lot of them are in eccentric orbits (like comets) and thus untrackable most of the time. The rest are no threat because they're in regular orbits that don't interesect ours. The ones that were in intersection orbits got swept up a very long time ago -- that's how planets are formed. The danger comes when these orbits change, after being disturbed by interaction with another object. So if we every get serious about looking out for killer asteroids, we won't try to track every one we already know about -- we'll just keep a general watch for new objects or old objects in new orbits.
Also, really small objects are no threat, because they burn up in the atmosphere. Objects big enough to punch through do hit pretty often, but I've never heard of anybody getting hurt by one. Which I guess indicates that we're not as big a planetary feature as we like to think, and also explains why there's such a short memory for these events. As indicated by the attention the Indian impacts are getting.
More common is damage to buildings and machinery. Speaking of which, if you find that your car has had a hole punched in it by something falling from the sky, do not get it repaired until you've determined the cause -- here are collectors who pay good money for cars with meteorite damage. But don't plan your retirement before you've made sure it's not just blue ice.
Not quite fair. It's not the media's fault that most people know jack about astronomy, and can't distinguish a harmless rock from a killer asteroid. Which is pretty important. Armageddon-style planet killers are rarer than intelligent Hollywood movies, but some scientists think that rocks big enough to wipe out a city happen every 100 years. And in fact, it's been almost that long since the Tunguska event. Which, alas, most people know about mainly from watching The X Files.I've seen a little of this show. It does seem to be mostly pretty bad, but I don't quite see how we can blame GR for it. Yeah, they put his name on it, but that's just an example of using the name of a retired or dead SF person as a kind of brand name. One of SF's more depressing trends.
Which is only fair. If nobody ripped off Michael Moore's DVDs then he'd lose his status as Righteous Outsider. It makes up for the fact that he makes all his money from the same corporate establishment he loves to criticize.
But never mind all that, just suppose that we do allow owners of networks and servers absolute control of what passes over their wires. Is that something you really want? Sure, it gives them the power to shut down spam. But it also gives them the power to control what web sites their users can access. Or what their users can put on their own web sites. Now, if hardware is owned by a private company and all its users are employees who are supposed to be using the internet to do their jobs, I suppose you have to grant that company a large measure of control. But if we're talking about public ISPs, then we're talking about something very scary. These ISPs, if they coordinated their efforts, and were allowed to totally control whatever passes over their wires, could do something that governments have repeatedly tried and failed to do: censor the internet.
A few years ago, there was a site called blackdeath.org that offended certain parties with its anti-Christian rants. Who demanded that their ISP pull the plug. When the ISP declined, they went to the ISP's backbone provider. Which happened to be owned by a major media company. Now, media companies are not fans of censorship, but they like offending people even less -- they might complain to the FCC, or worse, stop watching TV. So the backbone provider told the ISP to pull the plug on blackdeath.org, or else they'd lose their own internet service, and be forced out of business. Naturally they complied. Blackdeath.org went dark, briefly came back with a low-bandwidth provider, then finally disappeared forever.
This really scared me at the time, since the internet backbone had been consolidated into just a few big companies, most of them with the same censorship-prone connections as the Time Warner backbone. Since then, the backbone situation has gotten a little more competitive. But with the trend to consolidate more and more communications into fewer and fewer companies, I wouldn't get to sanguine. And I'd look for solutions to the spam problem that emphasizes individual, not central, control over network traffic.
Probably any intelligent person could figure out this convoluted explanation of aerospike engines. But few will bother, because it is convoluted. Perhaps you need all the history and technical background to understand the fine detail. But a good writer would start out with some kind of superficial explanation, so the reader can get some sense of why this material is important and acquire some kind of mental handle before plunging into the hard stuff.
The links in the ScottKin's original submission are even less impressive. Garvey just issues a press release talking about how cool their aerospike engine is, without the tiniest hint as to WTF an aerospike engine is. (Yeah, that will make people take notice!) The "California Space Authority" (someone's read too much Jerry Pournelle) site tries to explain, but utterly fails. And the Boeing site is most pathetic of all, with its pound-feet and square inches. I mean, I can understand that its politically impossible to metricize the U.S. consumer. But these guys are supposed to be the world's leading aerospace engineers! Yet decades after the rest of the world has gone metric, and after screwup after screwup after screwup in metric-English conversion, these "rocket scientists" refuse to modernize their measurements. Is it any wonder the rest of the world thinks we're a bunch of arrogant assholes?
Although this habit actually served him well in TOS. Any fan of WW II movies will notice that Balance of Terror was an unabashed ripoff of The Enemy Below. But it's a different audience, so what the heck.
Just as long as it doesn't run for public office, I don't care!
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of beowulf cluster jokes?
Or they'll all shut up and get rich. Decisions, decisions...
That's dangerous thinking, buster. Seditious, even. Next you'll be questioning the basic social principle of the Bush Era: buying lots of useless crap is patriotic!
You have some very quaint notions as to how easy it is to prove a crime. Maybe you think they concoted their evidence, and maybe I even agree with you. But where's the proof? You have to show not only that the evidence is bogus (and even that's controversial) -- you have to show that they know it's bogus.
Nonsense! As Q explains so well in the last episode, really great minds don't need logical consistency!
Nonsense! This kind of exerimental low-bandwidth, low-reliability protocol has a long and honorable history!