That is only a scientific answer if you do the research to back up that in fact people are afraid to die and that this is the reason that there are after life myths. It should be simple enough to show that people show physiological arousal when in danger of death, so that one will be fine. Showing the last one will be more complicated.
I've been thinking about your post for a while. It astounds me that you could be unable to understand the point I was making, and at the same time be so aggressive about it. Perhaps it's simply trolling, but perhaps not. So I've decided to explain it again, and the nature of your reply or the absence of a reply would be interesting to me.
In your post, you wrote that stealing is the act of depriving someone of the economic value of a thing. This is a definition of the word stealing, and you use that definition to show that piracy is stealing. That only succeeds if the definition you offer is in fact a good definition of stealing.
To be a good definition of stealing, it should apply in exactly those situations where the concept of stealing applies and in no other situations. What I did in my post was introduce an example where your definition of stealing applies, but no stealing has actually occurred. The point of that is to point out that the definition of stealing that you've offered is incorrect, and so you cannot draw any conclusions using that definition. In particular, your argument that piracy is stealing fails. That does not imply that piracy is not stealing, it just means that your particular argument fails.
You perceived what I wrote to be an analogy, so that you thought that I was trying to say that a pirate is analogous to an unsavory character moving into the neighborhood and depressing housing prices. This is a misunderstanding, since I was not offering an analogy for piracy. Instead, I was giving an example that shows that your definition of stealing is incorrect. My example has no connection to piracy, and it does not need to have a connection to show that your definition was incorrect. It is only if it actually was an analogy that it would need to relate to piracy.
You perceived my examples of breach of privacy and defamation to be straw men. A straw man is when one party in a discussion mis-characterizes the position of another party and then goes on to refute that position, which can be pretty easy since often the mis-characterization makes the other persons position preposterous. I did not state or imply that your position is on piracy is related to defamation or privacy, so there is no straw man. In fact it is the other way around: by stating those things to be straw men, you are implying that it is my position that your stance on piracy is related to these things. That is not the case, and you even go on to refute "my" argument based on this incorrect assumption, so in doing so it is actually you who are committing the straw man fallacy.
The point of mentioning privacy and defamation was to say that you can believe that piracy is odious without some specific odious adjective applying to it. So that was an analogy. Piracy may (or may not) be odious, and defamation is odious, yet piracy is not defamation. You may object that this is indeed a straw man, since you have never stated that just any random odious category applies to piracy - you have only specifically stated that piracy is theft. However, you have also pointed out that piracy is odious, and with your aggressive attitude in your last question in your post you implicitly imply that saying that piracy is not theft is also a statement that piracy is just fine. The point of my analogy is that you can continue to believe that piracy is odious without calling it theft.
So point out that piracy isn't theft is not necessarily defending piracy, it is merely pointing out an error. For example you could make an argument for how evil it is to breach a EULA/license, which is what piracy is.
What I would think if someone violated a GPL license is completely irrelevant to the question of whether piracy is theft, so I do not need to address it to point out that piracy is not theft. Never the less, what I would think is that a license has been broken. I would not think that it was theft. If someone does not follow the Artistic License on a program of yours, then that someone has not stolen from you. This person may be doing something wrong, but if so that wrong thing wouldn't be stealing. It would be not following the license you specified.
If an unsavory character moves into the house next to yours, that may well reduce the value of your house and thus deprive you of the economic value of something. Yet your neighbor did not steal from you. So stealing and depriving of economic value are different. If someone violates your license, they've violated your license. They have not stolen from you just like they have not breached your privacy or defamed you, because those are different things.
Your scare quotes are simply an instance of begging the question. There is a difference between a parking ticket and a speeding ticket. You may think they are exactly equally bad, but that does not turn one into the other. Copying and taking are not the same action, though you are free to apply the same moral value to it. That they are not the same is simply a matter of fact and trying to discuss that issue is silly. Whether they are morally equivalent is a matter of ethics, and I think that is what you really want to discuss. If you say "this is exactly as bad as stealing," then you could discuss the ethical stance that you actually care about instead of ending up on the losing side of a discussion that you don't really care about.
If you truly do not see how bits are different from things, consider how our notion about these things might change if there existed a machine that could precisely duplicate any physical item. Would I be stealing your burger if I used such a machine to copy the burger you just made even though you did not want me to copy your burger? Assume it works at a distance. I may be breaking some kind of future law about copying things, but I would not be stealing your burger. To maintain your stance, you have to maintain either that this situation is relevantly different from copying bits today, or that indeed copying a burger is stealing a burger. I don't see how any of those two things make sense.
Funny, that's how they responded to freeing the slaves, women's sufferage, and the Prohibition, and those are just the things I can quote out of the Constitution.
Best as I can see, the nearest analogy would be a slave saying fuck you to his owner for the owner's moral objections to the slave being set free. Somehow it seems you want to do this backwards so that the color-blind person becomes analogous to a slave owner for wishing to not be color-blind. I don't see how to make that work, but I give extra points for creativity. That or I got your position backwards.
The difference in genes we have now already make it so that there are things most people cannot do that some can do, and these genes are passed on from the successful to their children. The world you are describing is exactly the world you already live in. Of course environment plays a role too, but it would continue to do so in a world with much better gene technology, and it would matter in exactly the same kind of way that it does today.
In fact gene technology could do exactly the opposite of what you propose. We already live in the world you describe, and gene technology could make it so that we would no longer live in that world. Today some people have tremendous advantages because of their genes. There is no reason that gene technology could not be ubiquitous the way, say, mobile phones are now. Then everyone would be playing on a level playing field, and is that not exactly what you are asking for?
Yes, the benefits of modern civilization and the substitution of oil for harsh human labor are certainly analogous to severe head injury. If only you had incorporated a pizza, the user BadPizzaAnalogy would be jealous of you.
Let's try a car analogy. Researchers might in great detail measure how much more likely you are to get into a car crash if you use a mobile phone while driving, and they might measure this for several different kinds of phones, hand-free sets and so on. They might compare it to simply talking to someone else in the car. The newsstory will read "researchers conclude that being distracted is likely to get you into a crash than if you were paying attention," but that's a very unfair characterization. What you are doing is generalizing the results of this research to something that you don't think is surprising, while in fact the research is about something very specific.
Another thing is that people report being unsurprised by results from the social sciences, however for some results people will report this no matter how you tell them the research came out. If the research had found that lying ability was greater in subordinates, would you also be here saying "that's so obvious that these people are morons for researching it."
Sorry....my point flew right over your head. The basic metaphor is about expecting more than what you agreed to receive because the extra thing is "right there!"
Inflammatory comments aside, clearly that is the kind of metaphor you wanted to make, but what you actually succeeded in doing boils down to equivocation. In one case the burger is "right there" in the sense that you can take it away, while in the other sense it is "right there" in the sense that you can create a duplicate while leaving it where it is. Your attempted metaphor is to equivocate these two situations, but in fact it is entirely logical to oppose eating someone else's burger while approving of eating a burger that you have made yourself as a perfect copy of someone else's burger.
Considering that the more accurate situation would be eating a *copied* burger, the line of argument you attempted actually ends up supporting piracy if we think about the matter a little bit more - after all, what would be wrong about eating a copied burger? However, physical and digital things are so different that they cannot be thought of as the same, and I believe that that is what the grandparent poster meant when he said that your metaphor was equally lousy because whoppers aren't digital.
Games being digital and thus allowing zero-cost copying are the essence of the whole deal, and the whole point of your metaphor is thus to ignore the essence. So your metaphor is something like the opposite of what a metaphor is. It's like saying "you should never remove items from a store even when you've bought them, because imagine if you hadn't paid, then it would be stealing." It ignores what is essential to the whole discussion.
You are right. I haven't met people with a degree in Computer Science who do not indent their code either. I was responding to the line "Plus I meet so many junior progs who foul up (just a bit) with indenting." by the previous poster, and my point was that those people aren't actually unable to indent perfectly, they just don't care *that* much about it. With Python they will more quickly come to care, so that should be a good point for Python as opposed to something to worry about.
The idea here is of course not able to detect all malware, even though the article claims that it is. It is designed to counter a specific technique malware can use to avoid detection: to interfere with the normal processing of a malware detector. E.g. it can intercept kernel calls and lie to the malware detector (or any other software) about what the content of memory is. This is something the malware has to be actually running at the time of the scan to do, and to be able to run it has to be in memory. So if you swap out all code except the malware scanner (including drivers and so on), and you nuke all memory except the scanner's own code, then either the malware has to allow itself to be overwritten, or it has to remain in memory by intercepting the calls that would overwrite it. The idea in the article is to use a hardware check-sum function that cannot be intercepted. At that point the malware scanner will be able to tell that the real, hardware checksum of the memory does not match the check-sum it computed on its own, so there must be a piece of software still running and lying about the content of memory. Only malware would do that, so this technique defeats the malware technique of lying to a malware scanner about what is in memory.
Unfortunately the malware can of course still intercept the entire running of the malware scanner by not actually doing any scan at all and just displaying a message to the user that the malware scanner would normally display if there is no malware. That is still a half victory, though, as then the malware has to know about all the malware detectors that are out there and will be out there, which is a huge amount of work that the malware authors may not be able to keep up with. It could also just always display a message box saying "everything was fine" or it could crash the scanner, but then the user would possibly be able to tell that the something is wrong. A more sophisticated tactic would be to scan the scanner executable (before it runs) for the instructions that trigger the hardware mechanism, and replace those by different instructions that simply report the hash as it would be if there was no malware. Maybe you could obfuscate that somehow, perhaps by having the scanner generate the instructions it runs in memory instead of having them all in the executable directly, and at that points it becomes yet another arms race where now it is the malware authors trying to detect something and it is the anti-malware people trying to hide.
Unfortunately the type of scan proposed requires a hardware check-sum mechanism, it requires the OS to be able to swap every single part of itself to disk for an extended period of time (it then won't be able to respond to interrupts) and it still is not flawless. Still, it does make life more difficult for malware authors.
Generally more blood is stored than is needed for patients to not start dying. So tying receiving blood to blood donation would result in a situation where the doctor has a cheap, easy and viable way to save his patient, but he then does not because it has been decided some people don't deserve it. That's just nasty.
Junior coders only don't indent because they think it's stupid, unless we are talking people who only learned to program a few weeks ago. Python will give them a reason to do the sane thing before they realize through experience that indenting actually is not too much trouble anyway.
Sorry man, clearly the stupendous demand from impotent Canadians is driving down the price through extremely-large-scale efficiencies in sales and production.
You forgot option D: get an increase in revenue from all the other *ists. Even business owners who aren't *ists may be compelled to exclude certain demographics just to stay in business if the *ists are a large part of his customer base.
woooosh
His point was: Imagine that the landlord believed that blacks were more prone to do damage to his property and not pay for it than other people. If he then disallowed blacks from renting, he would be excluding an entire demographic based on the actions on just some people from that demographic, and we would frown on it for that reason. Excluding young people is exactly the same sort of behavior.
To make it really simple for you: he didn't make any statement about what is true or false of blacks, and the fact that you read it that way is more than a little bizarre.
I think the key word in "that's a mainland murder" is mainland rather than murder. So the point the original poster was making was not that now it's suddenly more morally odious because it's a murder, it's that now it's something the US police can handle without too much trouble, whereas the same thing inside Afghanistan would be harder to deal with.
To help matters along: Aardwark in the story is a "searh engine" that works by recording questions people ask it and then selecting other users who are likely to know the person asking and/or that are able to answer the question. E.g. facebook friends are used to connect people in this way.
I was wondering why there were almost no comments to this slashvertisement. Then I realized: to say something about this story, you have to read the story since the summary says little. Now it makes sense to me - no one reads the story around here.
From reading the actual paper, the analysis of source code is based on automatic static analysis, NOT on humans actually reading the code. Static analysis software can generate a high amount of false positives, so knowing that lots of software triggers the static analysis criteria for a fault doesn't necessarily mean anything at all about number of bugs or quality of the software. It does mildly suggest that there might be a problem, though.
The second part of the paper is about comparing different commercial software for doing calculations on seismic data. The results of this is that even though the operations that these software systems are supposed to carry out are completely mathematically stringently defined algorithms, the answers you get in the end differ wildly, and in some cases the different packages agree on only 1 figure! There is no one package that seems to generate better output than the others. As the paper states, this could result in drilling a 20 million dollar oil well in the wrong place, since up to three significant figures can be needed for that purpose.
To sum up, this is absolutely scandalous, and there is no reason to suspect that software for seismic calculations is any worse than for lots of other areas.
Slashdot Mirror
That is only a scientific answer if you do the research to back up that in fact people are afraid to die and that this is the reason that there are after life myths. It should be simple enough to show that people show physiological arousal when in danger of death, so that one will be fine. Showing the last one will be more complicated.
QED
I've been thinking about your post for a while. It astounds me that you could be unable to understand the point I was making, and at the same time be so aggressive about it. Perhaps it's simply trolling, but perhaps not. So I've decided to explain it again, and the nature of your reply or the absence of a reply would be interesting to me.
In your post, you wrote that stealing is the act of depriving someone of the economic value of a thing. This is a definition of the word stealing, and you use that definition to show that piracy is stealing. That only succeeds if the definition you offer is in fact a good definition of stealing.
To be a good definition of stealing, it should apply in exactly those situations where the concept of stealing applies and in no other situations. What I did in my post was introduce an example where your definition of stealing applies, but no stealing has actually occurred. The point of that is to point out that the definition of stealing that you've offered is incorrect, and so you cannot draw any conclusions using that definition. In particular, your argument that piracy is stealing fails. That does not imply that piracy is not stealing, it just means that your particular argument fails.
You perceived what I wrote to be an analogy, so that you thought that I was trying to say that a pirate is analogous to an unsavory character moving into the neighborhood and depressing housing prices. This is a misunderstanding, since I was not offering an analogy for piracy. Instead, I was giving an example that shows that your definition of stealing is incorrect. My example has no connection to piracy, and it does not need to have a connection to show that your definition was incorrect. It is only if it actually was an analogy that it would need to relate to piracy.
You perceived my examples of breach of privacy and defamation to be straw men. A straw man is when one party in a discussion mis-characterizes the position of another party and then goes on to refute that position, which can be pretty easy since often the mis-characterization makes the other persons position preposterous. I did not state or imply that your position is on piracy is related to defamation or privacy, so there is no straw man. In fact it is the other way around: by stating those things to be straw men, you are implying that it is my position that your stance on piracy is related to these things. That is not the case, and you even go on to refute "my" argument based on this incorrect assumption, so in doing so it is actually you who are committing the straw man fallacy.
The point of mentioning privacy and defamation was to say that you can believe that piracy is odious without some specific odious adjective applying to it. So that was an analogy. Piracy may (or may not) be odious, and defamation is odious, yet piracy is not defamation. You may object that this is indeed a straw man, since you have never stated that just any random odious category applies to piracy - you have only specifically stated that piracy is theft. However, you have also pointed out that piracy is odious, and with your aggressive attitude in your last question in your post you implicitly imply that saying that piracy is not theft is also a statement that piracy is just fine. The point of my analogy is that you can continue to believe that piracy is odious without calling it theft.
So point out that piracy isn't theft is not necessarily defending piracy, it is merely pointing out an error. For example you could make an argument for how evil it is to breach a EULA/license, which is what piracy is.
What I would think if someone violated a GPL license is completely irrelevant to the question of whether piracy is theft, so I do not need to address it to point out that piracy is not theft. Never the less, what I would think is that a license has been broken. I would not think that it was theft. If someone does not follow the Artistic License on a program of yours, then that someone has not stolen from you. This person may be doing something wrong, but if so that wrong thing wouldn't be stealing. It would be not following the license you specified.
The level of reading comprehension being displayed here is such that discussion cannot continue. Have a nice day.
If an unsavory character moves into the house next to yours, that may well reduce the value of your house and thus deprive you of the economic value of something. Yet your neighbor did not steal from you. So stealing and depriving of economic value are different. If someone violates your license, they've violated your license. They have not stolen from you just like they have not breached your privacy or defamed you, because those are different things.
Your scare quotes are simply an instance of begging the question. There is a difference between a parking ticket and a speeding ticket. You may think they are exactly equally bad, but that does not turn one into the other. Copying and taking are not the same action, though you are free to apply the same moral value to it. That they are not the same is simply a matter of fact and trying to discuss that issue is silly. Whether they are morally equivalent is a matter of ethics, and I think that is what you really want to discuss. If you say "this is exactly as bad as stealing," then you could discuss the ethical stance that you actually care about instead of ending up on the losing side of a discussion that you don't really care about. If you truly do not see how bits are different from things, consider how our notion about these things might change if there existed a machine that could precisely duplicate any physical item. Would I be stealing your burger if I used such a machine to copy the burger you just made even though you did not want me to copy your burger? Assume it works at a distance. I may be breaking some kind of future law about copying things, but I would not be stealing your burger. To maintain your stance, you have to maintain either that this situation is relevantly different from copying bits today, or that indeed copying a burger is stealing a burger. I don't see how any of those two things make sense.
This cure modifies your DNA, and our genetic identity is something that defines us.
So is our choice in breakfast cereal and the color of our shoes. What defines you is entirely a matter of perspective.
I say "fuck you" to your moral objection.
Funny, that's how they responded to freeing the slaves, women's sufferage, and the Prohibition, and those are just the things I can quote out of the Constitution.
Best as I can see, the nearest analogy would be a slave saying fuck you to his owner for the owner's moral objections to the slave being set free. Somehow it seems you want to do this backwards so that the color-blind person becomes analogous to a slave owner for wishing to not be color-blind. I don't see how to make that work, but I give extra points for creativity. That or I got your position backwards.
The difference in genes we have now already make it so that there are things most people cannot do that some can do, and these genes are passed on from the successful to their children. The world you are describing is exactly the world you already live in. Of course environment plays a role too, but it would continue to do so in a world with much better gene technology, and it would matter in exactly the same kind of way that it does today. In fact gene technology could do exactly the opposite of what you propose. We already live in the world you describe, and gene technology could make it so that we would no longer live in that world. Today some people have tremendous advantages because of their genes. There is no reason that gene technology could not be ubiquitous the way, say, mobile phones are now. Then everyone would be playing on a level playing field, and is that not exactly what you are asking for?
Yes, the benefits of modern civilization and the substitution of oil for harsh human labor are certainly analogous to severe head injury. If only you had incorporated a pizza, the user BadPizzaAnalogy would be jealous of you.
Let's try a car analogy. Researchers might in great detail measure how much more likely you are to get into a car crash if you use a mobile phone while driving, and they might measure this for several different kinds of phones, hand-free sets and so on. They might compare it to simply talking to someone else in the car. The newsstory will read "researchers conclude that being distracted is likely to get you into a crash than if you were paying attention," but that's a very unfair characterization. What you are doing is generalizing the results of this research to something that you don't think is surprising, while in fact the research is about something very specific. Another thing is that people report being unsurprised by results from the social sciences, however for some results people will report this no matter how you tell them the research came out. If the research had found that lying ability was greater in subordinates, would you also be here saying "that's so obvious that these people are morons for researching it."
Sorry....my point flew right over your head. The basic metaphor is about expecting more than what you agreed to receive because the extra thing is "right there!"
Inflammatory comments aside, clearly that is the kind of metaphor you wanted to make, but what you actually succeeded in doing boils down to equivocation. In one case the burger is "right there" in the sense that you can take it away, while in the other sense it is "right there" in the sense that you can create a duplicate while leaving it where it is. Your attempted metaphor is to equivocate these two situations, but in fact it is entirely logical to oppose eating someone else's burger while approving of eating a burger that you have made yourself as a perfect copy of someone else's burger.
Considering that the more accurate situation would be eating a *copied* burger, the line of argument you attempted actually ends up supporting piracy if we think about the matter a little bit more - after all, what would be wrong about eating a copied burger? However, physical and digital things are so different that they cannot be thought of as the same, and I believe that that is what the grandparent poster meant when he said that your metaphor was equally lousy because whoppers aren't digital.
Games being digital and thus allowing zero-cost copying are the essence of the whole deal, and the whole point of your metaphor is thus to ignore the essence. So your metaphor is something like the opposite of what a metaphor is. It's like saying "you should never remove items from a store even when you've bought them, because imagine if you hadn't paid, then it would be stealing." It ignores what is essential to the whole discussion.
You are right. I haven't met people with a degree in Computer Science who do not indent their code either. I was responding to the line "Plus I meet so many junior progs who foul up (just a bit) with indenting." by the previous poster, and my point was that those people aren't actually unable to indent perfectly, they just don't care *that* much about it. With Python they will more quickly come to care, so that should be a good point for Python as opposed to something to worry about.
The idea here is of course not able to detect all malware, even though the article claims that it is. It is designed to counter a specific technique malware can use to avoid detection: to interfere with the normal processing of a malware detector. E.g. it can intercept kernel calls and lie to the malware detector (or any other software) about what the content of memory is. This is something the malware has to be actually running at the time of the scan to do, and to be able to run it has to be in memory. So if you swap out all code except the malware scanner (including drivers and so on), and you nuke all memory except the scanner's own code, then either the malware has to allow itself to be overwritten, or it has to remain in memory by intercepting the calls that would overwrite it. The idea in the article is to use a hardware check-sum function that cannot be intercepted. At that point the malware scanner will be able to tell that the real, hardware checksum of the memory does not match the check-sum it computed on its own, so there must be a piece of software still running and lying about the content of memory. Only malware would do that, so this technique defeats the malware technique of lying to a malware scanner about what is in memory.
Unfortunately the malware can of course still intercept the entire running of the malware scanner by not actually doing any scan at all and just displaying a message to the user that the malware scanner would normally display if there is no malware. That is still a half victory, though, as then the malware has to know about all the malware detectors that are out there and will be out there, which is a huge amount of work that the malware authors may not be able to keep up with. It could also just always display a message box saying "everything was fine" or it could crash the scanner, but then the user would possibly be able to tell that the something is wrong. A more sophisticated tactic would be to scan the scanner executable (before it runs) for the instructions that trigger the hardware mechanism, and replace those by different instructions that simply report the hash as it would be if there was no malware. Maybe you could obfuscate that somehow, perhaps by having the scanner generate the instructions it runs in memory instead of having them all in the executable directly, and at that points it becomes yet another arms race where now it is the malware authors trying to detect something and it is the anti-malware people trying to hide.
Unfortunately the type of scan proposed requires a hardware check-sum mechanism, it requires the OS to be able to swap every single part of itself to disk for an extended period of time (it then won't be able to respond to interrupts) and it still is not flawless. Still, it does make life more difficult for malware authors.
Generally more blood is stored than is needed for patients to not start dying. So tying receiving blood to blood donation would result in a situation where the doctor has a cheap, easy and viable way to save his patient, but he then does not because it has been decided some people don't deserve it. That's just nasty.
There is. It's +1 Funny.
Junior coders only don't indent because they think it's stupid, unless we are talking people who only learned to program a few weeks ago. Python will give them a reason to do the sane thing before they realize through experience that indenting actually is not too much trouble anyway.
Sorry man, clearly the stupendous demand from impotent Canadians is driving down the price through extremely-large-scale efficiencies in sales and production.
You forgot option D: get an increase in revenue from all the other *ists. Even business owners who aren't *ists may be compelled to exclude certain demographics just to stay in business if the *ists are a large part of his customer base.
woooosh His point was: Imagine that the landlord believed that blacks were more prone to do damage to his property and not pay for it than other people. If he then disallowed blacks from renting, he would be excluding an entire demographic based on the actions on just some people from that demographic, and we would frown on it for that reason. Excluding young people is exactly the same sort of behavior. To make it really simple for you: he didn't make any statement about what is true or false of blacks, and the fact that you read it that way is more than a little bizarre.
I think the key word in "that's a mainland murder" is mainland rather than murder. So the point the original poster was making was not that now it's suddenly more morally odious because it's a murder, it's that now it's something the US police can handle without too much trouble, whereas the same thing inside Afghanistan would be harder to deal with.
To help matters along: Aardwark in the story is a "searh engine" that works by recording questions people ask it and then selecting other users who are likely to know the person asking and/or that are able to answer the question. E.g. facebook friends are used to connect people in this way.
I was wondering why there were almost no comments to this slashvertisement. Then I realized: to say something about this story, you have to read the story since the summary says little. Now it makes sense to me - no one reads the story around here.
From reading the actual paper, the analysis of source code is based on automatic static analysis, NOT on humans actually reading the code. Static analysis software can generate a high amount of false positives, so knowing that lots of software triggers the static analysis criteria for a fault doesn't necessarily mean anything at all about number of bugs or quality of the software. It does mildly suggest that there might be a problem, though.
The second part of the paper is about comparing different commercial software for doing calculations on seismic data. The results of this is that even though the operations that these software systems are supposed to carry out are completely mathematically stringently defined algorithms, the answers you get in the end differ wildly, and in some cases the different packages agree on only 1 figure! There is no one package that seems to generate better output than the others. As the paper states, this could result in drilling a 20 million dollar oil well in the wrong place, since up to three significant figures can be needed for that purpose.
To sum up, this is absolutely scandalous, and there is no reason to suspect that software for seismic calculations is any worse than for lots of other areas.