"Beyond all reasonable doubt" does not require that you have no doubts, only that such doubts as you have are beyond what may be considered reasonable. What, though, is the standard for "reasonableness"? It's stricter than "on the balance of probabilities" (a weaker requirement), so it requires more than a 50/50 chance, but it's less than 100/0 (which would be unreasonable).
Also consider the word "proof". This is not "proof" in the scientific sense. I doubt most judges or lawyers even have enough of a science background to understand what the scientific sense is. As best as I can tell, "proof" means anything that has not been cast into some degree of doubt by the other side, where doubt must also be "reasonable".
So what is this reasonableness, anyway? What I regard it as being is likely totally different from anything anyone else sees it as being. To me, "reasonableness" in a legalistic sense would mean "if you had N people of average or above average intelligence, from a uniformly random cross-section of the population, who were honest to themselves and others and who held no preconceived notions on the subject, the majority would reach a similar or the same conclusion".
(I'm crudely basing that on the whole notion of the jury being "twelve good men and true" and the requirements for impartiality and fairness that can be traced through history to the very origins of the legal system.)
Or they needed 640 ports for internal connectivity (or 640 ports, channel-bonded, for upstream connectivity). Personally, I think it's the manager's password, though.
On the one hand, testing is expensive. On the other, many aircraft flaws were a result of errors in design assumptions. You obviously can think of new tests forever, but they need to stop when the value of additional testing is exceeded by any risks caused from a lack.
Personally, I'd be in favour of much more testing. Yes, the wings are more flexible, but is that necessarily a good thing? A Boeing is not in the same league as the round-the-world-nonstop aircraft, where wing flexibility has been paramount. Nor is it under the same stresses as a fighter aircraft. Optimizing for one variable may de-optimize another, so it is important that the right one is picked.
I'd also want to see much more data collected on these new wings. Again, fighters are probably scrutinized very carefully, and RTW aircraft generally only fly once. How much data has been gathered on fatigue? Were ultrasound or IR sensors used to pick up where stress was building, allowing for direct comparison between computer models and the tested system? Can the wings take being repeatedly stressed to that degree, or will faults rapidly develop?
Fuel is stored in the wings, so the wings become lighter as the aircraft flies. That fuel is pumped between the tanks under the aircraft and the wings in both directions, so wing loading will be non-linear with time. If the wings are highly flexible, will this affect lift or other characteristics?
We can assume Boeing has all the answers to these questions, but that's all we'd be doing. Unless you work there, you don't know for a fact what data they have, all you know is what they say they have, which may be entirely different.
Of course, with the rise in popularity of Blended Wing Bodies and Waveriders, there is the question of why Boeing is even sill using the tube-with-wings design. It's inefficient, it's likely more prone to failure, and a good BWB airframe should be able to land more passengers on smaller runways, greatly increasing the number of people who could buy them.
Gnu's C compiler and assembler do some very nice optimization and are entitled to ignore suboptimal or inferior methods. Just because the assembler can generate some instruction doesn't mean it will in practice. Unless you specify an assembler block AND tell it to do no optimization whatsoever AND specifically use some degenerate case of an opcode, you would never run into that situation in practice, using GCC and binutils.
We already know that some Intel-isms are not used in GCC - PGCC was rejected utterly by the GCC developers, not because it produced poorer code, as it typically produced greatly superior code for Intel-specific processors, but because of disputes over what and how things should be done. If Intel's compilers are producing weird code, as is implicit in the PGCC disputes, then we can assume Intel's compilers will generate opcodes and sequences of opcodes that GCC never will in any practical, real-world situation. (Forced assembly code is neither practical nor real-world.)
The text released is heavily censored. How censored? That's hard to say. Reports seem to indicate that it could be several hundred pages held back or blacked out for every paragraph published. This would appear to be more of a deliberate distraction rather than an actual, meaningful release of information on illegal activities.
The future releases will indeed be important, but I have to say that if there is unreleasable, "hot" information from failed operations that have been subject to three Congressional inquiries (in which Congress got much of what is now blacked-out), I would most definitely want that information examined by Congress and published if at all possible. It is evident that the CIA - however much it has changed - has not changed in a key area: the unreasoning paranoia that led to many of the crimes in the first place.
Depends on the instruction(s) inflicted. Based on the limited information available, it could be anything from a mode that's unused outside of Windows to an instruction that the compiler used for Mac OS/X simply never generates. (A sub-optimal instruction, for example, would be skipped by any decent optimizing compiler as the same thing could be done in superior ways.)
If anyone wants to place their machine at grave risk, I'd be interested to know what happens if you are running a Windows machine in one virtual container and Linux in another, then patch the microcode from Windows. How does it affect Linux? Do kernel tests, say in the LTP or one of the other testing kits, suddenly succeed where they'd otherwise fail, or vice versa?
Likewise, if you use IE in WINE and pull the patch down, purely in a Linux environment, does it disrupt Linux, benefit it, or have no impact whatsoever?
If we knew this, we should be able to figure out more what the defect actually is and what the patch does to correct it, as we can track what Linux is doing at the time something different happens.
What worries me is the idea of Microsoft Update mucking with the processor in the first place. And what is Genuine Disadvantage going to think of patching a non-Microsoft product anyway?
...regardless, we have Sir Isaac Newton's word that this won't be an issue until 2060 at the earliest.
(On a serious note, you seem to be following the same argument there as C. S. Lewis - re: Horse and his boy - but it is unclear from any doctrine of any faith I know of that this holds up, with the possible exception of some remarks by James that get largely ignored by most religions of the Judeo-Christian branch. Even the identity of the Saviour is questioned - the remnants of the followers of John the Baptist have a very different interpretation of events, and it would seem foolish to ignore the writings of the group who actually recorded what happened at the time. I'm not saying X is right, Y is wrong, but rather that the picture is very very complicated and that what seems so simple is confusing and unclear. Beliefs are prone to start flamewars, rarely because of the beliefs and much more because all frames of reference are contrary.)
Thank you for the compliment. It's equally nice to know that there are active questioners on Slashdot determined to stretch the quality to the limits. In the spirit of providing information, though, I'll add a few links for the perusal and amusement of all. I'm hard on some of the software, but that's not because I could do better. If anything, it's because I have confidence the authors could.
Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes 3D is a nice Fortran-based CFD, requires some hefty paperwork to obtain, and may need you to use G95 rather than GCC's GFortran, due to compiler bugs.
Viscous Upwind ALgorithm for Complex Flow ANalysis is the hardest of the CFD codes at NASA to obtain, but if you want to work on anything hypersonic, it's the best place to start. Do Not Use hypersonic airflows for CPU cooling.
Kerrighed is an up-and-coming clustering system for Linux. I saw it demonstrated at SC|05 - and was less than impressed. It needed a lot of work at that point. However, it looks like it has improved a lot since then, and it would be unreasonable to not mention it.
MOSIX is the second-oldest clustering technology to gain a fan following to rival Star Trek. It's very good, though hard to get if you're not in academia. Arguably for entirely fair reasons.
OpenMOSIX was originally a fork from MOSIX but is now essentially its own clustering technology. Development is nowhere near the speed I'd like, it does need far more eyes, but is well-known and highly regarded. Moshe Bar is also one of the coolest developers I've encountered.
DAKOTA is a program for profiling parallel applications and should be useful in telling you where you are gaining and losing.
HPC Toolkit is another toolkit for profiling HPC applications.
is yet another profiler for parallel software. Between this and the others I've listed, you should have more information than sequential programmers ever get to work with.
Performance API is a facility used by most of the profiling software to provide an architecture-independent view of performance counters. I have it on good authority that some (now former)
Well, there are companies who I cannot name due to NDA who were supposed to fix this very issue, but due to issues I cannot discuss because of NDA are wholly incapable of doing so. What bothers me is that they've been selling the machines I cannot name to customers with very dark glasses whose three-letter-acronym is named only by a suicidal idiot, NDA or otherwise.
If you include medical imaging, then computed tomography and computational fluid dynamics are heavily dependent on 3D FFTs, which are in turn heavily parallelizable. In extreme cases (raytracing, for example) where there is next to zero communication between nodes, you get linear scaling with the number of nodes for as many nodes as you like. Well, in the case of raytracing, up to the resolution your "camera" works at. On a modern display, you may be talking one million or so distinct originating points at three colours, typically using "bundles" of rays to eliminate effects, which would normally be 64 rays in size. With something like 250 million cores, you could actually generate an animated feature film from raw data files at the time of showing.
How many of these are "real world"? Well, medical and CFD applications are significant, but hardly what you'd call mainstream, and the raytracing may have been used in Titanic on a smaller scale, but IMAX is under no threat at this time.
...their rights to go psychotic and trash recordings, as they did in the 70s. I can't think of anything else they'd want to secure to that kind of level, especially as they have their own technology unit (what do you think dirac came from?).
Ooooh! I know! They're trying to stop people stealing the copy of Micro Live!, where the BBC was hacked on live TV by the Cheshire Catalyst!
First, you assume that there was ever a time when there was a nothing. The big bang is the point at which time comes into being, so there is nothing preceding it, so there is no time of nothing into which the something arrived. Thus, your whole thing of what was there before there was a time for there to be anything there doesn't mean anything. There has to be a time before there can be a something (or a nothing) to exist in it. Phew. Having got the trivial bit out the way, I'll get into the more complicated part.
Part, the second: Physics doesn't permit a nothing to exist. There is no such thing in science as "nothing". There are no "perfect vaccuum"s, except in adverts. There is a quantum foam, which consists of pairs of virtual particles whose sum total of mass and energy is zero. This is not a cheat, it is an inevitable consequence of the inescapable laws of thermodynamics which underly ALL other laws of the Universe. Besides, there's a possibility it has been observed in experiments on the Casmir Effect.
Now we get to the third part. Relativity requires that space/time curve under gravity. If you backtrack time towards the Big Bang, time bends inwards. The closer you get, the slower time subjectively is. You can never reach time zero. It's flat. The gradient is zero. There is no point from which the Big Bang erupted. Time is parabolic that early on. If there is no origin, then there is no need to explain what happened then. (This was why Professor Hawking was nervous about talking to the late Pope John Paul II - the Pope said it was ok to explore the universe, just not talk about how it originated. Hawking's talk earlier that day had shown that there was no origin to talk about.)
Next, we get to part four. Testability. The Big Bang is a verifiable hypothesis - we can create the conditions needed to create a virtual energy density necessary to inflate a bubble universe, and that has been known for many decades now. I'm not saying anything new here. Creationism and Intelligent Design is unverifiable, short of God appearing on Larry King Live, and strangely I don't see the Creationists begging Him/Her to do so. Odd, that.
(I have nothing against faith, but many who claim to have faith have nothing of the sort and I do have a great many problems with abuse of faith.)
...it was intended for publication in Nature. Although the English could have been improved, the information is ultimately the important part of any project - the presentation is merely the PR, and any geek who puts PR above data is missing some rather important points.
The US is stratified by perceptions and social groups. It's also stratified by income, education, class (which is amazingly important for a supposedly classless society), and a whole bunch of other parameters.
Really, it would be better to do an N-way analysis of variance and derive the most significant divisions within American society (there are many), although that would be well beyond the resources of a project at this level.
Which is still very important and very significant. Personally, I'd like Fermilab to discover a few more intermediate particles but for CERN to get the Higgs. That way, both groups get lots of kudos and maybe even the cash they need. As it stands, neither are getting the support they should.
keeping unusual work hours, unreported contacts with foreign nationals, unreported contact with foreign government, military, or intelligence officials, attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know, and unexplained absences
So everyone who plays WoW (unusual work hours, to catch up), plays MUDs or goes on IRC (unreported contacts with foreign nationals), provides an EU government with Linux tech support (unreported contact with foreign government), applies patches to SELinux from the NSA's counterparts elsewhere (military, or intelligence officials), wants a Classical Education or wants to learn additional subjects out of enjoyment, interest or geekiness (attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know), or goes to play pinball at the student union hall instead of attending class (unexplained absences) is a spy?
That makes 99.9% of all student population spies, and a good 75% of all lecturers. When will the DoD launch a bombing campaign on Skull and Bones secret meetings? Oh, they can't - they all belong.
In the short term, repairing the grades makes absolute sense. That is when the grades matter the most. In the longer term, the grades are of no consequence - graduating will be all that matters and the extra year will begin to count against you.
The question becomes one of whether you want jam today or jam tomorrow, the system isn't geared to let you have both, which to me is a clear demonstration of the flaws in the modern system. Why? Because medium-term jobs will penalize you for having poor jobs early on, if you choose the long-term path, and you will only start to see results ten or so years on from graduation. That's a long time to lose money and it's questionable as to whether the profits later will compare to the lost interest.
On the other hand, ten years on, nobody will give a damn about the grades, they will only care that you are listed as failing/repeating a year, of you take the short-term path, which s Bad News. In other words, after that critical time when college scores cease to matter and early references have long-since vanished, your earning power will drop and your marketability will suffer. If a typical career lasts 30 years, then you've profited on 10 but lost on 20.
All this is moot, of course, if you have a thirty-year career with the same place, but those who retire with the golden watch are becoming increasingly rare. If you have very few jobs, then the better grades will lead to better prospects. If, as happens a lot these days, sustainability suffers, then that's not the way to do it.
Personally, I'd say don't worry about it, join a professional society or two that ONLY accepts people of good standing, and utilize the hell out of the association. Professional societies and certain certifications count for more than all the grades and education in the world.
(I'll just add that if American education worked on the premise that better-trained employees do more and earn more for the company and country, you wouldn't have needed to do so much on the side, and therefore would already have the good grades.)
I'm having a hard time deciding if that was satire or not. From the moderations, I'm guessing others picked the satire option. After what Take Two did to David Braben, and after what they've done to other software authors, the only envelopes Take Two have any business pushing are the envelopes containing the pink slips to management. As for "free speech", Take Two aren't even willing to own up to their own speech, so why the hell should I care if they lose the freedom of it? How does one lose what one doesn't claim to have?
That is related to the vagueness of what is meant by "able to do the job". I'm sure half the employees of KFC are "able" to develop websites, if "able" can be understood to mean "push the buttons we tell you to". On the other hand, tailor-made job descriptions made specifically to obtain a particular individual is hardly going to get you the best person either. It can only get you the person you know about, regardless of whether better people are available.
It's common practice in any place where "competition" for jobs is required, in most countries. The truth is, the "job market" really isn't a market at all. There's no openness, little honesty, and many employers are apt to advertise fake positions to collect resumes so they can cherry-pick later for the real positions.
A metalaw by means of national referendum is entirely different from an actual law by national referendum. It's also commonplace in many democracies. You seem to be confusing the establishing of a framework (which must be by mutual agreement if it is to be sound) with the establishing of actual laws and regulations within that framework (which has to be done by people who know what they're doing, regardless of what subset of the population that is). Your language suggests you've programmed, so I really don't see what's so hard about the distinction between an abstract specification (what something is to do) and a concrete implementation (how it is to go about doing it).
(I'll leave for another discussion my contempt for the vast numbers of programmers who can't draw up a decent specification and whose understanding of QA is limited to spelling the acronym.)
Slashdot Mirror
Also consider the word "proof". This is not "proof" in the scientific sense. I doubt most judges or lawyers even have enough of a science background to understand what the scientific sense is. As best as I can tell, "proof" means anything that has not been cast into some degree of doubt by the other side, where doubt must also be "reasonable".
So what is this reasonableness, anyway? What I regard it as being is likely totally different from anything anyone else sees it as being. To me, "reasonableness" in a legalistic sense would mean "if you had N people of average or above average intelligence, from a uniformly random cross-section of the population, who were honest to themselves and others and who held no preconceived notions on the subject, the majority would reach a similar or the same conclusion".
(I'm crudely basing that on the whole notion of the jury being "twelve good men and true" and the requirements for impartiality and fairness that can be traced through history to the very origins of the legal system.)
If the delay is that long, you won't get overlapping sounds when you pass the sound file through something to add echos.
Or they needed 640 ports for internal connectivity (or 640 ports, channel-bonded, for upstream connectivity). Personally, I think it's the manager's password, though.
Personally, I'd be in favour of much more testing. Yes, the wings are more flexible, but is that necessarily a good thing? A Boeing is not in the same league as the round-the-world-nonstop aircraft, where wing flexibility has been paramount. Nor is it under the same stresses as a fighter aircraft. Optimizing for one variable may de-optimize another, so it is important that the right one is picked.
I'd also want to see much more data collected on these new wings. Again, fighters are probably scrutinized very carefully, and RTW aircraft generally only fly once. How much data has been gathered on fatigue? Were ultrasound or IR sensors used to pick up where stress was building, allowing for direct comparison between computer models and the tested system? Can the wings take being repeatedly stressed to that degree, or will faults rapidly develop?
Fuel is stored in the wings, so the wings become lighter as the aircraft flies. That fuel is pumped between the tanks under the aircraft and the wings in both directions, so wing loading will be non-linear with time. If the wings are highly flexible, will this affect lift or other characteristics?
We can assume Boeing has all the answers to these questions, but that's all we'd be doing. Unless you work there, you don't know for a fact what data they have, all you know is what they say they have, which may be entirely different.
Of course, with the rise in popularity of Blended Wing Bodies and Waveriders, there is the question of why Boeing is even sill using the tube-with-wings design. It's inefficient, it's likely more prone to failure, and a good BWB airframe should be able to land more passengers on smaller runways, greatly increasing the number of people who could buy them.
We already know that some Intel-isms are not used in GCC - PGCC was rejected utterly by the GCC developers, not because it produced poorer code, as it typically produced greatly superior code for Intel-specific processors, but because of disputes over what and how things should be done. If Intel's compilers are producing weird code, as is implicit in the PGCC disputes, then we can assume Intel's compilers will generate opcodes and sequences of opcodes that GCC never will in any practical, real-world situation. (Forced assembly code is neither practical nor real-world.)
The future releases will indeed be important, but I have to say that if there is unreleasable, "hot" information from failed operations that have been subject to three Congressional inquiries (in which Congress got much of what is now blacked-out), I would most definitely want that information examined by Congress and published if at all possible. It is evident that the CIA - however much it has changed - has not changed in a key area: the unreasoning paranoia that led to many of the crimes in the first place.
If anyone wants to place their machine at grave risk, I'd be interested to know what happens if you are running a Windows machine in one virtual container and Linux in another, then patch the microcode from Windows. How does it affect Linux? Do kernel tests, say in the LTP or one of the other testing kits, suddenly succeed where they'd otherwise fail, or vice versa?
Likewise, if you use IE in WINE and pull the patch down, purely in a Linux environment, does it disrupt Linux, benefit it, or have no impact whatsoever?
If we knew this, we should be able to figure out more what the defect actually is and what the patch does to correct it, as we can track what Linux is doing at the time something different happens.
What worries me is the idea of Microsoft Update mucking with the processor in the first place. And what is Genuine Disadvantage going to think of patching a non-Microsoft product anyway?
(On a serious note, you seem to be following the same argument there as C. S. Lewis - re: Horse and his boy - but it is unclear from any doctrine of any faith I know of that this holds up, with the possible exception of some remarks by James that get largely ignored by most religions of the Judeo-Christian branch. Even the identity of the Saviour is questioned - the remnants of the followers of John the Baptist have a very different interpretation of events, and it would seem foolish to ignore the writings of the group who actually recorded what happened at the time. I'm not saying X is right, Y is wrong, but rather that the picture is very very complicated and that what seems so simple is confusing and unclear. Beliefs are prone to start flamewars, rarely because of the beliefs and much more because all frames of reference are contrary.)
Let's start with a Slashdotting of NASA...
Well, there are companies who I cannot name due to NDA who were supposed to fix this very issue, but due to issues I cannot discuss because of NDA are wholly incapable of doing so. What bothers me is that they've been selling the machines I cannot name to customers with very dark glasses whose three-letter-acronym is named only by a suicidal idiot, NDA or otherwise.
How many of these are "real world"? Well, medical and CFD applications are significant, but hardly what you'd call mainstream, and the raytracing may have been used in Titanic on a smaller scale, but IMAX is under no threat at this time.
Ooooh! I know! They're trying to stop people stealing the copy of Micro Live!, where the BBC was hacked on live TV by the Cheshire Catalyst!
...there's always a chance that they'll put each other out of business and thus save the world. Maybe.
Part, the second: Physics doesn't permit a nothing to exist. There is no such thing in science as "nothing". There are no "perfect vaccuum"s, except in adverts. There is a quantum foam, which consists of pairs of virtual particles whose sum total of mass and energy is zero. This is not a cheat, it is an inevitable consequence of the inescapable laws of thermodynamics which underly ALL other laws of the Universe. Besides, there's a possibility it has been observed in experiments on the Casmir Effect.
Now we get to the third part. Relativity requires that space/time curve under gravity. If you backtrack time towards the Big Bang, time bends inwards. The closer you get, the slower time subjectively is. You can never reach time zero. It's flat. The gradient is zero. There is no point from which the Big Bang erupted. Time is parabolic that early on. If there is no origin, then there is no need to explain what happened then. (This was why Professor Hawking was nervous about talking to the late Pope John Paul II - the Pope said it was ok to explore the universe, just not talk about how it originated. Hawking's talk earlier that day had shown that there was no origin to talk about.)
Next, we get to part four. Testability. The Big Bang is a verifiable hypothesis - we can create the conditions needed to create a virtual energy density necessary to inflate a bubble universe, and that has been known for many decades now. I'm not saying anything new here. Creationism and Intelligent Design is unverifiable, short of God appearing on Larry King Live, and strangely I don't see the Creationists begging Him/Her to do so. Odd, that.
(I have nothing against faith, but many who claim to have faith have nothing of the sort and I do have a great many problems with abuse of faith.)
...it was intended for publication in Nature. Although the English could have been improved, the information is ultimately the important part of any project - the presentation is merely the PR, and any geek who puts PR above data is missing some rather important points.
Really, it would be better to do an N-way analysis of variance and derive the most significant divisions within American society (there are many), although that would be well beyond the resources of a project at this level.
Leela: "They say the Evil One eats babies!"
Which is still very important and very significant. Personally, I'd like Fermilab to discover a few more intermediate particles but for CERN to get the Higgs. That way, both groups get lots of kudos and maybe even the cash they need. As it stands, neither are getting the support they should.
So everyone who plays WoW (unusual work hours, to catch up), plays MUDs or goes on IRC (unreported contacts with foreign nationals), provides an EU government with Linux tech support (unreported contact with foreign government), applies patches to SELinux from the NSA's counterparts elsewhere (military, or intelligence officials), wants a Classical Education or wants to learn additional subjects out of enjoyment, interest or geekiness (attempting to gain new accesses without the need to know), or goes to play pinball at the student union hall instead of attending class (unexplained absences) is a spy?
That makes 99.9% of all student population spies, and a good 75% of all lecturers. When will the DoD launch a bombing campaign on Skull and Bones secret meetings? Oh, they can't - they all belong.
The question becomes one of whether you want jam today or jam tomorrow, the system isn't geared to let you have both, which to me is a clear demonstration of the flaws in the modern system. Why? Because medium-term jobs will penalize you for having poor jobs early on, if you choose the long-term path, and you will only start to see results ten or so years on from graduation. That's a long time to lose money and it's questionable as to whether the profits later will compare to the lost interest.
On the other hand, ten years on, nobody will give a damn about the grades, they will only care that you are listed as failing/repeating a year, of you take the short-term path, which s Bad News. In other words, after that critical time when college scores cease to matter and early references have long-since vanished, your earning power will drop and your marketability will suffer. If a typical career lasts 30 years, then you've profited on 10 but lost on 20.
All this is moot, of course, if you have a thirty-year career with the same place, but those who retire with the golden watch are becoming increasingly rare. If you have very few jobs, then the better grades will lead to better prospects. If, as happens a lot these days, sustainability suffers, then that's not the way to do it.
Personally, I'd say don't worry about it, join a professional society or two that ONLY accepts people of good standing, and utilize the hell out of the association. Professional societies and certain certifications count for more than all the grades and education in the world.
(I'll just add that if American education worked on the premise that better-trained employees do more and earn more for the company and country, you wouldn't have needed to do so much on the side, and therefore would already have the good grades.)
I'm having a hard time deciding if that was satire or not. From the moderations, I'm guessing others picked the satire option. After what Take Two did to David Braben, and after what they've done to other software authors, the only envelopes Take Two have any business pushing are the envelopes containing the pink slips to management. As for "free speech", Take Two aren't even willing to own up to their own speech, so why the hell should I care if they lose the freedom of it? How does one lose what one doesn't claim to have?
It's common practice in any place where "competition" for jobs is required, in most countries. The truth is, the "job market" really isn't a market at all. There's no openness, little honesty, and many employers are apt to advertise fake positions to collect resumes so they can cherry-pick later for the real positions.
Lawyers have wrists?
(I'll leave for another discussion my contempt for the vast numbers of programmers who can't draw up a decent specification and whose understanding of QA is limited to spelling the acronym.)