I like to use that example as well. AC's comment about fitness, above, boils down to "a marine needs to be strong; the average man is stronger than the average woman; therefore, this specific woman right here should not be permitted to try to be a marine". And by the same logic, "a fighter pilot needs to be short, to fit in a small cockpit. The average woman is shorter than the average man. Therefore, this specific man right here should not be allowed to try to be a fighter pilot." Now, I'm sure that a lot of people in the military are uncomfortable with LGBT people of various types. I'm sure a gay soldier has it harder than a straight soldier, and being trans is no cakewalk at the best of times. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do the right thing.
I can't help but wonder: what makes an experiment "very unique" as opposed to merely unique? "Unique" already means "one of a kind". How do you get more one-of-a-kind than that?
If Musk doesn't want his employees getting seduced by the Union, he should probably consider bumping the pay of his workers
If only there were some kind of mechanism by which employers and employees (or their representatives) could sit down and hammer out a deal that's fair to all sides.
I get the nostalgia and novelty value of using old media. I even understand liking LPs because at least they had decent-sized art and liner notes. But cassettes? --ing cassettes? I've written about this before, but basically, cassettes combine the worst aspects of LPs and CDs.
Last week, Drake dropped two new singles off his upcoming album Views from the 6. The tracks are currently only available on Apple Music.
It took me a second reading to realize that this didn't mean "Drake removed two tracks from his new album, and the only place where tracks 9 and 10 can still be found is Apple Music."
I don't care for the ~ extension for backup filenames. I grew up with Gosling Emacs, which uses.bak instead. So now my.emacs has
(setq make-backup-file-name-function 'my-make-backup-file-name) (defun my-make-backup-file-name (file)
"Create the non-numeric backup file name for FILE. This is a customized version of this function."
(message "Inside my-make-backup-file-name")
(concat file ".bak"))
I visited a toxic waste dump (Weldon Springs Conservation Area in St. Charles, MO, ICAC) on my last vacation. It houses stuff that'll remain toxic for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. But it was only designed to last 1000 years because, well, there were too many problems that couldn't be foreseen.
But part of the project was to open up a visitor center, to get the word out. Even if civilization collapses, there may remain legends that dude, there's some nasty stuff under that pile of rocks, and you seriously don't want to go digging there.
The gist of it is that the source tells you what the code does, and comments tell you what it's supposed to do, why it looks that way, how it connects to other parts of the program, any weird gotchas, and so forth.
Comments help you zero in on the part of the code you're looking for when you're trying to fix a bug; and they help confirm that the code really does what you think it does.
It's not just a question of understanding what was written; it's also a question of how hard it is to reach that understanding.
Let's say that you're reading a data stream with enough checksums and such to correct any error. In the best case, you read the data, read the checksum, note that they match, and move on. But if there's a mismatch, then you need to do extra work to figure out whether the data or the checksum is corrupt, find the error, and correct it.
Likewise, with natural languages, if the word you've read is in fact the one that the writer intended, with a spelling and meaning that both of you can agree on, then that doesn't raise any flags; you just read, understand, and move on. If, on the other hand, a word is misspelled, you need to go back and try to figure out which word was meant. When the misspelled word is also a valid word, you may read several words past the mistake before realizing that there was an error, which forces you to backtrack to find the mistake (e.g., a sentence that begins with "I know its cold" implies that the sentence is something like "I know its cold embrace very well". If it actually says "I know its cold but I need to go outside anyway", you may get to "I" before noticing that "its" should be "it's").
> Why aren't there any adventure games made anymore?
Right now, it seems that the biggest purveyor of adventure games is Dreamweaver aka The Adventure Company. As I understand it, however, they don't develop their own games: they just market them; the games themselves are of quite variable quality; I've played some decent ones, but there have been quite a few clunkers, too.
I've always had a soft spot for LucasArts games because their games consistently have certain qualities: you can't die, the purpose of the game is to solve puzzles, not to hunt for pixels, there's some quality control in place, they seem to be at the right difficulty level, and so forth.
You know about Myst, of course. Other than that, check out The Longest Journey (and there's a sequel in the works! w00t!). RHEM is minimal, but much better than the graphics might lead you to believe.
if ( $?term && "$shell" =~ *tcsh) then
if ( "$term" =~ xterm* ) alias cwdcmd 'echo -n "^[]2;${HOST} - ${cwd}^G"'
endif
set hostname=`echo $HOSTNAME | sed "s/\..*//"`
set euser=`whoami`
if ( "$euser" == arensb ) then
if ( "$shell" =~ *tcsh ) then
set prompt = "%U[\!]$hostname >%u "
else
set prompt = "[\!]$hostname > "
endif
else
if ( "$shell" =~ *tcsh ) then
set prompt = "%S[\!]$hostname($euser)>%s "
else
set prompt = "[\!]$hostname($euser)> "
endif
endif
-----
No, this isn't flashy. But if I'm su-ed to someone
else, the prompt is in inverse video rather than
underlined.
The hostname and current directory go in the
xterm title bar, rather than cluttering up the
prompt.
If I mentally go back in time to the dawn of
photography, it's obvious that it isn't art:
you don't need to spend years learning paints,
lighting, perspective, etc. You just buy a
camera, click, and get a perfect picture. No
art involved.
So why, a hundred years later, do we think of
photography as art? I think that part of the
answer is that a photographer exercises his art
by choosing from the infinite set of subjects,
angles, camera settings, films, etc.
This, of course, is just an analogy for computer
art. It's obviously not art because once you've
written your Gimp script-fu tool (and programming
isn't a art, right?), you can churn out pictures
by the million, each identical or different, as
desired, but produced by a machine, not a human.
The "Undo" menu entry means that you can try
something over and over again until you get it
right, so you don't even need to learn proper
control.
So how does one fight this mindset? I'd start by
using a pad simply as another kind of brush.
Show how good you are at conventional techniques;
that'll make you more credible when you go beyond.
Next, work on something that highlights your
choices. The critic should say, "This is
computerized, so of course the shading and texture
are flawless, but I'm impressed by his the
choice of subject matter, and the composition."
And if that doesn't work, make a million bucks
selling copies of VelvetElvis.png:-)
What I find interesting about this list of
newsgroups is how short it is. In particular,
it excludes the a.b.amateur.* and a.b.$FETISH
groups.
In fact, these newsgroups all appear to claim
to contain stuff from one particular company
(with the exception of a.b.movies*, which I'm
willing to bet does not consist of struggling
filmmakers posting their own work to make a name
for themselves).
If the "Stolen Sony Stuff Swap-meet" were to
spring up, Sony would be right to take a dim view
of this, and try to shut it down. IMHO this is
the same thing.
If you're going to buy this book, try to get
a newer edition, one that includes the essay
"Whirligig World." In this essay, Clement talks
about the way he writes (summary: come up with a
world; play with it; write it down). Good reading.
And just in passing, Clement has a (annoying?)
habit of throwing in at least one puzzle, and
then not solving it. In _Mission of Gravity_,
IIRC it was
``I can see the building, but I can't see any
people.''
``Of course not. Your eyes are smaller than mine.''
Every time I read an article like this one, with
privacy implications, I'm reminded of David Brin's
"The Transparent Society." In particular, he
suggested passing a law that if a company collects
information about people, then that information
about the top N officers of the company should be
made publicly available. You want to know what
I buy? Fine, tell me what you buy.
Having said this, one cool application for these
tags would be to find my own stuff. It'd be neat
to be able to home in on that misplaced Beatles CD
with a scanner, rather than look all over the
place by hand.
The stuff you recieve in the mail are mostly
legitimate. Its easy to filter out. It only takes
time if you let it
Almost, but not quite, true. One time I gave
someone a stock certificate as a gift. My broker
sent me the certificate in an envelope without
a logo, with only a P.O. box for a return address.
In addition, the envelope said, ``Important. Do
not discard.''
So, of course, I almost tossed it because
I thought it was junk mail.
The person I gave it to later told me
that she had been sorting her mail and almost
threw the envelope out as well, for the same
reasons.
Neither Amazon nor the Authors' Guild are being
Bad Guys here. The AG recognizes that Amazon is
well within its rights to sell used books the
way it does. Amazon is also not doing anything
that used book stores, and many new book stores,
do. Most of the used book stores I frequent have
cheap, nearly-perfect copies of books that came
out scant weeks or months ago.
What Amazon is doing here is making it
very convenient for a person to go
looking for a new book, and buy a used one
instead. Easier than finding a new copy on the
shelf at Borders and checking the used book rack
to see if they have a used copy. Much easier than
finding the book at Barnes & Noble, then
driving over to a used book store to look for it.
In this convenience lies all the difference.
As a reader, I appreciate this convenience.
However, since writers are second only to
recording artists in getting screwed by the big
publishers, I have some sympathy for them as well.
I think the best course of action would be for
Amazon to follow the second suggestion, and move
the blue box to the end of the page, so as to
encourage the sale of new books.
If you leave the company and the product turns to garbage, do you want your name associated with it?
So choose the name that'll go in the credits.
Harlan Ellison has a long history of using the
pseudonym "Cordwainer Bird" when he feels that
a studio has taken his magnificent script and
turned it into dreck, as a way of letting people
know that he wants to dissociate himself from the
project.
If this happened to you, you could have the
company credit you as IDidntWriteThisCrap@sorehands.com
does anyone know how to configure sendmail, so that if the sender domain matches
some RBL (ORBS, etc) "SPAM:" is inserted into the subject line of the header (or some X-SPAM:
header is set).
I looked into this at some length at my previous
job, where we couldn't just drop spam in the
bit-bucket for policy reasons, but wanted to
identify spam so that users could easily filter
it out themselves if they wanted to.
The ideal solution would be something like: H?Spam?X-Spam: ${RBL} ${ORBS} ${DUL}
where the variables ${Spam}, ${RBL}, ${ORBS}, etc.
are set by the standard rulesets. This way, those
messages identified as spam would have an X-Spam:
header providing more details. Normal messages
would be passed unchanged.
Unfortunately, it appears to be impossible to set
a variable from inside a ruleset (please tell me
if I'm wrong), so this doesn't work.
The next best thing would be HX-Spam: $>CheckSpam
which would add an X-Spam: header to every
message, the value of which would be whatever is
returned by the CheckSpam ruleset.
Unfortunately, it looks as if sendmail 8.10.2
doesn't allow you to invoke rules from within
header definition lines. Brett Glass's article
hints otherwise (see Listing 2), but perhaps he's
using a newer version of sendmail than I am.
When dealing with the issue of genetic discrimination, why would it be better to create a large
government beaurocracy for healthcare as opposed to just barring anybody but your personal doctors
from having access to such records?
The problem here isn't privacy. According to the
article, the woman's life was probably saved by
the test. This suggests that making genetic
information widely available can be a Good Thing.
So the problem here is not protecting one's
privacy; the problem is allowing everyone to have
medical treatment should they need it. It is in
an insurance company's interest to have as much
information about a prospective customer as
possible, in order to best estimate how much that
person is likely to cost them.
Now, we as a society have decided that people are
entitled to certain goodies just by virtue of
existing: in the case of an invasion, everyone
is protected by the military. If you lose your
job, even though your own fault, you can collect
unemployment insurance that all of us pay for.
A national health care plan, if properly done,
should be just an extension of this idea: everyone
is entitled to some minimum level of health care,
just by virtue of being alive. This could be
simply an uber-insurance plan, in which everyone
automatically gets some minimum level of coverage
(if you break your leg, the uber-plan pays for
your cast), and everyone pays for it, through
taxes.
This should not, as some have feared, put
existing insurance companies out of business: they
would now be in the business of providing more
and better treatment than the uber-plan covers
(e.g., crutches, pain-killers, etc.). They should
then, of course, charge correspondingly less,
which should balance out the higher taxes.
One important side effect of this system would
be that it would no longer be in the insurer's
interest to turn a person away completely, since
everyone would be minimally covered by the
common plan.
The discrimination issue would then become, "Bob
is likely to get $DISEASE. If I hire Bob, he will
be out sick a lot and cost us productivity." This
used to be an argument against hiring women in
certain positions (s/$DISEASE/pregnancy/), but
people got over it.
We look to private industry for efficiency, and
to the government for fairness. In this case,
we're looking for fairness.
I was always going to be something someday. And eventually, they're going to find out what that is. -- Pat Cadigan, "My Brother's Keeper"
What would a sensible contract look like?
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 1
This is more of a UCITA comment than a EULA
comment, but here's my suggestion for a starting
point for a sensible sale contract (one that
both informed buyers and software vendors would
agree to):
1. Although the user owns the package and its
media, including any copies, user also agrees
that the package includes vendor's intellectual
property (copyrights, trademarks, and patented
algorithms) and shall treat it in accordance with
applicable law.
[Most of this is redundant, but the lawyers will
insist.]
2. User agrees not to allow more people to use
the software at once than was agreed during the
sale.
[IOW: if it's a one-person package, then you can
use it on any machine that you have access to,
but only one at a time. If you've purchased a
15-user license, then only 15 people can use the
package at once.]
3. Vendor warrants that, when used properly
(such-and-such OSes, such-and-such drivers, etc.),
the package performs substantially in accordance
with its associated documentation (including
manuals and advertising materials), except for
certain defects known at the time of purchase,
which are listed at <URL>.
4. Vendor agrees to make patches for serious
bugs available to user for the price of media
and shipping, and agrees to notify registered
users in a timely manner when serious bugs get
patched. User agrees to notify vendor in a timely
manner of any new bugs discovered by the user.
5. User and vendor are expected to exercise
proper judgment.
[IOW: you are not allowed to be a freakin' moron.
If a financial package destroys your server, you
can sue for the cost of the server and downtime.
But if it suggests that you shouldn't pay your
employees this month, and you believe it, and
your company goes under, then you deserve what
you get. OTOH, the vendor should recognize that
people aren't going to double-check everything
the package says, especially if it looks
sensible.]
Slashdot Mirror
I like to use that example as well. AC's comment about fitness, above, boils down to "a marine needs to be strong; the average man is stronger than the average woman; therefore, this specific woman right here should not be permitted to try to be a marine".
And by the same logic, "a fighter pilot needs to be short, to fit in a small cockpit. The average woman is shorter than the average man. Therefore, this specific man right here should not be allowed to try to be a fighter pilot."
Now, I'm sure that a lot of people in the military are uncomfortable with LGBT people of various types. I'm sure a gay soldier has it harder than a straight soldier, and being trans is no cakewalk at the best of times. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do the right thing.
GLENDOWER
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
-- William Shakespeare, "Henry IV, part 1", Act 3, scene 1.
I can't help but wonder: what makes an experiment "very unique" as opposed to merely unique? "Unique" already means "one of a kind". How do you get more one-of-a-kind than that?
If they want to become unionized implies that they're currently ionized. That can't be healthy.
If Musk doesn't want his employees getting seduced by the Union, he should probably consider bumping the pay of his workers
If only there were some kind of mechanism by which employers and employees (or their representatives) could sit down and hammer out a deal that's fair to all sides.
I get the nostalgia and novelty value of using old media. I even understand liking LPs because at least they had decent-sized art and liner notes. But cassettes? --ing cassettes?
I've written about this before, but basically, cassettes combine the worst aspects of LPs and CDs.
It took me a second reading to realize that this didn't mean "Drake removed two tracks from his new album, and the only place where tracks 9 and 10 can still be found is Apple Music."
Gotta give a shout out to Ed Yong, who writes Not Exactly Rocket Science. He has a knack for summarizing research papers and show why they're cool.
Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy is also good at sharing his enthusiasm for astronomy. And the Astronomy Picture of the Day has pretty pictures.
I don't care for the ~ extension for backup filenames. I grew up with Gosling Emacs, which uses .bak instead. So now my .emacs has
How to prevent long lines from wrapping: (setq truncate-lines t)
How to make Emacs do things when it starts: (add-to-list 'command-line-functions 'my-startup-stuff)
How to input a character for which you have the Unicode hex value: use the ucs input method.
I visited a toxic waste dump (Weldon Springs Conservation Area in St. Charles, MO, ICAC) on my last vacation. It houses stuff that'll remain toxic for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. But it was only designed to last 1000 years because, well, there were too many problems that couldn't be foreseen.
But part of the project was to open up a visitor center, to get the word out. Even if civilization collapses, there may remain legends that dude, there's some nasty stuff under that pile of rocks, and you seriously don't want to go digging there.
I wrote what I thought was a pretty decent article on comments a while back:
http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/238/
The gist of it is that the source tells you what the code does, and comments tell you what it's supposed to do, why it looks that way, how it connects to other parts of the program, any weird gotchas, and so forth.
Comments help you zero in on the part of the code you're looking for when you're trying to fix a bug; and they help confirm that the code really does what you think it does.
It's not just a question of understanding what was written; it's also a question of how hard it is to reach that understanding.
Let's say that you're reading a data stream with enough checksums and such to correct any error. In the best case, you read the data, read the checksum, note that they match, and move on. But if there's a mismatch, then you need to do extra work to figure out whether the data or the checksum is corrupt, find the error, and correct it.
Likewise, with natural languages, if the word you've read is in fact the one that the writer intended, with a spelling and meaning that both of you can agree on, then that doesn't raise any flags; you just read, understand, and move on. If, on the other hand, a word is misspelled, you need to go back and try to figure out which word was meant. When the misspelled word is also a valid word, you may read several words past the mistake before realizing that there was an error, which forces you to backtrack to find the mistake (e.g., a sentence that begins with "I know its cold" implies that the sentence is something like "I know its cold embrace very well". If it actually says "I know its cold but I need to go outside anyway", you may get to "I" before noticing that "its" should be "it's").
> Why aren't there any adventure games made anymore?
Right now, it seems that the biggest purveyor of
adventure games is Dreamweaver aka The Adventure
Company. As I understand it, however, they don't
develop their own games: they just market them; the
games themselves are of quite variable quality;
I've played some decent ones, but there have been
quite a few clunkers, too.
I've always had a soft spot for LucasArts games
because their games consistently have certain
qualities: you can't die, the purpose of the game
is to solve puzzles, not to hunt for pixels,
there's some quality control in place, they seem
to be at the right difficulty level, and so forth.
You know about Myst, of course. Other than that,
check out The Longest Journey (and there's a
sequel in the works! w00t!). RHEM is minimal, but
much better than the graphics might lead you to
believe.
if ( $?term && "$shell" =~ *tcsh) then
if ( "$term" =~ xterm* ) alias cwdcmd 'echo -n "^[]2;${HOST} - ${cwd}^G"'
endif
set hostname=`echo $HOSTNAME | sed "s/\..*//"`
set euser=`whoami`
if ( "$euser" == arensb ) then
if ( "$shell" =~ *tcsh ) then
set prompt = "%U[\!]$hostname >%u "
else
set prompt = "[\!]$hostname > "
endif
else
if ( "$shell" =~ *tcsh ) then
set prompt = "%S[\!]$hostname($euser)>%s "
else
set prompt = "[\!]$hostname($euser)> "
endif
endif
-----
No, this isn't flashy. But if I'm su-ed to someone
else, the prompt is in inverse video rather than
underlined.
The hostname and current directory go in the
xterm title bar, rather than cluttering up the
prompt.
If I mentally go back in time to the dawn of
:-)
photography, it's obvious that it isn't art:
you don't need to spend years learning paints,
lighting, perspective, etc. You just buy a
camera, click, and get a perfect picture. No
art involved.
So why, a hundred years later, do we think of
photography as art? I think that part of the
answer is that a photographer exercises his art
by choosing from the infinite set of subjects,
angles, camera settings, films, etc.
This, of course, is just an analogy for computer
art. It's obviously not art because once you've
written your Gimp script-fu tool (and programming
isn't a art, right?), you can churn out pictures
by the million, each identical or different, as
desired, but produced by a machine, not a human.
The "Undo" menu entry means that you can try
something over and over again until you get it
right, so you don't even need to learn proper
control.
So how does one fight this mindset? I'd start by
using a pad simply as another kind of brush.
Show how good you are at conventional techniques;
that'll make you more credible when you go beyond.
Next, work on something that highlights your
choices. The critic should say, "This is
computerized, so of course the shading and texture
are flawless, but I'm impressed by his the
choice of subject matter, and the composition."
And if that doesn't work, make a million bucks
selling copies of VelvetElvis.png
In fact, these newsgroups all appear to claim to contain stuff from one particular company (with the exception of a.b.movies*, which I'm willing to bet does not consist of struggling filmmakers posting their own work to make a name for themselves).
If the "Stolen Sony Stuff Swap-meet" were to spring up, Sony would be right to take a dim view of this, and try to shut it down. IMHO this is the same thing.
If you're going to buy this book, try to get
a newer edition, one that includes the essay
"Whirligig World." In this essay, Clement talks
about the way he writes (summary: come up with a
world; play with it; write it down). Good reading.
And just in passing, Clement has a (annoying?)
habit of throwing in at least one puzzle, and
then not solving it. In _Mission of Gravity_,
IIRC it was
``I can see the building, but I can't see any
people.''
``Of course not. Your eyes are smaller than mine.''
Every time I read an article like this one, with
privacy implications, I'm reminded of David Brin's
"The Transparent Society." In particular, he
suggested passing a law that if a company collects
information about people, then that information
about the top N officers of the company should be
made publicly available. You want to know what
I buy? Fine, tell me what you buy.
Having said this, one cool application for these
tags would be to find my own stuff. It'd be neat
to be able to home in on that misplaced Beatles CD
with a scanner, rather than look all over the
place by hand.
Almost, but not quite, true. One time I gave someone a stock certificate as a gift. My broker sent me the certificate in an envelope without a logo, with only a P.O. box for a return address. In addition, the envelope said, ``Important. Do not discard.''
So, of course, I almost tossed it because I thought it was junk mail.
The person I gave it to later told me that she had been sorting her mail and almost threw the envelope out as well, for the same reasons.
What Amazon is doing here is making it very convenient for a person to go looking for a new book, and buy a used one instead. Easier than finding a new copy on the shelf at Borders and checking the used book rack to see if they have a used copy. Much easier than finding the book at Barnes & Noble, then driving over to a used book store to look for it. In this convenience lies all the difference.
As a reader, I appreciate this convenience. However, since writers are second only to recording artists in getting screwed by the big publishers, I have some sympathy for them as well. I think the best course of action would be for Amazon to follow the second suggestion, and move the blue box to the end of the page, so as to encourage the sale of new books.
So choose the name that'll go in the credits.
Harlan Ellison has a long history of using the pseudonym "Cordwainer Bird" when he feels that a studio has taken his magnificent script and turned it into dreck, as a way of letting people know that he wants to dissociate himself from the project.
If this happened to you, you could have the company credit you as IDidntWriteThisCrap@sorehands.com
I looked into this at some length at my previous job, where we couldn't just drop spam in the bit-bucket for policy reasons, but wanted to identify spam so that users could easily filter it out themselves if they wanted to.
The ideal solution would be something like:
H?Spam?X-Spam: ${RBL} ${ORBS} ${DUL}
where the variables ${Spam}, ${RBL}, ${ORBS}, etc. are set by the standard rulesets. This way, those messages identified as spam would have an X-Spam: header providing more details. Normal messages would be passed unchanged.
Unfortunately, it appears to be impossible to set a variable from inside a ruleset (please tell me if I'm wrong), so this doesn't work.
The next best thing would be
HX-Spam: $>CheckSpam
which would add an X-Spam: header to every message, the value of which would be whatever is returned by the CheckSpam ruleset. Unfortunately, it looks as if sendmail 8.10.2 doesn't allow you to invoke rules from within header definition lines. Brett Glass's article hints otherwise (see Listing 2), but perhaps he's using a newer version of sendmail than I am.
The problem here isn't privacy. According to the article, the woman's life was probably saved by the test. This suggests that making genetic information widely available can be a Good Thing.
So the problem here is not protecting one's privacy; the problem is allowing everyone to have medical treatment should they need it. It is in an insurance company's interest to have as much information about a prospective customer as possible, in order to best estimate how much that person is likely to cost them.
Now, we as a society have decided that people are entitled to certain goodies just by virtue of existing: in the case of an invasion, everyone is protected by the military. If you lose your job, even though your own fault, you can collect unemployment insurance that all of us pay for.
A national health care plan, if properly done, should be just an extension of this idea: everyone is entitled to some minimum level of health care, just by virtue of being alive. This could be simply an uber-insurance plan, in which everyone automatically gets some minimum level of coverage (if you break your leg, the uber-plan pays for your cast), and everyone pays for it, through taxes.
This should not, as some have feared, put existing insurance companies out of business: they would now be in the business of providing more and better treatment than the uber-plan covers (e.g., crutches, pain-killers, etc.). They should then, of course, charge correspondingly less, which should balance out the higher taxes.
One important side effect of this system would be that it would no longer be in the insurer's interest to turn a person away completely, since everyone would be minimally covered by the common plan.
The discrimination issue would then become, "Bob is likely to get $DISEASE. If I hire Bob, he will be out sick a lot and cost us productivity." This used to be an argument against hiring women in certain positions (s/$DISEASE/pregnancy/), but people got over it.
We look to private industry for efficiency, and to the government for fairness. In this case, we're looking for fairness.
I was always going to be something someday. And eventually, they're going to find out what that is.
-- Pat Cadigan, "My Brother's Keeper"
This is more of a UCITA comment than a EULA
comment, but here's my suggestion for a starting
point for a sensible sale contract (one that
both informed buyers and software vendors would
agree to):
1. Although the user owns the package and its
media, including any copies, user also agrees
that the package includes vendor's intellectual
property (copyrights, trademarks, and patented
algorithms) and shall treat it in accordance with
applicable law.
[Most of this is redundant, but the lawyers will
insist.]
2. User agrees not to allow more people to use
the software at once than was agreed during the
sale.
[IOW: if it's a one-person package, then you can
use it on any machine that you have access to,
but only one at a time. If you've purchased a
15-user license, then only 15 people can use the
package at once.]
3. Vendor warrants that, when used properly
(such-and-such OSes, such-and-such drivers, etc.),
the package performs substantially in accordance
with its associated documentation (including
manuals and advertising materials), except for
certain defects known at the time of purchase,
which are listed at <URL>.
4. Vendor agrees to make patches for serious
bugs available to user for the price of media
and shipping, and agrees to notify registered
users in a timely manner when serious bugs get
patched. User agrees to notify vendor in a timely
manner of any new bugs discovered by the user.
5. User and vendor are expected to exercise
proper judgment.
[IOW: you are not allowed to be a freakin' moron.
If a financial package destroys your server, you
can sue for the cost of the server and downtime.
But if it suggests that you shouldn't pay your
employees this month, and you believe it, and
your company goes under, then you deserve what
you get. OTOH, the vendor should recognize that
people aren't going to double-check everything
the package says, especially if it looks
sensible.]
6. There is no clause #6.