Enforcing that kind of license legally sounds expensive and well beyond the budget of a startup. I'd say keep it closed until the company either takes off and is secure, or crashes and burns and it doesn't matter if it's closed anymore.
Does ninite prevent developer included crapware? Specifically looking at uTorrent here which is notorius for giving you check boxes concerning crapware and then installing it anyway regardless of what you checked.
I also used to really like the site many years ago. It was the only segment of Cnet that was worth going to. Ironically it seems that Cnet's technology news has gotten marginally better. Although that's probably more a function of their losing one of the two dumbest technology writers on the internet (Brian X. Chen). Wired's news took a similar hit for hiring him and has also improved since losing him.
+1 I made the mistake of getting a G-tablet on sale from woot. Even at that discount on an already budget price, it wasn't even close to worth it. The screen is complete trash. Viewsonic used to make top notch LCD monitors. I don't know what hack shop they contracted this panel out to but it's absolutely terrible. I prefer reading on my tiny HTC Incredible screen than the much larger G-Tablet it's so bad.
Sometimes people post in their own question about how they are capable of rooting a tablet themselves but don't want to waste the time while being perfectly happy to waste their time (much more than would be needed to actually root an android device) and the time of others with this silly question. He could have rooted a tablet 10 times over in the amount of time it will take him to get a useful response from this thread. I think that makes him an idiot.
That was true for maybe a total of 2 years around 2003-ish. Mostly it's overblown. I've been playing PC games since the early 90s and I've never had hardware go totally out of date in less than 3 years. A few highly visible outliers in PC gaming targeted hardware well beyond what was even currently available (Oblivion, Crysis), but PC hardware holds up a lot longer than people assume. And it's gotten much better than that in the past few years. GPUs are cheaper than they've ever been and more powerful than most devs currently know what to do with. PC gaming isn't nearly as expensive of a hobby as it used to be. Considering you can get a very good graphics card for around $150 to $200 and that PC games tend to be cheaper (usually $10 less at release and discounted much sooner than console games after that) I'm not even sure that console gaming isn't more expensive in total now a days (buy a couple $50 dualshock 3's and a couple $60 Move controllers and check what's more expensive after that).
The models predict trends. And the trends have been extremely accurate for the past 20 years. If you think that 2008 being cooler than model predictions disqualifies the model than you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. A single data point doesn't constitute a trend. Particularly since we are now years past 2008 and can see that predicted temperature trends have continued. Look at the data because "what you heard" was wrong.
US student loans work pretty much nothing like this. There are federally subsidized loans which require no payments AND accumulate no interest until after you graduate, but there is a yearly limit (a small limit compared to the cost of professional schools) to how much of that you can take. Other forms of student loans have higher limits, but they start accumulating interest when you take them, not when you graduate. Although you still don't owe any payments until after you graduate. They aren't automatically payroll deducted. You do owe them payments regardless of your employment situation. There are some special rules regarding default. Like I'm pretty sure that if you declare bankruptcy, most of your assets are distributed to outstanding debts by the judge, but federal student loans are automatically wiped and don't enter the same default process as all other loans.
You assert that the climate is driven by too many variables to accurately model. Based on what? What scientific reason do you have to think that the number of variables currently considered is inadequate? How many more would be adequate? You have started with an unsupported assertion that the climate is too complicated to model. But you have given no scientifically grounded reason why this is true. It sounds like you just decided it for yourself and have dismissed any attempt to model the climate out of hand ever since. Calling it "the nature of an experiment the size of the earth" is a cop out. You'll have to make a better scientific argument than that.
You also imply that a model which proves accurate on current data won't be in the future without any scientific justification for why the laws of nature which govern our climate will change in the future. Explain HOW you can have a model which accurately explains temperature from current data but is "useless" 20 years from now. You think that our current model includes multiple erroneous variables which just happen to cancel each other out perfectly over the entire span of current data? You think all the trees on the planet are going to start growing white leaves and our albedo based predictions will all be wrong? You seem to understand how climate modeling works, but have these irrational hand wavey assertions that don't make any sense clogging up your judgement. Predictions based on models from many years ago HAVE tracked with new data (20 years worth of it even) and the models have improved since then.
Nobody's cheating on the science. The models HAVE shown predictive power. But you aren't satisfied because it "doesn't feel right to you". You'll have to excuse me if I think our public policy deserves a more rational basis than that.
Actually, the burden of proof is on you, man. 97% of climate scientists agree with me. I'd say you are the one who needs to define what you mean by models not agreeing with each other and show some data to back it up. But I'll throw you a bone.
Now this has turned into the same discussion about physical models that I'm having with someone else below. What you are talking about as if it's bad science is good science. It's how all science works. The "model" isn't some curve fitting equation. It's a large number of calculations based on relevant elements of well understood physics as applied to the climate. A model is always going to involve less physics than the real thing (or what's the point) so we might model a car based on distribution of mass and velocity, acceleration etc. but completely leave out the quantum waveform distribution of electrons in the metal of the steel because it's irrelevant to what we want to know about how a car behaves. So by refining a climate model, you are making better assumptions about what elements of known physics are and are not relevant to the macro behavior of the climate. The point that everybody misses is that getting a good model fit to OLD data is perfectly valid. The model is a compilation of known science calculations. If that model fits reality (even past reality) than that model is making appropriate assumptions about what parts of known science influence the phenomena under consideration and which don't. People act like changing the model after the fact is cheating. This idea is based on board games, not science. This is how science is always done. Maxwell didn't pull those equations out of his ass and then run some experiments to see if they worked. They were based on empirical data. Getting more data that requires you to adjust the equation to make it a better description of nature isn't cheating, it's science. Everybody gets hung up on the predictions. The models don't NEED to predict anything to be assessed for accuracy. Building a model specifically to fit previous data is exactly how science has always worked. "The model" is the important part. That's where the science is. "The predictions" aren't where the science is. Every time new data suggests an adjustment of the model to make it fit that data better, that means the model is getting better and our understanding of the physical phenomena driving the climate is improved. Climate science isn't a casino game where we all bet on the outcomes. Like ALL science it's an iterative process where currently known data informs our understanding of a phenomena and new data refines that understanding and when our understanding is no longer being refined by new data we may decide that we are confident to make predictions. The predictions aren't the goal of the science, they are a happy by-product which makes the scientific understanding more useful in practical terms, not necessarily better understood in the first place.
Sure you could just plug in a curve fit to old data and say that "it fits perfectly! Job well done!" And climate change deniers claim that this is how it works. But a curve fit is NOT a model. A model starts from first principles in science. Climate scientists don't start with a curve fit, they start with the Stefan-Boltzmann Law and the ideal gas equation and many other proven scientific principles about heat, radiation, gases, etc. Compiling them into something that matches past data is not gaming the system. It's the entire point of the model.
"The earth is an amalgamation of reactions that do not follow anything even close to this level of controlled predictability. There are so many covariates, unknown inputs, unknown reactions, etc that it is impossible to model it given current technology. Climate models are currently little more than a guess. They are cool in the sense that they are exploring predictive models and that is fine, that is interesting science that may help with predictions on a smaller scale. But to think that climate models are hard science that are providing valid and reliable answers to what will happen in the future--that is wrong. And it isn't anti-science to point out the limits of what models can do."
This is a common misconception. The current models of climate (something which you say is unmodelable) have been quite accurate. If you can't make a climate model that fits real data, then how come we have been doing exactly that? You are buying the common cable news non-science that all sides are equally valid and everything is a matter of opinion. The models have demonstrated excellent accuracy. People love to pretend that the models don't actually work (they do), or that the solutions are such large scale that we need to study them first (the amount of ongoing study on this very topic that is summarily dismissed by the "we don't understand enough about it" people is astonishing), or that we as humans couldn't possibly enact a solution of this scale despite the fact that we have been perfectly capable of creating a problem of this scale. It's all blogger masturbation designed to make people who never studied science feel like they are better informed than experts on the topic. Vaccines cause autism, and flouride in the water does too.
" Science is independent of time - past, present or future. A scientific hypothesis is valid here on Earth or on Mars or under the sea, 1000 years ago or 10000 years in the future."
Now do you see why I called you an idiot? If science is independent of time and valid everywhere, then why do I need new data before assessing any kind of confidence in a model of physical phenomena? If the climate physics at play over the past 40 years are the same as those at play over the next 40, then why can a model only be accurate if it matches future reality and not past reality? You are just digging yourself in deeper here. I boldly claimed that you have no idea what you are talking about, and you continue to reinforce that with your posts.
Physical modeling doesn't need to predict. It needs to replicate behavior. The predictive power is bonus. The replication of reality is the science. If your model is built on physical principles and matches old climate data, than you can assert that you understand which physical phenomena drive the behavior of climate. You can obviously assert this with more confidence when you have more data and show a closer match to that data from the model. Suggesting that we can't possibly know if a model is any good until after we get new data is foolish. You model based on physics not based on fitting curves to old data in Excel. You are introducing criteria that are irrelevant. "Why doesn't this model of a car's behavior include predicting when it will start to rust?" I seriously doubt that you have any credentials in science because you show a stunning ignorance about how the modeling of physical phenomena works. ALL modeling of physical phenomena, not just climate, is done exactly this way.
Predicting the future climate? You mean what climate models have been doing reliably for 10 years? And you are absolutely wrong about how modeling works. I can certainly take a data set and make a "model" that just reprints the data set and say that it's a "perfect match!" But that's not a scientific model. If you model the underlying physical principles and it matches real data, then your model gains traction for being accurate. It doesn't actually matter if the data is old or new. If you make a model based on physics that matches old climate data perfectly, you have done science. You sound like somebody who has never actually done any science or made a computational model of anything. I'm calling you an idiot because you literally have no idea how scientific modeling works. Not even a little bit. You are so ignorant of it, that you don't even have a concept of what you don't know about it. It's Dunning-Kruger in action.
WRONG! Why do climate skeptics try to pretend that we haven't been modeling the climate for over FORTY YEARS? Sure the early models weren't very good. They've been getting better progressively since then. They line up with reality. You sound like a fool. If the model is the hypothesis and the model lines up with reality than the hypothesis is.... wrong, uncertain, unclear, anything but correct. It can't possibly be correct because a blog I read had graphs on it! Take your head out of your ass and try learning the slightest bit about how science actually works before you make such stupid assertions.
There needs to be an option to mod a post -1 "Doesn't understand how science works".
And just in case you are still confused, I'm talking about ALL science. The way modeling is handled in climate science is exactly the same way it's handled in all other sciences. Feel free to claim that the modern scientific method doesn't work. But you'll sound even more like an idiot than you already do.
As I sit in my electrically lit office, using my table top computation device, drinking water delivered from the ground after being treated with sanitizing chemicals to make it safe to drink, sitting in a chair composed of materials derived from multi-step chemical synthesis and processing, reading your electronically delivered tripe sent from hundreds of miles or more away, I can see how the misconception that science works could be so common. Thanks for informing me.
I haven't read any of the Xanth series. But as for Hyperion, I would have been less disappointed if it was ONLY a stupid plot line. But that's the biggest problem. The quality of the writing dropped down to the level of bad fan fiction. Like lists of names of people who aren't the slightest bit relevant to the story other than that Simmons likes to bring them up as background (I guess to show off how clever he is at making up futuristic Chinese sounding names?). And the pages of dull geography lessons which wouldn't have been interesting even if the worlds he was talking about weren't straight-up, whole-cloth reconstructions of stereotypical human civilizations and locations. A mountainous Chinese/Buddhist planet, an icy Eskimo planet, and so on. Anybody who hasn't read the books should read the first two and then just skim the wikipedia summary of the last two. Just enough skimming to convince you that they really aren't worth reading and that you are better off making up your own ending to the books.
Uhg, Hyperion. There never was a more disappointing series of books/movies/TV shows/etc. The first two books were brilliant, some of the best fiction I've read. The 2nd two books were complete trash. Stupid, overblown, poorly written, pretentious masturbation. It's like Simmons had a stroke after writing the first two and decided to finish the series despite being newly mentally handicapped.
This entire thread is full of idiotic tripe. Why does nobody here actually understand how product liability works?! Liability is proportional to 1. the DAMAGES and 2. to the degree of negligence shown by the producer as determined by the courts. Hobbyist programmers don't need to worry about liability because their programs aren't likely to cause any real damages no matter how badly they fail. No court would assign penalties to a hobbyist because their freely distributed DVD ripping software didn't work properly. Good faith mistakes that cause no significant damages are not the target of product liability cases. Mission critical software that can cause real damage, like loss of life or loss of a million customer CC numbers, absolutely should be treated like other engineering products that can cause such damages. Then there's the group of whiners talking endlessly about how software can't be 100% bug free. Who said anything about that? Cars, planes, and bridges can't be bug free either! Liability is proportional to damages. Commercial software doesn't need to be "bug free". If the producer is liable for damages, then they have incentive to make sure that their mostly but not completely bug free software is at least not going to cause damages, even if it isn't 100%. And as I already said, courts have always been lenient on good faith mistakes and unforeseeable circumstances. Negligence is the key word in any product liability legislation, and it completely changes the nature of the law in a way which most people posting here just don't seem to get.
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Enforcing that kind of license legally sounds expensive and well beyond the budget of a startup. I'd say keep it closed until the company either takes off and is secure, or crashes and burns and it doesn't matter if it's closed anymore.
Why is there no mod parent -1 "did not even pretend to read the question"?
Does ninite prevent developer included crapware? Specifically looking at uTorrent here which is notorius for giving you check boxes concerning crapware and then installing it anyway regardless of what you checked.
I also used to really like the site many years ago. It was the only segment of Cnet that was worth going to. Ironically it seems that Cnet's technology news has gotten marginally better. Although that's probably more a function of their losing one of the two dumbest technology writers on the internet (Brian X. Chen). Wired's news took a similar hit for hiring him and has also improved since losing him.
+1 I made the mistake of getting a G-tablet on sale from woot. Even at that discount on an already budget price, it wasn't even close to worth it. The screen is complete trash. Viewsonic used to make top notch LCD monitors. I don't know what hack shop they contracted this panel out to but it's absolutely terrible. I prefer reading on my tiny HTC Incredible screen than the much larger G-Tablet it's so bad.
Sometimes people post in their own question about how they are capable of rooting a tablet themselves but don't want to waste the time while being perfectly happy to waste their time (much more than would be needed to actually root an android device) and the time of others with this silly question. He could have rooted a tablet 10 times over in the amount of time it will take him to get a useful response from this thread. I think that makes him an idiot.
That was true for maybe a total of 2 years around 2003-ish. Mostly it's overblown. I've been playing PC games since the early 90s and I've never had hardware go totally out of date in less than 3 years. A few highly visible outliers in PC gaming targeted hardware well beyond what was even currently available (Oblivion, Crysis), but PC hardware holds up a lot longer than people assume. And it's gotten much better than that in the past few years. GPUs are cheaper than they've ever been and more powerful than most devs currently know what to do with. PC gaming isn't nearly as expensive of a hobby as it used to be. Considering you can get a very good graphics card for around $150 to $200 and that PC games tend to be cheaper (usually $10 less at release and discounted much sooner than console games after that) I'm not even sure that console gaming isn't more expensive in total now a days (buy a couple $50 dualshock 3's and a couple $60 Move controllers and check what's more expensive after that).
The models predict trends. And the trends have been extremely accurate for the past 20 years. If you think that 2008 being cooler than model predictions disqualifies the model than you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. A single data point doesn't constitute a trend. Particularly since we are now years past 2008 and can see that predicted temperature trends have continued. Look at the data because "what you heard" was wrong.
US student loans work pretty much nothing like this. There are federally subsidized loans which require no payments AND accumulate no interest until after you graduate, but there is a yearly limit (a small limit compared to the cost of professional schools) to how much of that you can take. Other forms of student loans have higher limits, but they start accumulating interest when you take them, not when you graduate. Although you still don't owe any payments until after you graduate. They aren't automatically payroll deducted. You do owe them payments regardless of your employment situation. There are some special rules regarding default. Like I'm pretty sure that if you declare bankruptcy, most of your assets are distributed to outstanding debts by the judge, but federal student loans are automatically wiped and don't enter the same default process as all other loans.
You assert that the climate is driven by too many variables to accurately model. Based on what? What scientific reason do you have to think that the number of variables currently considered is inadequate? How many more would be adequate? You have started with an unsupported assertion that the climate is too complicated to model. But you have given no scientifically grounded reason why this is true. It sounds like you just decided it for yourself and have dismissed any attempt to model the climate out of hand ever since. Calling it "the nature of an experiment the size of the earth" is a cop out. You'll have to make a better scientific argument than that.
You also imply that a model which proves accurate on current data won't be in the future without any scientific justification for why the laws of nature which govern our climate will change in the future. Explain HOW you can have a model which accurately explains temperature from current data but is "useless" 20 years from now. You think that our current model includes multiple erroneous variables which just happen to cancel each other out perfectly over the entire span of current data? You think all the trees on the planet are going to start growing white leaves and our albedo based predictions will all be wrong? You seem to understand how climate modeling works, but have these irrational hand wavey assertions that don't make any sense clogging up your judgement. Predictions based on models from many years ago HAVE tracked with new data (20 years worth of it even) and the models have improved since then.
Nobody's cheating on the science. The models HAVE shown predictive power. But you aren't satisfied because it "doesn't feel right to you". You'll have to excuse me if I think our public policy deserves a more rational basis than that.
Actually, the burden of proof is on you, man. 97% of climate scientists agree with me. I'd say you are the one who needs to define what you mean by models not agreeing with each other and show some data to back it up. But I'll throw you a bone.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/comparing-global-temperature-predictions.html
Now this has turned into the same discussion about physical models that I'm having with someone else below. What you are talking about as if it's bad science is good science. It's how all science works. The "model" isn't some curve fitting equation. It's a large number of calculations based on relevant elements of well understood physics as applied to the climate. A model is always going to involve less physics than the real thing (or what's the point) so we might model a car based on distribution of mass and velocity, acceleration etc. but completely leave out the quantum waveform distribution of electrons in the metal of the steel because it's irrelevant to what we want to know about how a car behaves. So by refining a climate model, you are making better assumptions about what elements of known physics are and are not relevant to the macro behavior of the climate. The point that everybody misses is that getting a good model fit to OLD data is perfectly valid. The model is a compilation of known science calculations. If that model fits reality (even past reality) than that model is making appropriate assumptions about what parts of known science influence the phenomena under consideration and which don't. People act like changing the model after the fact is cheating. This idea is based on board games, not science. This is how science is always done. Maxwell didn't pull those equations out of his ass and then run some experiments to see if they worked. They were based on empirical data. Getting more data that requires you to adjust the equation to make it a better description of nature isn't cheating, it's science. Everybody gets hung up on the predictions. The models don't NEED to predict anything to be assessed for accuracy. Building a model specifically to fit previous data is exactly how science has always worked. "The model" is the important part. That's where the science is. "The predictions" aren't where the science is. Every time new data suggests an adjustment of the model to make it fit that data better, that means the model is getting better and our understanding of the physical phenomena driving the climate is improved. Climate science isn't a casino game where we all bet on the outcomes. Like ALL science it's an iterative process where currently known data informs our understanding of a phenomena and new data refines that understanding and when our understanding is no longer being refined by new data we may decide that we are confident to make predictions. The predictions aren't the goal of the science, they are a happy by-product which makes the scientific understanding more useful in practical terms, not necessarily better understood in the first place.
Sure you could just plug in a curve fit to old data and say that "it fits perfectly! Job well done!" And climate change deniers claim that this is how it works. But a curve fit is NOT a model. A model starts from first principles in science. Climate scientists don't start with a curve fit, they start with the Stefan-Boltzmann Law and the ideal gas equation and many other proven scientific principles about heat, radiation, gases, etc. Compiling them into something that matches past data is not gaming the system. It's the entire point of the model.
"The earth is an amalgamation of reactions that do not follow anything even close to this level of controlled predictability. There are so many covariates, unknown inputs, unknown reactions, etc that it is impossible to model it given current technology. Climate models are currently little more than a guess. They are cool in the sense that they are exploring predictive models and that is fine, that is interesting science that may help with predictions on a smaller scale. But to think that climate models are hard science that are providing valid and reliable answers to what will happen in the future--that is wrong. And it isn't anti-science to point out the limits of what models can do."
This is a common misconception. The current models of climate (something which you say is unmodelable) have been quite accurate. If you can't make a climate model that fits real data, then how come we have been doing exactly that? You are buying the common cable news non-science that all sides are equally valid and everything is a matter of opinion. The models have demonstrated excellent accuracy. People love to pretend that the models don't actually work (they do), or that the solutions are such large scale that we need to study them first (the amount of ongoing study on this very topic that is summarily dismissed by the "we don't understand enough about it" people is astonishing), or that we as humans couldn't possibly enact a solution of this scale despite the fact that we have been perfectly capable of creating a problem of this scale. It's all blogger masturbation designed to make people who never studied science feel like they are better informed than experts on the topic. Vaccines cause autism, and flouride in the water does too.
Way to totally miss the point. Nice one.
This is FUD. The models mostly agree with each other. You are simply misinformed.
" Science is independent of time - past, present or future. A scientific hypothesis is valid here on Earth or on Mars or under the sea, 1000 years ago or 10000 years in the future."
Now do you see why I called you an idiot? If science is independent of time and valid everywhere, then why do I need new data before assessing any kind of confidence in a model of physical phenomena? If the climate physics at play over the past 40 years are the same as those at play over the next 40, then why can a model only be accurate if it matches future reality and not past reality? You are just digging yourself in deeper here. I boldly claimed that you have no idea what you are talking about, and you continue to reinforce that with your posts.
Physical modeling doesn't need to predict. It needs to replicate behavior. The predictive power is bonus. The replication of reality is the science. If your model is built on physical principles and matches old climate data, than you can assert that you understand which physical phenomena drive the behavior of climate. You can obviously assert this with more confidence when you have more data and show a closer match to that data from the model. Suggesting that we can't possibly know if a model is any good until after we get new data is foolish. You model based on physics not based on fitting curves to old data in Excel. You are introducing criteria that are irrelevant. "Why doesn't this model of a car's behavior include predicting when it will start to rust?" I seriously doubt that you have any credentials in science because you show a stunning ignorance about how the modeling of physical phenomena works. ALL modeling of physical phenomena, not just climate, is done exactly this way.
Predicting the future climate? You mean what climate models have been doing reliably for 10 years? And you are absolutely wrong about how modeling works. I can certainly take a data set and make a "model" that just reprints the data set and say that it's a "perfect match!" But that's not a scientific model. If you model the underlying physical principles and it matches real data, then your model gains traction for being accurate. It doesn't actually matter if the data is old or new. If you make a model based on physics that matches old climate data perfectly, you have done science. You sound like somebody who has never actually done any science or made a computational model of anything. I'm calling you an idiot because you literally have no idea how scientific modeling works. Not even a little bit. You are so ignorant of it, that you don't even have a concept of what you don't know about it. It's Dunning-Kruger in action.
WRONG! Why do climate skeptics try to pretend that we haven't been modeling the climate for over FORTY YEARS? Sure the early models weren't very good. They've been getting better progressively since then. They line up with reality. You sound like a fool. If the model is the hypothesis and the model lines up with reality than the hypothesis is.... wrong, uncertain, unclear, anything but correct. It can't possibly be correct because a blog I read had graphs on it! Take your head out of your ass and try learning the slightest bit about how science actually works before you make such stupid assertions.
There needs to be an option to mod a post -1 "Doesn't understand how science works".
And just in case you are still confused, I'm talking about ALL science. The way modeling is handled in climate science is exactly the same way it's handled in all other sciences. Feel free to claim that the modern scientific method doesn't work. But you'll sound even more like an idiot than you already do.
As I sit in my electrically lit office, using my table top computation device, drinking water delivered from the ground after being treated with sanitizing chemicals to make it safe to drink, sitting in a chair composed of materials derived from multi-step chemical synthesis and processing, reading your electronically delivered tripe sent from hundreds of miles or more away, I can see how the misconception that science works could be so common. Thanks for informing me.
I haven't read any of the Xanth series. But as for Hyperion, I would have been less disappointed if it was ONLY a stupid plot line. But that's the biggest problem. The quality of the writing dropped down to the level of bad fan fiction. Like lists of names of people who aren't the slightest bit relevant to the story other than that Simmons likes to bring them up as background (I guess to show off how clever he is at making up futuristic Chinese sounding names?). And the pages of dull geography lessons which wouldn't have been interesting even if the worlds he was talking about weren't straight-up, whole-cloth reconstructions of stereotypical human civilizations and locations. A mountainous Chinese/Buddhist planet, an icy Eskimo planet, and so on. Anybody who hasn't read the books should read the first two and then just skim the wikipedia summary of the last two. Just enough skimming to convince you that they really aren't worth reading and that you are better off making up your own ending to the books.
Uhg, Hyperion. There never was a more disappointing series of books/movies/TV shows/etc. The first two books were brilliant, some of the best fiction I've read. The 2nd two books were complete trash. Stupid, overblown, poorly written, pretentious masturbation. It's like Simmons had a stroke after writing the first two and decided to finish the series despite being newly mentally handicapped.
This entire thread is full of idiotic tripe. Why does nobody here actually understand how product liability works?! Liability is proportional to 1. the DAMAGES and 2. to the degree of negligence shown by the producer as determined by the courts. Hobbyist programmers don't need to worry about liability because their programs aren't likely to cause any real damages no matter how badly they fail. No court would assign penalties to a hobbyist because their freely distributed DVD ripping software didn't work properly. Good faith mistakes that cause no significant damages are not the target of product liability cases. Mission critical software that can cause real damage, like loss of life or loss of a million customer CC numbers, absolutely should be treated like other engineering products that can cause such damages.
Then there's the group of whiners talking endlessly about how software can't be 100% bug free. Who said anything about that? Cars, planes, and bridges can't be bug free either! Liability is proportional to damages. Commercial software doesn't need to be "bug free". If the producer is liable for damages, then they have incentive to make sure that their mostly but not completely bug free software is at least not going to cause damages, even if it isn't 100%. And as I already said, courts have always been lenient on good faith mistakes and unforeseeable circumstances. Negligence is the key word in any product liability legislation, and it completely changes the nature of the law in a way which most people posting here just don't seem to get.
What was the cost of all the baseless conjecture and talk radio paranoia?