If you release code under a BSD-ish license, Microsoft can co-opt your work into a proprietary product directly without playing the same open source game that you are.
At which point any updates to the code become their maintenance headache.
No, that just simplifies Microsoft's whole embrace and extend (and extinguish) normal operating procedure. The updates make the BSD code no longer Microsoft compatible.
For other companies, you may have a point, but the ancestor was specifically referring to Mircosoft.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Stargate SG-1, which certainly is sci-fi, and Captain/Major/Lt. Colonel Samantha Carter is not only a babe who can kick butt, she's smart. No miniskirts or skintight body suits, either (more's the pity;-).
Actually, it's "Catholic" Christians that _don't_ have "this problem"
Yep, that's what I said. Where "this problem" is an apparent constitutional inability to understand evolution, the same way someone with an inability to count higher than two could understand that 2+2 != 5.
I wouldn't know, I'm not "Catholic" and haven't looked into it.
I just googled for "catholic church evolution" to verify what I'd heard from several different sources. www.catholic.com says:
Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that man's body developed from previous biological forms, under God's guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul. Pope Pius XII declared that "the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions . . . take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter--[but] the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God" (Pius XII, Humani Generis 36). So whether the human body was specially created or developed, we are required to hold as a matter of Catholic faith that the human soul is specially created; it did not evolve, and it is not inherited from our parents, as our bodies are.
That same site has this interesting take on the whole discussion:
The Catholic Church has always taught that "no real disagreement can exist between the theologian and the scientist provided each keeps within his own limits. . . . If nevertheless there is a disagreement . . . it should be remembered that the sacred writers, or more truly 'the Spirit of God who spoke through them, did not wish to teach men such truths (as the inner structure of visible objects) which do not help anyone to salvation'; and that, for this reason, rather than trying to provide a scientific exposition of nature, they sometimes describe and treat these matters either in a somewhat figurative language or as the common manner of speech those times required, and indeed still requires nowadays in everyday life, even amongst most learned people" (Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus 18).
As the Catechism puts it, "Methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things the of the faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are" (CCC 159). The Catholic Church has no fear of science or scientific discovery.
So perhaps Darwin came up with and published his theory of evolution because he was divinely inspired to do so.
Science doesn't invoke the supernatural, by definition. Creationism does.
Permitting creationism as part of a "science" curriculum is the camel's nose that could then permit any unexplained observation (for example, discontinuities in what ought to be a continuous emission spectrum) to be dismissed as "divine intervention" or "a miracle" or "the way it was Intelligently Designed", rather than coming up with a revised or new theory to explain it naturally (eg, quantum theory). In the real world, the latter has proved far more productive.
What needs to be understood is the distinction between micro- and macro-evolution.
A distinction that only Creationists (or whatever they're calling themselves this year) make.
Nearly no reasonable person would claim that selective pressure over a long period of time can cause gradual changes to a species' DNA. [...] Also, it's the only process Darwin demonstrated did actually occur.
Darwin did no such thing. He published "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" in 1859 (30 years after his voyages on HMS Beagle), six years before Mendel's work on genetics (published in 1865), and a century before Watson and Crick determined the structure of DNA. Darwin was unaware of the underlying mechanism, but the process itself was so obvious to him that he wrote his book.
ID (different from creationism)
The only difference seems to be a disagreement in detail. Both posit a supernatual "creator" (or "designer") with no explanation as to where this creator/designer came from, and insist on supernatural explanations for events for which science has well-accepted natural explanations for. The extent to which they argue that those latter theories fail to explain said events, is simply evidence that they don't understand those explanations. It's like trying to teach simple arithmetic to some primitive tribesman: the concept isn't really that hard, but it's totally alien (and thus incomprehensible) to someone who grew up counting "one, two, many".
Of course, it's only certain brands of evangelical Christian (among Christians -- for all I know Moslem fundamentalists may have the same problem) that have this problem; the Catholic Church has accepted biological evolution as essentially correct, except that the human soul was specifically created by God. (After all, a God that can do that is perfectly capable of designing the process of evolution, micro, macro, or anything in between;-)
Thanks. The comments in the Suse 10.0 kdegraphics3 package claim kuickshow is there, but I couldn't find it (and rpm -q -l didn't show it). I did find an RPM (kdegraphics3-imaging) out on the web (under ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/kde/stable/3.4.3/SuSE), and also one for mplayer, under ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-jengelh/SUSE-10.0 /.
More often than not, the advantage to having the source of the API (lib or OS) that your application is calling is not so that you can fix a bug in that lib or OS, but so that you can see how the API really works rather than how it is documented to work. Quite frequently documentation is wrong, or out of date, or omits certain assumptions the API developer made about the apps that would be calling it.
I've fixed many a misbehaving application because I could see where invoked code differed from its design or documentation. Tough to do with closed-source.
I just tried it (Suse 10.0 on an AMD64) -- the link for LyX shows up in the KDE menu under the Office->Word Processor items. The couple of other apps (eg K3B) I've installed after the initial install also show up with new links in the menu. Looks like that's now a non-issue.
(I've been a SuSE user since about 6.1. My only gripe with recent versions is that they don't include my two favorite viewer apps, kuickshow and mplayer. No big deal to download and build them, and my preference is probably because they have good command-line interfaces, something many people won't care about.)
What in the world gave you the idea that Qt was an open source project? It's a commercial product from a commercial company that, out of the goodness of their hearts (or because they see a commercial advantage in offering the toolkit free for developers to play with), they also happen to release under the GPL. What you describe may indeed be a crappy way to run an open source project, but it's a great way to run a company -- it avoids copyright infringement.
If you want an open source project, go restart Harmony -- the project to create a (L?)GPL'd version of the Qt toolkit back before Trolltech released it under that license.
Richard Dawkins' book "Climbing Mount Improbable" has an excellent section on how various animal eyes have evolved from basic light-sensitive spots, including diagrams.
Heck, pit vipers have evolved eyes twice -- the typical vertebrate eye inherited from their reptile ancestors, and the infrared-sensitive pits (like the visible light eyepits of some invertebrates) they use to track prey in the dark.
For example, you'd expect to see animals with 1 arm, 2 arms, 3 arms, 10 arms, no arms, half an arm, round arms, and so on for every part of the body while evolution is fine tuning this stuff.
No, I'd expect to find that in an Intelligent Designer's scrap heap. Evolution is not a designer, it doesn't "fine tune" stuff, it just goes with what works, with things occasionally getting mixed up through mutation or gene mixing (sex!) along the way.
And we do occasionally see critters with odd numbers of arms or misshapen limbs. These are usually because of teratogenic rather than mutagenic effects. (Ie, that particular individual's embryonic development was messed up by environmental factors, such as chemicals that mimic hormones, physical damage, etc. See 1960s thalidomide babies as an example.) This has nothing to do with evolution, acquired traits are not inherited (retroviruses aside).
The world is round.
As every educated or observant person for thousands of years has known, including to a reasonable approximation the diameter, since at least the time of Erastothenes about 200 BC. Everyone thought Columbus was an idiot not because they believed the world flat, but because they knew the westward oceanic route to China was far too long for the ships of the day. What they didn't know was that there was a continent in the middle of all that ocean -- although Columbus may have suspected that from Norse history and stories from Grand Banks fishermen.
Other than the name, I've never found anything particularly "cowboy" about Cowboy Bebop. It seems to me that anyone comparing Serenity/Firefly with Cowboy Bepop hasn't seen one or the other, or possibly both.
As for top 10 of all time -- Dune may rank down there with the worst, if you're talking about the De Laurentis version. Way too many deviations from the book. Bladerunner -- are we talking the theatrical release, the director's cut, or the sneak preview (which was close to the director's cut but not quite)? Blade Runner isn't bad, but as with much of Philip K. Dick's work, there aren't any really likeable characters.
but I cannot think of a single English word that begins with a 'g' followed by a vowel that has a soft g (i.e. a 'j' sound) as opposed to a hard g (i.e. a 'guh' sound).
giraffe giant ginger gelatin germ gyroscope
But there are plenty that go the other way:
gimbal giddy game gorilla get
AFACT, the closest to a rule you're going to find is that 'g' followed by 'a' or 'o' or 'u' is (almost?) always hard, 'g' followed by 'y' is (almost?) always soft (except in names, eg Geldorf, Getty), but followed by 'i' or 'e' could go either way.
Personally, I think GIF should be pronounced with a hard 'g', like 'gift' -- because the 'g' stands for 'graphics', which is also a hard 'g'.
This is what HP's Linux COE is all about (well, that and custom network installs). The link is for the software needed to set up such a site, you can't build ISOs from there. (If you're on HP's internal network you can use the internal Linux COE site, which works great for this purpose, with multiple distros.)
As another poster mentioned, SUSE already lets you do a network install from an ftp or web server.
Lawrence Block, a prolific and award-winning writer of mysteries and science fiction, has a character (who is a renowned author) say this about people who try to analyze his (the mythical author's) work: "I have enough trouble with getting the words down to tell the story I want, let alone trying to hide any meaning in them".
Fiction writers, first of all, have to tell a good story. If that means coming up with a story whose characters or background bear absolutely no resemblence to what the author believes, then that's what takes precedence. That may not always be the case, but it's worth considering before one bases his beliefs about what an author thinks solely on the fiction that author has written.
Truth to tell, I haven't liked much of Card's fiction beyond Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, but that hasn't stopped me from recommending Ender's Game to my daughter.
Orson Scott Card is a mediocre writer with an ego that is completely out of proportion to his talent.
I've never met the man, so I can't address that specifically. However, any author whose first novel wins both the Hugo and Nebula awards -- and then goes on to do that again the very next year with the sequel (Speaker for the Dead), certainly has a right to at least some of that ego.
Possibly for the same reason sharks don't, or (as a rule) other top predators don't. Like sharks, they might well turn on their own if they detect weakness, but otherwise it may not be worth the risk. (In one of the TV episodes, Serenity avoided a chance Reaver encounter by just continuing on, ignoring the Reaver ship -- if they'd run it would have triggered a chase. Although as it turned out, the Reaver apparently followed them to their destination.)
Reavers may be crazy, but they aren't completely stupid.
You and the parent poster didn't pay attention. The event that created the Reavers (and we're getting into spoiler territory here) was less than a generation in the past, so none of that is relevant.
Presumably the Reavers are a self-solving problem in a few more decades -- they'll all have died out. Assuming, that is, that no more get created.
Hypothetically, yes. The Burroughs OS put a lot of restrictions on languages that used pointers as such. The general programming language was Extended Algol (though PL/I, Cobol, Fortran, APL etc were available), which limited how you access the hardware. For systems level programming there was DCAlgol (Device Control Algol), which included a built-in command to issue commands as though they came from the system console, and Espol, an Algol-like language which included a built-in array called "memory" -- which is exactly what it sounds like. Both the DCAlgol and Espol compilers were restricted to the equivalent of the "root" user.
None of which is particularly relevant to today's Unix-like, paged memory systems. I've toyed with the idea of writing an emulator for the B6700 hardware (48-bit word plus 3 tag bits, would work fine -- with bits to spare -- on an AMD64) but unlike OS/360, none of the Burroughs system software (AFAIK) was ever made public. (Unisys has their own emulator, of course.)
I don't remember x86 segmentation working this way.
You seem to be describing how Burroughs Large Systems (B[567][5789]00 models -- and possibly the current A series, though I'm not very familiar with those) handled memory. Yeah, segments were any size you want, accessed through a descriptor (which had hardware-recognizable tag bits) which described the position and length of the segment. Try to access out of those bounds and the hardware wouldn't let you. The descriptor also carried info as to whether the segment was executable or not, etc.
Generally then, segments are either writeable or executable. Data segments could still get overwritten, which could put unsafe values in unexpected variables (like "write to that file" instead of this file).
The method of attack would then be to write to that file where that file is an executable binary. I.e., the attack takes place on disk, instead of in memory. (Oh sure, it'll be more complicated than that, but that's the effect.)
The Burroughs MCP used addition tag bits in memory so that executable code was unmodifiable at the hardware level. It got around the disk attack by enforcing that only an application tagged as a compiler could mark a disk file as executable, and only the kernel could tag an application as a compiler (and then, normally only by a command entered from the console). Writing to an executable file would immediately clear its executable bit. I still came up with two different attacks on that, but they were very tricky and one involved the use of a doctored (on a non-Burroughs system) backup tape.
Still, anything that helps prevent the easy exploits is worth looking at, and probably implementing.
I think Herman Melville gets to claim priority even over Battlestar Galactica, let alone the burnt coffee chain. He used Starbuck as a character in a book (Moby Dick) over 150 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
If you release code under a BSD-ish license, Microsoft can co-opt your work into a proprietary product directly without playing the same open source game that you are.
At which point any updates to the code become their maintenance headache.
No, that just simplifies Microsoft's whole embrace and extend (and extinguish) normal operating procedure. The updates make the BSD code no longer Microsoft compatible.
For other companies, you may have a point, but the ancestor was specifically referring to Mircosoft.
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Stargate SG-1, which certainly is sci-fi, and Captain/Major/Lt. Colonel Samantha Carter is not only a babe who can kick butt, she's smart. No miniskirts or skintight body suits, either (more's the pity ;-).
Yep, that's what I said. Where "this problem" is an apparent constitutional inability to understand evolution, the same way someone with an inability to count higher than two could understand that 2+2 != 5.
I wouldn't know, I'm not "Catholic" and haven't looked into it.
I just googled for "catholic church evolution" to verify what I'd heard from several different sources. www.catholic.com says:
That same site has this interesting take on the whole discussion:
So perhaps Darwin came up with and published his theory of evolution because he was divinely inspired to do so.
Science doesn't invoke the supernatural, by definition. Creationism does.
Permitting creationism as part of a "science" curriculum is the camel's nose that could then permit any unexplained observation (for example, discontinuities in what ought to be a continuous emission spectrum) to be dismissed as "divine intervention" or "a miracle" or "the way it was Intelligently Designed", rather than coming up with a revised or new theory to explain it naturally (eg, quantum theory). In the real world, the latter has proved far more productive.
What needs to be understood is the distinction between micro- and macro-evolution.
;-)
A distinction that only Creationists (or whatever they're calling themselves this year) make.
Nearly no reasonable person would claim that selective pressure over a long period of time can cause gradual changes to a species' DNA. [...] Also, it's the only process Darwin demonstrated did actually occur.
Darwin did no such thing. He published "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life" in 1859 (30 years after his voyages on HMS Beagle), six years before Mendel's work on genetics (published in 1865), and a century before Watson and Crick determined the structure of DNA. Darwin was unaware of the underlying mechanism, but the process itself was so obvious to him that he wrote his book.
ID (different from creationism)
The only difference seems to be a disagreement in detail. Both posit a supernatual "creator" (or "designer") with no explanation as to where this creator/designer came from, and insist on supernatural explanations for events for which science has well-accepted natural explanations for. The extent to which they argue that those latter theories fail to explain said events, is simply evidence that they don't understand those explanations. It's like trying to teach simple arithmetic to some primitive tribesman: the concept isn't really that hard, but it's totally alien (and thus incomprehensible) to someone who grew up counting "one, two, many".
Of course, it's only certain brands of evangelical Christian (among Christians -- for all I know Moslem fundamentalists may have the same problem) that have this problem; the Catholic Church has accepted biological evolution as essentially correct, except that the human soul was specifically created by God. (After all, a God that can do that is perfectly capable of designing the process of evolution, micro, macro, or anything in between
Thanks. The comments in the Suse 10.0 kdegraphics3 package claim kuickshow is there, but I couldn't find it (and rpm -q -l didn't show it). I did find an RPM (kdegraphics3-imaging) out on the web (under ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/kde/stable/3.4.3/SuSE), and also one for mplayer, under ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-jengelh/SUSE-10.0 /.
Thanks for the tip on the Packman repository.
More often than not, the advantage to having the source of the API (lib or OS) that your application is calling is not so that you can fix a bug in that lib or OS, but so that you can see how the API really works rather than how it is documented to work. Quite frequently documentation is wrong, or out of date, or omits certain assumptions the API developer made about the apps that would be calling it.
I've fixed many a misbehaving application because I could see where invoked code differed from its design or documentation. Tough to do with closed-source.
What happens if I add LyX for example?
I just tried it (Suse 10.0 on an AMD64) -- the link for LyX shows up in the KDE menu under the Office->Word Processor items. The couple of other apps (eg K3B) I've installed after the initial install also show up with new links in the menu. Looks like that's now a non-issue.
(I've been a SuSE user since about 6.1. My only gripe with recent versions is that they don't include my two favorite viewer apps, kuickshow and mplayer. No big deal to download and build them, and my preference is probably because they have good command-line interfaces, something many people won't care about.)
What in the world gave you the idea that Qt was an open source project? It's a commercial product from a commercial company that, out of the goodness of their hearts (or because they see a commercial advantage in offering the toolkit free for developers to play with), they also happen to release under the GPL. What you describe may indeed be a crappy way to run an open source project, but it's a great way to run a company -- it avoids copyright infringement.
If you want an open source project, go restart Harmony -- the project to create a (L?)GPL'd version of the Qt toolkit back before Trolltech released it under that license.
Scones.
And no, don't ask what they call what USians call scones, we could be here all day.
Richard Dawkins' book "Climbing Mount Improbable" has an excellent section on how various animal eyes have evolved from basic light-sensitive spots, including diagrams.
Heck, pit vipers have evolved eyes twice -- the typical vertebrate eye inherited from their reptile ancestors, and the infrared-sensitive pits (like the visible light eyepits of some invertebrates) they use to track prey in the dark.
For example, you'd expect to see animals with 1 arm, 2 arms, 3 arms, 10 arms, no arms, half an arm, round arms, and so on for every part of the body while evolution is fine tuning this stuff.
No, I'd expect to find that in an Intelligent Designer's scrap heap. Evolution is not a designer, it doesn't "fine tune" stuff, it just goes with what works, with things occasionally getting mixed up through mutation or gene mixing (sex!) along the way.
And we do occasionally see critters with odd numbers of arms or misshapen limbs. These are usually because of teratogenic rather than mutagenic effects. (Ie, that particular individual's embryonic development was messed up by environmental factors, such as chemicals that mimic hormones, physical damage, etc. See 1960s thalidomide babies as an example.) This has nothing to do with evolution, acquired traits are not inherited (retroviruses aside).
The world is round.
As every educated or observant person for thousands of years has known, including to a reasonable approximation the diameter, since at least the time of Erastothenes about 200 BC. Everyone thought Columbus was an idiot not because they believed the world flat, but because they knew the westward oceanic route to China was far too long for the ships of the day. What they didn't know was that there was a continent in the middle of all that ocean -- although Columbus may have suspected that from Norse history and stories from Grand Banks fishermen.
Other than the name, I've never found anything particularly "cowboy" about Cowboy Bebop. It seems to me that anyone comparing Serenity/Firefly with Cowboy Bepop hasn't seen one or the other, or possibly both.
As for top 10 of all time -- Dune may rank down there with the worst, if you're talking about the De Laurentis version. Way too many deviations from the book. Bladerunner -- are we talking the theatrical release, the director's cut, or the sneak preview (which was close to the director's cut but not quite)? Blade Runner isn't bad, but as with much of Philip K. Dick's work, there aren't any really likeable characters.
but I cannot think of a single English word that begins with a 'g' followed by a vowel that has a soft g (i.e. a 'j' sound) as opposed to a hard g (i.e. a 'guh' sound).
giraffe
giant
ginger
gelatin
germ
gyroscope
But there are plenty that go the other way:
gimbal
giddy
game
gorilla
get
AFACT, the closest to a rule you're going to find is that 'g' followed by 'a' or 'o' or 'u' is (almost?) always hard, 'g' followed by 'y' is (almost?) always soft (except in names, eg Geldorf, Getty), but followed by 'i' or 'e' could go either way.
Personally, I think GIF should be pronounced with a hard 'g', like 'gift' -- because the 'g' stands for 'graphics', which is also a hard 'g'.
This is what HP's Linux COE is all about (well, that and custom network installs). The link is for the software needed to set up such a site, you can't build ISOs from there. (If you're on HP's internal network you can use the internal Linux COE site, which works great for this purpose, with multiple distros.)
As another poster mentioned, SUSE already lets you do a network install from an ftp or web server.
What's stoping the sniper from shoting the robot?
Not much. So you deploy two robots -- let's see him shoot both at once.
Lawrence Block, a prolific and award-winning writer of mysteries and science fiction, has a character (who is a renowned author) say this about people who try to analyze his (the mythical author's) work: "I have enough trouble with getting the words down to tell the story I want, let alone trying to hide any meaning in them".
Fiction writers, first of all, have to tell a good story. If that means coming up with a story whose characters or background bear absolutely no resemblence to what the author believes, then that's what takes precedence. That may not always be the case, but it's worth considering before one bases his beliefs about what an author thinks solely on the fiction that author has written.
Truth to tell, I haven't liked much of Card's fiction beyond Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, but that hasn't stopped me from recommending Ender's Game to my daughter.
Yeah, but I was trying to avoid too many spoilers.
Orson Scott Card is a mediocre writer with an ego that is completely out of proportion to his talent.
I've never met the man, so I can't address that specifically. However, any author whose first novel wins both the Hugo and Nebula awards -- and then goes on to do that again the very next year with the sequel (Speaker for the Dead), certainly has a right to at least some of that ego.
why do the Reavers not attack each other?
Possibly for the same reason sharks don't, or (as a rule) other top predators don't. Like sharks, they might well turn on their own if they detect weakness, but otherwise it may not be worth the risk. (In one of the TV episodes, Serenity avoided a chance Reaver encounter by just continuing on, ignoring the Reaver ship -- if they'd run it would have triggered a chase. Although as it turned out, the Reaver apparently followed them to their destination.)
Reavers may be crazy, but they aren't completely stupid.
You and the parent poster didn't pay attention. The event that created the Reavers (and we're getting into spoiler territory here) was less than a generation in the past, so none of that is relevant.
Presumably the Reavers are a self-solving problem in a few more decades -- they'll all have died out. Assuming, that is, that no more get created.
Hypothetically, yes. The Burroughs OS put a lot of restrictions on languages that used pointers as such. The general programming language was Extended Algol (though PL/I, Cobol, Fortran, APL etc were available), which limited how you access the hardware. For systems level programming there was DCAlgol (Device Control Algol), which included a built-in command to issue commands as though they came from the system console, and Espol, an Algol-like language which included a built-in array called "memory" -- which is exactly what it sounds like. Both the DCAlgol and Espol compilers were restricted to the equivalent of the "root" user.
None of which is particularly relevant to today's Unix-like, paged memory systems. I've toyed with the idea of writing an emulator for the B6700 hardware (48-bit word plus 3 tag bits, would work fine -- with bits to spare -- on an AMD64) but unlike OS/360, none of the Burroughs system software (AFAIK) was ever made public. (Unisys has their own emulator, of course.)
I don't remember x86 segmentation working this way.
You seem to be describing how Burroughs Large Systems (B[567][5789]00 models -- and possibly the current A series, though I'm not very familiar with those) handled memory. Yeah, segments were any size you want, accessed through a descriptor (which had hardware-recognizable tag bits) which described the position and length of the segment. Try to access out of those bounds and the hardware wouldn't let you. The descriptor also carried info as to whether the segment was executable or not, etc.
It's not quite that easy.
Generally then, segments are either writeable or executable. Data segments could still get overwritten, which could put unsafe values in unexpected variables (like "write to that file" instead of this file).
The method of attack would then be to write to that file where that file is an executable binary. I.e., the attack takes place on disk, instead of in memory. (Oh sure, it'll be more complicated than that, but that's the effect.)
The Burroughs MCP used addition tag bits in memory so that executable code was unmodifiable at the hardware level. It got around the disk attack by enforcing that only an application tagged as a compiler could mark a disk file as executable, and only the kernel could tag an application as a compiler (and then, normally only by a command entered from the console). Writing to an executable file would immediately clear its executable bit. I still came up with two different attacks on that, but they were very tricky and one involved the use of a doctored (on a non-Burroughs system) backup tape.
Still, anything that helps prevent the easy exploits is worth looking at, and probably implementing.
I think Herman Melville gets to claim priority even over Battlestar Galactica, let alone the burnt coffee chain. He used Starbuck as a character in a book (Moby Dick) over 150 years ago.