They even planned far ahead. In 1972, "VFF = 6.3VAC" was obvious in itself, but for you youngsters that don't know about vacuum tubes they added the footnote "6. For the filament heater, of course."
Yes, it's now a very old joke, but it's been fun watching a new "generation" rediscover it every five years or so.
How come we don't hear about CTS amoungst piano players, organist and the like.
There aren't nearly as many musicians that spend hours a day playing as there are people tied to computer keyboards, but also proper position and posture is part of a musician's training. IIRC, pianists keep their arms in the air and strike the keys from above, so their wrists stay straight. On a computer keyboard or mouse, it's very easy to get into a forearms on the table position, where your wrists have to bend upwards to get your fingers to the buttons. That position puts extra pressure on the carpal tunnel.
I learned to type on manual typewriters. The force needed for those meant that I kept my arms in the air above the keyboard and swung my whole forearm down to hit a key. If the wrist bent at all, it was downwards to add punch to the stroke. Typing a term paper this way could give me sore shoulders and neck from holding the arms up, and of course the fingertips got sore, but I never heard of carpal tunnel in those days.
So I don't have problems with typing, but I do get wrist pain from the mouse. Nearly all mice seem designed to be operated with the palm of the hand - which bends my wrist backwards when clicking the buttons. Maybe it's my big farm-boy hands, but I'd like a mouse that was about 4 times the size...
I am a test engineer with an electronics manufacturer. This proposal by the MPAA to require watermark detection in all analog to digital conversion (ADC) devices would affect virtually all modern electronic equipment, most of which is NOT capable of doing anything with copyrighted material. Digital thermometers are based on an ADC chip. All test equipment is based on ADC chips. Even the automatic teller machine controllers we build include ADC.
In making this proposal, the MPAA has shown that they do not care how much havoc they wreak on the economy in general. You should not only reject this particular proposal, but take steps to reduce the power of the MPAA and similar organizations in the future.
Feel free to copy and paste, but please make some changes so they know each of you has commented individually.
Doesn't something change when you take human conscience out of the equation? The dot on the screen is a village with many homes, families, adults and children. We can unleash hell without ever seeing our victims. To them, we are a faceless empire, worse than Rome's wildest dreams.
It's a little late to worry about that now. 18th Century artillerymen (with a 3-mile range) could drop shells over a hill and kill people they couldn't see. By 1914, most artillery shells were fired at unseen targets, and more casualties were inflicted by artillery than with any other weapon. By 1942, bomber fleets could destroy an entire city from 25,000 feet, never seeing anything as small as a human being below. By the early 60's, two men in a Minuteman silo in North Dakota could turn their keys and vaporize a million people on another continent... A remote control airplane flying low enough for the camera to actually see people and firing off one precision weapon at a time is a welcome step back from the remote-killing capabilities we already have.
But finally, even when killing someone meant getting up close with sword or axe and getting splashed with their blood, armies could still slaughter entire civilian populations. It just took more work and some training to kill.
I agree that the FBI agents' use of the database was corrupt, immoral, and illegal. (From other posts, it sounds like anyone could have dug the same information out for themselves - but what the agents' pals did with the data was insider trading, and the agents were accomplices, not to mention using agency resources - and, I suspect, on-the-clock time - for profit.) I've heard of enough FBI misbehavior, and mistakes compounded by gross arrogance, that I would seriously consider firing all the agents and starting over, because no one's ever going to catch all the bad apples, and I don't see any way to change the culture that _creates_ the bad apples except replacing them all, good or bad...
But someone was criticizing the FBI as a whole for collecting information. It's pretty clear the NCIC is the sort of info the FBI or some other federal law enforcement agency should be collecting.
Why these guys were collecting such information in the first place.
In the only specific instance described in the article, the FBI agents used the National Crime Information Center to find a corporation executive with a serious criminal record. Their stock analyst co-conspirator sold the corporation stock short and publicized the facts.
It's perfectly proper for the FBI to have a database where they can look up criminal records. What I wonder about is why it took FBI agents to dig out the facts - shouldn't the rest of us be able to check out whether the people we entrust with our money have a criminal record without making friends in the cops? And why didn't that corporation find out about this before they hired the guy?
Re:One thing I've NEVER seen here....
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Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 2
A patents protects an idea, but a copyright protects one expression of an idea. If a program is copyrighted, you can't just copy it, but you can write a new program that does the same thing without infringing copyright. If it's patented, anything using the unique and novel ideas covered by the patents will infringe. That may make it impossible to write a competitive program at all.
The controversy with software patents is: (1) Incompetent patent examiners often rubber-stamp patents for ideas that are not novel and unobvious. (2) Software/"business method" patents usually say "Do something people have long done by hand using a computer". IMO, that's not novel. (3) There was a time when patents were not granted for laws of nature, living things, or mathematical algorithms. If a (non-business method) software patent actually contains a novel and unobvious idea, it's probably a mathematical algorithm. I never heard that Congress changed the law, and yet the RSA patent is quite simply for a mathematical algorithm...
Re:There ARE other ways
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Fair IP Laws?
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there was no way to easily copy these works when they were created
Shakespeare did have lots of trouble with other acting troupes copying his plays. (Or Marlowe had lots of trouble with Shakespeare stealing his plays...) Bach and Beethoven were dependent on wealthy patrons who paid them to produce and perform new works; they had no way to collect from others who copied their sheet music and performed their compositions. Mozart had a bit more independence in that he was also the best performer of his era and could pick his live gigs - but he didn't get a cent from all the others performing his compositions. Maybe if there had been a copyright mechanism in place, Mozart would have been able to afford to live healthier, and we would have 40 more years of his work.
And of course, Homer (not Ulysses, which is the Latin corruption of the name of Homer's character Odysseus) had to tell stories for his supper his entire life, and got no material benefit from all the other minstrels copying his oral performance, let alone the written versions of centuries later. Not that copyright law was practical in a non-literate society.
Note that from about 500 BC to 1500 AD, literary works could be recorded in writing and copied one at a time, but not mass-produced, and no one felt a need for copyright then either. This includes the Greek golden age, the many Roman writers, Chaucer and Boccaccio. It's possible that as copying on demand becomes cheaper than selling stamped disks in stores, copyright will become unenforceable to the extent that we wind up back in Chaucer's situation - you can write for the joy of it or for a wealthy client, but you can't make a steady living from writing, and no big corporations are in business just to distribute entertainment. I'm not sure how much real creativity we'll lose, although it might be pretty hard for Lucas's grandchildren to raise $100 million to produce Starwars episode XII... There really is only one thing likely to push things to that extreme - the present arrogance of big media companies that create Britney clones instead of finding real musicians, similarly fill 99% of TV and movie theatres with imitative crap, and want to charge you every time you open your eyes.
) Implied warranties like the warranty of merchantability and fittness for a particular purpose cannot we waived in a commerical software EULA. Free (as in beer) software can be distriubuted 'as is', but the second you exchange money for software, you take responsibility for it functioning correctly.
I wouldn't go quite that far, because it is impossible for anyone to be sure their software will work in every computer, in combination with thousands of other applications programs. However, I would say that fair laws covering software would provide:
1) There is a default case that applies unless limitations are clearly and prominently stated BEFORE purchase - on the box in shrinkwrap, on the web page if you download, on price quotations, etc. The default is that software is warrantied for merchantability and fitness for the purpose it is marketed for, but with damages limited to three times the purchase price. That is, if the vendor cannot or will not make the software work properly on your computer, you can get back the purchase price. You can also get re-paid for troubleshooting time, loss of data, and restoration of your system to the original state, but only up to 3 times the purchase price. If you paid $0.00, 3 x 0 = 0... Vendor can increase warranty coverage(larger damages) or limit it, but all limitations have to be revealed before purchase, and in any price quotations.
2. If the advertising for a product claims it has certain concrete attributes, for instance that servers can run a long time unattended, then regardless of anything they put on or in the box, the vendor is responsible for damages if the product falls short of the advertisements. This is NOT subject to the 3x purchase price limitation.
3. You can make infinite backups of software or other copyrighted digital data for your own use; you cannot transfer copies to others except when you re-sell the software and remove all copies from your system. Technical means of blocking copying are illegal, unless the packaging clearly and prominently states that copying is blocked and the software is not for commercial use.
4. If the software is sold to you, you own it. They can't keep you from reselling it or transferring it to other computers you own or control. If they include a product activation feature, you get paid for any time over 15 minutes you spend getting the codes to re-activate it, and if you cannot get re-activated within two hours, you can sue for damages (time, interruption of business, blocked access to your own data). This applies unless the software is clearly leased, not sold.
5. In any software sale or lease, except when the terms were negotiated with the buyer's lawyer involved, any limitations to points #1 and 2 must be stated in plain language. If a jury cannot read and understand it, it reverts to the default.
6. The vendor may not impose terms that limit the buyer's freedom of speech.
7. If the vendor refuses redress under the any of the above points and is found by the court to be in violation, the vendor must pay the user's reasonable and proper legal fees and court costs.
IIRC, the actual sentence is along the lines of, "If you would destroy liberty, first kill all the lawyers."
I can't find the source for that quotation, although I remember it. I think it was around the time of the American revolution or later.
Shakespeare was definitely first with "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers", in Henry V, I can't remember if it was Part I or Part II, and Bartlett's wasn't specific enough. Note that Shakespeare definitely did not present it as a good idea, but rather as the ranting of an irresponsible revolutionary. Still, it's the one revolutionary idea that's remained competitive with "kill the rich and steal their stuff" over the years, and that seems to say something about lawyers...
Yes, in truth liberty cannot survive without the law, and since it's impossible for everyone to both study the law and possess the verbal abilities required to present a case in court, we need lawyers. The problem is that they have long dominated government to the point where they have made themselves indispensable rather than useful, by creating laws so convoluted that no normal person can understand them, by twisting the language until in court things don't mean what they say, etc. Maybe we ought to just hang all the politician-lawyers!
Or, I'd settle for hanging every congressman with a law degree that proposed an unconstitutional law. They damn well ought to know better.
Keywords and Search are the solution, and RealNames was not a bad idea. Where it became a _terrible_ idea was when they set a high price for listings. (Can anyone confirm that $1M? I don't want to call Chrisd a liar, but I can't imagine even the largest corporations paying that much until they had definite evidence that a RealNames listing would bring in lots of business. Which it wouldn't when, because listings cost too much, too few companies were listed too make it worth your time to do a RealNames search...)
If they'd charged $10 the first year, it might have been successful, although unprofitable unless they had exceptional management. And once the database was big enough to get consumers actually using it, then they could have proven it's value and jacked up the renewal price...
And you'd be quite surprised just how many "big" stories don't get picked up by the local media.
Not any more. When I was going to school in Stillwater, OK, about 1983, the feds arrested the entire county road commission for taking bribes, along with most of the road commissioners and contractors in the state. The local newspaper printed nothing about it - note that their office is within a block of the county offices, so it would have been hard not to notice the G-men descending on the place. Nor had it printed anything about various other crooked politicians getting caught, as long as they were conservative - or flat out reactionary - Republicans.
The story was big enough nationally that the Doonesbury comic strips were based on it for several weeks. The college newspaper, which usually didn't do any _news_ reporting beyond the football games, decided they had to run a real news article explaining what the hell Doonesbury was about. And then the town newspaper finally decided to start running the stories - dumped unedited from the AP lines.
Already happened (except it was a badly handled arithmetic overflow). European Space Agency satellite launch, Ariadne II, IIRC. The software was multiplying speed x time and adding it up to get distance traveled, or something like this, and because the II went faster than the I, eventually it overflowed. And the control system froze.
But I don't think this was Windows or any other commercial OS...
the whole central idea of the film -- that hard work can overcome lack of a custom genetic background is just fighting against a straw-man argument that nobody holds.
Unfortunately, however unpopular and disproven that idea might be among the real geneticists, it will be very, very popular among the corporate and government chieftains as soon as genetic testing is priced low enough. They want a way to pick employees without all the work of finding out what their real abilities are. And some so-called scientists will be willing to pander to this wish.
We know this from history. To begin with, the two centuries or more in which a particular skin color was considered to be a nearly absolute indicator of (in)ability. There is also phrenology, graphology, and lie detectors. Some corporations still use hand-writing analysis in their applications process, never mind that it has no more scientific basis than astrology. (Which may have determined some presidential decisions in the 1980's.) Like voodoo, lie detectors have been well proven to work mainly on people who believe in lie detectors, but government and private security agencies still use them in employee screening.
So give them a process which actually has a meagre scientific basis (I'm sure that sooner or later genes will be discovered that give you a 1% greater chance of stealing, or something like that), and the PHB's will glom right onto it, and start treating those 1% tendencies as 100%. And of course, treat someone like a criminal for long enough and he'll prove you right...
Well, if you are going to exclude things from SF for lack of science, you would only have to do a top 3 list. Add a bottom 3 list, and you've probably got them _all_ covered - including some Carl Sagan documentaries...
There are bound to be some bad movies in there, because frankly there haven't yet been 20 good ones. I agree with you about Forbidden Planet, it ought to be in the top 3 (with 2001 & Blade Runner, I can't decide in which order.) Fantastic Voyage, maybe somewhere's down the list - I'm highly prejudiced towards it because it came out when I was 12 years old and my best friend decided we were big enough to bike downtown by ourselves and watch it... It wasn't that good a movie, but it probably wasn't terribly bad either, I think. No way should The Matrix or Gattaca rank above 2001. Blade Runner, depending on what you like, might actually be the best.
I'd give Barbarella #20 somewhere on the list simply for the first scene where Hanoi Jane (Fonda) takes off her spacesuit and is covered only by opening credits. You might mute the sound so you don't have to listen to her, but she sure looked good... (Of course, she probably now claims that she was hypnotized or something by her boyfriend/director and the cheesecake photography is appallingly politically incorrect.)
Someone defeating the copy protection mechanisms would most likely get into more trouble than someone causing bodily harm.
We're definitely moving towards a sliding scale of punishment for crimes, depending on whom got hurt how. Lowest to highest:
1. Bodily harm to a welfare client or other ghetto dweller. (Thieving in the ghettos doesn't even rate a police investigation.) 2. Hurting a consumer/employee in the pocket book (burglary, e.g.) 3. Causing bodily harm to a consumer/employee. 4. Hurting a corporate chief in the pocket book (DMCA violations, using drugs not made by corporations...) 5. Bodily harm to one of our government masters (assault on a police officer, for example) 6.
Well, you ought to be able to guess what #6 is, but with the bodyguards the corporate chiefs can hire it doesn't seem likely to be an issue anyhow...
Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance commented on how as a tech writer assigned to write user manuals, usually the guy assigned to teach him how the thing worked was the least competent and knowledgeable on the whole team. Nobody minded _him_ being taken away from his work to do documentation....
I suspect coding or documentation standards are often the victim of this same practice, squared.
"//FIXME" is a pretty good way to flag sections that aren't complete yet, so a simple search will find them later. Just don't forget to remove these comments. 8-)
Looked like these good supporting actors had been replaced by wooden carvings.
Re:Reviewer was right on, if late
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Review: U-571
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· Score: 2
I also hated the movie. Das Boot is probably the most realistic.
Torpedoes did make a pretty big bang (over a ton of TNT), but the water must have muffled the explosion somewhat. The bigger ships (like most freighters) were usually far from destroyed by a single torpedo, but just had a piece of the ship blown up, then over a period of hours would take on water and sink, or spread fire through the cargo until they had to be abandoned. (Torpedo guidance in WWII just wasn't good enough to hit smaller ships, like destroyers and submarines, except by plain luck.) This movie looked like everything but the U571 itself must have been packed clear full of high explosives, especially the critical area where torpedoes would hit...
And the gun battle with the destroyer! First off, no way could a German destroyer have been operating in those waters. Second, subs did not fight destroyers. They ran away, submerged, hid, or died. The destroyer had at least 20 times the firepower of any sub's deck guns. The destroyer is big enough that a hit by a 3 inch sub deck gun is a relatively minor matter (although it could kill a dozen sailors and take out the radio, e.g., but I seriously doubt it would be out for long.) On a sub, any hit that penetrates the hull, or even weakens it, is a death sentence. The destroyer's machine guns would have killed everyone outside the pressure hull, then the heavier guns would have ripped big holes in it. If you believe the sub could pound the destroyer and get away, you'll believe Rick Moranis could sneak a punch at Mike Tyson and run away while Tyson was nursing a bloody nose....
Das Boot was good, and as realistic as possible.
OTOH, I've also recently watched Run Silent, Run Deep, probably the oldest sub movie around. It was pretty bad in the realism department too. The sub captain was out to get the Japanese destroyer that had sunk his first sub - did I explain that the odds are about 100-1 against a torpedo actually hitting a destroyer? If a sub ever deliberately torpedoed a destroyer, it must have been a desperation move by a ship too crippled to submerge... If you were submerged, firing a torpedo at a destroyer would just give away your position. (Accidental hits, where the destroyer cuts in between the sub and the real target, but usually the torpedo would go right under the destroyer's keel.)
Oh, and they used up most of their torpedos on Japanese freighters. Make it a German sub piling into an Allied convoy and that would be accurate, but most Japanese freighters were so small they weren't considered worth a torpedo. American subs would surface at night and use their deck guns - the ratio of Japanese freighters to escort ships was so high a sub's light guns could sink or set on fire many of the tiny ships before the escort approached and they had to submerge and hide.
Actual supersonic flight was impossible for a propellor plane because the propellors (at least as designed in WWII) would lose effectiveness when the airflow around them approached the speed of sound supersonic. However, airflow (relative to the airplane) around the wings, fuselage, and tail is faster than the airplane itself because the air has to move sideways. So for the hottest aircraft in steep dives, there was a possibility of parts of the airflow becoming supersonic. This caused a shock wave ("sonic boom"), which the aircraft were hardly built to endure, and could cause control surfaces to lose their bite so it may have been impossible to pull the plane out of the dive. This was something fighter pilots had to be warned about - in a power dive, you had to watch your speed.
On the other hand, millions of riflemen were firing bullets at supersonic speeds, and nobody every noticed that they were "breaking the sound barrier".
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They even planned far ahead. In 1972, "VFF = 6.3VAC" was obvious in itself, but for you youngsters that don't know about vacuum tubes they added the footnote "6. For the filament heater, of course."
Yes, it's now a very old joke, but it's been fun watching a new "generation" rediscover it every five years or so.
How come we don't hear about CTS amoungst piano players, organist and the like.
There aren't nearly as many musicians that spend hours a day playing as there are people tied to computer keyboards, but also proper position and posture is part of a musician's training. IIRC, pianists keep their arms in the air and strike the keys from above, so their wrists stay straight. On a computer keyboard or mouse, it's very easy to get into a forearms on the table position, where your wrists have to bend upwards to get your fingers to the buttons. That position puts extra pressure on the carpal tunnel.
I learned to type on manual typewriters. The force needed for those meant that I kept my arms in the air above the keyboard and swung my whole forearm down to hit a key. If the wrist bent at all, it was downwards to add punch to the stroke. Typing a term paper this way could give me sore shoulders and neck from holding the arms up, and of course the fingertips got sore, but I never heard of carpal tunnel in those days.
So I don't have problems with typing, but I do get wrist pain from the mouse. Nearly all mice seem designed to be operated with the palm of the hand - which bends my wrist backwards when clicking the buttons. Maybe it's my big farm-boy hands, but I'd like a mouse that was about 4 times the size...
I am a test engineer with an electronics manufacturer. This proposal by the MPAA to require watermark detection in all analog to digital conversion (ADC) devices would affect virtually all modern electronic equipment, most of which is NOT capable of doing anything with copyrighted material. Digital thermometers are based on an ADC chip. All test equipment is based on ADC chips. Even the automatic teller machine controllers we build include ADC.
In making this proposal, the MPAA has shown that they do not care how much havoc they wreak on the economy in general. You should not only reject this particular proposal, but take steps to reduce the power of the MPAA and similar organizations in the future.
Feel free to copy and paste, but please make some changes so they know each of you has commented individually.
Doesn't something change when you take human conscience out of the equation? The dot on the screen is a village with many homes, families, adults and children. We can unleash hell without ever seeing our victims. To them, we are a faceless empire, worse than Rome's wildest dreams.
It's a little late to worry about that now. 18th Century artillerymen (with a 3-mile range) could drop shells over a hill and kill people they couldn't see. By 1914, most artillery shells were fired at unseen targets, and more casualties were inflicted by artillery than with any other weapon. By 1942, bomber fleets could destroy an entire city from 25,000 feet, never seeing anything as small as a human being below. By the early 60's, two men in a Minuteman silo in North Dakota could turn their keys and vaporize a million people on another continent... A remote control airplane flying low enough for the camera to actually see people and firing off one precision weapon at a time is a welcome step back from the remote-killing capabilities we already have.
But finally, even when killing someone meant getting up close with sword or axe and getting splashed with their blood, armies could still slaughter entire civilian populations. It just took more work and some training to kill.
I agree that the FBI agents' use of the database was corrupt, immoral, and illegal. (From other posts, it sounds like anyone could have dug the same information out for themselves - but what the agents' pals did with the data was insider trading, and the agents were accomplices, not to mention using agency resources - and, I suspect, on-the-clock time - for profit.) I've heard of enough FBI misbehavior, and mistakes compounded by gross arrogance, that I would seriously consider firing all the agents and starting over, because no one's ever going to catch all the bad apples, and I don't see any way to change the culture that _creates_ the bad apples except replacing them all, good or bad...
But someone was criticizing the FBI as a whole for collecting information. It's pretty clear the NCIC is the sort of info the FBI or some other federal law enforcement agency should be collecting.
Why are all FBI agents "special"? 8-)
Cut the power cord.
Why these guys were collecting such information in the first place.
In the only specific instance described in the article, the FBI agents used the National Crime Information Center to find a corporation executive with a serious criminal record. Their stock analyst co-conspirator sold the corporation stock short and publicized the facts.
It's perfectly proper for the FBI to have a database where they can look up criminal records. What I wonder about is why it took FBI agents to dig out the facts - shouldn't the rest of us be able to check out whether the people we entrust with our money have a criminal record without making friends in the cops? And why didn't that corporation find out about this before they hired the guy?
A patents protects an idea, but a copyright protects one expression of an idea. If a program is copyrighted, you can't just copy it, but you can write a new program that does the same thing without infringing copyright. If it's patented, anything using the unique and novel ideas covered by the patents will infringe. That may make it impossible to write a competitive program at all.
The controversy with software patents is: (1) Incompetent patent examiners often rubber-stamp patents for ideas that are not novel and unobvious. (2) Software/"business method" patents usually say "Do something people have long done by hand using a computer". IMO, that's not novel. (3) There was a time when patents were not granted for laws of nature, living things, or mathematical algorithms. If a (non-business method) software patent actually contains a novel and unobvious idea, it's probably a mathematical algorithm. I never heard that Congress changed the law, and yet the RSA patent is quite simply for a mathematical algorithm...
there was no way to easily copy these works when they were created
Shakespeare did have lots of trouble with other acting troupes copying his plays. (Or Marlowe had lots of trouble with Shakespeare stealing his plays...) Bach and Beethoven were dependent on wealthy patrons who paid them to produce and perform new works; they had no way to collect from others who copied their sheet music and performed their compositions. Mozart had a bit more independence in that he was also the best performer of his era and could pick his live gigs - but he didn't get a cent from all the others performing his compositions. Maybe if there had been a copyright mechanism in place, Mozart would have been able to afford to live healthier, and we would have 40 more years of his work.
And of course, Homer (not Ulysses, which is the Latin corruption of the name of Homer's character Odysseus) had to tell stories for his supper his entire life, and got no material benefit from all the other minstrels copying his oral performance, let alone the written versions of centuries later. Not that copyright law was practical in a non-literate society.
Note that from about 500 BC to 1500 AD, literary works could be recorded in writing and copied one at a time, but not mass-produced, and no one felt a need for copyright then either. This includes the Greek golden age, the many Roman writers, Chaucer and Boccaccio. It's possible that as copying on demand becomes cheaper than selling stamped disks in stores, copyright will become unenforceable to the extent that we wind up back in Chaucer's situation - you can write for the joy of it or for a wealthy client, but you can't make a steady living from writing, and no big corporations are in business just to distribute entertainment. I'm not sure how much real creativity we'll lose, although it might be pretty hard for Lucas's grandchildren to raise $100 million to produce Starwars episode XII... There really is only one thing likely to push things to that extreme - the present arrogance of big media companies that create Britney clones instead of finding real musicians, similarly fill 99% of TV and movie theatres with imitative crap, and want to charge you every time you open your eyes.
) Implied warranties like the warranty of merchantability and fittness for a particular purpose cannot we waived in a commerical software EULA. Free (as in beer) software can be distriubuted 'as is', but the second you exchange money for software, you take responsibility for it functioning correctly.
I wouldn't go quite that far, because it is impossible for anyone to be sure their software will work in every computer, in combination with thousands of other applications programs. However, I would say that fair laws covering software would provide:
1) There is a default case that applies unless limitations are clearly and prominently stated BEFORE purchase - on the box in shrinkwrap, on the web page if you download, on price quotations, etc. The default is that software is warrantied for merchantability and fitness for the purpose it is marketed for, but with damages limited to three times the purchase price. That is, if the vendor cannot or will not make the software work properly on your computer, you can get back the purchase price. You can also get re-paid for troubleshooting time, loss of data, and restoration of your system to the original state, but only up to 3 times the purchase price. If you paid $0.00, 3 x 0 = 0... Vendor can increase warranty coverage(larger damages) or limit it, but all limitations have to be revealed before purchase, and in any price quotations.
2. If the advertising for a product claims it has certain concrete attributes, for instance that servers can run a long time unattended, then regardless of anything they put on or in the box, the vendor is responsible for damages if the product falls short of the advertisements. This is NOT subject to the 3x purchase price limitation.
3. You can make infinite backups of software or other copyrighted digital data for your own use; you cannot transfer copies to others except when you re-sell the software and remove all copies from your system. Technical means of blocking copying are illegal, unless the packaging clearly and prominently states that copying is blocked and the software is not for commercial use.
4. If the software is sold to you, you own it. They can't keep you from reselling it or transferring it to other computers you own or control. If they include a product activation feature, you get paid for any time over 15 minutes you spend getting the codes to re-activate it, and if you cannot get re-activated within two hours, you can sue for damages (time, interruption of business, blocked access to your own data). This applies unless the software is clearly leased, not sold.
5. In any software sale or lease, except when the terms were negotiated with the buyer's lawyer involved, any limitations to points #1 and 2 must be stated in plain language. If a jury cannot read and understand it, it reverts to the default.
6. The vendor may not impose terms that limit the buyer's freedom of speech.
7. If the vendor refuses redress under the any of the above points and is found by the court to be in violation, the vendor must pay the user's reasonable and proper legal fees and court costs.
IIRC, the actual sentence is along the lines of, "If you would destroy liberty, first kill all the lawyers."
I can't find the source for that quotation, although I remember it. I think it was around the time of the American revolution or later.
Shakespeare was definitely first with "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers", in Henry V, I can't remember if it was Part I or Part II, and Bartlett's wasn't specific enough. Note that Shakespeare definitely did not present it as a good idea, but rather as the ranting of an irresponsible revolutionary. Still, it's the one revolutionary idea that's remained competitive with "kill the rich and steal their stuff" over the years, and that seems to say something about lawyers...
Yes, in truth liberty cannot survive without the law, and since it's impossible for everyone to both study the law and possess the verbal abilities required to present a case in court, we need lawyers. The problem is that they have long dominated government to the point where they have made themselves indispensable rather than useful, by creating laws so convoluted that no normal person can understand them, by twisting the language until in court things don't mean what they say, etc. Maybe we ought to just hang all the politician-lawyers!
Or, I'd settle for hanging every congressman with a law degree that proposed an unconstitutional law. They damn well ought to know better.
Keywords and Search are the solution, and RealNames was not a bad idea. Where it became a _terrible_ idea was when they set a high price for listings. (Can anyone confirm that $1M? I don't want to call Chrisd a liar, but I can't imagine even the largest corporations paying that much until they had definite evidence that a RealNames listing would bring in lots of business. Which it wouldn't when, because listings cost too much, too few companies were listed too make it worth your time to do a RealNames search...)
If they'd charged $10 the first year, it might have been successful, although unprofitable unless they had exceptional management. And once the database was big enough to get consumers actually using it, then they could have proven it's value and jacked up the renewal price...
And you'd be quite surprised just how many "big" stories don't get picked up by the local media.
Not any more. When I was going to school in Stillwater, OK, about 1983, the feds arrested the entire county road commission for taking bribes, along with most of the road commissioners and contractors in the state. The local newspaper printed nothing about it - note that their office is within a block of the county offices, so it would have been hard not to notice the G-men descending on the place. Nor had it printed anything about various other crooked politicians getting caught, as long as they were conservative - or flat out reactionary - Republicans.
The story was big enough nationally that the Doonesbury comic strips were based on it for several weeks. The college newspaper, which usually didn't do any _news_ reporting beyond the football games, decided they had to run a real news article explaining what the hell Doonesbury was about. And then the town newspaper finally decided to start running the stories - dumped unedited from the AP lines.
if you had source, would you be able to find instantly exploitable backdoors that would give you full root?
It doesn't seem to be too hard to find those backdoors _without_ source, considering that new exploits occur at a rate of about one a week.
Mid-air GPF anyone?
Already happened (except it was a badly handled arithmetic overflow). European Space Agency satellite launch, Ariadne II, IIRC. The software was multiplying speed x time and adding it up to get distance traveled, or something like this, and because the II went faster than the I, eventually it overflowed. And the control system froze.
But I don't think this was Windows or any other commercial OS...
Not to mention the patches that unexpectedly break something else, in a few of the million different configurations out there...
the whole central idea of the film -- that hard work can overcome lack of a custom genetic background is just fighting against a straw-man argument that nobody holds.
Unfortunately, however unpopular and disproven that idea might be among the real geneticists, it will be very, very popular among the corporate and government chieftains as soon as genetic testing is priced low enough. They want a way to pick employees without all the work of finding out what their real abilities are. And some so-called scientists will be willing to pander to this wish.
We know this from history. To begin with, the two centuries or more in which a particular skin color was considered to be a nearly absolute indicator of (in)ability. There is also phrenology, graphology, and lie detectors. Some corporations still use hand-writing analysis in their applications process, never mind that it has no more scientific basis than astrology. (Which may have determined some presidential decisions in the 1980's.) Like voodoo, lie detectors have been well proven to work mainly on people who believe in lie detectors, but government and private security agencies still use them in employee screening.
So give them a process which actually has a meagre scientific basis (I'm sure that sooner or later genes will be discovered that give you a 1% greater chance of stealing, or something like that), and the PHB's will glom right onto it, and start treating those 1% tendencies as 100%. And of course, treat someone like a criminal for long enough and he'll prove you right...
Well, if you are going to exclude things from SF for lack of science, you would only have to do a top 3 list. Add a bottom 3 list, and you've probably got them _all_ covered - including some Carl Sagan documentaries...
There are bound to be some bad movies in there, because frankly there haven't yet been 20 good ones. I agree with you about Forbidden Planet, it ought to be in the top 3 (with 2001 & Blade Runner, I can't decide in which order.) Fantastic Voyage, maybe somewhere's down the list - I'm highly prejudiced towards it because it came out when I was 12 years old and my best friend decided we were big enough to bike downtown by ourselves and watch it... It wasn't that good a movie, but it probably wasn't terribly bad either, I think. No way should The Matrix or Gattaca rank above 2001. Blade Runner, depending on what you like, might actually be the best.
I'd give Barbarella #20 somewhere on the list simply for the first scene where Hanoi Jane (Fonda) takes off her spacesuit and is covered only by opening credits. You might mute the sound so you don't have to listen to her, but she sure looked good... (Of course, she probably now claims that she was hypnotized or something by her boyfriend/director and the cheesecake photography is appallingly politically incorrect.)
Someone defeating the copy protection mechanisms would most likely get into more trouble than someone causing bodily harm.
We're definitely moving towards a sliding scale of punishment for crimes, depending on whom got hurt how. Lowest to highest:
1. Bodily harm to a welfare client or other ghetto dweller. (Thieving in the ghettos doesn't even rate a police investigation.)
2. Hurting a consumer/employee in the pocket book (burglary, e.g.)
3. Causing bodily harm to a consumer/employee.
4. Hurting a corporate chief in the pocket book (DMCA violations, using drugs not made by corporations...)
5. Bodily harm to one of our government masters (assault on a police officer, for example)
6.
Well, you ought to be able to guess what #6 is, but with the bodyguards the corporate chiefs can hire it doesn't seem likely to be an issue anyhow...
How do you like the new world order?
Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance commented on how as a tech writer assigned to write user manuals, usually the guy assigned to teach him how the thing worked was the least competent and knowledgeable on the whole team. Nobody minded _him_ being taken away from his work to do documentation....
I suspect coding or documentation standards are often the victim of this same practice, squared.
"//FIXME" is a pretty good way to flag sections that aren't complete yet, so a simple search will find them later. Just don't forget to remove these comments. 8-)
Sounds like a cast of supporting actors to me.
Looked like these good supporting actors had been replaced by wooden carvings.
I also hated the movie. Das Boot is probably the most realistic.
Torpedoes did make a pretty big bang (over a ton of TNT), but the water must have muffled the explosion somewhat. The bigger ships (like most freighters) were usually far from destroyed by a single torpedo, but just had a piece of the ship blown up, then over a period of hours would take on water and sink, or spread fire through the cargo until they had to be abandoned. (Torpedo guidance in WWII just wasn't good enough to hit smaller ships, like destroyers and submarines, except by plain luck.) This movie looked like everything but the U571 itself must have been packed clear full of high explosives, especially the critical area where torpedoes would hit...
And the gun battle with the destroyer! First off, no way could a German destroyer have been operating in those waters. Second, subs did not fight destroyers. They ran away, submerged, hid, or died. The destroyer had at least 20 times the firepower of any sub's deck guns. The destroyer is big enough that a hit by a 3 inch sub deck gun is a relatively minor matter (although it could kill a dozen sailors and take out the radio, e.g., but I seriously doubt it would be out for long.) On a sub, any hit that penetrates the hull, or even weakens it, is a death sentence. The destroyer's machine guns would have killed everyone outside the pressure hull, then the heavier guns would have ripped big holes in it.
If you believe the sub could pound the destroyer and get away, you'll believe Rick Moranis could sneak a punch at Mike Tyson and run away while Tyson was nursing a bloody nose....
Das Boot was good, and as realistic as possible.
OTOH, I've also recently watched Run Silent, Run Deep, probably the oldest sub movie around. It was pretty bad in the realism department too. The sub captain was out to get the Japanese destroyer that had sunk his first sub - did I explain that the odds are about 100-1 against a torpedo actually hitting a destroyer? If a sub ever deliberately torpedoed a destroyer, it must have been a desperation move by a ship too crippled to submerge... If you were submerged, firing a torpedo at a destroyer would just give away your position. (Accidental hits, where the destroyer cuts in between the sub and the real target, but usually the torpedo would go right under the destroyer's keel.)
Oh, and they used up most of their torpedos on Japanese freighters. Make it a German sub piling into an Allied convoy and that would be accurate, but most Japanese freighters were so small they weren't considered worth a torpedo. American subs would surface at night and use their deck guns - the ratio of Japanese freighters to escort ships was so high a sub's light guns could sink or set on fire many of the tiny ships before the escort approached and they had to submerge and hide.
Actual supersonic flight was impossible for a propellor plane because the propellors (at least as designed in WWII) would lose effectiveness when the airflow around them approached the speed of sound supersonic. However, airflow (relative to the airplane) around the wings, fuselage, and tail is faster than the airplane itself because the air has to move sideways. So for the hottest aircraft in steep dives, there was a possibility of parts of the airflow becoming supersonic. This caused a shock wave ("sonic boom"), which the aircraft were hardly built to endure, and could cause control surfaces to lose their bite so it may have been impossible to pull the plane out of the dive. This was something fighter pilots had to be warned about - in a power dive, you had to watch your speed.
On the other hand, millions of riflemen were firing bullets at supersonic speeds, and nobody every noticed that they were "breaking the sound barrier".