I ran into one outfit where the sysadmins rotated duties, and the one on duty had to be within reach of their home computer (with VPN) at all times. In theory, they weren't allowed to go out to get a gallon of milk while on duty.
Another situation required sysadmins to be phonable (not merely pageable)--they required that the sysadmin had a cell phone. Amazingly, they refused to pay the cell bill.
If you are playing tetris on a computer controlling your life support system, and every time you get a green piece tetris pauses briefly and the CO2 filter shuts off so you suffocate Tetris has a Severity 4 or 5 bug.
If a user is playing Tetris on a computer controlling your life support system, there are two top priority bugs:
The life support system has a bug in that it supports Tetris
The user is exhibiting an ID10T bug in his own brain by playing Tetris on the life support computer.
Commercial grade platforms, including Linux and Unix (possibly excepting QNX), don't have bet-your-life reliability. Do you trust your life support to an OS that's been around for ten years and has an MTBF in years? For that sort of thing, I expect MTBF in decades or centuries! I will bet my money on something like Linux, but not my life.
Bet-your-life systems tend to be very small, very limited in their functionality, isolated from the outside world, and tested up the yin-yang. If you are building a system that needs such systems, and want to add additional capabilities, the accepted practice is to put those capabilities on another computer that can't impact the bet-your-life system.
Take an airplane as an example. If it has a fly-by-wire system, that is a seperate computer. If there is a life support computer (do you need a computer to regulate pressure and the like?), that would be a separate computer. If it has an autopilot, that is a seperate computer. Other systems you can live without, such as navigation and targeting (on military jets), are again separate computers.
For that matter, there are airlines that want to provide net access in flight. This means that they have to have a small ISP on board their planes. These are certainly not going to get tied into the flight control computers. If they did, they can get infected with a virus in flight. By keeping the computers disconnected, any attacks on or failures of the ISP computers have no impact on flying the plane.
By doing this, engineers are able to protect the computing resources that you can't live without.
If you can play Tetris on your life-support system, then you lack the above isolation, and are betting your life on a system that may have bugs.
I'm a southpaw, and I love having the mouse on the right. Why? Because I hate meeses to pieces. I'm a Unixian touch-typist, and I feel that nice are a vast downwing conspiracy to break your flow by forcing you to reposition one hand. If I have to sacrifice hand position to a mouse, I'd rather the mouse eat my non-dominant, right hand. That way, I can use my left hand for typing.
Now if I could get a mouse or equivalent that works with my fingers on the home row, that would be cool.
I'd go to the nearest camping gear outfitter and ask for some closed-cell foam sleeping bag pads. Don't get the open-cell (looks like egg cartons), or the expensive self-inflating ones. Closed cell pads are about 1/2 to 3/4 inches thick, and they don't let air out when you squeeze them.
One nice thing about the closed-cell foam is that it can be cut, so one pad can handle several pieces of hardware.
One problem with them is that they are effective insulators--this is bad for anything that vents out the bottom.
Finally, and just for the sake of argument, I'd (gently) topple any towers--lay everything horizontally.
A link to a similar Story about a school administration supposedly "totally failed to distinguish between a student
who is a danger and a student who is different, extremely bright and imaginative,"
The problem is that we're talking about the Machine here.
Someone who is different, extremely bright, and imaginative is almost by definition a danger.
That person is a danger to the status quo.
Take the example of of Ghandi. He was all of the above. He wouldn't hurt a fly. And by not hurting a fly, he wrested control of a major nation from what was the dominant world power.
Quite literally, he was the most dangerous man in the British Empire.
Put the different, bright, and imaginative people among those of the status quo, and you get one of two things. Either you get people who want to ride their coattails, or (more likely) you get people with a tremendous urge to beat down that person as hard and as fast as possible, before they have a chance to change the world. I don't think we're taught to do that. I think it's genetic--a survival instinct to keep some mad genius from turning us all on a dime.
It isn't pretty, and it isn't right. But it is so. It's as much a law of nature as gravity, and we have to learn it and work with it.
And most people probably recall, no matter who starts the fight or throws punches, both people get suspended.
That happened to me as well, though not nearly so often. I've seen, and been in, cases where kid A beats on kid B for a long time in front of faculty, then B retaliates. Only then is it called and both kids suspended.
I have a few theories on this.
The school justice system is based on the hockey justice system. This is also why they don't call the first infraction, but only the retaliatory one. Maybe you need a goon on your team?
If kid B is just taking punches and not throwing them, it's not a fight, it's a beating. And I've never seen a H.S. rule against beatings. You see, the faculty's hands are tied until kid B retaliates.
If kid B is doing the Right Thing and not hitting back, then it obviously can't be that bad...don't worry about it.
BTW, the best one I remember was when a friend of mine was kid B, and outweighed kid A by about 40 lbs. He just stood there and took it for about five minutes, then leveled him with one punch. When they pulled B's mom in to haul away her recalcitrant son, she asked the principal one question:
There are two quality levels for software: money-critical (often called mission-critical or business-critical) and life-critical. The former type of software causes people to lose time and/or money when it fails. The latter causes people to die when it fails.
Most programmers, including myself, do money-critical software. Unless we are specifically trained to write life-critical software, it would be dangerous to even try. Money-critical coders would write unacceptable bugs into life-critical code, killing people. OTOH, life-critical coders working on money-critical code would get fired for failing to show progress.
Life-critical software is rare; the Osprey fly-by-wire and similar code is part of that. Note that its nav computer, comm scrambler (if it has one), and similar systems are not life-critical.
The reliability of life-critical software must be incredible, by commercial standards. Think of a pacemaker. To make sure that its failure rate is rare, it needs to have an uptime of centuries; that is, we should have hundreds of pacemaker-years before a software glitch.
Even Linux doesn't have that sort of reliability. It claims uptime in years, not even decades.
If you want to write life-critical software, you havew to know exactly what you are doing. You need to test extensively. And you need to limit the scope to the bare minimum.
When you build an airplane, the life-critical software they put on board takes about as long to write as the plane takes to build. That means that a "simple" fly-by-wire system can take five to ten years to write.
Imagine writing commercial software that way. If you really wanted to, you could build a life-critical office suite. However:
It would run on the bare metal, because there isn't a desktop OS with life-critical quality to sit on
It would take ten years to build
It would have the features of a 1995 office suite
It would cost several times as much as similar software.
The priorities in money-critical software are radically different. We throw away the need for as much quality so that we can get the code out the door in six months, rather than ten years. For that, we get an amazing array of features, and very affordable software.
If we built money-critical software to life-critical standards, we might just might have gotten to QDOS by now. If we built life-critical software to money-critical standards, you'd never see me anywhere near a hospital or an airport.
The article aside, XP itself doesn't say that it solves all the problems. It even notes that it isn't even a good idea in all cases. Don't write fly-by-wire code with it, for instance; it's not that bug free (for that you need stuff with MTBF in centuries).
As far as bad programmers go, software development isn't flipping burgers. Bad programmers produce bad software, and nothing short of turning them into good programmers is going to change that. Even UML, practiced by bad programmers, produces bad, UML-compliant software.
XP allows mediocre programmers to create half-decent code, and it allows great programmers to create great code (by avoiding mucho bureaucracy). If you have gurus, great! If you have just good-enough programmers, you can still use XP and get better results with them than using something like UML (in most cases).
It's enforced and immediate peer review. This way, the bugs get found before you even compile, much less submit your changes to the group.
This speeds things up by sharply reducing the amount of time you spend tracking bugs down. It also allows you to program with confidence, something few of us can do. You can break out of the "I hope I don't break this" mentality to a "Let's see if this works" mentality. The latter is a lot faster, as you're not worried about stepping on land mines.
The solution? You need to become such a person among humanity that society will pick up the bill of maintaining your tombstone forever.
You don't even have to do that; there is a thing out there called Perpetual Care. You (or more likely, your survivors) pay a chunk of change up front. The care for the plot (and sometimes the stone itself) come out of the interest payments.
This is probably safer than having society pick up the bill; if you're one of those people, you're likely to be stripped bare by a 24th century descendant of Lara Croft, well after you'd be able to enjoy it.
First, we redefine Bill Gates to be God. I'm sure he'll like that, if only to keep Larry Ellison from taking the title.
If Bill Gates is God, than Microsoft is his faith, his personality cult. From there, we can use the First Amendment freedom of religion to keep M$ and U$A from getting into cahoots!
It's nice to see someone with some stones standing up to this kind of corporate strongarming.
It's also nice to see a school with the same. Dr. Touretzky isn't fronting the major legal risk here, his employer is for letting him put it on the school Web site. This is not to discount Dr. Touretzky at all, but also note that an institution is standing up for what's right and not just shutting him down. This is even cooler.
I agree with the poing you give above. However, I believe that your point is unrelated to the story.
IMHO, The child in question behaved quite responsibly, and with a maturity some adults could learn from. Like most of us, she sees that, whether it should or not, race does matter in today's society. Rather than trying to take sides, she conducted an experiment to quantify that phenomenon, and then presented her findings.
In response, the adults present removed a perfectly valid and useful science project from the fair.
As you state, children need discipline. That is, when a child does something irresponsible or wrong, they should be corrected. In this case, the child did something responsible and right. The exhibit was certainly controversial, but that does not make it wrong. It seems to me that they pulled the exhibit down because it was controversial. By doing so, they taught her that talking about race relations is wrong. They taught her, and all the other children there, that being controversial was wrong.
If we teach our children that being controversial is wrong, we raise stupid little sheep. And I, for one, refuse to raise mutton.
If the adults acted responsibly, they might point out the exhibit, and use it as a starting point for a discussion on race relations. This is certainly a topic worth discussing. For my money, understanding that we don't live in a colorblind society, understanding why, and understanding what we can do about it, is much more useful to an emerging adult than remembering which shape on the map represents Belgium.
Instead, they tried to further the illusion that we do live in a colorblind society. They taught the lesson "If you ignore the issue, maybe it will go away". I don't think any of us here are stupid enough to believe that.
I'll be blunt about it. You want to do one of three things. Either you have a real admin doing security on your network, you outsource the network to some security pros, or you do not hook up to the internet.
Last year, e-commerce sites got cracked, including one that was exclusively credit cards. These companies presumably know a lot more about IT than a medical facility does, and I'd rather have my credit numbers stolen than my med records.
Knowing what I do about computer security (I have been an e-commerce crypto-jockey), I would avoid any medical facility that allowed me to access my records from my home. I would tell my friends to do the same.
That being said, having those records online in an intranet (visible only inside the clinic) poses very little security risk, certainly nothing that would scare me. And having a public Web site that did things like give brief bios of the physicians ("Cool! My urologist came from Harvard!") and directions to the facility would make the clinic more attractive without increasing risks.
The middle ground has been with us for centuries--it is copyright law. The problem is the stuff that they add onto that.
Between license agreements and the DMCA, content providers attempt to limit your ability to use their content after you have already purchase a copy. In effect, they are trying to destroy the normal consumer model.
In the traditional consumer model, I go out and buy something--and it's mine. I can buy a car for the entire purpose of beating on it with a sledgehammer--or extracting the motor and running a generator out of it. I can buy a book for the entire purpose of lambasting it in an acidic review--or even for publically burning it. In this consumer model, I have an implied limited warranty--I can reasonably expect what I buy to work as advertised. And if it doesn't work, I can return it and get my money back.
The restrictions on use are the onerous issue. Should I be able to give you a copy of my copy of the Bleeding Trees' new album? No! Should I be able to buy something that allows me to copy music around? Yes! Having a tool that allows you to commit a crime is not commiting the crime. If I have a bag of lock-picking tools, am I a catburgler or a locksmith? If I have a password cracker, am I a cyberintruder or a sysadmin? If I have a Napster account, am I trading Metallica tracks or just distributing some from my garage band?
The line was drawn over a century ago. Corporate Power is moving that line, very quickly. I for one don't like it.
Re:Microsoft can't do anything about free..
on
Linux Is Going Down
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· Score: 2
IMHO, Microsoft knows exactly what Linux is about. They just want to make sure that the user base is sufficiently confused that they don't get it.
If that's how you feel about it, how do you suggest we come up with the next HIV/Cancer/Cholesterol fighting wonder drug? Or do you have several million dollars to plunge into research, and several million more to plunge into FDA approval? And then when you're done, will you be perfectly willing to sit back and let every pharmeceutical company in the country turn out the same pills without fronting the R&D costs?
If so, you're a better (and richer) person than I am.
Patents are not an inherently bad idea. They exist to make it worth your while to do the research and create. The fact that patents are used for different reasons now is a good cause to revamp the system (as BountyQuest is doing), but not good enough cause to eliminate the system altogether.
IMHO, BountyQuest improves the patent system (by helping keep people honest), keeping it truer to its basically good function. If you throw out the patent system entirely, then you make R&D in many fields much less profitable, and thus much less R&D is likely to be done.
The one thing is that space-based life is probably going to be mucho expensive. Remember, you have to pack everything with you, and it still takes a lot of fuel to get anything up there.
A cheaper solution might be colonizing the ocean surface or ocean floor. The surface has to deal with weather, the floor has to deal with pressure, but you have access to raw materials and the geek's best friend, cheap sushi!.
The disadvantage is that other countries already have weapons designed to destroy such facilities, so you have to invest in an armed force and/or treaties. In space, people have yet to mass-produce the weapons that can take out a station.
Methinks that geeks would actually be better at finding prior art than lawyers. Presumably, lawyers look through legislation and case law like geeks look through source code. Prior art is not to be found there. It is to be found by industry research, and the best indurstry researchers are those in the business.
Lawyers are experts at taking evidence and swaying a judge and/or jury with them, but they are not usually experts at collecting evidence. That's why we have expert witnesses. Heck, even Perry Mason had a private investigator;^>
Slashdot Mirror
Another situation required sysadmins to be phonable (not merely pageable)--they required that the sysadmin had a cell phone. Amazingly, they refused to pay the cell bill.
If a user is playing Tetris on a computer controlling your life support system, there are two top priority bugs:
- The life support system has a bug in that it supports Tetris
- The user is exhibiting an ID10T bug in his own brain by playing Tetris on the life support computer.
Commercial grade platforms, including Linux and Unix (possibly excepting QNX), don't have bet-your-life reliability. Do you trust your life support to an OS that's been around for ten years and has an MTBF in years? For that sort of thing, I expect MTBF in decades or centuries! I will bet my money on something like Linux, but not my life.Bet-your-life systems tend to be very small, very limited in their functionality, isolated from the outside world, and tested up the yin-yang. If you are building a system that needs such systems, and want to add additional capabilities, the accepted practice is to put those capabilities on another computer that can't impact the bet-your-life system.
Take an airplane as an example. If it has a fly-by-wire system, that is a seperate computer. If there is a life support computer (do you need a computer to regulate pressure and the like?), that would be a separate computer. If it has an autopilot, that is a seperate computer. Other systems you can live without, such as navigation and targeting (on military jets), are again separate computers.
For that matter, there are airlines that want to provide net access in flight. This means that they have to have a small ISP on board their planes. These are certainly not going to get tied into the flight control computers. If they did, they can get infected with a virus in flight. By keeping the computers disconnected, any attacks on or failures of the ISP computers have no impact on flying the plane.
By doing this, engineers are able to protect the computing resources that you can't live without.
If you can play Tetris on your life-support system, then you lack the above isolation, and are betting your life on a system that may have bugs.
Now if I could get a mouse or equivalent that works with my fingers on the home row, that would be cool.
One nice thing about the closed-cell foam is that it can be cut, so one pad can handle several pieces of hardware.
One problem with them is that they are effective insulators--this is bad for anything that vents out the bottom.
Finally, and just for the sake of argument, I'd (gently) topple any towers--lay everything horizontally.
Finally, somebody has figured out a way to get enough PCs together to run an NT web site!
They probably use a proprietary ethernet-based protocol, and use the c/port (and a similar unit in the cage) to modulate between proprietary and SVGA.
Of course, that wouldn't work, because your firstborn child is already given away as part of the Microsoft EULA.
You've obviously never been to Boston or New York.
Especially during baseball season
The problem is that we're talking about the Machine here.
Someone who is different, extremely bright, and imaginative is almost by definition a danger.
That person is a danger to the status quo.
Take the example of of Ghandi. He was all of the above. He wouldn't hurt a fly. And by not hurting a fly, he wrested control of a major nation from what was the dominant world power.
Quite literally, he was the most dangerous man in the British Empire.
Put the different, bright, and imaginative people among those of the status quo, and you get one of two things. Either you get people who want to ride their coattails, or (more likely) you get people with a tremendous urge to beat down that person as hard and as fast as possible, before they have a chance to change the world. I don't think we're taught to do that. I think it's genetic--a survival instinct to keep some mad genius from turning us all on a dime.
It isn't pretty, and it isn't right. But it is so. It's as much a law of nature as gravity, and we have to learn it and work with it.
That happened to me as well, though not nearly so often. I've seen, and been in, cases where kid A beats on kid B for a long time in front of faculty, then B retaliates. Only then is it called and both kids suspended.
I have a few theories on this.
- The school justice system is based on the hockey justice system. This is also why they don't call the first infraction, but only the retaliatory one. Maybe you need a goon on your team?
- If kid B is just taking punches and not throwing them, it's not a fight, it's a beating. And I've never seen a H.S. rule against beatings. You see, the faculty's hands are tied until kid B retaliates.
- If kid B is doing the Right Thing and not hitting back, then it obviously can't be that bad...don't worry about it.
BTW, the best one I remember was when a friend of mine was kid B, and outweighed kid A by about 40 lbs. He just stood there and took it for about five minutes, then leveled him with one punch. When they pulled B's mom in to haul away her recalcitrant son, she asked the principal one question:"Did he win?"
"Well, yes..."
"Good!"
Most programmers, including myself, do money-critical software. Unless we are specifically trained to write life-critical software, it would be dangerous to even try. Money-critical coders would write unacceptable bugs into life-critical code, killing people. OTOH, life-critical coders working on money-critical code would get fired for failing to show progress.
Life-critical software is rare; the Osprey fly-by-wire and similar code is part of that. Note that its nav computer, comm scrambler (if it has one), and similar systems are not life-critical.
The reliability of life-critical software must be incredible, by commercial standards. Think of a pacemaker. To make sure that its failure rate is rare, it needs to have an uptime of centuries; that is, we should have hundreds of pacemaker-years before a software glitch.
Even Linux doesn't have that sort of reliability. It claims uptime in years, not even decades.
If you want to write life-critical software, you havew to know exactly what you are doing. You need to test extensively. And you need to limit the scope to the bare minimum.
When you build an airplane, the life-critical software they put on board takes about as long to write as the plane takes to build. That means that a "simple" fly-by-wire system can take five to ten years to write.
Imagine writing commercial software that way. If you really wanted to, you could build a life-critical office suite. However:
The priorities in money-critical software are radically different. We throw away the need for as much quality so that we can get the code out the door in six months, rather than ten years. For that, we get an amazing array of features, and very affordable software.
If we built money-critical software to life-critical standards, we might just might have gotten to QDOS by now. If we built life-critical software to money-critical standards, you'd never see me anywhere near a hospital or an airport.
The article aside, XP itself doesn't say that it solves all the problems. It even notes that it isn't even a good idea in all cases. Don't write fly-by-wire code with it, for instance; it's not that bug free (for that you need stuff with MTBF in centuries). As far as bad programmers go, software development isn't flipping burgers. Bad programmers produce bad software, and nothing short of turning them into good programmers is going to change that. Even UML, practiced by bad programmers, produces bad, UML-compliant software. XP allows mediocre programmers to create half-decent code, and it allows great programmers to create great code (by avoiding mucho bureaucracy). If you have gurus, great! If you have just good-enough programmers, you can still use XP and get better results with them than using something like UML (in most cases).
This speeds things up by sharply reducing the amount of time you spend tracking bugs down. It also allows you to program with confidence, something few of us can do. You can break out of the "I hope I don't break this" mentality to a "Let's see if this works" mentality. The latter is a lot faster, as you're not worried about stepping on land mines.
You don't even have to do that; there is a thing out there called Perpetual Care. You (or more likely, your survivors) pay a chunk of change up front. The care for the plot (and sometimes the stone itself) come out of the interest payments.
This is probably safer than having society pick up the bill; if you're one of those people, you're likely to be stripped bare by a 24th century descendant of Lara Croft, well after you'd be able to enjoy it.
Here's the plan.
First, we redefine Bill Gates to be God. I'm sure he'll like that, if only to keep Larry Ellison from taking the title.
If Bill Gates is God, than Microsoft is his faith, his personality cult. From there, we can use the First Amendment freedom of religion to keep M$ and U$A from getting into cahoots!
Yow! Am I CONSING yet?!?
I think that this was User Friendly from last month!
It's also nice to see a school with the same. Dr. Touretzky isn't fronting the major legal risk here, his employer is for letting him put it on the school Web site. This is not to discount Dr. Touretzky at all, but also note that an institution is standing up for what's right and not just shutting him down. This is even cooler.
Of course, we don't need that today. We have Neon Genesis Evangelion...
IMHO, The child in question behaved quite responsibly, and with a maturity some adults could learn from. Like most of us, she sees that, whether it should or not, race does matter in today's society. Rather than trying to take sides, she conducted an experiment to quantify that phenomenon, and then presented her findings.
In response, the adults present removed a perfectly valid and useful science project from the fair.
As you state, children need discipline. That is, when a child does something irresponsible or wrong, they should be corrected. In this case, the child did something responsible and right. The exhibit was certainly controversial, but that does not make it wrong. It seems to me that they pulled the exhibit down because it was controversial. By doing so, they taught her that talking about race relations is wrong. They taught her, and all the other children there, that being controversial was wrong.
If we teach our children that being controversial is wrong, we raise stupid little sheep. And I, for one, refuse to raise mutton.
If the adults acted responsibly, they might point out the exhibit, and use it as a starting point for a discussion on race relations. This is certainly a topic worth discussing. For my money, understanding that we don't live in a colorblind society, understanding why, and understanding what we can do about it, is much more useful to an emerging adult than remembering which shape on the map represents Belgium.
Instead, they tried to further the illusion that we do live in a colorblind society. They taught the lesson "If you ignore the issue, maybe it will go away". I don't think any of us here are stupid enough to believe that.
Last year, e-commerce sites got cracked, including one that was exclusively credit cards. These companies presumably know a lot more about IT than a medical facility does, and I'd rather have my credit numbers stolen than my med records.
Knowing what I do about computer security (I have been an e-commerce crypto-jockey), I would avoid any medical facility that allowed me to access my records from my home. I would tell my friends to do the same.
That being said, having those records online in an intranet (visible only inside the clinic) poses very little security risk, certainly nothing that would scare me. And having a public Web site that did things like give brief bios of the physicians ("Cool! My urologist came from Harvard!") and directions to the facility would make the clinic more attractive without increasing risks.
Between license agreements and the DMCA, content providers attempt to limit your ability to use their content after you have already purchase a copy. In effect, they are trying to destroy the normal consumer model.
In the traditional consumer model, I go out and buy something--and it's mine. I can buy a car for the entire purpose of beating on it with a sledgehammer--or extracting the motor and running a generator out of it. I can buy a book for the entire purpose of lambasting it in an acidic review--or even for publically burning it. In this consumer model, I have an implied limited warranty--I can reasonably expect what I buy to work as advertised. And if it doesn't work, I can return it and get my money back.
The restrictions on use are the onerous issue. Should I be able to give you a copy of my copy of the Bleeding Trees' new album? No! Should I be able to buy something that allows me to copy music around? Yes! Having a tool that allows you to commit a crime is not commiting the crime. If I have a bag of lock-picking tools, am I a catburgler or a locksmith? If I have a password cracker, am I a cyberintruder or a sysadmin? If I have a Napster account, am I trading Metallica tracks or just distributing some from my garage band?
The line was drawn over a century ago. Corporate Power is moving that line, very quickly. I for one don't like it.
IMHO, Microsoft knows exactly what Linux is about. They just want to make sure that the user base is sufficiently confused that they don't get it.
If so, you're a better (and richer) person than I am.
Patents are not an inherently bad idea. They exist to make it worth your while to do the research and create. The fact that patents are used for different reasons now is a good cause to revamp the system (as BountyQuest is doing), but not good enough cause to eliminate the system altogether.
IMHO, BountyQuest improves the patent system (by helping keep people honest), keeping it truer to its basically good function. If you throw out the patent system entirely, then you make R&D in many fields much less profitable, and thus much less R&D is likely to be done.
A cheaper solution might be colonizing the ocean surface or ocean floor. The surface has to deal with weather, the floor has to deal with pressure, but you have access to raw materials and the geek's best friend, cheap sushi!.
The disadvantage is that other countries already have weapons designed to destroy such facilities, so you have to invest in an armed force and/or treaties. In space, people have yet to mass-produce the weapons that can take out a station.
Lawyers are experts at taking evidence and swaying a judge and/or jury with them, but they are not usually experts at collecting evidence. That's why we have expert witnesses. Heck, even Perry Mason had a private investigator ;^>