In 1998, I was invited to make a presentation to a state licensing board showing them ways people could use technology to cheat on their license exams. Preparing for that seminar was the most fun I'd had in a long time! Why is that relevant?
Imagine, if you will, hundreds of students taking a test in a large classroom. One of them, near the back of the room, perhaps, has a little chat session running on his handheld, allowing his friend who took that test during the previous period to feed him all kinds of useful information. Hmmm.
Coming up with a dozen other ways to cheat on exams using a campus-wide wireless network is left as an exersize for the reader. Coming up with a reliable way to prevent such cheating is a great career move for anyone interested in an IT position with the school.
Pinball Wizard asked, "if this "problem" has been around since the mid-80's why has it never been exploited?"
It has been. To cite the best-known example, this vulnerability is what Kevin Mitnick used to break into Tsutomu Shimomura's computers, which triggered Shimomura's vendetta, and eventually led to Mitnick getting caught and spending several years in jail.
First, rdl said, "The reason most ISPs don't filter their outgoing traffic is that most cisco routers will end up with 100% cpu utilization to do basic filtering on any decent sized pipe."
Then, he followed up with, "Juniper, among others, make routers which can do filtering on the interface cards themselves..."
Does anyone else see the inherent conflict in those two statements? Gee, let's take the low-end Cisco products, which use interface cards about as sophisticated as the NIC in your PC, and compare them with Juniper's top-of-the-line products.
Cisco products like the 7500 and the 12000 also do filtering (based on ACLs) directly on the line cards. A friend who does testing on the GSR line says that they can indeed maintain linerate on an OC192, and without getting packets out of sequence like the Juniper machines do.
The article failed to point out the main reason that we'll never see computer viruses stamped out.
Diseases (computer and biological) propogate through some kind of vector. One way to fight the disease is to control or destroy the vector. You want to prevent the spread of malaria? Wipe out the Anopheles gambiae mosquito.
The latest rash of computer viruses (worms), including such favorites as Naked Wife and Melissa, spread through ignorance and stupidity (how long will it take people to learn not to open attachments?). I don't expect to see that particular vector controlled or eliminated in the near future.
Certainly there are laws to protect consumers. In theory, we'd read the licensing agreement from Microsoft, have a good belly laugh, and buy someone else's product. The theory breaks down in practice, however:
First, the vast majority of people don't bother to read license agreements, so they don't know about these restrictions until long after they've bought the product.
Second, Microsoft's monopoly means many of us don't have a choice what product we use. The company we work for shoves Microsoft down our throats so that they can be "compatible" (note: I'm lucky enough to work for a company where over 1/3 of the employees use Unix or Linux, and we use Oracle rather than Microsoft's DBM products).
Last, but not least, a bizarre twist to U.S. laws allows for an abomination called a "shrink-wrap license," which you don't see until after you've implicitly agreed to it by opening the shrink wrap around the box it resides in.
And, by the way, if you think this twist on the reviews is bad, how about a licensing caveat from the industry I used to work in? When you buy the software, you agree to pay the software manufacturer a "software license transfer fee" of several hundred dollars if you ever sell it. Nasty, eh? I was proud to be the only leading software vendor in that industry that didn't charge those "transfer fees."
"Most companies incorporate in Delaware"? You actually believe that over 50% of U.S. corporations are incorporated in Delaware? If you look up the actual numbers, I think you'll be surprised. Most companies that incorporate do so in their home state.
Remember the old homily that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link? You can set up your server on Sealand, become a Sealand citizen, take up permanent residency on Sealand, and the weak link remains the same. It only takes one addition to the ACLs (access control lists) in the router at the other end of your Internet connection to block your server. A couple of minutes' work in England (or whomever HavenCo buys connectivity from), and you're shut off.
You'll still be operating, and still be sovereign, but it won't do you much good if nobody other than Sealand residents can access your system!
I know it's in their license, but I have a serious ethical problem with a company being able to control "independent" reviews of their products.
I believe that it's only reasonable for a company doing product reviews to allow the vendor to respond. If Network World puts up a review saying that SQL is slower on NT5^H^H^HWin2000 than on NT4, Microsoft should not be able to kill the review. They should be able to respond, and Network World should post the response along with their review. That's called responsible journalism.
Chuck Flynn wrote "The real problem is why chip manufacturers are selling mislabeled chips to begin with. In any other industry, that'd be considered fraud."
You're joking, right? A company tests a chip at 500MHz and determines that the majority of their products pass. They happen to get a good one that works safely and within temperature and power specs at 650MHz, and you're ready to charge them with fraud? That's insane.
Personally, I fail to see why there's such an issue surrounding overclocking. If you want to modify your home PC to run faster, be my guest. If you want to modify your car to run faster, have fun. Why should anyone tell you not to mess with your PC? If you break it, it's your own fault.
Remarkers, however, are another story, unless they're willing to provide some heavy-duty warranties...
What if you could comment on the ad banners, such as each ad banner has its own discussion forum?
I think that's an outstanding idea. Slashdot is, after all, a forum for discussion. The number of comments posted here shows that we like to share information and opinions. The advertisers would benefit from the feedback: a bad banner would be flamed and (hopefully) fixed, and a successful ad would generate a productive discussion of the product or service.
"Never show me this ad again or I swear I will lose it and someone will have to call security."
Most of the time I ignore banner ads that don't interest me, but (advertisers& webmasters write this down) I have actually stopped visiting sites because of banner ads. In one case, the flashing was so annoying I didn't want it on my screen, and in another, I didn't want the risque girlie pictures in the ads on my screen at work. Those sites wouldn't have lost me as a visitor if I could have turned off those ads.
And don't tell me about the programs I could have loaded to shut off the banner ads-- I actually look at banner ads, and I've bought products because of them. I dislike banners that don't explain what they're selling, but good relevant banners actually bring value to a site.
What if you could select which kinds of ads you want to see, and which kinds of ads you don't want to see?
That depends entirely on the site and how much I trust them. Amazon.com knows a lot about me. I like their policies and I've been a customer for years. I don't know you from a hole in the ground. Why should I share my private demographic information with you without knowing who you'll sell it to?
As you accumulate karma points in our ad system...
While a karma-based system would work on a gearhead site like slashdot, it would be hopeless for mainstream sites where the users are lucky if they can enter a boolean search correctly.
This concept would require a lot of thought and a lot of work to make it cheat-proof, and I'm not sure the benefit is there.
One day this web site will be free of your commercial opportunist tryannical business, all the trolls will leave, this site will be cool again, and then food will taste better!
Just strain the food through that metal colander you're wearing on your head: it does wonders. And you wouldn't want the trolls to leave! Just as chili powder, paprika, and cilantro add flavor to your food, trolls add flavor to a discussion forum. It's the people who don't know how to deal with trolls that get annoying. Besides, think how much better Linux would be if Microsoft took it over, and how many fewer bugs there'd be if every new baby in the country was issued a handgun and a once-per-lifetime "get out of jail for shooting a programmer who failed to test and document his braindead kludge" card.
Electric Angst has come up with either the most innovative troll for the day or the most twisted justification for unethical behavior that I've ever seen. Either way, his post makes entertaining reading, and his psychiatrist's reports (which God Himself wants us all to read) would be even more entertaining.
Legally, this all boils down to one question: Is leaving a file share set up with no password equivalent to (a) leaving your front door unlocked so friends can come on in, or (b) leaving your front door open with a "come on in" sign so anybody can come in?
If you subscribe to point-of-view (a) above, then the ShareSniffer people are advocating using the tool for the electronic equivalent of walking down the street checking doors to see if they're locked, which can get you arrested. If you believe (b) above, then it's equivalent to walking through a commercial district and into an open shop door, which is not only legal, but encouraged.
Is this any different from the wardialers of the 1980s or the port scanners of the 1990s? I don't think so. I tend to take the point of view that tools aren't evil, only what people do with them. That would say the ShareSniffer folks didn't do anything wrong just by writing the tool, just like I (oops, I mean that guy I knew back in college) didn't do anything wrong by writing a TCP/UDP port scanner some years ago.
I love Eric's writing style. "the vast invisible
dark mass of COBOL financial applications," indeed!
I'd be interested to know what Larry Wall thinks of Eric's assertion that Perl was specifically designed to replace Awk. I don't know Larry myself, but I've sure gotten the impression that he designed Perl specifically to handle some tasks that Awk couldn't handle. I don't think he actually set out to design a language that all Awk users would switch to. Maybe I'm wrong...
The big question, though, is whether any SlashDotters can fill in Eric's first "fixme" note and point to any studies listing the breakdown of bug types in C code. As a longtime C coder, I'd agree that the majority of errors I've made and seen in other's code had to do with memory management, but is it really 90%? There are certainly a lot of OBO errors and misunderstanding of specifications and version control errors and algorithmic mistakes and just plain typos, too. Do those all aggregate to 10% or less of the total C bugs? Hard to believe.
11thangel wrote "I even found an old password protection cgi two YEARS ago that did that."
I presume you didn't read the press release or the patent. The application for Patent #US6192407 was filed on April 4, 1997, and prior art is only relevant if it happened before the patent was filed, not before it was granted.
That tidbit notwithstanding, the mind still boggles at this patent. The U.S. Patent Office is a random and capricious place! I filed for a patent five years ago for an ergonomic stenographic keyboard, split in two parts which could be attached to the arms of a court reporter's chair, lessening carpal tunnel syndrome problems by changing arm positions. The Patent Office declared it to be "obvious." Then they grant this piece of silliness? Good grief!
jmenenzes nitpicked "...it clearly states that its free to use as you see fit for personal use, or internally for R&D purposes WITHOUT notifying apple..."
See my response to bnenning for a broad view of my reasoning. To get down to the details you cite, I'm presuming you haven't had the misfortune to deal much with lawyers? Especially lawyers for very large companies?
If I modify something "for my own use" in a small-business environment, and use it every day, does that constitute "release to a production environment"? How about if I allow my co-workers to use it? I guarantee that if a lawsuit were filed, my lawyer would answer "no" to both questions and Apple's lawyer would answer "yes." Apple has quite a bit more money than I do, which means that in today's legal environment, they'd step all over me.
The first rule in dealing with contracts is to practice preventive law. Don't sign anything that can be interpreted against you. Clearly, there are holes in the APSL you could drive a truck through, and I don't like them.
bnenning quoted a single sentence from my article and wrote "From my reading of the APSL this is incorrect."
Please read the rest of the paragraph you lifted that sentence from. You'll see that I'm referring to home and business use. When one does freelance writing/coding and/or owns one's own business, then the line becomes very fuzzy between personal use and business use.
I wrote my computer off on my taxes because I use it for work. A strict reading of the APSL would probably cause any changes I made to be interepreted as not being for "personal use."
I appreciate the comments, but please read the entire message you're responding to rather than quoting me out of context.
I think one of the most egregious parts of the new APSL is the clause preventing you from making modifications for your own use without sending them in to Apple. One of the great benefits of open source software is the ability to tweak it to fit your own unique or perverse environment, whether it's home or business.
I change things. I hack. I added trailer brake controls to my pickup truck and put diamond plate steel in high-wear parts of the bed. I put longer power cords on some of my tools. I've made numerous tweaks to my computer hardware. I made holes in a bookshelf for power cords so I could put electronics in it.
People modify their environment. It's one of our distinguishing characteristics. I deeply resent a software vendor telling me that I can't tweak with their open source software unless I'm willing to send them my changes, and I have a feeling I'm not the only one.
Vanders wrote: "And no, outside of unit testing, the coder cannot teste their own code properly!"
I'd take exception with your exception. In managing programmers, you should always have someone else review test cases, including unit tests. One of the most common reasons for malfunctioning code is programmers misunderstanding the requirements. I guarantee you, if they don't understand the requirements when they write the code, they won't understand when they write the test wrappers and/or stubs, either.
It's good to have programmers write test code and devise test strategies. It makes them think. Having them do test code/specs for each other, too, makes them think even more.
I'm sure, however, since Vanders does testing for a living, he (?) will agree that a professional fulltime tester brings yet another perpective, and will find problems the programmers don't find.
The more testing methodologies you employ, the more problems you find.
The earlier you start thinking about testing, the less problems there will be to find.
The more problems you find in released code, the more there probably are still waiting to be found.
There are many factors more important than "cybercourts" in selecting the location of a startup company. Yes, by the way, I've been there and done that. I chose locations for corporate headquarters based in large part on where I lived at the time, and set up operations elsewhere as well when it made financial sense. Why start a company for someone else's convenience?
When I've started companies, I've done it with the hope that I'd never end up in a courtroom at all, cyber or otherwise. I certainly wouldn't choose a different state just because it would be more convenient for people who wished to sue me!
Real factors in selecting a startup location include state income taxes, cost of employees (disability insurance, worker's comp, and such), ability to find qualified employees in the area (for non-telecommuting positions), proximity to customers (it's convenient to have beta testers close at hand), real estate prices, the reputation of other businesses in the area, crime rates in the area, proximity to vendors (shipping can be a significant cost of business), and proximity to good schools (if you can't find good, well-trained employees, grow your own).
I think that list would be two or three times that length before I'd add "being in a state with cybercourts," and my last startup was in the legal software business!
As one last closing thought, the court systems of the U.S. are becoming more "electronic" all the time. People are often deposed by teleconference or videoconference during the discovery phase, transcripts are being e-filed and digitally signed, court documents are available in a number of different databases, and with the advent of Legal XML, it's all becoming more accessible to the average citizen. None of this is unique to any one state.
Slashdot Mirror
In 1998, I was invited to make a presentation to a state licensing board showing them ways people could use technology to cheat on their license exams. Preparing for that seminar was the most fun I'd had in a long time! Why is that relevant?
Imagine, if you will, hundreds of students taking a test in a large classroom. One of them, near the back of the room, perhaps, has a little chat session running on his handheld, allowing his friend who took that test during the previous period to feed him all kinds of useful information. Hmmm.
Coming up with a dozen other ways to cheat on exams using a campus-wide wireless network is left as an exersize for the reader. Coming up with a reliable way to prevent such cheating is a great career move for anyone interested in an IT position with the school.
Pinball Wizard asked, "if this "problem" has been around since the mid-80's why has it never been exploited?"
It has been. To cite the best-known example, this vulnerability is what Kevin Mitnick used to break into Tsutomu Shimomura's computers, which triggered Shimomura's vendetta, and eventually led to Mitnick getting caught and spending several years in jail.
First, rdl said, "The reason most ISPs don't filter their outgoing traffic is that most cisco routers will end up with 100% cpu utilization to do basic filtering on any decent sized pipe."
Then, he followed up with, "Juniper, among others, make routers which can do filtering on the interface cards themselves..."
Does anyone else see the inherent conflict in those two statements? Gee, let's take the low-end Cisco products, which use interface cards about as sophisticated as the NIC in your PC, and compare them with Juniper's top-of-the-line products.
Cisco products like the 7500 and the 12000 also do filtering (based on ACLs) directly on the line cards. A friend who does testing on the GSR line says that they can indeed maintain linerate on an OC192, and without getting packets out of sequence like the Juniper machines do.
Let's compare apples and apples here.
The article failed to point out the main reason that we'll never see computer viruses stamped out.
Diseases (computer and biological) propogate through some kind of vector. One way to fight the disease is to control or destroy the vector. You want to prevent the spread of malaria? Wipe out the Anopheles gambiae mosquito.
The latest rash of computer viruses (worms), including such favorites as Naked Wife and Melissa, spread through ignorance and stupidity (how long will it take people to learn not to open attachments?). I don't expect to see that particular vector controlled or eliminated in the near future.
Certainly there are laws to protect consumers. In theory, we'd read the licensing agreement from Microsoft, have a good belly laugh, and buy someone else's product. The theory breaks down in practice, however:
First, the vast majority of people don't bother to read license agreements, so they don't know about these restrictions until long after they've bought the product.
Second, Microsoft's monopoly means many of us don't have a choice what product we use. The company we work for shoves Microsoft down our throats so that they can be "compatible" (note: I'm lucky enough to work for a company where over 1/3 of the employees use Unix or Linux, and we use Oracle rather than Microsoft's DBM products).
Last, but not least, a bizarre twist to U.S. laws allows for an abomination called a "shrink-wrap license," which you don't see until after you've implicitly agreed to it by opening the shrink wrap around the box it resides in.
And, by the way, if you think this twist on the reviews is bad, how about a licensing caveat from the industry I used to work in? When you buy the software, you agree to pay the software manufacturer a "software license transfer fee" of several hundred dollars if you ever sell it. Nasty, eh? I was proud to be the only leading software vendor in that industry that didn't charge those "transfer fees."
"Most companies incorporate in Delaware"? You actually believe that over 50% of U.S. corporations are incorporated in Delaware? If you look up the actual numbers, I think you'll be surprised. Most companies that incorporate do so in their home state.
Remember the old homily that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link? You can set up your server on Sealand, become a Sealand citizen, take up permanent residency on Sealand, and the weak link remains the same. It only takes one addition to the ACLs (access control lists) in the router at the other end of your Internet connection to block your server. A couple of minutes' work in England (or whomever HavenCo buys connectivity from), and you're shut off.
You'll still be operating, and still be sovereign, but it won't do you much good if nobody other than Sealand residents can access your system!
I know it's in their license, but I have a serious ethical problem with a company being able to control "independent" reviews of their products.
I believe that it's only reasonable for a company doing product reviews to allow the vendor to respond. If Network World puts up a review saying that SQL is slower on NT5^H^H^HWin2000 than on NT4, Microsoft should not be able to kill the review. They should be able to respond, and Network World should post the response along with their review. That's called responsible journalism.
Chuck Flynn wrote "The real problem is why chip manufacturers are selling mislabeled chips to begin with. In any other industry, that'd be considered fraud."
You're joking, right? A company tests a chip at 500MHz and determines that the majority of their products pass. They happen to get a good one that works safely and within temperature and power specs at 650MHz, and you're ready to charge them with fraud? That's insane.
Personally, I fail to see why there's such an issue surrounding overclocking. If you want to modify your home PC to run faster, be my guest. If you want to modify your car to run faster, have fun. Why should anyone tell you not to mess with your PC? If you break it, it's your own fault.
Remarkers, however, are another story, unless they're willing to provide some heavy-duty warranties...
What if you could comment on the ad banners, such as each ad banner has its own discussion forum?
I think that's an outstanding idea. Slashdot is, after all, a forum for discussion. The number of comments posted here shows that we like to share information and opinions. The advertisers would benefit from the feedback: a bad banner would be flamed and (hopefully) fixed, and a successful ad would generate a productive discussion of the product or service.
"Never show me this ad again or I swear I will lose it and someone will have to call security."
Most of the time I ignore banner ads that don't interest me, but (advertisers& webmasters write this down) I have actually stopped visiting sites because of banner ads. In one case, the flashing was so annoying I didn't want it on my screen, and in another, I didn't want the risque girlie pictures in the ads on my screen at work. Those sites wouldn't have lost me as a visitor if I could have turned off those ads.
And don't tell me about the programs I could have loaded to shut off the banner ads-- I actually look at banner ads, and I've bought products because of them. I dislike banners that don't explain what they're selling, but good relevant banners actually bring value to a site.
What if you could select which kinds of ads you want to see, and which kinds of ads you don't want to see?
That depends entirely on the site and how much I trust them. Amazon.com knows a lot about me. I like their policies and I've been a customer for years. I don't know you from a hole in the ground. Why should I share my private demographic information with you without knowing who you'll sell it to?
As you accumulate karma points in our ad system...
While a karma-based system would work on a gearhead site like slashdot, it would be hopeless for mainstream sites where the users are lucky if they can enter a boolean search correctly.
This concept would require a lot of thought and a lot of work to make it cheat-proof, and I'm not sure the benefit is there.
One day this web site will be free of your commercial opportunist tryannical business, all the trolls will leave, this site will be cool again, and then food will taste better!
Just strain the food through that metal colander you're wearing on your head: it does wonders. And you wouldn't want the trolls to leave! Just as chili powder, paprika, and cilantro add flavor to your food, trolls add flavor to a discussion forum. It's the people who don't know how to deal with trolls that get annoying. Besides, think how much better Linux would be if Microsoft took it over, and how many fewer bugs there'd be if every new baby in the country was issued a handgun and a once-per-lifetime "get out of jail for shooting a programmer who failed to test and document his braindead kludge" card.
Was this just a rhetorical question?
If you have a life outside of work, then of course you're going to consider it when selecting a job.
If you don't have a life outside of work, then your job is your social life, so it would be impossible to choose one without considering the other.
Either way, you've taken your social life into consideration.
Electric Angst has come up with either the most innovative troll for the day or the most twisted justification for unethical behavior that I've ever seen. Either way, his post makes entertaining reading, and his psychiatrist's reports (which God Himself wants us all to read) would be even more entertaining.
Legally, this all boils down to one question: Is leaving a file share set up with no password equivalent to (a) leaving your front door unlocked so friends can come on in, or (b) leaving your front door open with a "come on in" sign so anybody can come in?
If you subscribe to point-of-view (a) above, then the ShareSniffer people are advocating using the tool for the electronic equivalent of walking down the street checking doors to see if they're locked, which can get you arrested. If you believe (b) above, then it's equivalent to walking through a commercial district and into an open shop door, which is not only legal, but encouraged.
Is this any different from the wardialers of the 1980s or the port scanners of the 1990s? I don't think so. I tend to take the point of view that tools aren't evil, only what people do with them. That would say the ShareSniffer folks didn't do anything wrong just by writing the tool, just like I (oops, I mean that guy I knew back in college) didn't do anything wrong by writing a TCP/UDP port scanner some years ago.
I love Eric's writing style. "the vast invisible dark mass of COBOL financial applications," indeed!
I'd be interested to know what Larry Wall thinks of Eric's assertion that Perl was specifically designed to replace Awk. I don't know Larry myself, but I've sure gotten the impression that he designed Perl specifically to handle some tasks that Awk couldn't handle. I don't think he actually set out to design a language that all Awk users would switch to. Maybe I'm wrong...
The big question, though, is whether any SlashDotters can fill in Eric's first "fixme" note and point to any studies listing the breakdown of bug types in C code. As a longtime C coder, I'd agree that the majority of errors I've made and seen in other's code had to do with memory management, but is it really 90%? There are certainly a lot of OBO errors and misunderstanding of specifications and version control errors and algorithmic mistakes and just plain typos, too. Do those all aggregate to 10% or less of the total C bugs? Hard to believe.
11thangel wrote "I even found an old password protection cgi two YEARS ago that did that."
I presume you didn't read the press release or the patent. The application for Patent #US6192407 was filed on April 4, 1997, and prior art is only relevant if it happened before the patent was filed, not before it was granted.
That tidbit notwithstanding, the mind still boggles at this patent. The U.S. Patent Office is a random and capricious place! I filed for a patent five years ago for an ergonomic stenographic keyboard, split in two parts which could be attached to the arms of a court reporter's chair, lessening carpal tunnel syndrome problems by changing arm positions. The Patent Office declared it to be "obvious." Then they grant this piece of silliness? Good grief!
jmenenzes nitpicked "...it clearly states that its free to use as you see fit for personal use, or internally for R&D purposes WITHOUT notifying apple..."
See my response to bnenning for a broad view of my reasoning. To get down to the details you cite, I'm presuming you haven't had the misfortune to deal much with lawyers? Especially lawyers for very large companies?
If I modify something "for my own use" in a small-business environment, and use it every day, does that constitute "release to a production environment"? How about if I allow my co-workers to use it? I guarantee that if a lawsuit were filed, my lawyer would answer "no" to both questions and Apple's lawyer would answer "yes." Apple has quite a bit more money than I do, which means that in today's legal environment, they'd step all over me.
The first rule in dealing with contracts is to practice preventive law. Don't sign anything that can be interpreted against you. Clearly, there are holes in the APSL you could drive a truck through, and I don't like them.
bnenning quoted a single sentence from my article and wrote "From my reading of the APSL this is incorrect."
Please read the rest of the paragraph you lifted that sentence from. You'll see that I'm referring to home and business use. When one does freelance writing/coding and/or owns one's own business, then the line becomes very fuzzy between personal use and business use.
I wrote my computer off on my taxes because I use it for work. A strict reading of the APSL would probably cause any changes I made to be interepreted as not being for "personal use."
I appreciate the comments, but please read the entire message you're responding to rather than quoting me out of context.
I think one of the most egregious parts of the new APSL is the clause preventing you from making modifications for your own use without sending them in to Apple. One of the great benefits of open source software is the ability to tweak it to fit your own unique or perverse environment, whether it's home or business.
I change things. I hack. I added trailer brake controls to my pickup truck and put diamond plate steel in high-wear parts of the bed. I put longer power cords on some of my tools. I've made numerous tweaks to my computer hardware. I made holes in a bookshelf for power cords so I could put electronics in it.
People modify their environment. It's one of our distinguishing characteristics. I deeply resent a software vendor telling me that I can't tweak with their open source software unless I'm willing to send them my changes, and I have a feeling I'm not the only one.
Vanders wrote: "And no, outside of unit testing, the coder cannot teste their own code properly!"
I'd take exception with your exception. In managing programmers, you should always have someone else review test cases, including unit tests. One of the most common reasons for malfunctioning code is programmers misunderstanding the requirements. I guarantee you, if they don't understand the requirements when they write the code, they won't understand when they write the test wrappers and/or stubs, either.
It's good to have programmers write test code and devise test strategies. It makes them think. Having them do test code/specs for each other, too, makes them think even more.
I'm sure, however, since Vanders does testing for a living, he (?) will agree that a professional fulltime tester brings yet another perpective, and will find problems the programmers don't find.
The more testing methodologies you employ, the more problems you find.
The earlier you start thinking about testing, the less problems there will be to find.
The more problems you find in released code, the more there probably are still waiting to be found.
There are many factors more important than "cybercourts" in selecting the location of a startup company. Yes, by the way, I've been there and done that. I chose locations for corporate headquarters based in large part on where I lived at the time, and set up operations elsewhere as well when it made financial sense. Why start a company for someone else's convenience?
When I've started companies, I've done it with the hope that I'd never end up in a courtroom at all, cyber or otherwise. I certainly wouldn't choose a different state just because it would be more convenient for people who wished to sue me!
Real factors in selecting a startup location include state income taxes, cost of employees (disability insurance, worker's comp, and such), ability to find qualified employees in the area (for non-telecommuting positions), proximity to customers (it's convenient to have beta testers close at hand), real estate prices, the reputation of other businesses in the area, crime rates in the area, proximity to vendors (shipping can be a significant cost of business), and proximity to good schools (if you can't find good, well-trained employees, grow your own).
I think that list would be two or three times that length before I'd add "being in a state with cybercourts," and my last startup was in the legal software business!
As one last closing thought, the court systems of the U.S. are becoming more "electronic" all the time. People are often deposed by teleconference or videoconference during the discovery phase, transcripts are being e-filed and digitally signed, court documents are available in a number of different databases, and with the advent of Legal XML, it's all becoming more accessible to the average citizen. None of this is unique to any one state.