Moving parts. Robots are inherently going to be expensive to purchase and service because anything that moves mechanically is going to be subject to breakdown. Even robots on assembly lines cost many dollars an hour to keep running and they wouldn't require 1/100th the *mechanical* complexity of a robot working in a construction site.
Progress in the electronic world is going in leaps and bounds. In the mechanical world, things move a lot slower, and all the processing power in the world is not going to change it. After all, by the same token, the way technology moves cars should cost $10 and use no fuel...
As for jobs that don't require movement... They could indeed be in danger.
Actually, one aspect of this that hasn't gotten much coverage is that this is really bad news for small businesses. A lot of small businesses survive by being able to do things cheaper than the large businesses.
However, when all the large businesses can outsource (not an option for a small shop) their programming for a 1/6th or a 1/10th of what the it will cost my company, I'm going to look ridiculously overpriced...
Suddenly the tables are turned. You can only produce reasonably priced software if you are *large* enough.
What are the boards going to do when they realize you can get a CEO for only 100k / year in India or Russia ? If Ed Whitacre (SBC) was replaced, the 82 million a year savings (yes, look it up) would nearly be enough to make SBC profitable, for the first time since they hired him !
Corporate Boards themselves are much cheaper overseas; in some cases you only have to go as far as Canada to get boards that work for a tenth the price of boards in the United States.
Ain't going to happen. The one thing that senior executives have that CANNOT be duplicated elsewhere is connections to other American businesses. That's essentially what makes a CEO valuable (plus business management skills). That and service jobs are about the only thing that are safe!
The trouble is that in essence, there is almost *no* human characteristic, be it training, knowledge, strength, dexterity, etc., that will always be unique to industrialized countries.
Innovation? Certainly a few thinkers will have jobs (wherever they are), but the implementation of an innovation should be done externally.
What characteristics are unique? Well, I can think of only a few:
Location: Obviously some jobs, (mainly domestic service) have to be done locally.
Personal connections: If you know people who you can help facilitate transactions, this is a useful skill.
Capital: If you have a lot of wealth, then companies come to you for investment.
I really can't see any justification for more than 10,000 decision makers who have a position because of personal connections and capital. For the rest of us, domestic service is pretty much the only thing that can't be done cheaper elsewhere.
On the bright side, things will likely get cheaper here!
It's funny how what people admire about the books (there are no good guys, or the "good" guys are only marginally better than the bad guys and they certainly don't fare any better) is exactly why I gave up half way through book 2.
I found myself not giving a damn about any of the characters after Eddard Stark was out of the picture. By halfway through book 2, I realized that I didn't actually care *who* came out on top, as they were all SOBs. I quit when I found myself hoping for a event that would kill off all of the characters, perhaps letting some decent offscreen characters live their lives without the interference of all of these self-serving butchers.
I could probably take about 1 volume of this, given that it *is* well written. But 6? No way. It's sort of like reading a 6 volume summary of the recent history of the Congo. The only hope for the people is that everyone drops dead.
Re:OLD publishing depends on inefficiency.
on
Mighty Amazon
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
NEW publishing depends on not having publishers.
The argument that people will cease to write unless publishers can make a profit is no more valid than the argument that people will cease to make music if record companies cease to make a profit. People will always write, and people will always make music, and if they want to feed themselves without having to do anything else, they'll find a way to get you to pay for their goods.
Actually, there's absolutely no guarantee that an effective means of communication of published works to readers will exist. Without the publishers to filter works, there's every possibility that most people will simply find alternate things to spend their money on.
I have little trouble believing that 10-20 years from now people may be (on average) reading 1/20th of what they used to. That bookstores will be almost non-existent and that only a handful of titles will be published that can be "more or less" guaranteed enough sales to make money before the extreme efficiencies of the market wipe out sales. And of course, if there aren't enough sales, then everybody stops selling books.
Of course, if Amazon held all the sales of a market 1/20 the size that it used to be, it would still be a huge success for them!
Of course, there will be a thriving subculture of literature, but the idea of making enough money to say, make a living could well be laughable in the next while. Sort of like making vinyl records. A labour of love, not a way to bring something to the masses.
There are certainly many other markets that have been obliterated by changes in market conditions. The idea that the Author's Guild is attempting (through persuasion, not legal means) to stop what could be a serious threat to their industry doesn't seem unreasonable.
You too can make money while sitting on your ass by replying to email challanges for the princely sum of 3 cents per message!
Are you kidding? If spam cost spammers 3 cents a message, they'd go broke in a week! The whole point of spam is that is must cost the senders less than 1/100 of a cent each or they lose their shirts.
If pot is legal in Canada, then we (the US; I'm American) are going to have to radically overhaul the way we monitor US-Canada border crossings. It would be an absolute nightmare (even more than it already is) for the US to have pot illegal and for Canada to have it legal.
You mean the way that handguns are legal in the USA and (almost totally) illegal in Canada. Great Scott! We'd better close the border from the U.S.A!
If you want high rhetoric and shrill accusations, as a Canadian, I'd reply something like:
"Most severe crimes of violence in Canada are perpetrated using guns manufactured in the United States, which are supported by the American government. Over the last 20 years, hundreds of Canadian lives have been lost to these American tools of death. Even now, the American givernment is considering giving special, unprecedented support to these merchants of violence, sheltering them from the consequences of their products. At this point, we have no choice but to invade Afghan... whoops. America."
However, I won't:-). Let's just say that its obvious that Canadians and Americans (as an average, pretty high standard deviation here) value certain civil liberties differently. It doesn't have to mean the destruction of a mutually benficial relationship.
But I would if the car were given to me for free with the blueprints.
I suspect that most people would be afraid that it would be the end of the *commercial* open-source movement.
And surely you would agree that without Red-Hat, and the other commercial organizations working to sell Linux, Linux in the outside world would be a shadow of its current self.
That's why legislation could be so disasterous. The reason that commercializing open source works is that the source material (sorry:-)) is free. It can't be a high margin business when you're selling free stuff, which means you don't have the resources to maintain liability for a huge project that you didn't create yourself.
It is certainly true that users place reliability very low on their list of priorities when buying products, but that does not necessarily means that they don't value reliability. It merely means that they take reliability for granted.
For example, the last time I filled in a car survey, I didn't put "does not explode when ignition key turned" anywhere on the form.
The problem is a fundamental one. There are way, way, way too many possible parties to blame. The only logical reaction for MS if such a law was enacted would be to immediately cease running any software that wasn't authorized by MS (with approriate fees, bars for competing programs, etc.), a situation that I imagine they see only in their fondest dreams. Legislation like this would be the perfect excuse. To be honest, even I would barely question their right to secure their system if they are going to be held responsible for its flaws.
As for the idea that open source software should be exempt - I doubt that you'd accept the idea that cars should be exempt from safety standard if they provided you with the blueprints:-).
Sounds like you could pick up some very interesting projects by being a contrarian; ie, getting the stuff that's getting poo-pooed on the boards and actually READING it; then picking it up for less than the project would've gotten if it were universally lauded.
And get fired the first time any of these contrarian projects didn't work.
"Anyone who's anyone knew this was a bomb and you couldn't figure it out? bye-bye"
The problem is that it isn't easy to tell what's a winner, even reading the stuff. This means that your career has to be based on being able to mitigate your failures. There's no better excuse than "Nobody thought it would bomb. Look, half the studios were bidding on it!"
In what is essentially a complete gamble with extraordinary amounts of money, it's no wonder that the decision makers use the herd for protection. All the ones that didn't got fired long ago...
At least, when MS was handing out academic copies at the affair I attended, it certainly came with the piece of paper that had all the legalities of how I could use the software.
And yes, there is no way that his MS contact has the authority to single handedly overrule MS's business processes. The MS employee saying it is alright in no way protects the user. If the secretary told you it was alright to loot the safe, *you* are still the one that goes to jail...
That having been said, it's pretty obvious that MS would never bother with hunting anyone down. It's completely a matter of a point of principle. All that happened was that the MS rep forgot the separate piece of paper with the license and is trying to forge a practical, if not legally binding, solution.
Once the division is complete, the blood bath that is their processor division will become even more evident. How long before the shareholders demand that AMD leave a business that is throwing away their money (and always will) and concentrate on a business that actually makes money.
While the processor industry will be poorer for it, there's no reason why the shareholders should have to foot the bill just so we have competition that lowers Intel's prices and makes their processors faster.
Apple will come out with a 64-bit OS X sometime in the next year (with the 970). Critics will say "Wow!", and then ignore it. Apple sales won't change a bit and three years later MS will come out with 64-bit computing to universal acclaim and the market will buy it like hotcakes...
The terms of service (and I imagine how they support themselves), say they take 6% or $1.00, whichever is higher of each donation.
What it doesn't say is if that is 6% plus credit card charges (usually 2.5%, but often higher of you have lots of small transactions) or instead of credit card charges.
Either way, donations of $10 or less means that they are taking a substantial portion. To be fair to them, it's probably the only way they can stay in business.
That's because Matrox doesn't care what OS you use with their cards, they only care if you use their hardware.
No, that's because Matrox doesn't have any decent knowledge locked up in their code. If they did, they'd have just given away a good part of their company to the competition and their officers should be sued by the stockholders.
And no, GPL protects *code*. It doesn't protect ideas, and that's what the competition is looking for with a fine tooth comb.
Now, having said that, it's the right thing to do if your expertise is in hardware, not in drivers.
OSS is unlikely to become mainstream because by its very nature there isn't going to be anyone who can spend the millions of dollars necessary to market a product well enough to make it widely used.
Having the better product has little to do with success. If noone is making big bucks from the software(and the average user is the worst type of user from a make-money-from-OSS point of view), then there isn't incentive for anyone to spend the big bucks to market it.
Online references are all well and good if you already know exactly what you are looking for. However, a printed manual is ideal for browsing. I read them over on the subway rides. I'm not trying to memorize every class and method name, just learn what classes and methods are available.
I can then use online help to lookup the details later on. (The old "I know there's a class that does this...") Without the paper copy, it's far too likely that I'll only use classes that I have been made aware of in previous projects.
It's also why I find the absence of printed manuals for many programs very annoying. Why bother to add a feature to a product when most of your users will never learn that the feature exists!
After accidentally hitting a geocities site, I now have to *manually* close 150 pop-under/over/beside windows, each one of which pops up another 150 windows.
I want IE dead, and I want it now!
Where's my Exit menu item?
(I know, I know, it's in Mozilla. Time to switch.)
Saving up for a "real" supercomputer is a pipe dream. Supercomputers cost several million dollars a year in upkeep, and that's the killer. You might easily get grants to allow a project to use 'x' dollars worth of computing, but nobody is going to approve a capital grant that requires millions each year.
When the University of Toronto did purchase a Cray in the mid-eighties, there was a massive fight. Many felt that the resources to support the Cray were sucking money desperately needed everywhere else. (although, boy, we in meteorology a happy bunch...)
While lower profile and somewhat more painful to use, this is far more practical solution for the realities of academic computing today.
Just 2% of the 1 billion in India understand English. That's only 20 million if my arithmetic is correct.
I find that number incredibly hard to believe. India has IIRC, some 14 official languages and 8 official alphabets. (And we in Canada complain about bilingualism.) As a result of the fact that nobody really wants to help make their neighbor's language dominant, and the fact that England ruled India for many years, English is the second language of most.
I still remember driving (okay, being driven:-))through South India and stopping at a small town when the car broke down. I was the first westerner there in many years according to the townspeople, yet a significant fraction spoke English well enough to hold a conversation with me. (And all were eager to practice their English with a native speaker.)
I find it incredibly difficult to believe that anyone genuinely thinks that someone should be *sent to jail* for this kind of thing
I don't know. Just ask the small software developer who sees a web page boasting about how "I stole this software and now you can download it for free" after receiving a phone call saying "Sorry, there are no orders this year as all the would-be purchasers downloaded it for free".
Now, whether I could carry out the sentence, I don't know. But boy, it's a bit of a salve to imagine it...
My favorite compiler bug
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Was in the C compiler in the old Ontario ICON computer, which used a variant of QNX.
If you had a variable that happened to be the same as the name of a function, then the compiler wouldn't complain, but it would use the address of the function as the value of the variable. Took me a **long** time to figure out where it was getting that value from.
I strongly disagree. I would never work for a company where I had to fight for my raises. The company pays me what they think I'm worth (and what they can afford). If I disagree, then I leave.
(Of course, this may be the reason I work for small companies.)
The only justification for this would apparently be to punish them for not having properly performed the hitherto unknown parental reposnibility of not allowing a child to install software.
You are not installing software, you are approving a legal contract. You wouldn't expect your children to be allowed to sign an employment contract or a contract to buy a house.
Obviously the solution is to not allow software to be installed without the advice of a lawyer.
Slashdot Mirror
Moving parts. Robots are inherently going to be expensive to purchase and service because anything that moves mechanically is going to be subject to breakdown. Even robots on assembly lines cost many dollars an hour to keep running and they wouldn't require 1/100th the *mechanical* complexity of a robot working in a construction site.
Progress in the electronic world is going in leaps and bounds. In the mechanical world, things move a lot slower, and all the processing power in the world is not going to change it.
After all, by the same token, the way technology moves cars should cost $10 and use no fuel...
As for jobs that don't require movement... They could indeed be in danger.
Actually, one aspect of this that hasn't gotten much coverage is that this is really bad news for small businesses. A lot of small businesses survive by being able to do things cheaper than the large businesses.
However, when all the large businesses can outsource (not an option for a small shop) their programming for a 1/6th or a 1/10th of what the it will cost my company, I'm going to look ridiculously overpriced...
Suddenly the tables are turned. You can only produce reasonably priced software if you are *large* enough.
What are the boards going to do when they realize you can get a CEO for only 100k / year in India or Russia ? If Ed Whitacre (SBC) was replaced, the 82 million a year savings (yes, look it up) would nearly be enough to make SBC profitable, for the first time since they hired him !
Corporate Boards themselves are much cheaper overseas; in some cases you only have to go as far as Canada to get boards that work for a tenth the price of boards in the United States.
Ain't going to happen. The one thing that senior executives have that CANNOT be duplicated elsewhere is connections to other American businesses. That's essentially what makes a CEO valuable (plus business management skills). That and service jobs are about the only thing that are safe!
Innovation? Certainly a few thinkers will have jobs (wherever they are), but the implementation of an innovation should be done externally.
What characteristics are unique? Well, I can think of only a few:
I really can't see any justification for more than 10,000 decision makers who have a position because of personal connections and capital. For the rest of us, domestic service is pretty much the only thing that can't be done cheaper elsewhere.
On the bright side, things will likely get cheaper here!
It's funny how what people admire about the books (there are no good guys, or the "good" guys are only marginally better than the bad guys and they certainly don't fare any better) is exactly why I gave up half way through book 2.
I found myself not giving a damn about any of the characters after Eddard Stark was out of the picture. By halfway through book 2, I realized that I didn't actually care *who* came out on top, as they were all SOBs. I quit when I found myself hoping for a event that would kill off all of the characters, perhaps letting some decent offscreen characters live their lives without the interference of all of these self-serving butchers.
I could probably take about 1 volume of this, given that it *is* well written. But 6? No way. It's sort of like reading a 6 volume summary of the recent history of the Congo. The only hope for the people is that everyone drops dead.
NEW publishing depends on not having publishers.
The argument that people will cease to write unless publishers can make a profit is no more valid than the argument that people will cease to make music if record companies cease to make a profit. People will always write, and people will always make music, and if they want to feed themselves without having to do anything else, they'll find a way to get you to pay for their goods.
Actually, there's absolutely no guarantee that an effective means of communication of published works to readers will exist. Without the publishers to filter works, there's every possibility that most people will simply find alternate things to spend their money on.
I have little trouble believing that 10-20 years from now people may be (on average) reading 1/20th of what they used to. That bookstores will be almost non-existent and that only a handful of titles will be published that can be "more or less" guaranteed enough sales to make money before the extreme efficiencies of the market wipe out sales. And of course, if there aren't enough sales, then everybody stops selling books.
Of course, if Amazon held all the sales of a market 1/20 the size that it used to be, it would still be a huge success for them!
Of course, there will be a thriving subculture of literature, but the idea of making enough money to say, make a living could well be laughable in the next while. Sort of like making vinyl records. A labour of love, not a way to bring something to the masses.
There are certainly many other markets that have been obliterated by changes in market conditions. The idea that the Author's Guild is attempting (through persuasion, not legal means) to stop what could be a serious threat to their industry doesn't seem unreasonable.
You too can make money while sitting on your ass by replying to email challanges for the princely sum of 3 cents per message!
Are you kidding? If spam cost spammers 3 cents a message, they'd go broke in a week! The whole point of spam is that is must cost the senders less than 1/100 of a cent each or they lose their shirts.
If pot is legal in Canada, then we (the US; I'm American) are going to have to radically overhaul the way we monitor US-Canada border crossings. It would be an absolute nightmare (even more than it already is) for the US to have pot illegal and for Canada to have it legal.
:-). Let's just say that its obvious that Canadians and Americans (as an average, pretty high standard deviation here) value certain civil liberties differently. It doesn't have to mean the destruction of a mutually benficial relationship.
You mean the way that handguns are legal in the USA and (almost totally) illegal in Canada. Great Scott! We'd better close the border from the U.S.A!
If you want high rhetoric and shrill accusations, as a Canadian, I'd reply something like:
"Most severe crimes of violence in Canada are perpetrated using guns manufactured in the United States, which are supported by the American government. Over the last 20 years, hundreds of Canadian lives have been lost to these American tools of death. Even now, the American givernment is considering giving special, unprecedented support to these merchants of violence, sheltering them from the consequences of their products. At this point, we have no choice but to invade Afghan... whoops. America."
However, I won't
But I would if the car were given to me for free with the blueprints.
:-)) is free. It can't be a high margin business when you're selling free stuff, which means you don't have the resources to maintain liability for a huge project that you didn't create yourself.
I suspect that most people would be afraid that it would be the end of the *commercial* open-source movement.
And surely you would agree that without Red-Hat, and the other commercial organizations working to sell Linux, Linux in the outside world would be a shadow of its current self.
That's why legislation could be so disasterous. The reason that commercializing open source works is that the source material (sorry
It is certainly true that users place reliability very low on their list of priorities when buying products, but that does not necessarily means that they don't value reliability. It merely means that they take reliability for granted.
:-).
For example, the last time I filled in a car survey, I didn't put "does not explode when ignition key turned" anywhere on the form.
The problem is a fundamental one. There are way, way, way too many possible parties to blame. The only logical reaction for MS if such a law was enacted would be to immediately cease running any software that wasn't authorized by MS (with approriate fees, bars for competing programs, etc.), a situation that I imagine they see only in their fondest dreams. Legislation like this would be the perfect excuse. To be honest, even I would barely question their right to secure their system if they are going to be held responsible for its flaws.
As for the idea that open source software should be exempt - I doubt that you'd accept the idea that cars should be exempt from safety standard if they provided you with the blueprints
Sounds like you could pick up some very interesting projects by being a contrarian; ie, getting the stuff that's getting poo-pooed on the boards and actually READING it; then picking it up for less than the project would've gotten if it were universally lauded.
And get fired the first time any of these contrarian projects didn't work.
"Anyone who's anyone knew this was a bomb and you couldn't figure it out? bye-bye"
The problem is that it isn't easy to tell what's a winner, even reading the stuff. This means that your career has to be based on being able to mitigate your failures. There's no better excuse than "Nobody thought it would bomb. Look, half the studios were bidding on it!"
In what is essentially a complete gamble with extraordinary amounts of money, it's no wonder that the decision makers use the herd for protection. All the ones that didn't got fired long ago...
At least, when MS was handing out academic copies at the affair I attended, it certainly came with the piece of paper that had all the legalities of how I could use the software.
And yes, there is no way that his MS contact has the authority to single handedly overrule MS's business processes. The MS employee saying it is alright in no way protects the user. If the secretary told you it was alright to loot the safe, *you* are still the one that goes to jail...
That having been said, it's pretty obvious that MS would never bother with hunting anyone down. It's completely a matter of a point of principle. All that happened was that the MS rep forgot the separate piece of paper with the license and is trying to forge a practical, if not legally binding, solution.
Once the division is complete, the blood bath that is their processor division will become even more evident. How long before the shareholders demand that AMD leave a business that is throwing away their money (and always will) and concentrate on a business that actually makes money.
While the processor industry will be poorer for it, there's no reason why the shareholders should have to foot the bill just so we have competition that lowers Intel's prices and makes their processors faster.
Apple will come out with a 64-bit OS X sometime in the next year (with the 970). Critics will say "Wow!", and then ignore it. Apple sales won't change a bit and three years later MS will come out with 64-bit computing to universal acclaim and the market will buy it like hotcakes...
The terms of service (and I imagine how they support themselves), say they take 6% or $1.00, whichever is higher of each donation.
What it doesn't say is if that is 6% plus credit card charges (usually 2.5%, but often higher of you have lots of small transactions) or instead of credit card charges.
Either way, donations of $10 or less means that they are taking a substantial portion. To be fair to them, it's probably the only way they can stay in business.
That's because Matrox doesn't care what OS you use with their cards, they only care if you use their hardware.
No, that's because Matrox doesn't have any decent knowledge locked up in their code. If they did, they'd have just given away a good part of their company to the competition and their officers should be sued by the stockholders.
And no, GPL protects *code*. It doesn't protect ideas, and that's what the competition is looking for with a fine tooth comb.
Now, having said that, it's the right thing to do if your expertise is in hardware, not in drivers.
OSS is unlikely to become mainstream because by its very nature there isn't going to be anyone who can spend the millions of dollars necessary to market a product well enough to make it widely used.
Having the better product has little to do with success. If noone is making big bucks from the software(and the average user is the worst type of user from a make-money-from-OSS point of view), then there isn't incentive for anyone to spend the big bucks to market it.
No marketing = no success.
Online references are all well and good if you already know exactly what you are looking for. However, a printed manual is ideal for browsing. I read them over on the subway rides. I'm not trying to memorize every class and method name, just learn what classes and methods are available.
I can then use online help to lookup the details later on. (The old "I know there's a class that does this...") Without the paper copy, it's far too likely that I'll only use classes that I have been made aware of in previous projects.
It's also why I find the absence of printed manuals for many programs very annoying. Why bother to add a feature to a product when most of your users will never learn that the feature exists!
After accidentally hitting a geocities site, I now have to *manually* close 150 pop-under/over/beside windows, each one of which pops up another 150 windows.
I want IE dead, and I want it now!
Where's my Exit menu item?
(I know, I know, it's in Mozilla. Time to switch.)
Saving up for a "real" supercomputer is a pipe dream. Supercomputers cost several million dollars a year in upkeep, and that's the killer. You might easily get grants to allow a project to use 'x' dollars worth of computing, but nobody is going to approve a capital grant that requires millions each year.
When the University of Toronto did purchase a Cray in the mid-eighties, there was a massive fight. Many felt that the resources to support the Cray were sucking money desperately needed everywhere else. (although, boy, we in meteorology a happy bunch...)
While lower profile and somewhat more painful to use, this is far more practical solution for the realities of academic computing today.
Just 2% of the 1 billion in India understand English. That's only 20 million if my arithmetic is correct.
:-))through South India and stopping at a small town when the car broke down. I was the first westerner there in many years according to the townspeople, yet a significant fraction spoke English well enough to hold a conversation with me. (And all were eager to practice their English with a native speaker.)
I find that number incredibly hard to believe. India has IIRC, some 14 official languages and 8 official alphabets. (And we in Canada complain about bilingualism.) As a result of the fact that nobody really wants to help make their neighbor's language dominant, and the fact that England ruled India for many years, English is the second language of most.
I still remember driving (okay, being driven
It was taught at the nearby school.
I find it incredibly difficult to believe that anyone genuinely thinks that someone should be *sent to jail* for this kind of thing
I don't know. Just ask the small software developer who sees a web page boasting about how "I stole this software and now you can download it for free" after receiving a phone call saying "Sorry, there are no orders this year as all the would-be purchasers downloaded it for free".
Now, whether I could carry out the sentence, I don't know. But boy, it's a bit of a salve to imagine it...
Was in the C compiler in the old Ontario ICON computer, which used a variant of QNX.
If you had a variable that happened to be the same as the name of a function, then the compiler wouldn't complain, but it would use the address of the function as the value of the variable. Took me a **long** time to figure out where it was getting that value from.
If you don't ask for a raise, you don't get it.
I strongly disagree. I would never work for a company where I had to fight for my raises. The company pays me what they think I'm worth (and what they can afford). If I disagree, then I leave.
(Of course, this may be the reason I work for small companies.)
The only justification for this would apparently be to punish them for not having properly performed the hitherto unknown parental reposnibility of not allowing a child to install software.
You are not installing software, you are approving a legal contract. You wouldn't expect your children to be allowed to sign an employment contract or a contract to buy a house.
Obviously the solution is to not allow software to be installed without the advice of a lawyer.