Whether the ill-will generated within his gulag costs him more than the total time he would have lost with a loser Richt Fuhrer...
In short, do his employees "waste" more time "on the clock" because the clock is so strict?
It is easy to imagine that people who would "steal" time by shaving it would be "quite inclined" to "take back" the pay they were docked by wasting twice as much time while at work. And then they'd bitch and moan about it too boot.
The single most common form of employee revolt is literal obedience compounded by ill will.
There is more to the ballance sheet than the dollar figures.
This is *EXACTLY* as dumb as the RIAA treating their clients as thieves, or SCO suing their customer base.
Treat people as thieves and, sure as rain, they *will* steal from you.
The actual problem isn't that the incidnce of theft *of time* (real shrinkage in the form of stolen merchandize from a retail or wholesale business is a different issue) is significant, it is that it *seems* significant if you only look at the dollar values *and* you are unwilling or unable to fire the known dead-wood.
Lets face it, everywhere you have ever worked, *everyone* knew who was worth it as opposed to who were the fekless inexplicable losers. You also wondered how those people didn't just lose their jobs right away. There is the only "real" cost. Turning a blind eye to the normal amount of time shaving and post-it note theft is actually much more useful and cost effective in the long run. Having your employees against you is like having cancer, it can go on for a long time and cost you all sorts of health and opertunity before you become aware that it is killing you.
If this is a union shop, where you *cant* fire the known-bad and unworthwile, then you need to get all technological in self defense. Baring that extreme condition of mutual emnity it is unbelievably bad to rule with too iron a fist.
You won't know how bad though, because it is hard to measure refusnik behavior and harder still to account for bad will. How many transactions a month do you lose to customers not liking the feel they got from your employees? How long would it have taken a happier and more "trusted" employee to put together that FratBaz report? How much money would have been saved?
The problem with the iron-fist aproach is that once you go down that road you can never have enough iron in your grasp. Fine, you time your employees arival and depatrure time. What about smoke and bathroom breaks? Time spend "reading reports" in the cube farm? Email read and respond? Coffie break? Collaboration visits with coworkers? Time in the copy-room?
When you construct a jail, you only really control passage through the outer wall. Making sure everybody "does their time" isn't the same as building a profitable enterprise.
You have "covered the cost in salary penalties"... good for you.
You don't seem to have made any assertions about having changed employee behavior, and you also havn't discussed the lost intangables(sp?) like how often your employees sit at their desks thinking "those but-munch managers dock me for 1 hour, I'll take it out of their hide... I'll just blow off two."
Not to get all biblical but "don't muzzle the ox who is trampling out your grain." That actually means a lot.
An example, I worked for a company that had strict "no personal calls" rules. Looked really good on paper but it was expensive as hell in that people would be sitting around for half the day worrying about elements of their personal lives that they could have resloved with five minutes on the phone "on company time". When I worked for a company without those typse of restrictions much more got done.
So now I will pull out Ben Franklen "Peny Wise, Pound Foolish" (for the surprisingly large number of those who don't know, in this usage it's "pounds stirling" i.e. "dollars" etc.) meaning that when you pinch your pennies and you will often hemmorage your real money.
Also remember that everybody has a little larceny lurking in their souls. A lot of really talented people "get off on" being able to "get over on their employeers". Sometimes it is stealing post-it notes, sometimes it is in shaving time. When an employer starts playing the game for real, and take extreme measures trying to stop this, they will almost invariably be screwed on the back end. This doesn't make your employees bad people, just regular ones. This is a game youusually lose by winning. (if you catch my meaning...)
Techonolgy cannot solve social problems and a strict time keeping system that doesn't have any latitude for shy the employees are skew to the system, really doesn't pay off long-run. When you treat your people as untrustworthy they will stop being worthy of your trust.
In point of fact, even without the technology, everybody at the company already knows who the slackers and the losers and the ought-to-be-fired(s) are already. You don't need a timeclock to tell you that. Find these people and fire them, then give everybody else their slack.
For instance, I for one, have about six hours of "good programmer time" in me a day. But I am very very good in those six hours. Once I get tired I star making stupid mistakes that take longer to undo than to make. When I get that tired I stop and either do paperwork (of which I have very little to do) or just go home. Sticking to this policy I end up producing some of the tightest code we have. A lot of my research, reading, and planning takes place informally and off the clock. That wouldn't be practical at your company, I'd just have to sit in jail for those couple hours a day/week/month. Goody, "I think of my job as jail!" That's just *GOT* to be "saving" you loads of money.
People rant about the RIAA treating their customers like criminals, but it is a bigger mistake to treat your employees as interchangable cattle and/or theives.
Sorry, missed a point. The design of a lift vehicle that used the nuclear pile to generate the acutal lift would only need to be designed to "blow up" into several separate chunks. In short, you would only need to make it perferated into "break here" segments. As stated the pile "could not ever" explode spontaniously as an atomic bomb. The densities and placements for a sustained reaction are orthogonal to an atomic explosive.
So you would only have to worry about the life vehicle blowing up for "some other reason" (including but not limited to sabatoge). But it isn't carying all thait fuel so it isn't going to be even as likely to explode as an average sports car. (And contrary to what you see in the movies, it is also *damn hard* to make a car blow up.)
So the payload of fisionables isn't going to blow up because it is just a bunch of parts. The actual lift system isn't going to blow up because it isn't even flamable and it is designed to deliver sustained power so it can't go super critical. There is no "rocket fuel" to blow up.
Well, intellegent post and all, but "critical" isn't a bad word in Nuclear Speak. It is a word that media types use to sound flashy, but it't not surprising that it is used wrong. A reactor that "cannot go critical" is a reactor that "cannot produce power."
See "nuclear piles" are just that, "piles" of nuclear material. When you get enough of the fissionables together in sufficent density, you reach a point where enough "slow nutrons" are released spontaniously so that fission is caused in other nearby atoms. That fission, in turn, produces more "slow" and "fast" nutrons. Once this is happening at a sustainable rate your nuclear pile has gone "critical" and power ensues.
The control rods and other "moderators" do one thing that produces two consequences. The "moderators" absorb slow nutrons "harmlessly". Put in enough moderator material and you absorb enough slow nutrons to quench the pile and return to the sub-critical no-meaningful-power state. In short the "Control rods" (etc) (originally nense carbon in the form of packed graphite, but I don't know if that is current state-of-the-art) slide in-and-out of the pile to turn up or down (e.g. moderate) the ongoing reaction.
So bandying about the word "critical" is kind of like the math-geek character in Jurassic Park rambling on and on about "Catastrophy Points" in chaos math, when that phrase translates to "the point in some functions where you stop using one equation and start using another" as in "its linear until X == 5 then it is exponential. X == 5 is a "catastropy point".
Anyway, to make an atomic bomb you have to arrange enough fissionable material in sufficent concentrations for the pile to go "super critical" where almost all the fissionables get their slow nutrons all at once. This requires the focusing of huge forces that pack a "Very concentrated" mass into a "Very Small" space. It is "damn hard to do" and takes an incredible balancing of forces. If you saw the movie "piecemaker" they have the suitcase nuke and they "have to cut all the wires at once." That is bull. If it had been a real bomb and they had just shot the thing once with a handgun they would have deformed the outer conventional explosive enough to prevent the compression of the material to super critical densities. As it was, the true secret of the atom bomb is that you have to put a bunch of different materials of different densities between the conventional expolsives and the nuclear pile to make the various shock waves arrive in the pile at the same time.
One of the more fascinating parts of this is the "fast" and "slow" nutrons. It is odd-but-true that fast nutrons cannot cause fission. The things, if they hit, just blow through with no effect. Each uranium based fission produces two fast and one slow nutron. This means that it takes a lot of urnaium to make a simple pile.
Water, however, is excellent at "slowing down" fast nutrons. The colder the water the denser it is and the more likely it becomes that the water will way-lay and slow down a nutron. So we cool our nuclear plants with water. As the water heats up the chain reaction in the pile slows down. As the water cools, the reaction speeds up. "Steam, however, is "not our friend" in a pile as it is harmful and hard to control.
Water also cannot become radio active. (Consequently there is, in fact, *technically* no such thing as "radioactive steam". Unfortunately, water is never 100% pure so the "other stuff" in the water can become radioactive.)
So we put a pressurized a loop of water through the pile but we don't let it become steam because of the intense pressure. Then we use that water to heat "second stage" water which is then taken over to a boiler where it boils "third stage" water into steam that drives turbans and makes electricity. (millitary plants on ships are only two-stage, but I recall our civilian systems are "always" three-stage, but I could be wrong. 8-)
The "neat bit" is that the process of making that steam "cools" the
I suppose this means that eventually, any unregistered RFID tag scanned by anybody will result in a $2.00 (US) bill from "tagfinder" for using what must clearly be "their" property...
Seems like this company deserves an explicit revocation all around. IANAL but it seems that the denyal of GPL provisions is grounds for revocation. That revocation has always read "a little strange to me" because it could be construed to revoke the GPL in general and not just for the one product. Yea, that is a tinfoil hat possition, but then again it is demonstrably "bad faith" to say that the license you are using for one product is weak for another.
With no license in force, all of KISS' linux (etc.) products are simply in violation of copyright.
So they should be forced to legally cease and desist.
And again, since civil matters are "preponderance of evidence" then their "our software must have leaked" defense would rest on their ability to proveide provenance for "their code".
Actually, that is an excerpted *fragment* of an argument against outsourcing, as you can see from its nature as a fragment of a post.
Cultural Differences are real problems, and they are "most commonly found" where clutures are different, as in "over there" as opposed to "over here"
Since a complete argument is usually based on the construction of several "elementary points" in support of a position.
So the "locally employed forigner" *can* be validly held up as a microcosom of the larger issue which you seemed to miss:
Local Sensibilities Can Not Be Exported.
See, you want to send your local sensibilities off to the subcontractor, but you can't. And they code to *their* sensibilities and when those are delivered back to you *their* local sensibilities infect the the work they are "exporting back" to you.
In short, it is *very* easy to make pasty goo out of the most explicit spesification when all the "little things" are done wrong.
So our local-loop didn't protect us even though, in theory it was "very short". How much *less* effective is a trans-oceanic feedback loop going to be, what with the degraded path of communicaiton?
A Lot. Trust Me. Several of our suppliers are "very far away" and it can take *days* to "pin donw" details that should only take a few exchanges.
We have lots of "coders" but in truth there is an agregious lack of "designers".
In Aphorisim: Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail.
The real cost of software is generally in the noise floor compared to the *realized* cost of the software caused by people tyring to bean-count their way to a solution using over-simple metrics.
In the last decade that overly simple metric was money, before that it was kLOCS (thousands of lines of code).
"Good code" is just that, "good". The "right code" is outstandingly good for what you are doing and has all the right intangibles for your need. But like the difference between "good" and "bad" is like art, "good code" really doesn't *have* any single empirical metric. Heck, even "works" vs "doesn't work" well, doesn't work as a metric since you can only honestly go as far as "seems to work".
Efficacy, Correctness, Near Term Cost, "TCO", Competeion vs Penalty Cost (over the domains of time and money); all of these are important factors.
Whoever you be, save your self grief and cash: Find a good designer, who you can *talk* *to* *EFFECTIVELY* or just live in your mess.
Just now my company is being held hostage by one of our founders. She has the code effectively in escrow and won't talk to anybody about anything. She insists you "just tell her what to do and she'll do it" and GOD SAVE YOU if you have to change your mind about the slightest detail or explain it to a customer.
Really, hell hath no furry like a (wo)man engaged in self-protectionist isolation over a bad design and peacmeal implementation.
It was "cheap and fast" and that will be costing us for an *EXCEEDINGLY* long time.
In terms of cost My Roommate's Brother(tm) who does a lot of obscure and classified work for, well, I don't think I can even say that, has done some interesting research.
According to the latest numbers *he* has access too, last year 4 out of 6 Offshored IT projects which reached maturity (were supposed to be "done") failed to produce a usable product despite being "finished" (and paid for) by the parties involved. Why he phrased it as 4 out of 6 instead of 2 out of 3 is a statistical mistery... 8-)
The one thing that offshoring *does* do is get the horse so far away from the driver that the necessary whiping cannot take place.
And so it was a "very expensive cost saving measure".
I could not, howerver, get him to give me a good X out of Y for unusable but finished domestically produced IT projects, so...
In short, nobody knows what *any* of these numbers mean nor what the costs or benefits really are in absolute numbers or dollar values.
So all things being equal, further away is worse. Sending money into another country is bad for the local economy. (Hence all of the rest of the world not wanting to send money to Redmond WA.)
The particularly vile intangables are, well, particularly vile. The cultural differences and their effects on the results can be legion. For instance the very-smart chineese woman who is writing our app in-house used this sickly and nausiating yellow-on-yellow color scheme "nobody likes." I know, however, that these are "prosperity colors" in her socalization.
A lot of making people happy is making a product that meets the local sensibilities.
You can't Offshore "local sensibilities" in any useful manner.
Costs will be paid, people will mess up. "Enron Happens" largely because it must. And the U.S. of A. is positioning itself to be The Premere Third World Country of the Next Millennium, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, Amen...
It all sounds so mysterious, but spammers do this all the time. It probably didn't take mroe than sending the mail as html, with a unique image link in it.
Or how about a delivery/read receipt?
[hat type="tinfoil"]
I mean really people, next thing you know Microsoft will be announcing that their products don't acually suck, per se, but that the USGov requires them to have certian "points of ingress" and the real reason they take so long to patch things is that every time someone finds a USGov hole, the patch has to include a suitable replacement...
For those who havn't read the book, the wizzards first rule is thus: "People Are Stupid."
Every dollar made in the stock market represents two people who lost fifty cents each. Like most of our economy, the Stock Market is a confidence scam. Oh for about forty years there, after the end of The Depression, there "had to be value" behind stocks. Then "Intellectual Property" came along and the marketing of vapor and pipe-dreams was re-introduced to the mainstream.
I am actually surprised that the stock hasn't moved *more*. Considering the number of timid sheep out there, I am surprised that lots of companies didn't pay SCO just to settle their onw indigestion.
People are Stupid.
The Law is an Ass.
Only the presence of a five-star opponent (IBM) has kept this from being just nearly the worst thing to happen to "Intellectual Property" in this country since its inception.
As long as no trier-of-fact has a brain hemmorage, this is just an aftershock of the people who learned how to manage money in the late ninties.
It hast that status only because we empower sex to be a great evil. If we suddenly decided that we desperatly needed to protect our children from all knowledge of milk production, the Dairy Farmers of America would be a great evil and lunch-ladies around the world would be burnt at the stake.
If porn were not "dirty" and "evil" then it would just be more office work.
If drugs (expecially pot) weren't the "dirty" and "evil" then drug dealing would take place in pharmacies where it belonged.
If both of these were de-villified then the mafia would be nearly gone too.
Like Dan Akroid (in GhostBusters) we have chosen the Sta-Puffed Marshmellow Men of our own distruction, and they are so much more interesting than Famine and Pestelence...
Where you CANNOT carry cocealed weapons, you are more likely to be shot. Kids die in gun related accidents more often where guns are scarce, because that very scarcity makes them an attractive nusance.
You want to make a kid never want to touch a gun. Make him go out shooting with his father twice a week for a while. Make him *study* the dang thing. Make it an "important chore." Something he *has* to know. Make it a tool, not a secret.
Where do kids end up shooting eachother and themselves by accident? Out in the country where every house has a rifle? In Switzerland where every house has an automatic rifle? Nope... In L.A. where guns are impossible to get (legally) and full of mistique.
Really, this isn't that hard to fathom. Stop crying about this stuff and start thinking about it instead. The model is simple and obvious.
The "humanist solutions" that our milk-sop crystal trance-channeling egalatarian ineffectuals have been cramming down everybodies throats have worn away the structrual underpinnings of reson and responsibility.
U.S.A.! Carefully poised to be the premere Third World Country of the New Mellinium!
World War Two was a nice and tidy exportation of violence. It was cause for orgastic nationalisim but it didn't cost "the average american" a damned thing on balance. (In the spesific people lost loved ones, but in the general "we" got to "rescue" all those smart-alek sods back in the old world, aren't we clever. And our "darkies" and our "redskins" were oh so integrated with us all, on the posters at least...)
In short, one of our greatest cultural disasters was that the contential US (heck, Hawaii wasn't even in the US for WWII if I recall) was *never* *really* touched bye the war. It made us all "superior" to everybody and it *improved* our economy beyond all hope of salvation.
The gun control thing started here, as stated by the previous poster, in 1968 when Viet Nam came to our living rooms on TV. But, in an ironic twist, this brought home all the "cost" of guns while washing away the "value". In the same way that an ex-smoker is the most obnoxious and vociferous anti-smoking lobbiest, the "isn't that terrible" lobby that rules our laughable culture has managed to spackle over the facts.
And the facts are simple: Gun crimes are acts of cowardice, and occur in exact ratio to the scarcity of firearms. (The chart of least restrictive carry laws, where every grandmother might have a gun in her purse, to most restrictive is *IDENTICAL* to the chart of lowest gun crime rates to highest. The "i'll shoot them all" set attack schools and commuter trains and such, and only in municipalities where guns are scarce. You don't see these people walking into a Country Buffet (restraunt chain) in Texas and pulling out their guns, they'd get their waggon fixed for sure if they tried.
In point of fact, the U.S. of A. is populated by the religous wackos (or their decendents) that were thrown out of all the good countries. Reason isn't taught in our schools and morals are "those things decreed by our corrupt legslatures". Nobody here can or will take responsibility for what is in their own heads, let alone what they put in the heads of their children, or what they keep in their cupboards and closets.
So it follows to reason, from those premises, that the Video Games and T.V. (and those nasty and pernicous Canadians 8-) are responsible for how porly the children are doing.
After all, I can't possibly be responsible for how my child turned out, I never even _talked_ to the litte shite...
Oh yea, they bemoan, the issues are more complex than this. But the root cause of our cultural death is the blithe neglect we pay it each day.
I don't remember which plane had the icing + auto-pilot == fall from sky unexpectedly problem. I know for a fact that it was *NOT* the one that landed in the Patomic river.
The patomic river (+14th street bridge) incident was a failure to generate necessary lift on takeoff thing.
The incident I was referring to (I don't remember the fligt number and date) involved a plane cruising at altitude. It entered icing conditions. As the ice formed the plane kept nosing up slightly to maintin "level flight". Finally there was no more nose-up to be had. Part of the real failure was the failure of the de-icing system. The pilots never knew that the plane was icing until... well... all the falling started.
If you are *really* interested in this sort of thing do a google search on the words Plane Crash and Autopilot.
Yea, it isn't one to one on that list. But these technologies are only as good as their operators. The answer is *not* to build more complex systems.
Actually, as an "american" (meaning, spesifically a citizen of the U.S. of A., and one of the few who understand that America is way bigger than "America", if you get my drift 8-) the problem is rather two sided.
Side 1: The United States is leading the world for the position of "the Premere Third World Country of the Next Mellinium." Some tiny fraction of people are starting to catch on to this fact. Popularisim plus Corporatisim means no concept of "doing the hard thing is often doing the right thing" in any of our policies and procedures. We (try to) legislate morality and we legislate pigopoly at the same time and don't see a conflict. We pay our teachers and cops the way we pay our buss-boys and then act all surprised that the rising wave of uneducated hoodlums are getting away with murder.
Side 2: The US of A is the only "modern western country" that *didn't* lose anything significant in World War II. We "exported" our losses as a controlled activity. We may have felt "a little threatened" but our buildings didn't burn and our civilians were not trodden under foot. Consequently, we were never forced to face up to our own (artificial) sense of superiority. As a nation we never visited the fact that our own minority population wasn't "somehow inferrior" because we never were really required to *depend* on "them". There were a few shining examples held up (the Tusgeegie(sp?) Airmen and such) as "exceptions".
Consequently, this country is that spoilt little rich kid that has never been challenged except for one poke-in-the-nose in gradeschool.
All you *really* have to do to silence a social class in this country is to call it a minority. In our collective subconcious minority status implies inferior status. The reasoning, if I may use that word without laughing, is that if it was so great to be (whatever) then everybody would be. So since everybody isn't (whatever) there must be no value to it.
While the rest of the western world was facing up to the idea that Might does not make Right, the US of A was still engaged in "Manifest Destiny". It is sad really.
We are punk adolecents and as all such do eventually, we are doomed to suffer our comeuppance.
Meanwhile, in our "maturity" we have never internalized as a culture that, as the investment bankers say, past performance is not a guarantee of future returns.
Our only real hope is to export our stupidity while we still have the leverage, which is why our state department is doing things like forcing DMCA analogs onto the E.U. (suckers... 8-)
How stupid are we? We loan countries money and then use "economic sanctions" against them. We go our of our way to be rude to and try to bully our international creditors. Our political definition of a "job" is nine months of consecutive employment so that each year our polititions can "create" the same jobs with the same packages year after year. We deliberately hire experts to prove our bad idea is a good one instead of just asking them which ideas are which. We strike down "right to work" laws to "protect workers" by letting unions force them to join and pay dues on penalty of losing not just their jobs but their carriers, which is extortion.
and then, to quote the song, we "Blame Canada!"
By this enlightened point of reason of course India is incapable of innovation. They aren't good white Americans. (I am white BTW, but it is still true). It couldn't be that the bad economy in India could in any way be related to their very-recient colonial (rape victim) status. Nor the general self-perpetuating "don't invest there, nobody invests there, so its a bad investment" logic.
All that having been said.
It is dumb as all f### to send your money and jobs overseas. The U.S. companies should not be offshoring thier programmers. Then again the rest of the world shouldn't be sending their Microsoft Tax to Redmond, WA, USA.
Economics is a contact sport, and nobody has ever won a Football (whatever that sport is in your country) Game/Match by always giving the ball to the opposing players.
yea, he is both a chimp in cowboy gear AND a coke-head in a suit. There is also a good bit of "puppet on a string" in there too.
Not to wander into the Hitler camp all un-awares but...
Most of the true viliany of WWII Germany wansn't really Hitler. They had this vague but extremeist leader. He never said "lets put all the jews and homosexuals in camps and invent all these cool ways to kill them." He just gave "vague direction" like "I don't like jews and homosexuals, and don't even get me started on the Gypsies."
It was RAMPANT CRONYISM to a vague and "dynamic" but "nonspesific" anti-leader who "led" by astitute popularisim unvarnished by detailed planning or intellegence.
It was the "lapdog intellectuals" (no really! 8-) in his cabnet that were falling over one-another for the Furher's attention who set themselves to currying favor from their "leader" who came up with the real atrocities. Hitler's main role and contribution was to inspire the base cronyism and ruin the "real" plans of any general who had the _gall_ to try to do their jobs instead of currying favor.
Then there were the real personal sick-o's like Mengle who just took advantage of, and masterfully played, the situation so that they could indulge their apetites.
Now, do some name substitution and allow for companies now where individuals were then. Ashcroft, Rice, Haloburton and so forth.
This president LEADS NOTHING and the yappy lapdogery (8-) crammed in behind his pandering to an imaginary "core constituency" leads to a chaotic and pointless result.
We even have starter concentration camps in Cuba, and bush managed that in less than two years.
It took almost a decade for Hitler's little system go get *that* far.
So I guess Bush has excelled his archtype.
Then again, I could be wrong... But in a few more years this sort of criticisim will be punnisable by law (even retroactively) so I need to say it now while I have no idea the true personal cost...
The thing I have noticed to be the greatest single limit on web searching is the operator. I can regularly find things on the net that my co-workers cannot. This is because I understand keyword boolean searching at a deeper level than most people.
I blame this on the level of education of the common population, as opposed to being evidence of my own superiority. 8-)
In a world where most people have never actually met or "dealt with" a librarian (archivist, whatever 8-) it should surprise nobody that these self-same people have no idea what it means to take personal responsibility for organizing their own approach to knowing things.
Having grown up near and actually talked to librarians all my life I actually understand how to group information. Applying that knowledge to a search for some words and against others isn't that far a stretch.
It is a personal pet peve of mine to have to listen to people bemoan Google (etc.) when these self-same people have never even *noticed* the advanced search link, nor even learned the power of the minus ("-") in the standard search bar.
There is no technology that can "fix" bad user inquiries that won't in turn "ruin" good ones.
In the normal flying automatically from here to there model that would be true, it *rarely* happens. It has happend though, I'm sure. I am prety sure that one is responsible for a recient (last ten years) because the autopilot had no way to know that the wings were icing up and it just kept making corrections for the problems until the beast fell from the sky. Reguardless, in terms of walking a plane from one way-point to another across hundreds of miles (etc) the total expected control movements are "corrective". That is, the plane is nudged left or right (or up or down) gently as it drifts from its heading. That is, the autopilot makes "correcting turns" and such.
In the case of a system that has errected a "wall" around a space to prevent crashing and such, the controll movements would be "rather more drastic."
The *first* lesson a pilot should learn: A plane can stall, or be made to stall, at any attitude and at any speed.
Remember, this system isn't about getting from Desmonis to Debuke, it's about seizing control from a (malicous) pilot and making him miss the target. The more urgently the system preceives that need, the more likely it will be to do something completely drastic. This is *espeically* true if the aricraft is already in distress.
For instance, a down-burst carries a plane "close" to a protected structure pretty much dead-center over the region of protection. The system is gong to see the "the best" way out is to climb as it is "surrounded" by "protected airspace". The system "pulls up" while the plane is being "forced down" and the angle-of-attack of the aircraft exceeds its stall attitude with respect to the "relative wind" and stops flying. That is, it stalls.
To recover from a stall the pilot needs to nose-down but the "safety system" "knows" that "down" is "illegal" so the control movement is not allowed.
The ground (or indeed the protected building) is not your friend...
Boom!... really...
And the system could almost-certianly be likewise "gamed" by faking such emergencies anyway.
This would be a lot of tech with more "harm than good" written all over it.
"Contract Law" is a bit like saying "Intellectual property". It isn't right. Contract law is really "tort" law, and a "tort" is a twisting (violation etc) of an agreement. The word "contract" is just a place-holder for the formula for an agreement, and it is broader than you might imagine.
A contract exists when (if I recall correctly) consideration (value) is exchanged under terms of agreement. In point of fact, there is legal precident for the idea of a "social contract". In other words, a contract is just an agreement of a certian complexity that meets certian requirements. All the penalties and violations happen in/as "tort" and that is a broad brush indeed.
In gerenral, if the author finds value in having his work used, and indeed worked on or modified and distributed, this argument becomes stronger. But... (always more buts... 8-)
-- Default terms were offered.
-- Acceptance of those terms is inferred by re-distribution. (this is as valid as a click-through in terms of being evidence of agreement.)
-- Value was exchanged more-or-less, though some of that value is a little esoteric.
-- The failure of KISS to fulfill their agreement is tort (kind of like not paying after you agreed to pay.)
IF you insist that you had no agreement *THEN* it is copyright issue.
The thing is, there is nothing to be had by persuing the tort, as the tort can be resolved by providing the source and licencing terms. The remedies under tort are huge if you *need* the product and you insist on your refusal to pony up the source. This is why the GPL violations are essentially resolved by production of the source, which is much easier than pulling the product etc. If the distributor fulfills the agreement and causes the tort to disapear, the issue is over.
GOD SAVE the company that insists the GPL is invalid, refuses to comply whit it, has not other agreement to use the material, and thereby gets things promoted into the copyright law.
So, in fact, the License Agreement is a contract. But just as a man with a legion standing behind him is stronger than a man standing alone; the license agreement (as a concept) has copyright law standing behind it. It creates a "deal with me or deal with my armies" kind of condrum that brings lawyers nicely to heel.
These bodies of law overlap a good bit, but here is the key thing: I have a copyright and I proffer terms for its use. There isn't a special body of law saying what those terms may be. There are no explicit "copyright assignment statutes". The fact that I cannot require you to do bizzare and incidental things comes from "contract law" and not copyright law. The word "agreement" is the great unifier here. Only certian kinds of agreements are enforcable. What those kinds are is covered in contract law. (and so on, forever, ahmen... 8-)
The GPL is a CONTRACT dealing with the assignments of copyright rights.
just as
The purchase agreement on a home is a CONTRACT dealing with the transfer of real property (rights) between parties.
just as
If I ignore my Microsoft EULA, particularly if I do something having nothing to do with "copying" such as actually securing my system against Microsoft's right to snoop on and upgrade my box (8-) or deleting all the microsoft logos and replacing them with pictures of blowfish, I am liable for things like lawyers fees but I am not automatically thrown to the $150,000 sharks.
If you violate the GPL, you tort a contract, if you abrogate that contract by any means so there is no governing agreement at all, THEN the copyright holder can hammer you for viloating his copyrights.
Remember, there is no magic to "signing something", a signature is *ONLY* evidence of agreement. For a contract to exist there needs *only* be an agreement by all parties that isn't otherwise illegal as an agreement per-se. (e.g. an contract to murder someone isn't legally
More or less exactly true. "WANTS TO CRASH". Right there is the *why* I was talking about. If you know they "want to crash" you have answered that ellusive and nagging "why".
This is a proposed no-fly system not a no-crash system.
Once your honestly understand that the no-fly system couldn't stop someone from flying "into" a building, as that is too late, you can think about what it means to make a *FLIGHT* intervention system. It would have to stop people from flying "near and towards" the building. So yes, exactly, you don't know *if* you should allow someone to fly near and towards a building unless you know *why* they are flying near and towards the building. Guessing wrong means multiple death and misery events.
So, your carping (trolling) asside, in order to stop someone from crashing into a building you would have to stop them from flying in all sorts of attitudes and positions that "might lead to crashing into the building". If the no-fly started at the building's surface it would be far too late, what with the laws of physics and such.
So imagine a plane needs to fly "near" the building (actually the edge of the no-fly "wall") for some legitimate reason (for any technologically accurate measure of "near"), that is, the pilot needs to "skim" the no-fly zone or was forced there by exigent circumstances. Wind (or the the condinuing exigent circumstance etc.) buffets him into the no-fly zone proper and the controls take over. The auto-pilot tries to initiate a wings-level climb, the plane stalls and hits the building.
Same for an automatically initiated strong right turn while the plane is in a left turn attitude.
Boom!
Fat lot of good that did.
By induction, the flypaper effect of having planes renched out of the control of their pilots only to cause accidents, can only be pushed to the extreme surface of a larger and larger volume of space. So the empire state building is protected but plane (being piloted by a non-malicious pilot-in-trouble) plunges into a subway or a shopping mall instead.
Oooh... yet another fat lot of good...
Then people start bitching about how the planes *are* allowed to fly over the poor neighborhoods but *not* any of the upscale realestate.
Just great, no-fly jerrymandering around the wealth and race cards...
This is just a technological solution to an imaginary problem, waiting to cause a social engeneering disaster.
The actual social solution is to stop being sheep. Don't let people take over the airplanes in the air. Don't negotiate with terrorists, EVER.
The planes on the ground are a different matter. If the pilot takes off with the plan of ramming the building, he likely had the chance and forethought to disable the no-fly hardware anyway. It would only take wire-cutters.
And that is the last "fat lot of good" that this system falls apart around.
Consider that for all that this incident involved a big tall building, it would have been equally "traumatic" if it had been a nice large church or even "the right" highschool football game. How many people died in Oaklahoma?
If the terrorists wanted to make a statement they could drive a gas tanker through a WallMart (times three or six or whatever) to greater effect.
Hell, if I were a terrorist(tm) I would do something totally different. I would simultaneously set off a harmless smoke bombs in, say, every MacDonalds in L.A. It would demonstrate more planning, and more manpower. It would have all the positive spin of a well executed publicity stunt (which is all that terrorisim is after all, a publicity stunt) and it would "hint at" the threat without invoking reactionary ire.
But thankfully the terrorist are as profoundly stupid as the people suggesting this no-fly system and those otherwise demanding that "somebody do something" no matter how ill-considered and fraught with lasting probable damage to our country and way of life.
Today that plane would not have been shot down because that plane turned "before" it would have been in the no-fly zone.
Additionally, the no-fly zones are a lot larger than the "will shoot you down" zones within them. A no-fly zone is not, and could never socially survive being, a wall of death. It just wouldn't work.
[Leastwise not without a lot of automatic lazer cannons, and we saw how well those worked out for the Death Star... 8-)]
Now, if that plane had made that same turn "later" "back then" it might have gotten shot down back then if it had gotten too close to something significant.
Persons who cannot follow arguments to their conclusions, and execute the tasks of basic reason, *are* "entitled" to their opinions, but they should be beaten bloody (at the least metaphorically, but don't let that limit your options 8-) for expressing them in the presence of any equally-undescerning audience.
This is so wrong... words almost fail me. The reasons are almos too manifold to enumerate menaingfully.
The simple version is, well, simple. If you don't know *why* an action is being attempted you have no means to know *if* it should be allowed. For instance, A guy who knows that there is a profound problem with his aircraft or his persion (having a onboard fire or heart attack and cannot safely land plane) decides to point it at that nicly unoccupied mountain so it can crash and burn with a minimal loss of life. Unfortunately once he punches out (or passes out), the "automatic no-fly system" redirects the "obvious pilot error" and safely redirects the plane into the playground or highway or hospital.
"but those places would be no fly too!" Hardly you couldn't cross any significant region of the country if every hospital and playground were tagged "no fly". Don't even get me stared on highways and suburban subdivisions blocking every path.
The VERY LST thing you want is to have a machine wrenching control away from a pilot (or driver for that matter) arbitrarily.
Other scenerios abound. Guy in bad whether blown into nearby no-fly zone. Instead of being able to correct his attitude and exit safely, the autopilot kicks in and executes a control movement that causes the plane to stall. Now you have created the very incident you alledged to want to avoid.
This, even before considering what a black-hat could do once he'd hacked the onboard map. All these no-fly-specks work to funnel a plane off course over/into DC or Manhattin and then leave the "only" valid course one that intersects a significant structure or population.
Nope, wouldn't want to fly into one of *these* "new" programmable bombs. Nosireee...
I really don't know why this is so hard for people to understand, but it "shouldn't" be that hard to create a peer-to-peer, fully trusted spam blacklist system.
1) Take a well known provider of such lists and have him generate himself a PGP/GPG (etc) key.
2) Create a hashing algo that can be applied to email addresses and domain names and produces (about) 60 or so distinct hashes.
3) Coordinate the email blacklists into N files where N is the number of hash results from item 2. These are the N components to the complete list. IF you have an address X and its hash is Xn then if the address doesn't apear in file N the address isn not blacklisted.
4) Construct (or use an existing) P2P app to distribute these N files. Ideally the P2P system in question can "bias" the fetch operation to favor retrevial from "previously known good" sources.
Here are the fine points:
A) The GPG secret key, and not the "location fetched from", is the magic that marks the list valid. You can not DDOS a secret key, just an originator.
B) A first-order web of trust, instead of a simple key, could also be used. That is, instead of requiring a signature from the master key, require a signature from a key signed by the master key. This way "the one key" can stay relatively unused while persons need to attack the rotating and regularly expiring frontage keys if they want to game the transfer for any reason.
C) The master key and the frontage keys don't have to equate to any real nor active network facility. They only need to be unique in key space. You simply *CANNOT* attack a namespace that isn't backed up by a physical facility. (For instance, if the master key were "master@control.spamcop.org", spamcop.org itself could be pointed at Geocities or something or nothing at all.)
D) While a current (Kaza-esque) P2P app would probably be less than ideal for the actual transport, it wouldn't be dificult to design a P2P style distribution mechanisim. It wouldn't need to be any more subtle than a bunch of http mirrors really, as long as the mirroring system (rdist/wget alike) would only put the files in the public directory if they passed a frontage-key/master-key signing test.
In practice you would probably want to distribute a signed known-mirrors (root) file too.
[Then again, a shite load of ptr records in a "spamcop.org" dns table could function as the analog of an MX table for this rooting purpose. Those sites would tend to become targets, but only for as long as the list size were small.]
If a "real" P2P app, or even a well designed friend-of-friend http-based network were put together and reached a core complexity of a at least a couple dozen known base points, it would be unquenchable. The target density would be too diverse to attack effectively. It would be like trying to DDOS "all the bloggers on the net".
Heck, set a pseudo standard: Every doman that wants to join the P2P network "backbone" should issue itself a "spamcop@my.domain" key and then do a challenge/response signing (on connection each party sends the other a challenge, gets the challenge back signed, checks the signature as valid) when it comes onto the backbone. Organize the thing like IRC but with records kept for keys used. Add some throttling (like IRC flood protection) and you are off. Abusers can be tracked down to their hosts and keys.
Then you can devolve. Regular users don't have to have keys to join the net and request information. Keys and domains can be blacklisted (possibly together?).
Heck, use the haxors techniques. Actually get permission to stake out some IRC channels to act as the root seed broadcast-style distribution system (list of known good core hosts, again, such lists are signed).
All you have to do is get some distribution without losing authenticity. That is what public keys are all about. The anti-assailable nature of P2P and the semi-chaotic nature of IRC have their legitimate purposes. Now all you need is to use these systems for good instead of evil.
How hard is this? If the applet can't be started the "extra light" version of the page would be displayed. The statefulness of the connection to the java applet, as verified by an "application level ping" could "ensure" that your customers are playing fair.
In other words, think: "You must allow java to see this page if you don't have a subscription."
Slashdot Mirror
Whether the ill-will generated within his gulag costs him more than the total time he would have lost with a loser Richt Fuhrer...
In short, do his employees "waste" more time "on the clock" because the clock is so strict?
It is easy to imagine that people who would "steal" time by shaving it would be "quite inclined" to "take back" the pay they were docked by wasting twice as much time while at work. And then they'd bitch and moan about it too boot.
The single most common form of employee revolt is literal obedience compounded by ill will.
There is more to the ballance sheet than the dollar figures.
This is *EXACTLY* as dumb as the RIAA treating their clients as thieves, or SCO suing their customer base.
Treat people as thieves and, sure as rain, they *will* steal from you.
The actual problem isn't that the incidnce of theft *of time* (real shrinkage in the form of stolen merchandize from a retail or wholesale business is a different issue) is significant, it is that it *seems* significant if you only look at the dollar values *and* you are unwilling or unable to fire the known dead-wood.
Lets face it, everywhere you have ever worked, *everyone* knew who was worth it as opposed to who were the fekless inexplicable losers. You also wondered how those people didn't just lose their jobs right away. There is the only "real" cost. Turning a blind eye to the normal amount of time shaving and post-it note theft is actually much more useful and cost effective in the long run. Having your employees against you is like having cancer, it can go on for a long time and cost you all sorts of health and opertunity before you become aware that it is killing you.
If this is a union shop, where you *cant* fire the known-bad and unworthwile, then you need to get all technological in self defense. Baring that extreme condition of mutual emnity it is unbelievably bad to rule with too iron a fist.
You won't know how bad though, because it is hard to measure refusnik behavior and harder still to account for bad will. How many transactions a month do you lose to customers not liking the feel they got from your employees? How long would it have taken a happier and more "trusted" employee to put together that FratBaz report? How much money would have been saved?
The problem with the iron-fist aproach is that once you go down that road you can never have enough iron in your grasp. Fine, you time your employees arival and depatrure time. What about smoke and bathroom breaks? Time spend "reading reports" in the cube farm? Email read and respond? Coffie break? Collaboration visits with coworkers? Time in the copy-room?
When you construct a jail, you only really control passage through the outer wall. Making sure everybody "does their time" isn't the same as building a profitable enterprise.
Really, do some reading and then ponder the similarities.
You have "covered the cost in salary penalties"... good for you.
You don't seem to have made any assertions about having changed employee behavior, and you also havn't discussed the lost intangables(sp?) like how often your employees sit at their desks thinking "those but-munch managers dock me for 1 hour, I'll take it out of their hide... I'll just blow off two."
Not to get all biblical but "don't muzzle the ox who is trampling out your grain." That actually means a lot.
An example, I worked for a company that had strict "no personal calls" rules. Looked really good on paper but it was expensive as hell in that people would be sitting around for half the day worrying about elements of their personal lives that they could have resloved with five minutes on the phone "on company time". When I worked for a company without those typse of restrictions much more got done.
So now I will pull out Ben Franklen "Peny Wise, Pound Foolish" (for the surprisingly large number of those who don't know, in this usage it's "pounds stirling" i.e. "dollars" etc.) meaning that when you pinch your pennies and you will often hemmorage your real money.
Also remember that everybody has a little larceny lurking in their souls. A lot of really talented people "get off on" being able to "get over on their employeers". Sometimes it is stealing post-it notes, sometimes it is in shaving time. When an employer starts playing the game for real, and take extreme measures trying to stop this, they will almost invariably be screwed on the back end. This doesn't make your employees bad people, just regular ones. This is a game youusually lose by winning. (if you catch my meaning...)
Techonolgy cannot solve social problems and a strict time keeping system that doesn't have any latitude for shy the employees are skew to the system, really doesn't pay off long-run. When you treat your people as untrustworthy they will stop being worthy of your trust.
In point of fact, even without the technology, everybody at the company already knows who the slackers and the losers and the ought-to-be-fired(s) are already. You don't need a timeclock to tell you that. Find these people and fire them, then give everybody else their slack.
For instance, I for one, have about six hours of "good programmer time" in me a day. But I am very very good in those six hours. Once I get tired I star making stupid mistakes that take longer to undo than to make. When I get that tired I stop and either do paperwork (of which I have very little to do) or just go home. Sticking to this policy I end up producing some of the tightest code we have. A lot of my research, reading, and planning takes place informally and off the clock. That wouldn't be practical at your company, I'd just have to sit in jail for those couple hours a day/week/month. Goody, "I think of my job as jail!" That's just *GOT* to be "saving" you loads of money.
People rant about the RIAA treating their customers like criminals, but it is a bigger mistake to treat your employees as interchangable cattle and/or theives.
It's dumb.
Sorry, missed a point. The design of a lift vehicle that used the nuclear pile to generate the acutal lift would only need to be designed to "blow up" into several separate chunks. In short, you would only need to make it perferated into "break here" segments. As stated the pile "could not ever" explode spontaniously as an atomic bomb. The densities and placements for a sustained reaction are orthogonal to an atomic explosive.
So you would only have to worry about the life vehicle blowing up for "some other reason" (including but not limited to sabatoge). But it isn't carying all thait fuel so it isn't going to be even as likely to explode as an average sports car. (And contrary to what you see in the movies, it is also *damn hard* to make a car blow up.)
So the payload of fisionables isn't going to blow up because it is just a bunch of parts. The actual lift system isn't going to blow up because it isn't even flamable and it is designed to deliver sustained power so it can't go super critical. There is no "rocket fuel" to blow up.
It's just not going to happen.
Well, intellegent post and all, but "critical" isn't a bad word in Nuclear Speak. It is a word that media types use to sound flashy, but it't not surprising that it is used wrong. A reactor that "cannot go critical" is a reactor that "cannot produce power."
See "nuclear piles" are just that, "piles" of nuclear material. When you get enough of the fissionables together in sufficent density, you reach a point where enough "slow nutrons" are released spontaniously so that fission is caused in other nearby atoms. That fission, in turn, produces more "slow" and "fast" nutrons. Once this is happening at a sustainable rate your nuclear pile has gone "critical" and power ensues.
The control rods and other "moderators" do one thing that produces two consequences. The "moderators" absorb slow nutrons "harmlessly". Put in enough moderator material and you absorb enough slow nutrons to quench the pile and return to the sub-critical no-meaningful-power state. In short the "Control rods" (etc) (originally nense carbon in the form of packed graphite, but I don't know if that is current state-of-the-art) slide in-and-out of the pile to turn up or down (e.g. moderate) the ongoing reaction.
So bandying about the word "critical" is kind of like the math-geek character in Jurassic Park rambling on and on about "Catastrophy Points" in chaos math, when that phrase translates to "the point in some functions where you stop using one equation and start using another" as in "its linear until X == 5 then it is exponential. X == 5 is a "catastropy point".
Anyway, to make an atomic bomb you have to arrange enough fissionable material in sufficent concentrations for the pile to go "super critical" where almost all the fissionables get their slow nutrons all at once. This requires the focusing of huge forces that pack a "Very concentrated" mass into a "Very Small" space. It is "damn hard to do" and takes an incredible balancing of forces. If you saw the movie "piecemaker" they have the suitcase nuke and they "have to cut all the wires at once." That is bull. If it had been a real bomb and they had just shot the thing once with a handgun they would have deformed the outer conventional explosive enough to prevent the compression of the material to super critical densities. As it was, the true secret of the atom bomb is that you have to put a bunch of different materials of different densities between the conventional expolsives and the nuclear pile to make the various shock waves arrive in the pile at the same time.
One of the more fascinating parts of this is the "fast" and "slow" nutrons. It is odd-but-true that fast nutrons cannot cause fission. The things, if they hit, just blow through with no effect. Each uranium based fission produces two fast and one slow nutron. This means that it takes a lot of urnaium to make a simple pile.
Water, however, is excellent at "slowing down" fast nutrons. The colder the water the denser it is and the more likely it becomes that the water will way-lay and slow down a nutron. So we cool our nuclear plants with water. As the water heats up the chain reaction in the pile slows down. As the water cools, the reaction speeds up. "Steam, however, is "not our friend" in a pile as it is harmful and hard to control.
Water also cannot become radio active. (Consequently there is, in fact, *technically* no such thing as "radioactive steam". Unfortunately, water is never 100% pure so the "other stuff" in the water can become radioactive.)
So we put a pressurized a loop of water through the pile but we don't let it become steam because of the intense pressure. Then we use that water to heat "second stage" water which is then taken over to a boiler where it boils "third stage" water into steam that drives turbans and makes electricity. (millitary plants on ships are only two-stage, but I recall our civilian systems are "always" three-stage, but I could be wrong. 8-)
The "neat bit" is that the process of making that steam "cools" the
I suppose this means that eventually, any unregistered RFID tag scanned by anybody will result in a $2.00 (US) bill from "tagfinder" for using what must clearly be "their" property...
Seems like this company deserves an explicit revocation all around. IANAL but it seems that the denyal of GPL provisions is grounds for revocation. That revocation has always read "a little strange to me" because it could be construed to revoke the GPL in general and not just for the one product. Yea, that is a tinfoil hat possition, but then again it is demonstrably "bad faith" to say that the license you are using for one product is weak for another.
With no license in force, all of KISS' linux (etc.) products are simply in violation of copyright.
So they should be forced to legally cease and desist.
And again, since civil matters are "preponderance of evidence" then their "our software must have leaked" defense would rest on their ability to proveide provenance for "their code".
Someone needs to be Beaoch Slapped.
Actually, that is an excerpted *fragment* of an argument against outsourcing, as you can see from its nature as a fragment of a post.
Cultural Differences are real problems, and they are "most commonly found" where clutures are different, as in "over there" as opposed to "over here"
Since a complete argument is usually based on the construction of several "elementary points" in support of a position.
So the "locally employed forigner" *can* be validly held up as a microcosom of the larger issue which you seemed to miss:
Local Sensibilities Can Not Be Exported.
See, you want to send your local sensibilities off to the subcontractor, but you can't. And they code to *their* sensibilities and when those are delivered back to you *their* local sensibilities infect the the work they are "exporting back" to you.
In short, it is *very* easy to make pasty goo out of the most explicit spesification when all the "little things" are done wrong.
So our local-loop didn't protect us even though, in theory it was "very short". How much *less* effective is a trans-oceanic feedback loop going to be, what with the degraded path of communicaiton?
A Lot. Trust Me. Several of our suppliers are "very far away" and it can take *days* to "pin donw" details that should only take a few exchanges.
We have lots of "coders" but in truth there is an agregious lack of "designers".
In Aphorisim: Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail.
The real cost of software is generally in the noise floor compared to the *realized* cost of the software caused by people tyring to bean-count their way to a solution using over-simple metrics.
In the last decade that overly simple metric was money, before that it was kLOCS (thousands of lines of code).
"Good code" is just that, "good". The "right code" is outstandingly good for what you are doing and has all the right intangibles for your need. But like the difference between "good" and "bad" is like art, "good code" really doesn't *have* any single empirical metric. Heck, even "works" vs "doesn't work" well, doesn't work as a metric since you can only honestly go as far as "seems to work".
Efficacy, Correctness, Near Term Cost, "TCO", Competeion vs Penalty Cost (over the domains of time and money); all of these are important factors.
Whoever you be, save your self grief and cash: Find a good designer, who you can *talk* *to* *EFFECTIVELY* or just live in your mess.
Just now my company is being held hostage by one of our founders. She has the code effectively in escrow and won't talk to anybody about anything. She insists you "just tell her what to do and she'll do it" and GOD SAVE YOU if you have to change your mind about the slightest detail or explain it to a customer.
Really, hell hath no furry like a (wo)man engaged in self-protectionist isolation over a bad design and peacmeal implementation.
It was "cheap and fast" and that will be costing us for an *EXCEEDINGLY* long time.
You have been warned... 8-)
In terms of cost My Roommate's Brother(tm) who does a lot of obscure and classified work for, well, I don't think I can even say that, has done some interesting research.
According to the latest numbers *he* has access too, last year 4 out of 6 Offshored IT projects which reached maturity (were supposed to be "done") failed to produce a usable product despite being "finished" (and paid for) by the parties involved. Why he phrased it as 4 out of 6 instead of 2 out of 3 is a statistical mistery... 8-)
The one thing that offshoring *does* do is get the horse so far away from the driver that the necessary whiping cannot take place.
And so it was a "very expensive cost saving measure".
I could not, howerver, get him to give me a good X out of Y for unusable but finished domestically produced IT projects, so...
In short, nobody knows what *any* of these numbers mean nor what the costs or benefits really are in absolute numbers or dollar values.
So all things being equal, further away is worse. Sending money into another country is bad for the local economy. (Hence all of the rest of the world not wanting to send money to Redmond WA.)
The particularly vile intangables are, well, particularly vile. The cultural differences and their effects on the results can be legion. For instance the very-smart chineese woman who is writing our app in-house used this sickly and nausiating yellow-on-yellow color scheme "nobody likes." I know, however, that these are "prosperity colors" in her socalization.
A lot of making people happy is making a product that meets the local sensibilities.
You can't Offshore "local sensibilities" in any useful manner.
Costs will be paid, people will mess up. "Enron Happens" largely because it must. And the U.S. of A. is positioning itself to be The Premere Third World Country of the Next Millennium, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, Amen...
It all sounds so mysterious, but spammers do this all the time. It probably didn't take mroe than sending the mail as html, with a unique image link in it.
Or how about a delivery/read receipt?
[hat type="tinfoil"]
I mean really people, next thing you know Microsoft will be announcing that their products don't acually suck, per se, but that the USGov requires them to have certian "points of ingress" and the real reason they take so long to patch things is that every time someone finds a USGov hole, the patch has to include a suitable replacement...
[/hat]
For those who havn't read the book, the wizzards first rule is thus: "People Are Stupid."
Every dollar made in the stock market represents two people who lost fifty cents each. Like most of our economy, the Stock Market is a confidence scam. Oh for about forty years there, after the end of The Depression, there "had to be value" behind stocks. Then "Intellectual Property" came along and the marketing of vapor and pipe-dreams was re-introduced to the mainstream.
I am actually surprised that the stock hasn't moved *more*. Considering the number of timid sheep out there, I am surprised that lots of companies didn't pay SCO just to settle their onw indigestion.
People are Stupid.
The Law is an Ass.
Only the presence of a five-star opponent (IBM) has kept this from being just nearly the worst thing to happen to "Intellectual Property" in this country since its inception.
As long as no trier-of-fact has a brain hemmorage, this is just an aftershock of the people who learned how to manage money in the late ninties.
It hast that status only because we empower sex to be a great evil. If we suddenly decided that we desperatly needed to protect our children from all knowledge of milk production, the Dairy Farmers of America would be a great evil and lunch-ladies around the world would be burnt at the stake.
If porn were not "dirty" and "evil" then it would just be more office work.
If drugs (expecially pot) weren't the "dirty" and "evil" then drug dealing would take place in pharmacies where it belonged.
If both of these were de-villified then the mafia would be nearly gone too.
Like Dan Akroid (in GhostBusters) we have chosen the Sta-Puffed Marshmellow Men of our own distruction, and they are so much more interesting than Famine and Pestelence...
Where you CANNOT carry cocealed weapons, you are more likely to be shot. Kids die in gun related accidents more often where guns are scarce, because that very scarcity makes them an attractive nusance.
You want to make a kid never want to touch a gun. Make him go out shooting with his father twice a week for a while. Make him *study* the dang thing. Make it an "important chore." Something he *has* to know. Make it a tool, not a secret.
Where do kids end up shooting eachother and themselves by accident? Out in the country where every house has a rifle? In Switzerland where every house has an automatic rifle? Nope... In L.A. where guns are impossible to get (legally) and full of mistique.
Really, this isn't that hard to fathom. Stop crying about this stuff and start thinking about it instead. The model is simple and obvious.
The "humanist solutions" that our milk-sop crystal trance-channeling egalatarian ineffectuals have been cramming down everybodies throats have worn away the structrual underpinnings of reson and responsibility.
U.S.A.! Carefully poised to be the premere Third World Country of the New Mellinium!
World War Two was a nice and tidy exportation of violence. It was cause for orgastic nationalisim but it didn't cost "the average american" a damned thing on balance. (In the spesific people lost loved ones, but in the general "we" got to "rescue" all those smart-alek sods back in the old world, aren't we clever. And our "darkies" and our "redskins" were oh so integrated with us all, on the posters at least...)
In short, one of our greatest cultural disasters was that the contential US (heck, Hawaii wasn't even in the US for WWII if I recall) was *never* *really* touched bye the war. It made us all "superior" to everybody and it *improved* our economy beyond all hope of salvation.
The gun control thing started here, as stated by the previous poster, in 1968 when Viet Nam came to our living rooms on TV. But, in an ironic twist, this brought home all the "cost" of guns while washing away the "value". In the same way that an ex-smoker is the most obnoxious and vociferous anti-smoking lobbiest, the "isn't that terrible" lobby that rules our laughable culture has managed to spackle over the facts.
And the facts are simple: Gun crimes are acts of cowardice, and occur in exact ratio to the scarcity of firearms. (The chart of least restrictive carry laws, where every grandmother might have a gun in her purse, to most restrictive is *IDENTICAL* to the chart of lowest gun crime rates to highest. The "i'll shoot them all" set attack schools and commuter trains and such, and only in municipalities where guns are scarce. You don't see these people walking into a Country Buffet (restraunt chain) in Texas and pulling out their guns, they'd get their waggon fixed for sure if they tried.
In point of fact, the U.S. of A. is populated by the religous wackos (or their decendents) that were thrown out of all the good countries. Reason isn't taught in our schools and morals are "those things decreed by our corrupt legslatures". Nobody here can or will take responsibility for what is in their own heads, let alone what they put in the heads of their children, or what they keep in their cupboards and closets.
So it follows to reason, from those premises, that the Video Games and T.V. (and those nasty and pernicous Canadians 8-) are responsible for how porly the children are doing.
After all, I can't possibly be responsible for how my child turned out, I never even _talked_ to the litte shite...
Oh yea, they bemoan, the issues are more complex than this. But the root cause of our cultural death is the blithe neglect we pay it each day.
I don't remember which plane had the icing + auto-pilot == fall from sky unexpectedly problem. I know for a fact that it was *NOT* the one that landed in the Patomic river.
The patomic river (+14th street bridge) incident was a failure to generate necessary lift on takeoff thing.
The incident I was referring to (I don't remember the fligt number and date) involved a plane cruising at altitude. It entered icing conditions. As the ice formed the plane kept nosing up slightly to maintin "level flight". Finally there was no more nose-up to be had. Part of the real failure was the failure of the de-icing system. The pilots never knew that the plane was icing until... well... all the falling started.
If you are *really* interested in this sort of thing do a google search on the words Plane Crash and Autopilot.
Yea, it isn't one to one on that list. But these technologies are only as good as their operators. The answer is *not* to build more complex systems.
Actually, as an "american" (meaning, spesifically a citizen of the U.S. of A., and one of the few who understand that America is way bigger than "America", if you get my drift 8-) the problem is rather two sided.
Side 1: The United States is leading the world for the position of "the Premere Third World Country of the Next Mellinium." Some tiny fraction of people are starting to catch on to this fact. Popularisim plus Corporatisim means no concept of "doing the hard thing is often doing the right thing" in any of our policies and procedures. We (try to) legislate morality and we legislate pigopoly at the same time and don't see a conflict. We pay our teachers and cops the way we pay our buss-boys and then act all surprised that the rising wave of uneducated hoodlums are getting away with murder.
Side 2: The US of A is the only "modern western country" that *didn't* lose anything significant in World War II. We "exported" our losses as a controlled activity. We may have felt "a little threatened" but our buildings didn't burn and our civilians were not trodden under foot. Consequently, we were never forced to face up to our own (artificial) sense of superiority. As a nation we never visited the fact that our own minority population wasn't "somehow inferrior" because we never were really required to *depend* on "them". There were a few shining examples held up (the Tusgeegie(sp?) Airmen and such) as "exceptions".
Consequently, this country is that spoilt little rich kid that has never been challenged except for one poke-in-the-nose in gradeschool.
All you *really* have to do to silence a social class in this country is to call it a minority. In our collective subconcious minority status implies inferior status. The reasoning, if I may use that word without laughing, is that if it was so great to be (whatever) then everybody would be. So since everybody isn't (whatever) there must be no value to it.
While the rest of the western world was facing up to the idea that Might does not make Right, the US of A was still engaged in "Manifest Destiny". It is sad really.
We are punk adolecents and as all such do eventually, we are doomed to suffer our comeuppance.
Meanwhile, in our "maturity" we have never internalized as a culture that, as the investment bankers say, past performance is not a guarantee of future returns.
Our only real hope is to export our stupidity while we still have the leverage, which is why our state department is doing things like forcing DMCA analogs onto the E.U. (suckers... 8-)
How stupid are we? We loan countries money and then use "economic sanctions" against them. We go our of our way to be rude to and try to bully our international creditors. Our political definition of a "job" is nine months of consecutive employment so that each year our polititions can "create" the same jobs with the same packages year after year. We deliberately hire experts to prove our bad idea is a good one instead of just asking them which ideas are which. We strike down "right to work" laws to "protect workers" by letting unions force them to join and pay dues on penalty of losing not just their jobs but their carriers, which is extortion.
and then, to quote the song, we "Blame Canada!"
By this enlightened point of reason of course India is incapable of innovation. They aren't good white Americans. (I am white BTW, but it is still true). It couldn't be that the bad economy in India could in any way be related to their very-recient colonial (rape victim) status. Nor the general self-perpetuating "don't invest there, nobody invests there, so its a bad investment" logic.
All that having been said.
It is dumb as all f### to send your money and jobs overseas. The U.S. companies should not be offshoring thier programmers. Then again the rest of the world shouldn't be sending their Microsoft Tax to Redmond, WA, USA.
Economics is a contact sport, and nobody has ever won a Football (whatever that sport is in your country) Game/Match by always giving the ball to the opposing players.
God people are dumb.
yea, he is both a chimp in cowboy gear AND a coke-head in a suit. There is also a good bit of "puppet on a string" in there too.
Not to wander into the Hitler camp all un-awares but...
Most of the true viliany of WWII Germany wansn't really Hitler. They had this vague but extremeist leader. He never said "lets put all the jews and homosexuals in camps and invent all these cool ways to kill them." He just gave "vague direction" like "I don't like jews and homosexuals, and don't even get me started on the Gypsies."
It was RAMPANT CRONYISM to a vague and "dynamic" but "nonspesific" anti-leader who "led" by astitute popularisim unvarnished by detailed planning or intellegence.
It was the "lapdog intellectuals" (no really! 8-) in his cabnet that were falling over one-another for the Furher's attention who set themselves to currying favor from their "leader" who came up with the real atrocities. Hitler's main role and contribution was to inspire the base cronyism and ruin the "real" plans of any general who had the _gall_ to try to do their jobs instead of currying favor.
Then there were the real personal sick-o's like Mengle who just took advantage of, and masterfully played, the situation so that they could indulge their apetites.
Now, do some name substitution and allow for companies now where individuals were then. Ashcroft, Rice, Haloburton and so forth.
This president LEADS NOTHING and the yappy lapdogery (8-) crammed in behind his pandering to an imaginary "core constituency" leads to a chaotic and pointless result.
We even have starter concentration camps in Cuba, and bush managed that in less than two years.
It took almost a decade for Hitler's little system go get *that* far.
So I guess Bush has excelled his archtype.
Then again, I could be wrong... But in a few more years this sort of criticisim will be punnisable by law (even retroactively) so I need to say it now while I have no idea the true personal cost...
(no, this isn't really funny...)
Yes, there is glut and yes there are blog-holes.
The thing I have noticed to be the greatest single limit on web searching is the operator. I can regularly find things on the net that my co-workers cannot. This is because I understand keyword boolean searching at a deeper level than most people.
I blame this on the level of education of the common population, as opposed to being evidence of my own superiority. 8-)
In a world where most people have never actually met or "dealt with" a librarian (archivist, whatever 8-) it should surprise nobody that these self-same people have no idea what it means to take personal responsibility for organizing their own approach to knowing things.
Having grown up near and actually talked to librarians all my life I actually understand how to group information. Applying that knowledge to a search for some words and against others isn't that far a stretch.
It is a personal pet peve of mine to have to listen to people bemoan Google (etc.) when these self-same people have never even *noticed* the advanced search link, nor even learned the power of the minus ("-") in the standard search bar.
There is no technology that can "fix" bad user inquiries that won't in turn "ruin" good ones.
In the normal flying automatically from here to there model that would be true, it *rarely* happens. It has happend though, I'm sure. I am prety sure that one is responsible for a recient (last ten years) because the autopilot had no way to know that the wings were icing up and it just kept making corrections for the problems until the beast fell from the sky. Reguardless, in terms of walking a plane from one way-point to another across hundreds of miles (etc) the total expected control movements are "corrective". That is, the plane is nudged left or right (or up or down) gently as it drifts from its heading. That is, the autopilot makes "correcting turns" and such.
... really ...
In the case of a system that has errected a "wall" around a space to prevent crashing and such, the controll movements would be "rather more drastic."
The *first* lesson a pilot should learn: A plane can stall, or be made to stall, at any attitude and at any speed.
Remember, this system isn't about getting from Desmonis to Debuke, it's about seizing control from a (malicous) pilot and making him miss the target. The more urgently the system preceives that need, the more likely it will be to do something completely drastic. This is *espeically* true if the aricraft is already in distress.
For instance, a down-burst carries a plane "close" to a protected structure pretty much dead-center over the region of protection. The system is gong to see the "the best" way out is to climb as it is "surrounded" by "protected airspace". The system "pulls up" while the plane is being "forced down" and the angle-of-attack of the aircraft exceeds its stall attitude with respect to the "relative wind" and stops flying. That is, it stalls.
To recover from a stall the pilot needs to nose-down but the "safety system" "knows" that "down" is "illegal" so the control movement is not allowed.
The ground (or indeed the protected building) is not your friend...
Boom!
And the system could almost-certianly be likewise "gamed" by faking such emergencies anyway.
This would be a lot of tech with more "harm than good" written all over it.
(This is a hair you are splitting.)
IANAL, but...
"Contract Law" is a bit like saying "Intellectual property". It isn't right. Contract law is really "tort" law, and a "tort" is a twisting (violation etc) of an agreement. The word "contract" is just a place-holder for the formula for an agreement, and it is broader than you might imagine.
A contract exists when (if I recall correctly) consideration (value) is exchanged under terms of agreement. In point of fact, there is legal precident for the idea of a "social contract". In other words, a contract is just an agreement of a certian complexity that meets certian requirements. All the penalties and violations happen in/as "tort" and that is a broad brush indeed.
In gerenral, if the author finds value in having his work used, and indeed worked on or modified and distributed, this argument becomes stronger. But... (always more buts... 8-)
-- Default terms were offered.
-- Acceptance of those terms is inferred by re-distribution. (this is as valid as a click-through in terms of being evidence of agreement.)
-- Value was exchanged more-or-less, though some of that value is a little esoteric.
-- The failure of KISS to fulfill their agreement is tort (kind of like not paying after you agreed to pay.)
IF you insist that you had no agreement *THEN* it is copyright issue.
The thing is, there is nothing to be had by persuing the tort, as the tort can be resolved by providing the source and licencing terms. The remedies under tort are huge if you *need* the product and you insist on your refusal to pony up the source. This is why the GPL violations are essentially resolved by production of the source, which is much easier than pulling the product etc. If the distributor fulfills the agreement and causes the tort to disapear, the issue is over.
GOD SAVE the company that insists the GPL is invalid, refuses to comply whit it, has not other agreement to use the material, and thereby gets things promoted into the copyright law.
So, in fact, the License Agreement is a contract. But just as a man with a legion standing behind him is stronger than a man standing alone; the license agreement (as a concept) has copyright law standing behind it. It creates a "deal with me or deal with my armies" kind of condrum that brings lawyers nicely to heel.
These bodies of law overlap a good bit, but here is the key thing: I have a copyright and I proffer terms for its use. There isn't a special body of law saying what those terms may be. There are no explicit "copyright assignment statutes". The fact that I cannot require you to do bizzare and incidental things comes from "contract law" and not copyright law. The word "agreement" is the great unifier here. Only certian kinds of agreements are enforcable. What those kinds are is covered in contract law. (and so on, forever, ahmen... 8-)
The GPL is a CONTRACT dealing with the assignments of copyright rights.
just as
The purchase agreement on a home is a CONTRACT dealing with the transfer of real property (rights) between parties.
just as
If I ignore my Microsoft EULA, particularly if I do something having nothing to do with "copying" such as actually securing my system against Microsoft's right to snoop on and upgrade my box (8-) or deleting all the microsoft logos and replacing them with pictures of blowfish, I am liable for things like lawyers fees but I am not automatically thrown to the $150,000 sharks.
If you violate the GPL, you tort a contract, if you abrogate that contract by any means so there is no governing agreement at all, THEN the copyright holder can hammer you for viloating his copyrights.
Remember, there is no magic to "signing something", a signature is *ONLY* evidence of agreement. For a contract to exist there needs *only* be an agreement by all parties that isn't otherwise illegal as an agreement per-se. (e.g. an contract to murder someone isn't legally
More or less exactly true. "WANTS TO CRASH". Right there is the *why* I was talking about. If you know they "want to crash" you have answered that ellusive and nagging "why".
This is a proposed no-fly system not a no-crash system.
Once your honestly understand that the no-fly system couldn't stop someone from flying "into" a building, as that is too late, you can think about what it means to make a *FLIGHT* intervention system. It would have to stop people from flying "near and towards" the building. So yes, exactly, you don't know *if* you should allow someone to fly near and towards a building unless you know *why* they are flying near and towards the building. Guessing wrong means multiple death and misery events.
So, your carping (trolling) asside, in order to stop someone from crashing into a building you would have to stop them from flying in all sorts of attitudes and positions that "might lead to crashing into the building". If the no-fly started at the building's surface it would be far too late, what with the laws of physics and such.
So imagine a plane needs to fly "near" the building (actually the edge of the no-fly "wall") for some legitimate reason (for any technologically accurate measure of "near"), that is, the pilot needs to "skim" the no-fly zone or was forced there by exigent circumstances. Wind (or the the condinuing exigent circumstance etc.) buffets him into the no-fly zone proper and the controls take over. The auto-pilot tries to initiate a wings-level climb, the plane stalls and hits the building.
Same for an automatically initiated strong right turn while the plane is in a left turn attitude.
Boom!
Fat lot of good that did.
By induction, the flypaper effect of having planes renched out of the control of their pilots only to cause accidents, can only be pushed to the extreme surface of a larger and larger volume of space. So the empire state building is protected but plane (being piloted by a non-malicious pilot-in-trouble) plunges into a subway or a shopping mall instead.
Oooh... yet another fat lot of good...
Then people start bitching about how the planes *are* allowed to fly over the poor neighborhoods but *not* any of the upscale realestate.
Just great, no-fly jerrymandering around the wealth and race cards...
This is just a technological solution to an imaginary problem, waiting to cause a social engeneering disaster.
The actual social solution is to stop being sheep. Don't let people take over the airplanes in the air. Don't negotiate with terrorists, EVER.
The planes on the ground are a different matter. If the pilot takes off with the plan of ramming the building, he likely had the chance and forethought to disable the no-fly hardware anyway. It would only take wire-cutters.
And that is the last "fat lot of good" that this system falls apart around.
Consider that for all that this incident involved a big tall building, it would have been equally "traumatic" if it had been a nice large church or even "the right" highschool football game. How many people died in Oaklahoma?
If the terrorists wanted to make a statement they could drive a gas tanker through a WallMart (times three or six or whatever) to greater effect.
Hell, if I were a terrorist(tm) I would do something totally different. I would simultaneously set off a harmless smoke bombs in, say, every MacDonalds in L.A. It would demonstrate more planning, and more manpower. It would have all the positive spin of a well executed publicity stunt (which is all that terrorisim is after all, a publicity stunt) and it would "hint at" the threat without invoking reactionary ire.
But thankfully the terrorist are as profoundly stupid as the people suggesting this no-fly system and those otherwise demanding that "somebody do something" no matter how ill-considered and fraught with lasting probable damage to our country and way of life.
Today that plane would not have been shot down because that plane turned "before" it would have been in the no-fly zone.
Additionally, the no-fly zones are a lot larger than the "will shoot you down" zones within them. A no-fly zone is not, and could never socially survive being, a wall of death. It just wouldn't work.
[Leastwise not without a lot of automatic lazer cannons, and we saw how well those worked out for the Death Star... 8-)]
Now, if that plane had made that same turn "later" "back then" it might have gotten shot down back then if it had gotten too close to something significant.
Persons who cannot follow arguments to their conclusions, and execute the tasks of basic reason, *are* "entitled" to their opinions, but they should be beaten bloody (at the least metaphorically, but don't let that limit your options 8-) for expressing them in the presence of any equally-undescerning audience.
This is so wrong... words almost fail me. The reasons are almos too manifold to enumerate menaingfully.
The simple version is, well, simple. If you don't know *why* an action is being attempted you have no means to know *if* it should be allowed. For instance, A guy who knows that there is a profound problem with his aircraft or his persion (having a onboard fire or heart attack and cannot safely land plane) decides to point it at that nicly unoccupied mountain so it can crash and burn with a minimal loss of life. Unfortunately once he punches out (or passes out), the "automatic no-fly system" redirects the "obvious pilot error" and safely redirects the plane into the playground or highway or hospital.
"but those places would be no fly too!" Hardly you couldn't cross any significant region of the country if every hospital and playground were tagged "no fly". Don't even get me stared on highways and suburban subdivisions blocking every path.
The VERY LST thing you want is to have a machine wrenching control away from a pilot (or driver for that matter) arbitrarily.
Other scenerios abound. Guy in bad whether blown into nearby no-fly zone. Instead of being able to correct his attitude and exit safely, the autopilot kicks in and executes a control movement that causes the plane to stall. Now you have created the very incident you alledged to want to avoid.
This, even before considering what a black-hat could do once he'd hacked the onboard map. All these no-fly-specks work to funnel a plane off course over/into DC or Manhattin and then leave the "only" valid course one that intersects a significant structure or population.
Nope, wouldn't want to fly into one of *these* "new" programmable bombs. Nosireee...
I really don't know why this is so hard for people to understand, but it "shouldn't" be that hard to create a peer-to-peer, fully trusted spam blacklist system.
1) Take a well known provider of such lists and have him generate himself a PGP/GPG (etc) key.
2) Create a hashing algo that can be applied to email addresses and domain names and produces (about) 60 or so distinct hashes.
3) Coordinate the email blacklists into N files where N is the number of hash results from item 2. These are the N components to the complete list. IF you have an address X and its hash is Xn then if the address doesn't apear in file N the address isn not blacklisted.
4) Construct (or use an existing) P2P app to distribute these N files. Ideally the P2P system in question can "bias" the fetch operation to favor retrevial from "previously known good" sources.
Here are the fine points:
A) The GPG secret key, and not the "location fetched from", is the magic that marks the list valid. You can not DDOS a secret key, just an originator.
B) A first-order web of trust, instead of a simple key, could also be used. That is, instead of requiring a signature from the master key, require a signature from a key signed by the master key. This way "the one key" can stay relatively unused while persons need to attack the rotating and regularly expiring frontage keys if they want to game the transfer for any reason.
C) The master key and the frontage keys don't have to equate to any real nor active network facility. They only need to be unique in key space. You simply *CANNOT* attack a namespace that isn't backed up by a physical facility. (For instance, if the master key were "master@control.spamcop.org", spamcop.org itself could be pointed at Geocities or something or nothing at all.)
D) While a current (Kaza-esque) P2P app would probably be less than ideal for the actual transport, it wouldn't be dificult to design a P2P style distribution mechanisim. It wouldn't need to be any more subtle than a bunch of http mirrors really, as long as the mirroring system (rdist/wget alike) would only put the files in the public directory if they passed a frontage-key/master-key signing test.
In practice you would probably want to distribute a signed known-mirrors (root) file too.
[Then again, a shite load of ptr records in a "spamcop.org" dns table could function as the analog of an MX table for this rooting purpose. Those sites would tend to become targets, but only for as long as the list size were small.]
If a "real" P2P app, or even a well designed friend-of-friend http-based network were put together and reached a core complexity of a at least a couple dozen known base points, it would be unquenchable. The target density would be too diverse to attack effectively. It would be like trying to DDOS "all the bloggers on the net".
Heck, set a pseudo standard: Every doman that wants to join the P2P network "backbone" should issue itself a "spamcop@my.domain" key and then do a challenge/response signing (on connection each party sends the other a challenge, gets the challenge back signed, checks the signature as valid) when it comes onto the backbone. Organize the thing like IRC but with records kept for keys used. Add some throttling (like IRC flood protection) and you are off. Abusers can be tracked down to their hosts and keys.
Then you can devolve. Regular users don't have to have keys to join the net and request information. Keys and domains can be blacklisted (possibly together?).
Heck, use the haxors techniques. Actually get permission to stake out some IRC channels to act as the root seed broadcast-style distribution system (list of known good core hosts, again, such lists are signed).
All you have to do is get some distribution without losing authenticity. That is what public keys are all about. The anti-assailable nature of P2P and the semi-chaotic nature of IRC have their legitimate purposes. Now all you need is to use these systems for good instead of evil.
How hard is this? If the applet can't be started the "extra light" version of the page would be displayed. The statefulness of the connection to the java applet, as verified by an "application level ping" could "ensure" that your customers are playing fair.
In other words, think: "You must allow java to see this page if you don't have a subscription."
Only with properly constructed teasers.