actually, credit card companies do not allow charges to known gambling sites... there are ways around... "paypal" type things for gambling, so the actual gambling site would not have "knowladge" that the person was from the US. Also, it's not for an out of the country site to abide by US law.. that's for US citizens to do on their own. Compare this issue to downloading libCSS from off shore, downloading MP3 from AllmyMP3 in Russia, or hosting porn in a friendly state.
In the last three cases we expect the citizen to follow the law, because to restrict or monitor access would be UnAmerican. Gambling is a "vice" crime so to the law enforcement "religion" it's different. The fundamental problem is that it's easier for the govt to collar these guys illegally than it is to fix the real problem going on in the country. Also, "rightist" state legislatures and law enforcement work very hard to delay, subjorn, etc. the Will of the people to change these backwards laws. For them "Law" is the "religion" and so they should not "compromise" even if the people vote for it.
I still wonder how this is illegal for a non-resident, hosted off shore, with no servers in the US at all. Now it should probably be illegal for US citizens.. many individual states have laws against gambling in any form...but that would be a state issue to their citizens. I sort of understand how the Federal Wire laws make state crimes illegal because you "used" a federal regulated wire service, but I can't understand how they can arrest citizens of other countries for running the service legally in their own country.
Of course, were the USA we can do what ever we want... I often wonder how we'd react if say Bill Gates was arrested in Communist China for being an "obscenely rich capitalist"...I'm sure that's still illegal over there, and Microsoft sells to China.. so why should the reds take a chance at getting him? It's the same basic principle.
what the board member did was wrong and could get HP in much trouble with the SEC also. Somebody on the board leaking information to anybody not thru proper channels opens HP up for insider trading allogations, as well as other SEC violations. They needed to keep this quiet and now the "martyr" is going to ruin that for the company as well.
wrong, Dunn did her job correctly.. it's the board members that are sociopathic and wrong here. They basically used PIs to find the leaker... and the "outside agency" was the one doing the "spying". This case is no different than a spouse hiring a PI to tail a cheating husband... and the same tricks were used.
This is somebody trying to use the media to get their way when they didn't follow the rules... The start of the case was before Dunn was even in her position... and thru due dilligence she found that private information from board meetings was being leaked... i.e. consider if one of your bosses leaked your confidential performance review to all your co-workers because they didn't like you... that's what happened here. After she started investigating several more incedents occured.. from information known only to upper management and board members.
It was information giving HP a black eye when the company choose a different course of action... deliberately by a rogue board member... would you really complain if this was Steve Jobs who found out that it was a board member leaking secrets to ThinkSecret? You know that member would be strung up... probably by his "member"!
It wasn't Dunn herself that ordered the spying anyway... it was the HP investigation department... with full knowladge of the General Consul. It was treated no differenlty that an insurance fraud case, or if you were secretly stealing from the company... PI's do dirty, underhanded stuff like that all the time and get away with it. The board member resigned because he didn't like being treated like an "employee" and didn't think board members should have to answer for their actions in the same manner... you guys have this all wrong. The Wall Street Journal had this on the front page today, and it looked like Dunn acted correctly and professionally...far more so that YOUR boss would be if it was YOU in the situation... given the fact that her BOSSES were the ones breaking company confidentiallity!!!
I read the WSJ paper in the work lobby today on the way out and this is much different than the way this slashdot posting makes it. The "spying" was barely mentioned.
This was a long running follow up to HP executive director's board members leaking information to the press in direct violation of BOARD policy to discuss meetings outside offical channels. The short story is that when Carly was still in charge information about her "chewing out" sessions with the board was leaked by a board member to "get back" at her with the press. Needless to say, it made Carly's job even harder and caused her to be let go sooner... again there was leaking involved in that decision also. When Carly left they split her 1 position of CEO/Pres 3 ways. Dunn and another guy pick up the CEO position and started invesigating who was leaking (late 2004). Over the next year they went to HP's internal affairs department and began investigaing what was going on... they had suspects, but no "smoking gun". Over the next year, they investigated several more big leaks..from meetings of only board members and upper management...i.e. people that should know better. By this point the board knew they were being investigated. The only mention of the "spying" in the WSJ article was that HP eventually hired outside investigators.. read that as slimy PIs just like workmans comp, and other private agencies use. It was the outside guys that scammed for the court records.. just like PIs do to catch you cheating on your wife! It's not new, it's done every day.
The reason it was known is that Both CEOs (Dunn and the other guy) and HPs council took the evidence to the ethics board.. over the head of the board of directors to recommend action. They discussed the entire evidence with the guy they fired and the guy who quit before taking it to the full board. They basicly went to the board and demanded they fire the guy..Who's still there! The guy who quit is full of crap, just like the leaker. There is no statement to be made... somebody was violating confidentiality of their board discussion to further their "agenda" and should be punished. In the WSJ article both the other CEO and the General Consul agreed if it was any normal "employee" of HP they would be terminated immediately under the companies rules.. This is about the "Board" thinking their above the rules and the CEO of a company doing their job.. nothing less.
in this case all the defendant wanted was a "fair" collection of evidence. All they have to point to in court is the boarderline illegal efforts the RIAA has already made to see that any information collected not directly related to evidence will not be handled professionally. Even the court was willing to accept that proposition... The RIAA was not... and left the ultimatum to the judge to let them... so the judge didn't budge and the RIAA dropped the case. If they were so "right" they should have had a list of file names/types ready to go for the independant auditors. All the "victim" wanted was a spelled out list of what the RIAA was looking for and what they were allowed to keep from her hard drive... that's perfectly reasonable in any court.
because EU countries also have a pretty good representation of left and far left parties. It's not uncommon for Union, Socialists, and even communist to get elected seats... and even more extreme people can run for office. In the US there is no "left"... left. now days somebody "center" during Regan would be "leftist" now.. and the mainline parties are clamboring to see how more "right" they can get.
What could somebody request in court to keep the other side from running up legal bills just to hurt you? Is there any legal concept of "equal footing" in a case that would restrict big corporations to using only 1 lawyer (and associated fees and such) instead of an entire "team" mearly to drown the defendant in charges?
the RIAA is contracting out the investigation.... they don't want to know where the data comes from... and will work harder than hell to keep that info from discovery in court.
Like the article is about, the RIAA is looking to do the HDD analysis themselves, without restrictions... which is way out of line in a civil case. The motion for an independant third party should have been welcome to the court... with restrictions as to scope and confidentiality of the data. Any judge not with that program needs disbarred... this is a music sharing case, not a criminal case.. the judges in these cases need to be quicker thinkers because these are "jon doe" cases and the plantiffs are grasping at straws to do damage... reguardless of whatever merits are involved to prevent fileshareing, the cases and evidence needs to stick to those terms.. not a farm to get info for more damage later.
it's not the other programmer's own fault... cdrecord changed their license... they were complying with the old license by also using GPL... now the new version is incompatible... so they can't use any further updates. The old version isn't going anywhere, so it's not like people are losing anything. But it puts a crimp in the course of normal updates because now everybody has to appy their own patches.
I'd agree it's a bit stupid, BUT... use Apple's or Microsoft's code out-of-license and see how long until you get a CnD letter! It's only vigilance that keeps the GPL from being watered down.. if OSS was to get too watered down because we allowed to much freedom, it could be considered "public domain" a concept that doesn't legally exist any more.. so somebody with bigger lawyers could swoop in and take the whole thing.
two points. First US law goes above and beyond the Geneva convention in terms of treatment of prisoners... we have laws against tourturing.. period. Those laws apply to all US citizens irreguardless of law enforement or militrary standing.. hell, even some BDSM runs afowl of those laws when the "tourture" is voulantary. Second, Geneva Convention applies to the battle zone and combat. If we had shot the non-combatants on sight or even wounded that would have been legal. In some ways they aren't under Geneva convention anymore anyway.. they prisoners were captured in their home country, removed from their country and forcibly taken to US owned soil. Again, if they wanted to shoot them on sight, fine. But once you bring them as prisoners to US soil, don't start bending the US law in ways that hurt US citizens.. that just makes us look stupid. Techinically they broke no law shooting at invading troops on their soil. (of course if they DID, tell that to the NRA because the 2nd amendment is useless now!) Plotting to destroy the USA isn't illegal in Iraq, or Canada for that matter... Soveriegn country and all. Of course they couldn't keep them in the country either because they'd have to let them go as the war is long done an over... after all defending your country against forgein invaders isn't illegal anywhere, uniformed or not.
another poster mentioned it was mostly rental and vacation homes being stolen... I could see that scam working. It would look to an out-of-town bank like they lived in the house, so it was theirs. They could have even shown the house or signed papers there. I could see this working if somebody got your mortgage slip for the house in the mail and grab some other mail to pretend to be you.
same rules apply for security fraud or stolen cars. if you find out the used car you purchased was stolen the cops come and take it back.. you might get money back if you can find the dealer you bought it from... same with mistaken bank money... when they want it back they just take it... out of whatever they can get.
In real estate that's what escrow and title companies are for. This should be an open and shut title dispute. And the title company would be holding the bag for allowing the fraudulant transaction. Any title company that let more than 1 or 2 of these through would be done. Protecting Mortgage companies and banks is foolish.. they get paid big bucks and pay title companies to ensure it's right.
How do we know there is not software that does this already? We've had web cams and microphones for 6-7 years now. First, what APIs exist in browsers that would allow this? Second what's the minimum software needed to do this?
Lastly, could it be done without installing anything extra at all... from a webpage?
simple, net neutrality was an undefined quantity that allowed the original internet to get rolling back in 1995 or so. It wasn't one specific law, but a series of prohibitions and FCC ownership rules that followed in the wake of the ATT breakup. Of corse the breakup took place in the mid 80s so it took nearly 10 years for the internet to catch on for normal users!
The key to Net Neutrality was that phone companies no longer controlled the lines anymore. They owned the lines and provided telecommunication service... They were not allowed to restrict end user devices that met FCC specification for Telcom (faxing and dial-up took off after this) the local bells were not allowed interstate long distance anymore. Later, the restrictions were included to define the telco as "line owner" and any company could rent the lines and provide service. Also, telcos were prohibited from providing many extra pay-for services outside phone service. Things like providing music over the phone, or even running their own ISPs were orginally prohibited.
What's happened specifically since 2000 is that there's been a push to designate internet connections as "data service" not "telco". Of course that narrowly defines "telco" as POTS.. when the network is so much more now. Thru FCC rulings and court cases they've got "data service" ruled as a seperate business from telephone. Cable companies pioneered this when they got Broadband over the "public" cable network reclassified as a seperate business from the Cable service with little to no public oversight..(never mind their orginal charters don't include data service either) since then telcos have been biding their time when they can own the whole "internet" all over again. You're still getting the internet over a phone line, they want to own it all again.
Net Neutrality is a "pre-emptive" strike against the telcos that have been manapulating for years to undo the restrictions put on them after the monopoly was broken up. The point is that they clearly plan to go right back to predatory, non-customer-friendly practices just as fast as they can when the ink is dry.. after all, 3 of the 5 were sued just last week after the Universal Service Charge was supposed to come off... but they tried to sneek a new fee in to replace it!!! is there any more proof than that needed to show we need to heavily restrict these guys BEFORE they ruin something really good for their own greed!
Also in Riven the clues were written out in the books you had to put together. Not necessarily the puzzles themselves, but how things worked was spelled out.. then you could figure out what the puzzle was and why you would solve it.
in this case it's is from a Federal agency... when somebody like MA wants to implement OSS in schools or offices they can point to this statement as "approval" for moving to OSS projects. M$ doesn't want ANY public recognition of OSS at the federal level. Imagine the effect if 1 State's budget for Office went to OpenOffice.org instead!!! That would cover their funding for several YEARS, but be a drop to Microsoft. The money would speed an OSS project up by 5 years or better... then still be FREE... MS can't let that happen at all costs.
Business should be a "sport" not a "battle"! Most industries follow that model, there's only so much work one company can do RIGHT, so it's more like sports where different teams lead each season. Nobody expects the winning NFL team to hurt or maim the other players.. that's not sporting. The other teams still show up next season and play again. Microsoft, Oracle, Walmart, and others see business as "WAR".. trying to win all the games at any cost.. trouble is that it's not "fun" anymore. And you have 1000's of people out of work because some already rich company wants ANOTHER.1% profit so squashed their companies with half-rate low cost products and FUD advertizing.
the biggest complaint of original mindstorms was the connections were made with regular bricks? Good for construction because lots of people had bricks, not for strength when you had moving connections. Pretty much all of the hobbyists involved pushed the move to "no studs" so all the components connect with snap connectors or axles.. hence the change from the technic "brick" with holes, but still a regular Lego piece, to the Technic Beam which has a slightly different "height" than the brick, but is entirely holes of the same size and spacing as regular bricks... it will make the creations stronger when you have moving parts.
I know that was one of the big differences between Myst and Riven. When they did Riven they really tried to put enought clues to solve the game in there. Where the Orignial had some very random puzzles, with missing logic, Riven was completely solveable with the in game hints.. you had to find them in the right order, but that's part of the game!
but they can also be used to discover or predict interactions between common components we'd never think of on our own. This is just applied design of experiments. The bonus is that the computer can run millions of experiments with nothing more than time being the limitation.... as long as you have a good model. So simple chemical interactions are ripe for this type of thing. I'd think another applilcation would be bug hunting Linux distros for hardware, program, and usage interactions you'd never see with enough predictability to fix by hand. Think of a small distro rerunning the models after every package change.. get interactivity with users involved and you'd change the face of software.
A Distro or individual project could get certified if they put the work into it.. it could even be a selling feature. I'd expect Suse and Red Hat already have something in place to satisfy these requirements as they deal in large enterprise installs already.
OSS and ISO really do go hand-in-hand, but hackers tend to like to do things their way... and ISO is all about following instructions. Still, it could be a neat project to provide ISO, Sox, HIPAA, etc. testing to OSS projects in some fashion that was non-disruptive to the fun stuff. It could be something Google Code or Sourceforge add to their hosting solutions.
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In the last three cases we expect the citizen to follow the law, because to restrict or monitor access would be UnAmerican. Gambling is a "vice" crime so to the law enforcement "religion" it's different. The fundamental problem is that it's easier for the govt to collar these guys illegally than it is to fix the real problem going on in the country. Also, "rightist" state legislatures and law enforcement work very hard to delay, subjorn, etc. the Will of the people to change these backwards laws. For them "Law" is the "religion" and so they should not "compromise" even if the people vote for it.
Of course, were the USA we can do what ever we want... I often wonder how we'd react if say Bill Gates was arrested in Communist China for being an "obscenely rich capitalist"..
what the board member did was wrong and could get HP in much trouble with the SEC also. Somebody on the board leaking information to anybody not thru proper channels opens HP up for insider trading allogations, as well as other SEC violations. They needed to keep this quiet and now the "martyr" is going to ruin that for the company as well.
This is somebody trying to use the media to get their way when they didn't follow the rules... The start of the case was before Dunn was even in her position... and thru due dilligence she found that private information from board meetings was being leaked... i.e. consider if one of your bosses leaked your confidential performance review to all your co-workers because they didn't like you... that's what happened here. After she started investigating several more incedents occured.. from information known only to upper management and board members.
It was information giving HP a black eye when the company choose a different course of action... deliberately by a rogue board member... would you really complain if this was Steve Jobs who found out that it was a board member leaking secrets to ThinkSecret? You know that member would be strung up... probably by his "member"!
It wasn't Dunn herself that ordered the spying anyway... it was the HP investigation department... with full knowladge of the General Consul. It was treated no differenlty that an insurance fraud case, or if you were secretly stealing from the company... PI's do dirty, underhanded stuff like that all the time and get away with it. The board member resigned because he didn't like being treated like an "employee" and didn't think board members should have to answer for their actions in the same manner... you guys have this all wrong. The Wall Street Journal had this on the front page today, and it looked like Dunn acted correctly and professionally...far more so that YOUR boss would be if it was YOU in the situation... given the fact that her BOSSES were the ones breaking company confidentiallity!!!
This was a long running follow up to HP executive director's board members leaking information to the press in direct violation of BOARD policy to discuss meetings outside offical channels. The short story is that when Carly was still in charge information about her "chewing out" sessions with the board was leaked by a board member to "get back" at her with the press. Needless to say, it made Carly's job even harder and caused her to be let go sooner... again there was leaking involved in that decision also. When Carly left they split her 1 position of CEO/Pres 3 ways. Dunn and another guy pick up the CEO position and started invesigating who was leaking (late 2004). Over the next year they went to HP's internal affairs department and began investigaing what was going on... they had suspects, but no "smoking gun". Over the next year, they investigated several more big leaks..from meetings of only board members and upper management...i.e. people that should know better. By this point the board knew they were being investigated. The only mention of the "spying" in the WSJ article was that HP eventually hired outside investigators.. read that as slimy PIs just like workmans comp, and other private agencies use. It was the outside guys that scammed for the court records.. just like PIs do to catch you cheating on your wife! It's not new, it's done every day.
The reason it was known is that Both CEOs (Dunn and the other guy) and HPs council took the evidence to the ethics board.. over the head of the board of directors to recommend action. They discussed the entire evidence with the guy they fired and the guy who quit before taking it to the full board. They basicly went to the board and demanded they fire the guy..Who's still there! The guy who quit is full of crap, just like the leaker. There is no statement to be made... somebody was violating confidentiality of their board discussion to further their "agenda" and should be punished. In the WSJ article both the other CEO and the General Consul agreed if it was any normal "employee" of HP they would be terminated immediately under the companies rules.. This is about the "Board" thinking their above the rules and the CEO of a company doing their job.. nothing less.
in this case all the defendant wanted was a "fair" collection of evidence. All they have to point to in court is the boarderline illegal efforts the RIAA has already made to see that any information collected not directly related to evidence will not be handled professionally. Even the court was willing to accept that proposition... The RIAA was not... and left the ultimatum to the judge to let them ... so the judge didn't budge and the RIAA dropped the case. If they were so "right" they should have had a list of file names/types ready to go for the independant auditors. All the "victim" wanted was a spelled out list of what the RIAA was looking for and what they were allowed to keep from her hard drive... that's perfectly reasonable in any court.
because EU countries also have a pretty good representation of left and far left parties. It's not uncommon for Union, Socialists, and even communist to get elected seats... and even more extreme people can run for office. In the US there is no "left"... left. now days somebody "center" during Regan would be "leftist" now.. and the mainline parties are clamboring to see how more "right" they can get.
What could somebody request in court to keep the other side from running up legal bills just to hurt you? Is there any legal concept of "equal footing" in a case that would restrict big corporations to using only 1 lawyer (and associated fees and such) instead of an entire "team" mearly to drown the defendant in charges?
Like the article is about, the RIAA is looking to do the HDD analysis themselves, without restrictions... which is way out of line in a civil case. The motion for an independant third party should have been welcome to the court... with restrictions as to scope and confidentiality of the data. Any judge not with that program needs disbarred... this is a music sharing case, not a criminal case.. the judges in these cases need to be quicker thinkers because these are "jon doe" cases and the plantiffs are grasping at straws to do damage... reguardless of whatever merits are involved to prevent fileshareing, the cases and evidence needs to stick to those terms.. not a farm to get info for more damage later.
Bah! Trolling again. The media loves Apple. Start being serious."
the media isn't biased against Apple at all
but the media loves to smear an overhyped media darling even more!!!! It's what they do.
I'd agree it's a bit stupid, BUT... use Apple's or Microsoft's code out-of-license and see how long until you get a CnD letter! It's only vigilance that keeps the GPL from being watered down.. if OSS was to get too watered down because we allowed to much freedom, it could be considered "public domain" a concept that doesn't legally exist any more.. so somebody with bigger lawyers could swoop in and take the whole thing.
two points. First US law goes above and beyond the Geneva convention in terms of treatment of prisoners... we have laws against tourturing.. period. Those laws apply to all US citizens irreguardless of law enforement or militrary standing.. hell, even some BDSM runs afowl of those laws when the "tourture" is voulantary. Second, Geneva Convention applies to the battle zone and combat. If we had shot the non-combatants on sight or even wounded that would have been legal. In some ways they aren't under Geneva convention anymore anyway.. they prisoners were captured in their home country, removed from their country and forcibly taken to US owned soil. Again, if they wanted to shoot them on sight, fine. But once you bring them as prisoners to US soil, don't start bending the US law in ways that hurt US citizens.. that just makes us look stupid. Techinically they broke no law shooting at invading troops on their soil. (of course if they DID, tell that to the NRA because the 2nd amendment is useless now!) Plotting to destroy the USA isn't illegal in Iraq, or Canada for that matter... Soveriegn country and all. Of course they couldn't keep them in the country either because they'd have to let them go as the war is long done an over... after all defending your country against forgein invaders isn't illegal anywhere, uniformed or not.
another poster mentioned it was mostly rental and vacation homes being stolen... I could see that scam working. It would look to an out-of-town bank like they lived in the house, so it was theirs. They could have even shown the house or signed papers there. I could see this working if somebody got your mortgage slip for the house in the mail and grab some other mail to pretend to be you.
In real estate that's what escrow and title companies are for. This should be an open and shut title dispute. And the title company would be holding the bag for allowing the fraudulant transaction. Any title company that let more than 1 or 2 of these through would be done. Protecting Mortgage companies and banks is foolish.. they get paid big bucks and pay title companies to ensure it's right.
cough.. ATT (NSA)
cough, cough, verison (NSA)
cough, cough, cough GM (remember that OnStar can spy when you're not using it)
and god knows what Microsoft has given to keep their monopoly
How do we know there is not software that does this already? We've had web cams and microphones for 6-7 years now. First, what APIs exist in browsers that would allow this? Second what's the minimum software needed to do this? Lastly, could it be done without installing anything extra at all... from a webpage?
The key to Net Neutrality was that phone companies no longer controlled the lines anymore. They owned the lines and provided telecommunication service... They were not allowed to restrict end user devices that met FCC specification for Telcom (faxing and dial-up took off after this) the local bells were not allowed interstate long distance anymore. Later, the restrictions were included to define the telco as "line owner" and any company could rent the lines and provide service. Also, telcos were prohibited from providing many extra pay-for services outside phone service. Things like providing music over the phone, or even running their own ISPs were orginally prohibited.
What's happened specifically since 2000 is that there's been a push to designate internet connections as "data service" not "telco". Of course that narrowly defines "telco" as POTS.. when the network is so much more now. Thru FCC rulings and court cases they've got "data service" ruled as a seperate business from telephone. Cable companies pioneered this when they got Broadband over the "public" cable network reclassified as a seperate business from the Cable service with little to no public oversight..(never mind their orginal charters don't include data service either) since then telcos have been biding their time when they can own the whole "internet" all over again. You're still getting the internet over a phone line, they want to own it all again.
Net Neutrality is a "pre-emptive" strike against the telcos that have been manapulating for years to undo the restrictions put on them after the monopoly was broken up. The point is that they clearly plan to go right back to predatory, non-customer-friendly practices just as fast as they can when the ink is dry.. after all, 3 of the 5 were sued just last week after the Universal Service Charge was supposed to come off... but they tried to sneek a new fee in to replace it!!! is there any more proof than that needed to show we need to heavily restrict these guys BEFORE they ruin something really good for their own greed!
Also in Riven the clues were written out in the books you had to put together. Not necessarily the puzzles themselves, but how things worked was spelled out.. then you could figure out what the puzzle was and why you would solve it.
in this case it's is from a Federal agency... when somebody like MA wants to implement OSS in schools or offices they can point to this statement as "approval" for moving to OSS projects. M$ doesn't want ANY public recognition of OSS at the federal level. Imagine the effect if 1 State's budget for Office went to OpenOffice.org instead!!! That would cover their funding for several YEARS, but be a drop to Microsoft. The money would speed an OSS project up by 5 years or better... then still be FREE... MS can't let that happen at all costs.
Business should be a "sport" not a "battle"! Most industries follow that model, there's only so much work one company can do RIGHT, so it's more like sports where different teams lead each season. Nobody expects the winning NFL team to hurt or maim the other players.. that's not sporting. The other teams still show up next season and play again. Microsoft, Oracle, Walmart, and others see business as "WAR".. trying to win all the games at any cost.. trouble is that it's not "fun" anymore. And you have 1000's of people out of work because some already rich company wants ANOTHER .1% profit so squashed their companies with half-rate low cost products and FUD advertizing.
the biggest complaint of original mindstorms was the connections were made with regular bricks? Good for construction because lots of people had bricks, not for strength when you had moving connections. Pretty much all of the hobbyists involved pushed the move to "no studs" so all the components connect with snap connectors or axles.. hence the change from the technic "brick" with holes, but still a regular Lego piece, to the Technic Beam which has a slightly different "height" than the brick, but is entirely holes of the same size and spacing as regular bricks... it will make the creations stronger when you have moving parts.
I know that was one of the big differences between Myst and Riven. When they did Riven they really tried to put enought clues to solve the game in there. Where the Orignial had some very random puzzles, with missing logic, Riven was completely solveable with the in game hints.. you had to find them in the right order, but that's part of the game!
no, indicating a poison would get the cops called for a "bomb threat" situation.
but they can also be used to discover or predict interactions between common components we'd never think of on our own. This is just applied design of experiments. The bonus is that the computer can run millions of experiments with nothing more than time being the limitation.... as long as you have a good model. So simple chemical interactions are ripe for this type of thing. I'd think another applilcation would be bug hunting Linux distros for hardware, program, and usage interactions you'd never see with enough predictability to fix by hand. Think of a small distro rerunning the models after every package change.. get interactivity with users involved and you'd change the face of software.
A Distro or individual project could get certified if they put the work into it.. it could even be a selling feature. I'd expect Suse and Red Hat already have something in place to satisfy these requirements as they deal in large enterprise installs already. OSS and ISO really do go hand-in-hand, but hackers tend to like to do things their way... and ISO is all about following instructions. Still, it could be a neat project to provide ISO, Sox, HIPAA, etc. testing to OSS projects in some fashion that was non-disruptive to the fun stuff. It could be something Google Code or Sourceforge add to their hosting solutions.