The NGOs and banking orgs continue to push developing countries into export crops rather than domestic food stocks. They're _supposed_ to buy their staples on the international market. It's more "efficient" that way. Till their export market tanks, or Australia has a crop failure or something and then the staples are unaffordable. Hey, it's the free market. Best of all possible worlds. If you're an investment banker.
The obvious application of this is a pricing model that includes the number of viewers in the room. This has been an issue since the early VCR days. Many of the big players (e.g. Disney) were violently opposed to the VCR at first for just this reason, that they could no longer charge based on the number of viewers. I'd be suprised if that idea didn't get floated soon after the debut of the camera, maybe in connection with some huge event.
Improved preferences/customization seems a small payout for such a large investment. They already have the 'thumbclick' data, which is far easier to run throgh the (Bayesian) software. I expect it's already got a model for how many regular users there are. From the perspective of preferences or targeted ads, who's holding the remote is more important than who's in the room.
The problem with hitting the brakes in traffic is stunningly obvious in the peloton (i.e. a large group of cyclists in a race):
Hit the brakes in a pack and you may cause a crash. The next guy is about 6 inches off your back wheel.
Hit the brakes and you have to spend energy getting back up to speed. It will cost you over the course of the race. The margin between placing and not is that thin. Really.
You lose more energy to the "accoridion" effect the further back in the pack you are. This is really pronounced in "crits" (criterium races). Pack position is evertyhing.
The higher the race category (i.e. experience level), the less braking, the less accordion (traffic jams), the fewer crashes and the faster race times. It's not just fitness, it's technique as well.
Which is why, as a newbie cyclist this year, I got yelled at (on team rides) every time I touched the brakes that wasn't absolutely necessary.
Do we really only perceive biologists as madmen who want to do evil experients for the heck of it? As someone working in the field, I say "no." They're weirdos and nutballs quite similar to the geeks that post on Slashdot, except that they frequently work with wet stuff and usually have more formal training.
My paranoia (and I own it as paranoia) is not that some mad scientist will do evil experiments. It's that perfectly "normal" and "rational" citizens running a large corporation will fsck up the planet by using this kind of technology in a stupid way on an industrial scale. By, say, monocropping all the wheat grown in North America with some GMO strain that can eat Roundup for breakfast. Or something like that.
If you have a problem with the NYPD, try living in
LA.
I'd say they're about even. I used to live in the Loisada (at the time a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood). I witnessed beatings and murders and I learned to be afraid of the cops (even though I was a honky). Not paranoia, fear of getting shot. NYPD is an occupying army in the barrios, neck deep in the drug trade and a lot of them (like my entire precinct, the 7th) seemed to have no problem with capping someone who got in the way.
I agree that it probably won't accomplish much. But damn, it gives me the creeps.
I enjoyed Cryptonomicon very much but I was constantly struck by similarites in theme and style to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Are you familiar with the book? Do you feel that Pynchon has had a significant effect on your work? Are the similarities intentional?
Sure it is. Lessig is brilliant but he's got it wrong this time.
A LOT of the appeal of the jibjab version is that the attitudes it exhibits are the exact opposite of what Guthrie's version had. The original spoke to universal feelings of brotherhood, shared heritage, etc. What makes this so funny is the complete lack of any such sentiment, both in the parody and the political figures it depicts. It would NOT be nearly as funny if they'd done it to the Star Wars theme or some random pop song. It comments on the original as well as the candidates, and that makes it parody.
I though the InnoDB tables supported row-level locking. Doesn't it offer several different transaction isolation levels described by the SQL-92 standard?
There's a story going around about the early days of VCR development: RCA was presenting to Disney it's first design for a "non-rewindable" cassete. They set up a meeting with some Disney bigwigs to show them how it worked. You needed a special device to rewind the cassete which presumably only the rental shops would have had. It was tamper-proof to the extent that casual attempts to rewind it without this special device would break the cassette or at least render it unplayable.
At the meeting the RCA engineers showed the cassete design, demonstrated the features and said "well, what do you think?"
The response of the Disney execs was to object that there was no way of controlling how many people were in the room watching when it played. They declared it unacceptable and left.
I've talked with Disney (video) engineers who assure me that this is precisely how these people think. But they're not alone. More than one "grand vision of the future" from corporate lobbyists presumes that we're going to pay for electronic print media a page view at a time.
If this keeps up, fair use is dead, and the days of free public libraries are numbered.
Re:Some truth is harmful; some taboos, useful.
on
What You Can't Say
·
· Score: 1
The Bell Curve is widely loathed because it's wretched science with a nasty, right-wing agenda. I recommend Stephen Jay Gould's rebuttal, one version of which is his review of the book in the New Yorker.
OK, back around '95 or '96 I was defacto administrator of a bunch of unix boxen at the department where I worked. I set up home directories for all users on the file server and optionally included startup stuff for them that ran the browser (Mosaic) and brought up a web page of their choice. In my case this was another server at the UW that had the daily weather report as text. For others it was the log file from the previous nights production runs.
There are an enormous number of SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems out there controlling various parts of the grid, and a significant percentage of them are
a) connected to the internet
b) running a Windows OS (e.g. WINCE)
Some dweeb from homeland security was being interviewed a while back & complained bitterly that he couldn't get anyone in congress to take this seriously.
It is in the interest of the producers to maintain a market for their products.
Sort of. Slavery works pretty well too, as long as you have the muscle to keep the slaves in line.
I guess there are alterate distopian possibilities, such as a massive imbalance of wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer people, which they article seems to be predicting.
Predicting? Here in the US the imbalance is already massive and getting bigger. It looks like an optimization problem to me: what's the minimum number of consumers you need to keep the elite in caviar? And if the number of super-wealthy get's smaller and the efficiency of your system goes up, well, the required number of consumers goes down.
As the elite get more removed/alienated from the general riff-raff, the efficiency of slavery (or whatever combination of repression, mis-education, propaganda, diversion into racist wars & reality TV seems to work) get's more appealing.
This sounds more like the morning news than sci-fi to me. Fifty percent seems pretty arbitrary but the current numbers are pretty horrific if you're looking at it from the bottom rung. Even now, here in WA, we're at ~8% unemployment. That's a lot of people.
The problem is already with us, and globalization is just going to rub our noses in it harder. We (society) have some serious thinking to do about labor, value, and how we're going to live and work. That is, if there's anyone left who still believes in things like "society" or "public discourse."
I don't mean to bash MS (there are so many on/. that do it so well) but realistically these kinds of security problems are very unlikely to stop happening. If you've worked there as a dev, even if only for a few months, you probably have a good idea why this is. It's not because people are uncaring or incompetent. The big obstacles are 1) their own history and culture and 2) the enormity of their codebase. Here's why I think so.
If you've made any study of it at all you know that effective security results from a process that starts before the software is even written. There is no protocol that will save you from logic errors (like the latest Passport hole). To do this reqires a good understanding by the devs of security and their adherence to design principles and coding practices. To do that you need a software development methodology that enforces the consistent application of those priciples and practices. Therein lies the problem.
In my little corner of MS (though by all accounts it was typical of the company as a whole) what was prized above all was meeting requirements and deadlines. Virtually no energy was put into the development environment (hence the hour I spent every morning just downloading the nightly build, the insane.bat scripts, constantly fixing my own NT install as a $55/hr contractor). Nobody got "c-hours" for making life easier. More importantly, there was little value placed on design, good technique. Lip service was paid in meetings and reviews, of course, and superficial style details received obsessive scrutiny. Code reviews often bogged down on correct hungarian notation but a unit test consisting of "return true" was perfectly ok. The "heros" were people with big brain muscles who spent nights and weekends hammering out code to meet the latest deadline.
The result of all this was a coding culture that I called the kingdom of cut-and-paste. I was actually encouraged to write routines by starting with someone else's routine to do something unrelated and edit it to do my task. A colleague would stand over my shoulder browsing the codebase looking for something convenient to steal. It was a shock to realize how little code people actually wrote. This is one of the things that I hated about working there, that I spent so much of my time fscking with the various APIs, incomprehensible include file heirarchies and so little time writing C++.
Well, in my Intro to Fortran class in '77 the prof explained why massive code duplication is a bad idea, and the results are visible in every MS product. You can't fix a bug in one place, you have to fix it every place it got copied to, and you don't know where those are. The codebase is now on the order of 100'sM lines or better? Probably not even MS has a good handle on this, because they can't know for sure how much duplication (with tiny variations) there is (clue: lots).
Once a company grows to a considerable size it's really hard to change the culture. I've seen this at several startups. MS is like a battleship or an aircraft carrier. High-tech and deadly but turning that boat around is really hard and simply may not happen in a short distance. Expecting them to change their performance WRT security in a few months (or year) is kind of like expecting the old Soviet apparatchiks to start respecting civil liberties and human dignity because the Central Comittee sends out a memo. Good luck. It's a city unto itself in Redmond, its own little world. And even if you did, what the hell are you going to do about the millions of lines of (largely incomprehensible) code in the installed base? The millions of systems in the wild that are unpatched and unmaintained?
I see many of the same disasters being recapitulated in.NET. They may talk security and I'm sure they're trying hard but I expect that their long term strategies are going to rely more on legislation than the (probably impossible)
task of bringing their products t
Arguably ours was custom. It started as RH, but
we rebuilt the kernel, tailored the devices,
ripped out X, etc. etc. Of course, that's a big
selling point for OSS, no, that you can tailor
the software to meet your specific needs?
As a 25 year veteran of the coding pits I feel strongly that it's not "developer candy" like context sensitive help that makes development easier or harder on a given platform. Editor features, IDEs, completion are all pretty superficial after a while (I'm a good typist & actually find man pages useful). What makes the difference for me is the transparency and modularity of the platform.
When I code in the Linux environment I have a very good idea of what the side effects of my calls to the OS or external libraries are going to be. If I don't, there are superb references available on the web or at the bookstore.
By contrast, during my stint at Microsoft I found that enormous amounts of critical information are available only as internal folklore e.g. "if you want to understand how that call works, go over to building 43 and ask Fred, he got it to work."
This, not "ease of use" or the politics are why
I would rather pull espresso than be an MS dev, either inside or outside the Redmond campus. I will never have the understanding of the underlying software architecture of NT/Win2k/XP that I do now of Linux. No one does. It's just not structured that way. And if I can't be really good (by my standards) at my trade than I'll get a new trade. I'll be a really great barrista.
No I don't have reliable, comprehensive survey data either (no one does AFAICT) but consider this: at our Seattle media/search company, we have striped as many as 20 workstations and 70+ rackmounts with the same linux distro. This is not an uncommon practice in my experience. I'd guess that it's standard proceedure for companies operating hi-volume backend environments.
Example: google is running (by their own admission) on the order of 50,000 linux rackmounts. How many times do you think they downloaded the disto?
What a guide service (free or paid) provides is
metadata. That is, information about the
information you want. In this case, that means
when when the movie starts, who's in it, what
year it was released, genre, etc. The metadata
is what makes the data useful, or at least accessible. Imagine 1000
channels continuously broadcasting with no guide
at all. Pretty useless, no?
The PVR manufacturer has to compete WRT the
quaility of hardware and software. Tivo is a great box, and the software is nicely integrated. RCA may realease a great box w/ good software as well - I don't know. Whichever you buy, the utility is going to depend a great deal on the
quality of the metadata, i.e. whether you find
what you want & the information is accurate &
updated.
In my 3 years at a search engine, I've learned
that, almost universally, metadata from
the content provider sucks. Ultimately
it may improve as people discover that it
improves your share (more eyeballs) to have
good metadata as well as hot babes and
exploding cars. But for now, it's up to
third party providers to do the curation,
cleaning up the mess (and it is truly a mess)
by writing very sophisticated software (screen
scaping is just the beginning) or having
teams of humans continuously fixing it up.
So it has utility, there will be a market, and
some of us will pay for higher quality stuff.
The pay stuff will be better. Remember,
it's not an open source software product it's
a service. If I have a dozen people on staff
I can do a lot better job. Someone has to
make sure the screen scapers haven't broken on
a new HTML format, or that somebody mispelled
vampire or tell the bayesian page parsers
that the token "ORC" increases the likelihood
that the page describes action/fantasy.
Full disclosure: I love my TiVo, and I work
for Thomson (which owns RCA).
Re:Occam's Razor (nitpick)
on
Starcraft
·
· Score: 1
I think what you're really invoking here is the
Copernican Principle. Occam's razor would have one
avoid multiplying entities (i.e. postulating more
things to explain the ones we see) unless you have to. In this case, you're arguably violating that
rule, since you're positing some new entities (aliens).
The Copernican Principle, OTOH, is
(roughly stated) "you're not special." Thus if
your explanation of the observed movements of the
planets requires that you just happen to be
at the center of all this motion and observing it,
it's not very plausible.
The argument "what are the odds that we're the
only life in the whole frikkin universe?" seems
to me more an argument against "specialness."
Several systems, such as Linux, use the same, satisfactory ISN generator as the one used a year ago, and because of that, are not covered here in any more detail.
It was tested the first time (a year ago) and was near-perfect, just slightly behind BSD. Since it wasn't likely to get better it wasn't included in
the second round of tests.
It is the goverment's job to see where the goverment needs something (that may not even be useful to anyone else), and supply money to get the need filled quickly. Any other research is for universities, and should be public domain.
Man, you need to get a clue about how research is
actually funded at universities in the US and who "owns" the
results. At the department where I worked it
went something like this:
Famous scientist solicits 10s of millions of
$$s from a variety of sources including
government (NIH, DOE) & industry. This process
is incredibly political WRT who the govt does
and does not fund, academic dominance struggles,
backbiting, etc.
University takes half off the top.
Scientists in department also get their
own grants, frequently from industry, with all
sorts of strings attached.
Enormous pressure on all involved to come
up with "commercial" IP.
Stuff is developed.
Furious battles among researchers - who owns
how much of what - as industry & VC gathers
round. University is heavily involved through
"Office of Technology Transfer" (from Regan era
mandate forcing recipients of public funds
to actively seek ways of transferring IP to
private sector).
Startups are formed and/or patents "transferred" (some might say given away).
Everyone who can keeps a percentage (stock,
rights) including University, but usually not
including postdocs, lab techs, anyone other than
principal investigators whether or not they
were really important to the work.
The public gets the publications (which is
to be fair the most important thing)but
precious little of the technology
(actual HOWTO and rights to do so)
It may be impossible to stop informed and skilled
individuals from using hard encryption. That cat
has been out of the bag for years. I suspect that
more even than terrorism these governments are
worried that ubiquitous encrytpion embedded in apps
like email and accounting programs will allow the
"black" i.e. unreported economy to balloon even
further. Estimates vary widely but it's likely
that a huge number of people in the US are
systematically underreporting their income.
When
the small business version of quicken has menu
items for "Encrypt my records so the IRS
cannot read them" and "untraceably and
exchange digital cash with this anonymous
correspondent" it will be a bigger threat to
the state than all the nukes the USSR ever had.
To defend against this the state doesn't need to
pry their GPG key away from/. readers, it just
needs to make it hard or scary enough that Joe/Jane sixpack
either can't or is afraid to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
The NGOs and banking orgs continue to push developing countries into export crops rather than domestic food stocks. They're _supposed_ to buy their staples on the international market. It's more "efficient" that way. Till their export market tanks, or Australia has a crop failure or something and then the staples are unaffordable. Hey, it's the free market. Best of all possible worlds. If you're an investment banker.
The obvious application of this is a pricing model that includes the number of viewers in the room. This has been an issue since the early VCR days. Many of the big players (e.g. Disney) were violently opposed to the VCR at first for just this reason, that they could no longer charge based on the number of viewers. I'd be suprised if that idea didn't get floated soon after the debut of the camera, maybe in connection with some huge event.
Improved preferences/customization seems a small payout for such a large investment. They already have the 'thumbclick' data, which is far easier to run throgh the (Bayesian) software. I expect it's already got a model for how many regular users there are. From the perspective of preferences or targeted ads, who's holding the remote is more important than who's in the room.
- Hit the brakes in a pack and you may cause a crash. The next guy is about 6 inches off your back wheel.
- Hit the brakes and you have to spend energy getting back up to speed. It will cost you over the course of the race. The margin between placing and not is that thin. Really.
- You lose more energy to the "accoridion" effect the further back in the pack you are. This is really pronounced in "crits" (criterium races). Pack position is evertyhing.
- The higher the race category (i.e. experience level), the less braking, the less accordion (traffic jams), the fewer crashes and the faster race times. It's not just fitness, it's technique as well.
Which is why, as a newbie cyclist this year, I got yelled at (on team rides) every time I touched the brakes that wasn't absolutely necessary.My paranoia (and I own it as paranoia) is not that some mad scientist will do evil experiments. It's that perfectly "normal" and "rational" citizens running a large corporation will fsck up the planet by using this kind of technology in a stupid way on an industrial scale. By, say, monocropping all the wheat grown in North America with some GMO strain that can eat Roundup for breakfast. Or something like that.
I'd say they're about even. I used to live in the Loisada (at the time a predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhood). I witnessed beatings and murders and I learned to be afraid of the cops (even though I was a honky). Not paranoia, fear of getting shot. NYPD is an occupying army in the barrios, neck deep in the drug trade and a lot of them (like my entire precinct, the 7th) seemed to have no problem with capping someone who got in the way.
I agree that it probably won't accomplish much. But damn, it gives me the creeps.
I enjoyed Cryptonomicon very much but I was constantly struck by similarites in theme and style to Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Are you familiar with the book? Do you feel that Pynchon has had a significant effect on your work? Are the similarities intentional?
A LOT of the appeal of the jibjab version is that the attitudes it exhibits are the exact opposite of what Guthrie's version had. The original spoke to universal feelings of brotherhood, shared heritage, etc. What makes this so funny is the complete lack of any such sentiment, both in the parody and the political figures it depicts. It would NOT be nearly as funny if they'd done it to the Star Wars theme or some random pop song. It comments on the original as well as the candidates, and that makes it parody.
I though the InnoDB tables supported row-level locking. Doesn't it offer several different transaction isolation levels described by the SQL-92 standard?
There's a story going around about the early days of VCR development: RCA was presenting to Disney it's first design for a "non-rewindable" cassete. They set up a meeting with some Disney bigwigs to show them how it worked. You needed a special device to rewind the cassete which presumably only the rental shops would have had. It was tamper-proof to the extent that casual attempts to rewind it without this special device would break the cassette or at least render it unplayable.
At the meeting the RCA engineers showed the cassete design, demonstrated the features and said "well, what do you think?"
The response of the Disney execs was to object that there was no way of controlling how many people were in the room watching when it played. They declared it unacceptable and left.
I've talked with Disney (video) engineers who assure me that this is precisely how these people think. But they're not alone. More than one "grand vision of the future" from corporate lobbyists presumes that we're going to pay for electronic print media a page view at a time.
If this keeps up, fair use is dead, and the days of free public libraries are numbered.
The Bell Curve is widely loathed because it's wretched science with a nasty, right-wing agenda. I recommend Stephen Jay Gould's rebuttal, one version of which is his review of the book in the New Yorker.
Prior art? Yeesh.
I use it for hacking the new touchscreen voting machines at my local polling place. If it's not legal to rig an election than I don't know what is.
As the elite get more removed/alienated from the general riff-raff, the efficiency of slavery (or whatever combination of repression, mis-education, propaganda, diversion into racist wars & reality TV seems to work) get's more appealing.
This sounds more like the morning news than sci-fi to me. Fifty percent seems pretty arbitrary but the current numbers are pretty horrific if you're looking at it from the bottom rung. Even now, here in WA, we're at ~8% unemployment. That's a lot of people.
The problem is already with us, and globalization is just going to rub our noses in it harder. We (society) have some serious thinking to do about labor, value, and how we're going to live and work. That is, if there's anyone left who still believes in things like "society" or "public discourse."
If you've made any study of it at all you know that effective security results from a process that starts before the software is even written. There is no protocol that will save you from logic errors (like the latest Passport hole). To do this reqires a good understanding by the devs of security and their adherence to design principles and coding practices. To do that you need a software development methodology that enforces the consistent application of those priciples and practices. Therein lies the problem.
In my little corner of MS (though by all accounts it was typical of the company as a whole) what was prized above all was meeting requirements and deadlines. Virtually no energy was put into the development environment (hence the hour I spent every morning just downloading the nightly build, the insane .bat scripts, constantly fixing my own NT install as a $55/hr contractor). Nobody got "c-hours" for making life easier. More importantly, there was little value placed on design, good technique. Lip service was paid in meetings and reviews, of course, and superficial style details received obsessive scrutiny. Code reviews often bogged down on correct hungarian notation but a unit test consisting of "return true" was perfectly ok. The "heros" were people with big brain muscles who spent nights and weekends hammering out code to meet the latest deadline.
The result of all this was a coding culture that I called the kingdom of cut-and-paste. I was actually encouraged to write routines by starting with someone else's routine to do something unrelated and edit it to do my task. A colleague would stand over my shoulder browsing the codebase looking for something convenient to steal. It was a shock to realize how little code people actually wrote. This is one of the things that I hated about working there, that I spent so much of my time fscking with the various APIs, incomprehensible include file heirarchies and so little time writing C++.
Well, in my Intro to Fortran class in '77 the prof explained why massive code duplication is a bad idea, and the results are visible in every MS product. You can't fix a bug in one place, you have to fix it every place it got copied to, and you don't know where those are. The codebase is now on the order of 100'sM lines or better? Probably not even MS has a good handle on this, because they can't know for sure how much duplication (with tiny variations) there is (clue: lots).
Once a company grows to a considerable size it's really hard to change the culture. I've seen this at several startups. MS is like a battleship or an aircraft carrier. High-tech and deadly but turning that boat around is really hard and simply may not happen in a short distance. Expecting them to change their performance WRT security in a few months (or year) is kind of like expecting the old Soviet apparatchiks to start respecting civil liberties and human dignity because the Central Comittee sends out a memo. Good luck. It's a city unto itself in Redmond, its own little world. And even if you did, what the hell are you going to do about the millions of lines of (largely incomprehensible) code in the installed base? The millions of systems in the wild that are unpatched and unmaintained?
I see many of the same disasters being recapitulated in .NET. They may talk security and I'm sure they're trying hard but I expect that their long term strategies are going to rely more on legislation than the (probably impossible)
task of bringing their products t
Arguably ours was custom. It started as RH, but we rebuilt the kernel, tailored the devices, ripped out X, etc. etc. Of course, that's a big selling point for OSS, no, that you can tailor the software to meet your specific needs?
By contrast, during my stint at Microsoft I found that enormous amounts of critical information are available only as internal folklore e.g. "if you want to understand how that call works, go over to building 43 and ask Fred, he got it to work."
This, not "ease of use" or the politics are why I would rather pull espresso than be an MS dev, either inside or outside the Redmond campus. I will never have the understanding of the underlying software architecture of NT/Win2k/XP that I do now of Linux. No one does. It's just not structured that way. And if I can't be really good (by my standards) at my trade than I'll get a new trade. I'll be a really great barrista.
Example: google is running (by their own admission) on the order of 50,000 linux rackmounts. How many times do you think they downloaded the disto?
The PVR manufacturer has to compete WRT the quaility of hardware and software. Tivo is a great box, and the software is nicely integrated. RCA may realease a great box w/ good software as well - I don't know. Whichever you buy, the utility is going to depend a great deal on the quality of the metadata, i.e. whether you find what you want & the information is accurate & updated.
In my 3 years at a search engine, I've learned that, almost universally, metadata from the content provider sucks. Ultimately it may improve as people discover that it improves your share (more eyeballs) to have good metadata as well as hot babes and exploding cars. But for now, it's up to third party providers to do the curation, cleaning up the mess (and it is truly a mess) by writing very sophisticated software (screen scaping is just the beginning) or having teams of humans continuously fixing it up.
So it has utility, there will be a market, and some of us will pay for higher quality stuff. The pay stuff will be better. Remember, it's not an open source software product it's a service. If I have a dozen people on staff I can do a lot better job. Someone has to make sure the screen scapers haven't broken on a new HTML format, or that somebody mispelled vampire or tell the bayesian page parsers that the token "ORC" increases the likelihood that the page describes action/fantasy.
Full disclosure: I love my TiVo, and I work for Thomson (which owns RCA).
The Copernican Principle, OTOH, is (roughly stated) "you're not special." Thus if your explanation of the observed movements of the planets requires that you just happen to be at the center of all this motion and observing it, it's not very plausible.
The argument "what are the odds that we're the only life in the whole frikkin universe?" seems to me more an argument against "specialness."
Coincidence? I think not...
"Well, don't do that!"
To defend against this the state doesn't need to pry their GPG key away from /. readers, it just
needs to make it hard or scary enough that Joe/Jane sixpack
either can't or is afraid to do it.