The whole point I was making was that any information you could possibly glean from an RFID tag on a passport can and ought to be public information, including SSN, the photo, passport number, and your full legal name.
That anybody could think of using that informaion as a means to commit identity theft is more an indication of a broken banking and government identification system that permits flimsy identity security needed for establishing and using identification information.
The reason for biometrics here is because you as an individual carry the "key" with you at all times, and it can be unique enough to distinguish yourselve from every other person on the Earth. Admitedly there are variations that do break down with most biometric systems, but those are rare and usually can't be duplicated by a determined criminal who wants to copy somebody's identity... at least the casual criminals that there are today who churn through hundreds of credit cards a day and thousands of SSN/name/birthdate records and randomly picking on people just to see who might "stick" on getting a false identity. Giving the current identity fraud that exists at the moment.
Those who are skilled to do a "James Bond" type of identity theft that duplicates DNA, retinal scans, and finger prints is hardly a major problem. If this were the only problem the Feds and others were facing in regards to identity theft, there would be about 2-3 agent/officers dealing with it in the USA as a total. The technology is available to get identity theft to this level and cheaply (to restrict identity theft to James Bond and his kin), but the various government agencies involved don't want to get to this level for various political reasons as the technical justifications are no longer valid.
Too bad this is an anonymous posting. I hate replying to AC's.
In the sense that all software is really just a huge number, yeah, I guess you could think of it that way.
So, can you copyright a number? How about patent a number? There reaches a point that the question becomes absurd to think about.
The point of the biometric information is to prove conclusively that a person really is who they claim to be.
When trying to document identity you need at some point to have actually met the person to establish the identity. The problem with SSNs is that somebody showing off that numbers is being used to electronically establish identity when there is no justification to believe that the person claiming the SSN really is that person. And there are only two pieces of information used to correlate the information, just the legal name and SSN. That is clearly not sufficient, even if adding more obscure things like a mother's maiden name and birthdate.
It is for this reason that identity theft is even occuring, and why the whole premise is built on a house of cards.
The internet remain free for anyone to use, which is vastly unlike the airwaves...
No, the internet is hardly free, nor free of government interference. Trying to obtain a block of IP addresses can cost a considerable sum of money, as can trying to register a domain name. The rationale for costs of either of these activities may be questionable, but it is there, together with bandwidth costs and other issues as well. Nor is internet activity free of criminal activity that could potentially land somebody (even somebody innocent due to circumstances beyond their control) in jail.
That the marginal costs involved are small enough that an ordinary person with a blue-collar job could easily set up their own web site + pay for day to day living expenses is more what makes the internet so amazing. Trying to set up a low-wattage (less than 50 watts) broadcast radio station, while comparatively cheaper than the major commercial stations, is not something that an ordinary person could do with "spare change" except a very devoted hobbiest. You can legally obtain low-power FM station licenses as an individual, but it isn't trivial to aquire.
You can argue that the FCC is deliberately trying to kill attempts by ordinary people to set up these stations, but that is a side issue. Even getting equipment with high enough quality that it will maintain a set frequency is difficult enough.
This "government interference" can be completely circumvented by playing music that is not owned by RIAA/ASCAP. There isn't any similar way to circumvent the restrictions on setting-up your own radio station.
The problem here is that you have to independently secure copyright permission from each and every artist seperately, for each person who desires to broadcast this type of music.
Now admittedly you can try to set up a rival organization to ASCAP that would do essentially the same thing (but with perhaps much better terms for the independent artists involved), but the problem here is that RIAA/ASCAP has been granted a government-sponsored monopoly here that prevents this from occuring. The legal implications of setting up this rival group.
I will admit that there are independent websites that have considerable music available under FOSS-like licenses that allow you to use it for broadcast purposes, including net radio stations. Someday the monopoly that RIAA/ASCAP enjoys right now may be broken due to individuals such as these that try to go around the system. But this opressive system is currently in place and will be for some time.
The psychological scarring I'm refering to is the near constant shifting between families in the foster care system, where the kids are being torn apart by three grandparents (I don't think the maternal grandfather is involved right now) all trying to get a piece of the action. Hans' parents got a divorce more than two decades ago, and that is hardly a trivial thing at the moment to deal with, adding extra problems given the current context of what is going on.
I've been through the judicial meat grinder myself, and it is not a pretty thing to behold, where you are guilty until proven innocent in a court of law, judicial BS not withstanding. Your comments here prove that you have that same mentality as well, strongly considering that Hans has done the crime and claiming that destroying his kids is something he has intentionally done. Perhaps he did, but I'm willing to wait and see first. Knowing Hans like I do, and knowing a bit about Nina as well (outside of the news) I'm willing to give Hans the benefit of the doubt myself.
I just don't know what happened. Period.
I've got to say, you really ran your plea for sympathy off the road with that one. "The man might be innocent.. his family's being torn apart.. and I'm losing money!"
I'm in a business relationship with Hans' father (Ramon) that was potentially to include Hans as well. Heck, if Hans gets out of this situation with an aquittal, I may end up trying to form a stronger business partnership with Hans as well on his next venture.
Just trying to deal with going back and forth from his home in Mississippi to California (as retired military he sometimes gets military transport... but that is only occasionally) Ramon spends so much money and time on trying to deal with his son that he can't really be productive doing anything else at the moment, not to mention dealing with his current family and younger children who also need attention.
I'll also say that you have absolutely no idea what is involved here, and none of this is very pleasant. It isn't like Hans is some dot-com multi-millionaire with money in the bank just burning a hole trying to go somewhere. While he has certainly had some comfortable salaries in the past and was CEO of his own company, much of that was something he self-financed with employment elsewhere. Namesys has hardly been a resounding financially success story even though he has been able to land a few fairly decent contracts over the past few years, making a modest profit. All that more remarkable that he has done that with FOSS software, something that many readers here on/. fail to figure out how to accomplish.
While I'm not talking about the current venture that Mr. Wales is doing, the point about Wikipedia is that it isn't "owned" by any single individual or even organization. With the GFDL, it is very easy to "fork" the service if a group like the WMF decides to "sell out" or do something that really pisses off the community.
Trust me, I've had offers to do exactly that, due to some huge infighting that took place on one particularly prominent Wikimedia project. I politely refused, prefering to stick within the community as I felt that it really wasn't that bad.
BTW, this content in Wikipedia can never be "bought up by Google" or even Microsoft, although certainly Google does take advantage of the numerous external links common to many Wikipedia articles as high quality links related to the topic of the article, hence the prominence of many Wikipedia pages on Google (not to mention the many incoming links going to the Wikipedia articles). But any web crawler would use similar criteria and it isn't restricted to Google or even Wikipedia for this kind of mutual admiration society.
Because Google can never "own" Wikipedia, many people are willing to work on it. And do so with a very rational justification behind it.
As far as your webhosting company is concerned, that is something that you are going to have to live with, as well as your "customers". At least with something like Wikipedia, there are enough technically inclined individuals involved (including some with $$$) that setting up a completely new server farm is a distinct possibility if the current "owner" decides to pack the bags and close down the current server farm.
Keep in mind that the reason why this "technology" is being added into the passports is mainly because the people running the passport control stations at places like international airports are lazy, through and through. That and they don't want to "hold up" those "important passengers" who have an uncanny tendancy of voting in the next election to get rid of anything that might be annoying. Or more important spend money on candidates to make a difference.
As if the Dept. of Homeland Security hasn't screwed up passenger travel enough anyway under the guise of increased security.
Instead of having to run a passport through an optical scanner like in a grocery store, you simply have to run it by an RFID scanner that brings in the same information. Oh, that and they can throw in additional "bits" to be something like a "flag" that is read only by border agents. Unfortunately, this is a classical case of somebody not thinking through this decision 100% completely and not realizing there are other consequences to this action.
No, you got that wrong. A "love it or leave it" is not always an option, and besides:
Where do you possibly move to, even if you don't have to rule out moving to non-English speaking countries (assuming you are smart enough to learn another language if you hated your current home)?
The only possible place that would allow you to maintain personal liberties is to move to Antartica, but then again there are "treaties" in place that prohibit people from even living there at all. Or perhaps Mars, but that makes even less sense and is completely not affordable. There is no other country you can run to from America that would really make much of a difference.... certainly not a mass migration from the USA to anywhere else in the world that might possibly wake up the rest of the citizens of the USA that there is something wrong.
Moving elsewhere is not a solution. Period. At least in terms of trying to maintain personal liberties. And the founders of the American Republic knew that oh so well when the U.S. Constitution was written. That their heirs (read those who currently are in control of the U.S. Federal Government) have trashed that document with unconstitional "laws" that never the less get enforced is more a sign that the founders were correct that government tends towards depotism in every situation where its hand isn't slapped down and told "NO".
This has abolutely nothing to do with "identity theft". Any numeric information (such as a SSN or other such number, including passport ID numbers) should never, never, never be used for identification purposes.
A SSN is nothing more than a name. No more or no less. It is the same as if your name is Joe "555-42-5553" Blow, or to perhaps "confirm" that a person with the name "Joe Blow" has a SSN with the number "555-42-5553". This does not in any way, shape, or form confirm that the person who has given you the name is the same as the one giving you the information.
Any bank, government agency, or other instutition who enters into a contract presuming that they have correctly "identified" the individual with just these two pieces of information is just being incredibly stupid, and IMHO any such contracts should be legally void. Unfortunately, the problem is that these insane institutions accept this piddling proof as sufficient to establish identity and courts accept that very strange notion.
The one and only legitimate way to identify somebody is through some biometrics test. This can be either a "signature", photo, fingerprint, retinal scan, or DNA sample, depending on how strongly you want the confirmation. To confirm identity in any other way is bulls**t.
The problem of "microwaving" a passport like this is that the metal in the RFID tag itself may also overheat, causing a "burn" in the passport that could potentially catch the passport itself on fire.
Or at the very least a very visible "char" spot would be found where the RFID tag was embedded within the pages of the passport.
By hammering the passport (with a rubber mallet or using a board between the hammer and the passport) you can achieve the same effect but leave no (outwardly) visible marks on the passport to those countries who are using it for visa entry.
Getting back into the USA might be a problem, but only because your passport may still be marked as having an RFID tag that is disabled.
The issues of digital vs. analog transmission are far more complex than even what you are mentioning here.
By far and away the worst issue I've seen of digital broadcast systems is that they have a strong tendency to "drop frames" at some of the worst possible moments. If something is garbled in the transmission at any point along the transmission path (from repeaters or whatever), the entire frame is dropped. Or more likely the previous frame is duplicated. This gives a very "choppy" image or perhaps even only weird blocks start appearing on the screen (due to incomplete MPEG frames being transmitted... with MPEG broadcast images typical with current HDTV systems).
Analog systems may have become very "snowy" and had other problems related to signal loss due to analog systems, but the issue of having frames drop out was never an issue. If you were at the "edge" of a broacast signal, you could still pick out most of what was there and (usually) be able to hear what was going on. If a signal dropped out, it would gradually fade and then come back (depending on local environmental factors). With digital broadcast under similar conditions, the digital signals simply cut out altogether when the "checksums" don't add up. It either works or it doesn't. Or the result is something so horrible to watch that you want to hide your head and put your hands on your ears.
I'm not entirely sure where the huge push for digital television is coming from, but I think the day will come that many ordinary people will bitterly complain about it, even though they are not entirely sure "why" the stuff they are watching sucks so much. At least at the moment I can still enjoy analog television, even if I am starting to see some of the effects of the transition to digital television (due to the repeaters I'm watching using digitial standards instead of analog... giving me the lousy images I'm describing).
What you are missing here in this exchange is the ASCAP royalty structure that is supported and condoned by the U.S. Federal government.... the government interference here is the issue, not the expectation of royalties to be paid to performers and "authors" (read composers and songwriters here) of music.
The courts have required that the means be established that royalties can be paid to these copyright holders at established industry rates. This is done through groups such as the MPAA (for motion pictures) or the RIAA/ASCAP as a central clearing house to deal with all of the money involved.
The point of the grandparent post here is that this is deliberately setup in such a way as to discourage smaller setups of somebody running a relatively low-volume operation.... kinda like trying to set up your own website with your own URL and web server. If you decide to stream some songs with the intention of trying to "stay legit" (if you don't care, that is another story) and paying royalties, the costs of doing so are prohibitive except for those who have some serious $$$ behind them.
In other words, the marginal costs to become a competitor in this sort of business is not trivial, and this is deliberately by design and "sanctioned" by the government.
The argument that is being made here, however, is that if this marginal cost were somehow lowered or eliminated, that substantial innovation would develop yet at the same time those professional artists who want to collect royalties on their works would also recieve that benefit. This is not the same as simply copying and streaming music illegally, but instead trying to reproduce legitimate works under license, but without having to negotiate with each music producer or performer seperately (which would border upon the level of being absurd, and why courts support this arrangement).
It could also be argued that no performing artist will actually get a single penny of royalties collected under this system, but that is another issue best left to another thread. If you have a private streaming site that is mainly "broadcasting" some music of some relatively obscure garage band (that is unfortunately "signed" by a major studio) and collects royalties through this royalty system, some huge amounts of money can be paid out as royalties yet the performers won't get a single penny. Now that is truly injustice at its worst.
And of course you can have the right to a free, but incompetent lawyer who mumbles during the trial "yeah, he did it, and I know it!"
Or you can even try to defend youself if you are smart enough to read legal texts and try to build your own case.
Based on perception alone, I don't know which of these is necessarily better.
Frankly, you get what you pay for in a legal defense. And as OJ Simpson proved, paying for the best can in some cases get you off free even if you are guilty.
Of course with OJ Simpson the LAPD had a body... and some grusome photos to show that she had in fact been murdered. That wasn't even a contested fact with the Simpson trial.
While there are some really bizzare details with this situation, not to mention Hans sometimes having foot-in-mouth disease (by his own admission!), it is really hard to try and come to a conclusion here.
If Nina showed up in Moscow somehow, it would be very interesting to see what would happen next.
As a very close and personal friend of the Reiser family (I actually know Hans' father better than Hans himself, but that is besides the point), I find this whole episode showing the absolute worst in humanity on almost every level.
This whole idea of speculating over his innocence or guilt is making me practically throw up each time I see news items here on/. related to this issue. If you have the investigation team equivalent of a D.A. that is going through this with a fine tooth comb, you might be able to intelligently make your own semi-accurate conclusions as to his guilt. For the rest of us, perhaps if we follow this very, very closely, we might be able to see the actual evidence that is presented to the court and make a judgement similar to a jury member.
If you are relying upon what you are reading or hearing from the popular press (even/. in this case) about what has happened, you are relying on deliberate misinformation and partial facts to come to a conclusion. Hardly the best way to come to any sort of judgement.
For myself, I see a very dear and personal friend who is going through a living nightmare in one way or another. A family that is litterally being ripped apart and a couple of kids that through no actions of their own are going to be permanently scarred emotionally over what the judicial system is doing to their family... even their extended family.
This is also in a small way economically affecting me personally, and I wish I had more money to send and help Hans out so he wouldn't have to go through this very drastic step.
At the same time, regardless of what happens, Hans' life in a sense is over and he is beginning something completely new from scratch. By selling the company he is also suggesting that perhaps it is time to move on with some other completely new project or even lifestyle.
I pray for the day that Hans will no longer be a major news item on/. especially in this context.
I would have to completely agree here. There are some Hollywood types that think the issues of the Cold War (total global destruction due to nuclear war, idological struggles, military domination) are things of the past. While some of the actors (speaking metaphorically here, not members of SAG) and political labels have changed in the past 10-20 years, it is surprisingly how much the worry over what is called either Al-Queida or Islamo-Facism (from whom you are hearing it described) compares so strongly with the old time worries with Communism. And both were religious movements after a sort as well.
The only thing that IMHO could be worse than a global thermonuclear war would be some people who are playing with moving asteroids and decide to "bump" one to a trajectory intersecting with a major metropolitan area. (AKA "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein) But that is something at the moment associated with Science Fiction and not anything realistic currently.
There is a current stereotype within Hollywood that thinks they know what us peon morons "in the public" really want. While there certainly is worry about spending millions of dollars to produce a movie that might bomb, I find many Hollywood types to also be quite out of touch with ordinary people as well, in part due to their lifestyles. Hollywood might as well be a different planet for all the good it does them.
Besides an incredible over generalization here based on nothing but anidotal evidence, what else would bring you to this conclusion?
AI research is so incredibly far from having anything with even the intelligence of a rat or other smaller mammal that I don't know how you can draw conclusions of any kind from those kind of research projects that have already transpired.
"AI" software that mimics interaction with humans is largely some cute parlor games based on some supposed pattern matching tricks. Besides, the software developers are as likely in this situation to influence the behavior of this software, or turn their own anti-social behaviors into the software that they are developing.
Now that is some food for thought... do we want machine intelligences to have the same personality as uber-geek master programmers?
Now this is an interesting idea in some ways.... and incredibly difficult to work on in practice.
What you are missing here is that the purpose of most servers is to perform some kind of accounting system to do two somewhat different tasks:
Maintain a "permanent" database of personal/character information. - Note that this includes not only current "attributes", but also any "quest" stage information and items "stored" in the "bank". This information you want to have highly protected as it will be the equivalent of theft if the information is modified in any manner outside of the game environment itself.
Describe player interactions. - This includes not only messaging between players, but also any "combat" or "trades" as in-game content is exchanged. Even something as simply as having one person move around a room and have that reflected in the other player "clients" is part of this inter-player interchange.
Now I've seen IRC-like clients done with P2P systems like Freenet, so the player interactions are at least potentially possible in some ways. Certainly you could have a "client" that would "know" who is in a given room/area and you could set up some sort of P2P system that would exchange this basic interaction information. To be efficient, it would be advisable to make this some sort of "custom" P2P engine, however and ignore the security layers of things like Freenet, unless that was also an explicit design goal.
The permanent database issue is IMHO much harder to overcome. While there are indeed some semi-permanent distributed storage systems available, most of this is for public data that is deliberately "pushed" around depending on the demand for the information. For a smallish community like was found on a typical MUD from back elsewhen that had only 50-300 players, it might be semi-reasonable to have everybody to have "copies" of just about everybody else who is or has semi-recently been playing. That also implies an element of "trust" among those in the community to not screw with other people's accounts, even if it is security by obscurity.
Of course that defeats the purpose of calling it "MMORPG" as it really isn't that "massive" in terms of numbers of people involved. Keeping track of thousands or even millions of other players simultaneously would IMHO be defeated rather quickly. There might be some ways to work around that issue as some P2P networks have done with distributed storage systems, but it still isn't going to be easy. Keeping information syncronized would be a virtual nightmare, and is something that a central server does much better than a distributed storage system.
Essentially think of what it would be like to have a distributed network version of an airline flight reservation system, and the issues here are almost identicle. You have thousands of people each changing significant pieces of information that have to be syncronized simultaneously and updated nearly instantaneously for everybody else to see what is going on (such as canceled, full, or new flights).
By far this accounting system is what causes all of the difficulties and expenses, requiring a true database with record locks and advanced database concepts to simply keep track of all of the information. A central server deals with most of these issues so smoothly that trying to hack some alternative is far more effort than is worth it. This isn't to say that in some abstract theory something like this might actually be possible, it is not going to be an easy task and is something that by itself would be a software engineering marvel to even have running at all. There are reasons why this isn't done at the moment.
While I know this is responding to a troll here, I must say that almost every point that you have made here can be refuted on so many levels that this is utter BS.
The Iraq War (the initial offensive, not this "insurgancy" war that is going on now) was in most ways a follow-up to what happened after the Persian Gulf War, where clearly Iraq was the aggressive country with dreams of empire on their minds, and a stated goal of domination of the Middle East, including the complete military conquest of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and all other countries in that region. That Iraq stopped at Kuwait was mainly an issue of their logistics unable to keep up with their soldiers as the Iraqi Army (under Hussein) had orders to continue marching further south and capture the Saudi oil fields as well.
As for evidence of weapons of mass distruction: We know Iraq had them because Hussein's government used them on his own people. Multiple times and over decades. This makes as much sense as saying the USA doesn't have any nuclear weapons, Hiroshima not withstanding.
And Saddam's own website (currently down, but a good read at the time) by itself contained enough information to show that he was sympathetic to Al-Queida and the attacks on 9/11. While not justification by itself for an invasion, there was plenty of other evidence to suggest that the Iraqi government pre-2002 was economically and militarily supporting terrorist actions against the USA and the U.S. government.
The best way I can say that this was successful (together with the actions in Afghanistan) is that after 9/11 there hasn't been a single international terrorist incident in the USA since 9/11. Instead it has been in Europe where people there are much more sympathetic to the political propaganda by Al-Queida. This isn't to say that some idiot terrorist won't succeed in America, but that is a record that even Putin can't claim as Russia itself has been targeted with successful terrorist actions, even if dealt with in a very typically Russian fashion.
As far as US elections being "rigged", how would you possibly explain Joe Liberman in Connecticut? Or Nancy Polosi becoming Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives? The mind here simply boggles at the thought.....
"We had to build new wires here, we built a central office there, it cost this much."
Was one of their original attempts at the matter, but that encourages gold plating--buying the most obscenely expensive equipment regardless of whether or not it was needed, because the government would use those costs to increase your profits. Obviously that was not desirable, so they went from scheme to scheme trying to find one that works.
Yeah, this sounds exactly like what Ma Bell did back before the breakup of the Bell System in 1984. Some of that Western Electric equipment was about as expensive as you could make it, but it also withstood the test of time and hardly ever broke down. And the old AT&T seemed to have it down to a science to know exactly when somebody would break and not be able to pay any more for their "services".
If you ever saw some of the older offices that Ma Bell ran, they were guilded lilies for the most part even though there was legitimate business that took place there as well. After the breakup there was considerable consolodation and most of the local "customer support" offices were completely shut down in favor of a single call center to recieve support. Technological changes also had an impact here, but my point is that this system of demanding a ROI on expenditures is exactly what the old Bell System used to justify their rates.
It didn't hurt either that for the most part AT&T usually asked for incremental rate reductions due to improved technologies and other cost effective methods of operation. You had better believe that they tried to gold brick most of their offices as much as they could to avoid dropping the rates too much.
This statement of calling/. readers "armchair constitutional scholars" is presuming that we (who are voting citizens of the USA) have no input into the governing process of this country and that our opinion on this matter is irrevant.
I would dare say that it is the exact opposite: That we are fellow citizens debating this concept and in some ways ignoring the attitudes of members of the various bar associations as a bunch of ignorant fools who don't understand that we live in democracy. This includes those nine members of the bar associations that happen to lead the judicial branch in Washinton D.C.
The constitution is superior to the Supreme Court, and if they rule in such a way that the ordinary citizens of this country strongly disagree with them on their interpretation, they will find that they will not be taken seriously and become irrelevant. Not that this isn't happening to some extent anyway, but their authority and power is derived from the ordinary citizens and not the other way around.
Debates of this matter are reasonable to make, and to gain the opinion of ordinary citizens is not only healthy, but absolutely necessary. What ordinary people think the constitution means will ultimately translate into people elected into Congress and the U.S. Presidency, as well as future appointments to the Supreme Court.
The last time SCOTUS ignored the will of ordinary voters and decided to act on suposed judicial principles was Dred Scott v. Sanford. That has been universally declared by current members of the SCOTUS as a terrible decision, but the judges at the time certainly thought it was good policy. I predict that if the current justices made such a narrow interpretation of the 2nd ammendment today such as these DC lawyers want to push into law, that it would have very similar consequences as the Dred Scott decision. And be as universally derided 100 years into the future.
That sounds to me much more like an old software system that has been hacked and prodded so much, with an initial lousy architechture design to boot, that any attempt to work on it tends to create more bugs than it fixes.
I've been in that situation, and I've (successfully) advocated a full from-scratch rewrite with formal software engineering principles to design a well thought-out architechture.
Of course that costs some serious money and manpower, but it moves some systems forward a full generation when done properly. When done poorly, of course, it can be worse than the original system, which is why it is a huge gamble that some bean counter managers prefer not to make.
That and you have to be able to bring in the old databases and be able to do a transition from the old system to the new system in a smooth manner. That is perhaps the toughest challenge of all, especially when something like a sales tracking tool is updated 24/7/365 like you are describing.
I've built software communications systems that were backward compatable for equipment over 20 years old, but it was a real challenge, particularly when the other computer systems had a completely different internal hardware architechture and a custom operating system (always something to avoid in some ways!) I did that so seamlessly that my immediate supervisor (after my previous boss quit) didn't even know that the capability was even in the software for backward compatability.
As far as my experience with COBOL, all I remember was that it was a very, very wordy programming language that tended to use more characters for an expression than similar statements in other programming languages. Otherwise, good code is the same in almost all programming languages.
COBOL is also the only programming language I got an "F" in for handing in assignments. I made the unforgivable sin of coming up with an original algorithm that the professor hadn't thought about which used fewer instructions and fewer CPU cycles to complete than the "standard" format being taught in the class. I got it changed to an "A" by arguing with the department head showing that the output was identicle with all of the rest of the students and that clearly it was original software instead of something plagurized from another student. Only in a COBOL class would such a comedy even be permitted.
There are a number of source for the information I was quoting. By far the best "original" source of information about the early history of IC production can be found at:
This is a lecture given by none other than Gordon Moore (of Moore's Law fame) that goes into the history of ICs.
There was also some time about (about a year or so, perhaps a little longer) a/. story about the Apollo Guidance Computer and an attempt to completely recreate it as a part of a home simulator. For details about this project, you can look at this website for some much futher information:
There is other information that I've picked up over the years as well, but these are two sources to get you started if you are really interested in some of the early history of the Apollo mission computers. Of course Wikipedia is also available with some other outstanding information if you look up "Apollo Guidance Computer", particularly if you read through the sources to generate the Wikipedia article.
You also forgot that the whole Apollo program, particularly getting to the Moon with Apollo 11, was blessed and sanctified by St. John the Divine, of Massachusetts, who was martyred in Dallas, Texas and whitewashed any project he was associated with, most especially going to the Moon. In short, it was political suicide to vote against it.
The only way this program could have a similar impact is if Air Force One was shot down over Baghdad by an Iranian missile, and even then I don't think George W. Bush would carry the same degree of martyrdom as JFK had in the 1960's. And even then all such an attack would do is ensure that the USA would be in Iraq for the next 100 years, as Bush is not really as strongly associated with going to Mars as JFK was associated with going to the Moon.
BTW, withdrawing from the earlier "Moon Treaty" is still an option by the U.S. government and was one of the provisions of the treaty. The U.S. government merely has to announce publicly and to the other signatory parties that they intend to withdraw from the treaty and afterward the treaty will have no effect.
The Outer Space Treaty, while considered currently "international law", was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, particularly when some Sci-Fi fans got the message to their senators that it was a horrible idea to ratify the treaty. Only the most die-hard liberals hoping for international peaceful space exploration even follow the concepts of that treaty anyway, nor is there any enforcement authority over the provisions of the treaty... particularly for private citizens who don't pay attention to such trivial details.
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The whole point I was making was that any information you could possibly glean from an RFID tag on a passport can and ought to be public information, including SSN, the photo, passport number, and your full legal name.
That anybody could think of using that informaion as a means to commit identity theft is more an indication of a broken banking and government identification system that permits flimsy identity security needed for establishing and using identification information.
The reason for biometrics here is because you as an individual carry the "key" with you at all times, and it can be unique enough to distinguish yourselve from every other person on the Earth. Admitedly there are variations that do break down with most biometric systems, but those are rare and usually can't be duplicated by a determined criminal who wants to copy somebody's identity... at least the casual criminals that there are today who churn through hundreds of credit cards a day and thousands of SSN/name/birthdate records and randomly picking on people just to see who might "stick" on getting a false identity. Giving the current identity fraud that exists at the moment.
Those who are skilled to do a "James Bond" type of identity theft that duplicates DNA, retinal scans, and finger prints is hardly a major problem. If this were the only problem the Feds and others were facing in regards to identity theft, there would be about 2-3 agent/officers dealing with it in the USA as a total. The technology is available to get identity theft to this level and cheaply (to restrict identity theft to James Bond and his kin), but the various government agencies involved don't want to get to this level for various political reasons as the technical justifications are no longer valid.
Too bad this is an anonymous posting. I hate replying to AC's.
In the sense that all software is really just a huge number, yeah, I guess you could think of it that way.
So, can you copyright a number? How about patent a number? There reaches a point that the question becomes absurd to think about.
The point of the biometric information is to prove conclusively that a person really is who they claim to be.
When trying to document identity you need at some point to have actually met the person to establish the identity. The problem with SSNs is that somebody showing off that numbers is being used to electronically establish identity when there is no justification to believe that the person claiming the SSN really is that person. And there are only two pieces of information used to correlate the information, just the legal name and SSN. That is clearly not sufficient, even if adding more obscure things like a mother's maiden name and birthdate.
It is for this reason that identity theft is even occuring, and why the whole premise is built on a house of cards.
No, the internet is hardly free, nor free of government interference. Trying to obtain a block of IP addresses can cost a considerable sum of money, as can trying to register a domain name. The rationale for costs of either of these activities may be questionable, but it is there, together with bandwidth costs and other issues as well. Nor is internet activity free of criminal activity that could potentially land somebody (even somebody innocent due to circumstances beyond their control) in jail.
That the marginal costs involved are small enough that an ordinary person with a blue-collar job could easily set up their own web site + pay for day to day living expenses is more what makes the internet so amazing. Trying to set up a low-wattage (less than 50 watts) broadcast radio station, while comparatively cheaper than the major commercial stations, is not something that an ordinary person could do with "spare change" except a very devoted hobbiest. You can legally obtain low-power FM station licenses as an individual, but it isn't trivial to aquire.
You can argue that the FCC is deliberately trying to kill attempts by ordinary people to set up these stations, but that is a side issue. Even getting equipment with high enough quality that it will maintain a set frequency is difficult enough.
The problem here is that you have to independently secure copyright permission from each and every artist seperately, for each person who desires to broadcast this type of music.
Now admittedly you can try to set up a rival organization to ASCAP that would do essentially the same thing (but with perhaps much better terms for the independent artists involved), but the problem here is that RIAA/ASCAP has been granted a government-sponsored monopoly here that prevents this from occuring. The legal implications of setting up this rival group.
I will admit that there are independent websites that have considerable music available under FOSS-like licenses that allow you to use it for broadcast purposes, including net radio stations. Someday the monopoly that RIAA/ASCAP enjoys right now may be broken due to individuals such as these that try to go around the system. But this opressive system is currently in place and will be for some time.
I've been through the judicial meat grinder myself, and it is not a pretty thing to behold, where you are guilty until proven innocent in a court of law, judicial BS not withstanding. Your comments here prove that you have that same mentality as well, strongly considering that Hans has done the crime and claiming that destroying his kids is something he has intentionally done. Perhaps he did, but I'm willing to wait and see first. Knowing Hans like I do, and knowing a bit about Nina as well (outside of the news) I'm willing to give Hans the benefit of the doubt myself.
I just don't know what happened. Period.
I'm in a business relationship with Hans' father (Ramon) that was potentially to include Hans as well. Heck, if Hans gets out of this situation with an aquittal, I may end up trying to form a stronger business partnership with Hans as well on his next venture.
Just trying to deal with going back and forth from his home in Mississippi to California (as retired military he sometimes gets military transport... but that is only occasionally) Ramon spends so much money and time on trying to deal with his son that he can't really be productive doing anything else at the moment, not to mention dealing with his current family and younger children who also need attention.
I'll also say that you have absolutely no idea what is involved here, and none of this is very pleasant. It isn't like Hans is some dot-com multi-millionaire with money in the bank just burning a hole trying to go somewhere. While he has certainly had some comfortable salaries in the past and was CEO of his own company, much of that was something he self-financed with employment elsewhere. Namesys has hardly been a resounding financially success story even though he has been able to land a few fairly decent contracts over the past few years, making a modest profit. All that more remarkable that he has done that with FOSS software, something that many readers here on
While I'm not talking about the current venture that Mr. Wales is doing, the point about Wikipedia is that it isn't "owned" by any single individual or even organization. With the GFDL, it is very easy to "fork" the service if a group like the WMF decides to "sell out" or do something that really pisses off the community.
Trust me, I've had offers to do exactly that, due to some huge infighting that took place on one particularly prominent Wikimedia project. I politely refused, prefering to stick within the community as I felt that it really wasn't that bad.
BTW, this content in Wikipedia can never be "bought up by Google" or even Microsoft, although certainly Google does take advantage of the numerous external links common to many Wikipedia articles as high quality links related to the topic of the article, hence the prominence of many Wikipedia pages on Google (not to mention the many incoming links going to the Wikipedia articles). But any web crawler would use similar criteria and it isn't restricted to Google or even Wikipedia for this kind of mutual admiration society.
Because Google can never "own" Wikipedia, many people are willing to work on it. And do so with a very rational justification behind it.
As far as your webhosting company is concerned, that is something that you are going to have to live with, as well as your "customers". At least with something like Wikipedia, there are enough technically inclined individuals involved (including some with $$$) that setting up a completely new server farm is a distinct possibility if the current "owner" decides to pack the bags and close down the current server farm.
Keep in mind that the reason why this "technology" is being added into the passports is mainly because the people running the passport control stations at places like international airports are lazy, through and through. That and they don't want to "hold up" those "important passengers" who have an uncanny tendancy of voting in the next election to get rid of anything that might be annoying. Or more important spend money on candidates to make a difference.
As if the Dept. of Homeland Security hasn't screwed up passenger travel enough anyway under the guise of increased security.
Instead of having to run a passport through an optical scanner like in a grocery store, you simply have to run it by an RFID scanner that brings in the same information. Oh, that and they can throw in additional "bits" to be something like a "flag" that is read only by border agents. Unfortunately, this is a classical case of somebody not thinking through this decision 100% completely and not realizing there are other consequences to this action.
No, you got that wrong. A "love it or leave it" is not always an option, and besides:
Where do you possibly move to, even if you don't have to rule out moving to non-English speaking countries (assuming you are smart enough to learn another language if you hated your current home)?
The only possible place that would allow you to maintain personal liberties is to move to Antartica, but then again there are "treaties" in place that prohibit people from even living there at all. Or perhaps Mars, but that makes even less sense and is completely not affordable. There is no other country you can run to from America that would really make much of a difference.... certainly not a mass migration from the USA to anywhere else in the world that might possibly wake up the rest of the citizens of the USA that there is something wrong.
Moving elsewhere is not a solution. Period. At least in terms of trying to maintain personal liberties. And the founders of the American Republic knew that oh so well when the U.S. Constitution was written. That their heirs (read those who currently are in control of the U.S. Federal Government) have trashed that document with unconstitional "laws" that never the less get enforced is more a sign that the founders were correct that government tends towards depotism in every situation where its hand isn't slapped down and told "NO".
This has abolutely nothing to do with "identity theft". Any numeric information (such as a SSN or other such number, including passport ID numbers) should never, never, never be used for identification purposes.
A SSN is nothing more than a name. No more or no less. It is the same as if your name is Joe "555-42-5553" Blow, or to perhaps "confirm" that a person with the name "Joe Blow" has a SSN with the number "555-42-5553". This does not in any way, shape, or form confirm that the person who has given you the name is the same as the one giving you the information.
Any bank, government agency, or other instutition who enters into a contract presuming that they have correctly "identified" the individual with just these two pieces of information is just being incredibly stupid, and IMHO any such contracts should be legally void. Unfortunately, the problem is that these insane institutions accept this piddling proof as sufficient to establish identity and courts accept that very strange notion.
The one and only legitimate way to identify somebody is through some biometrics test. This can be either a "signature", photo, fingerprint, retinal scan, or DNA sample, depending on how strongly you want the confirmation. To confirm identity in any other way is bulls**t.
The problem of "microwaving" a passport like this is that the metal in the RFID tag itself may also overheat, causing a "burn" in the passport that could potentially catch the passport itself on fire.
Or at the very least a very visible "char" spot would be found where the RFID tag was embedded within the pages of the passport.
By hammering the passport (with a rubber mallet or using a board between the hammer and the passport) you can achieve the same effect but leave no (outwardly) visible marks on the passport to those countries who are using it for visa entry.
Getting back into the USA might be a problem, but only because your passport may still be marked as having an RFID tag that is disabled.
The issues of digital vs. analog transmission are far more complex than even what you are mentioning here.
By far and away the worst issue I've seen of digital broadcast systems is that they have a strong tendency to "drop frames" at some of the worst possible moments. If something is garbled in the transmission at any point along the transmission path (from repeaters or whatever), the entire frame is dropped. Or more likely the previous frame is duplicated. This gives a very "choppy" image or perhaps even only weird blocks start appearing on the screen (due to incomplete MPEG frames being transmitted... with MPEG broadcast images typical with current HDTV systems).
Analog systems may have become very "snowy" and had other problems related to signal loss due to analog systems, but the issue of having frames drop out was never an issue. If you were at the "edge" of a broacast signal, you could still pick out most of what was there and (usually) be able to hear what was going on. If a signal dropped out, it would gradually fade and then come back (depending on local environmental factors). With digital broadcast under similar conditions, the digital signals simply cut out altogether when the "checksums" don't add up. It either works or it doesn't. Or the result is something so horrible to watch that you want to hide your head and put your hands on your ears.
I'm not entirely sure where the huge push for digital television is coming from, but I think the day will come that many ordinary people will bitterly complain about it, even though they are not entirely sure "why" the stuff they are watching sucks so much. At least at the moment I can still enjoy analog television, even if I am starting to see some of the effects of the transition to digital television (due to the repeaters I'm watching using digitial standards instead of analog... giving me the lousy images I'm describing).
What you are missing here in this exchange is the ASCAP royalty structure that is supported and condoned by the U.S. Federal government.... the government interference here is the issue, not the expectation of royalties to be paid to performers and "authors" (read composers and songwriters here) of music.
The courts have required that the means be established that royalties can be paid to these copyright holders at established industry rates. This is done through groups such as the MPAA (for motion pictures) or the RIAA/ASCAP as a central clearing house to deal with all of the money involved.
The point of the grandparent post here is that this is deliberately setup in such a way as to discourage smaller setups of somebody running a relatively low-volume operation.... kinda like trying to set up your own website with your own URL and web server. If you decide to stream some songs with the intention of trying to "stay legit" (if you don't care, that is another story) and paying royalties, the costs of doing so are prohibitive except for those who have some serious $$$ behind them.
In other words, the marginal costs to become a competitor in this sort of business is not trivial, and this is deliberately by design and "sanctioned" by the government.
The argument that is being made here, however, is that if this marginal cost were somehow lowered or eliminated, that substantial innovation would develop yet at the same time those professional artists who want to collect royalties on their works would also recieve that benefit. This is not the same as simply copying and streaming music illegally, but instead trying to reproduce legitimate works under license, but without having to negotiate with each music producer or performer seperately (which would border upon the level of being absurd, and why courts support this arrangement).
It could also be argued that no performing artist will actually get a single penny of royalties collected under this system, but that is another issue best left to another thread. If you have a private streaming site that is mainly "broadcasting" some music of some relatively obscure garage band (that is unfortunately "signed" by a major studio) and collects royalties through this royalty system, some huge amounts of money can be paid out as royalties yet the performers won't get a single penny. Now that is truly injustice at its worst.
And of course you can have the right to a free, but incompetent lawyer who mumbles during the trial "yeah, he did it, and I know it!"
Or you can even try to defend youself if you are smart enough to read legal texts and try to build your own case.
Based on perception alone, I don't know which of these is necessarily better.
Frankly, you get what you pay for in a legal defense. And as OJ Simpson proved, paying for the best can in some cases get you off free even if you are guilty.
Of course with OJ Simpson the LAPD had a body... and some grusome photos to show that she had in fact been murdered. That wasn't even a contested fact with the Simpson trial.
While there are some really bizzare details with this situation, not to mention Hans sometimes having foot-in-mouth disease (by his own admission!), it is really hard to try and come to a conclusion here.
If Nina showed up in Moscow somehow, it would be very interesting to see what would happen next.
As a very close and personal friend of the Reiser family (I actually know Hans' father better than Hans himself, but that is besides the point), I find this whole episode showing the absolute worst in humanity on almost every level.
/. related to this issue. If you have the investigation team equivalent of a D.A. that is going through this with a fine tooth comb, you might be able to intelligently make your own semi-accurate conclusions as to his guilt. For the rest of us, perhaps if we follow this very, very closely, we might be able to see the actual evidence that is presented to the court and make a judgement similar to a jury member.
/. in this case) about what has happened, you are relying on deliberate misinformation and partial facts to come to a conclusion. Hardly the best way to come to any sort of judgement.
/. especially in this context.
This whole idea of speculating over his innocence or guilt is making me practically throw up each time I see news items here on
If you are relying upon what you are reading or hearing from the popular press (even
For myself, I see a very dear and personal friend who is going through a living nightmare in one way or another. A family that is litterally being ripped apart and a couple of kids that through no actions of their own are going to be permanently scarred emotionally over what the judicial system is doing to their family... even their extended family.
This is also in a small way economically affecting me personally, and I wish I had more money to send and help Hans out so he wouldn't have to go through this very drastic step.
At the same time, regardless of what happens, Hans' life in a sense is over and he is beginning something completely new from scratch. By selling the company he is also suggesting that perhaps it is time to move on with some other completely new project or even lifestyle.
I pray for the day that Hans will no longer be a major news item on
I hope it isn't as bad as the 6502 assembly instructions for an Apple ][ that was running the Terminator.
I even recognized the code.... it was floating point BASIC (and Apple DOS) source code from the monitor program of the Apple ][.
Terminator II did a bit better, but I had a very hard time believing that a 6502 was running a Terminator robot at the time.
I would have to completely agree here. There are some Hollywood types that think the issues of the Cold War (total global destruction due to nuclear war, idological struggles, military domination) are things of the past. While some of the actors (speaking metaphorically here, not members of SAG) and political labels have changed in the past 10-20 years, it is surprisingly how much the worry over what is called either Al-Queida or Islamo-Facism (from whom you are hearing it described) compares so strongly with the old time worries with Communism. And both were religious movements after a sort as well.
The only thing that IMHO could be worse than a global thermonuclear war would be some people who are playing with moving asteroids and decide to "bump" one to a trajectory intersecting with a major metropolitan area. (AKA "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by Heinlein) But that is something at the moment associated with Science Fiction and not anything realistic currently.
There is a current stereotype within Hollywood that thinks they know what us peon morons "in the public" really want. While there certainly is worry about spending millions of dollars to produce a movie that might bomb, I find many Hollywood types to also be quite out of touch with ordinary people as well, in part due to their lifestyles. Hollywood might as well be a different planet for all the good it does them.
Besides an incredible over generalization here based on nothing but anidotal evidence, what else would bring you to this conclusion?
AI research is so incredibly far from having anything with even the intelligence of a rat or other smaller mammal that I don't know how you can draw conclusions of any kind from those kind of research projects that have already transpired.
"AI" software that mimics interaction with humans is largely some cute parlor games based on some supposed pattern matching tricks. Besides, the software developers are as likely in this situation to influence the behavior of this software, or turn their own anti-social behaviors into the software that they are developing.
Now that is some food for thought... do we want machine intelligences to have the same personality as uber-geek master programmers?
What you are missing here is that the purpose of most servers is to perform some kind of accounting system to do two somewhat different tasks:
Now I've seen IRC-like clients done with P2P systems like Freenet, so the player interactions are at least potentially possible in some ways. Certainly you could have a "client" that would "know" who is in a given room/area and you could set up some sort of P2P system that would exchange this basic interaction information. To be efficient, it would be advisable to make this some sort of "custom" P2P engine, however and ignore the security layers of things like Freenet, unless that was also an explicit design goal.
The permanent database issue is IMHO much harder to overcome. While there are indeed some semi-permanent distributed storage systems available, most of this is for public data that is deliberately "pushed" around depending on the demand for the information. For a smallish community like was found on a typical MUD from back elsewhen that had only 50-300 players, it might be semi-reasonable to have everybody to have "copies" of just about everybody else who is or has semi-recently been playing. That also implies an element of "trust" among those in the community to not screw with other people's accounts, even if it is security by obscurity.
Of course that defeats the purpose of calling it "MMORPG" as it really isn't that "massive" in terms of numbers of people involved. Keeping track of thousands or even millions of other players simultaneously would IMHO be defeated rather quickly. There might be some ways to work around that issue as some P2P networks have done with distributed storage systems, but it still isn't going to be easy. Keeping information syncronized would be a virtual nightmare, and is something that a central server does much better than a distributed storage system.
Essentially think of what it would be like to have a distributed network version of an airline flight reservation system, and the issues here are almost identicle. You have thousands of people each changing significant pieces of information that have to be syncronized simultaneously and updated nearly instantaneously for everybody else to see what is going on (such as canceled, full, or new flights).
By far this accounting system is what causes all of the difficulties and expenses, requiring a true database with record locks and advanced database concepts to simply keep track of all of the information. A central server deals with most of these issues so smoothly that trying to hack some alternative is far more effort than is worth it. This isn't to say that in some abstract theory something like this might actually be possible, it is not going to be an easy task and is something that by itself would be a software engineering marvel to even have running at all. There are reasons why this isn't done at the moment.
While I know this is responding to a troll here, I must say that almost every point that you have made here can be refuted on so many levels that this is utter BS.
The Iraq War (the initial offensive, not this "insurgancy" war that is going on now) was in most ways a follow-up to what happened after the Persian Gulf War, where clearly Iraq was the aggressive country with dreams of empire on their minds, and a stated goal of domination of the Middle East, including the complete military conquest of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and all other countries in that region. That Iraq stopped at Kuwait was mainly an issue of their logistics unable to keep up with their soldiers as the Iraqi Army (under Hussein) had orders to continue marching further south and capture the Saudi oil fields as well.
As for evidence of weapons of mass distruction: We know Iraq had them because Hussein's government used them on his own people. Multiple times and over decades. This makes as much sense as saying the USA doesn't have any nuclear weapons, Hiroshima not withstanding.
And Saddam's own website (currently down, but a good read at the time) by itself contained enough information to show that he was sympathetic to Al-Queida and the attacks on 9/11. While not justification by itself for an invasion, there was plenty of other evidence to suggest that the Iraqi government pre-2002 was economically and militarily supporting terrorist actions against the USA and the U.S. government.
The best way I can say that this was successful (together with the actions in Afghanistan) is that after 9/11 there hasn't been a single international terrorist incident in the USA since 9/11. Instead it has been in Europe where people there are much more sympathetic to the political propaganda by Al-Queida. This isn't to say that some idiot terrorist won't succeed in America, but that is a record that even Putin can't claim as Russia itself has been targeted with successful terrorist actions, even if dealt with in a very typically Russian fashion.
As far as US elections being "rigged", how would you possibly explain Joe Liberman in Connecticut? Or Nancy Polosi becoming Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives? The mind here simply boggles at the thought.....
Yeah, this sounds exactly like what Ma Bell did back before the breakup of the Bell System in 1984. Some of that Western Electric equipment was about as expensive as you could make it, but it also withstood the test of time and hardly ever broke down. And the old AT&T seemed to have it down to a science to know exactly when somebody would break and not be able to pay any more for their "services".
If you ever saw some of the older offices that Ma Bell ran, they were guilded lilies for the most part even though there was legitimate business that took place there as well. After the breakup there was considerable consolodation and most of the local "customer support" offices were completely shut down in favor of a single call center to recieve support. Technological changes also had an impact here, but my point is that this system of demanding a ROI on expenditures is exactly what the old Bell System used to justify their rates.
It didn't hurt either that for the most part AT&T usually asked for incremental rate reductions due to improved technologies and other cost effective methods of operation. You had better believe that they tried to gold brick most of their offices as much as they could to avoid dropping the rates too much.
This statement of calling /. readers "armchair constitutional scholars" is presuming that we (who are voting citizens of the USA) have no input into the governing process of this country and that our opinion on this matter is irrevant.
I would dare say that it is the exact opposite: That we are fellow citizens debating this concept and in some ways ignoring the attitudes of members of the various bar associations as a bunch of ignorant fools who don't understand that we live in democracy. This includes those nine members of the bar associations that happen to lead the judicial branch in Washinton D.C.
The constitution is superior to the Supreme Court, and if they rule in such a way that the ordinary citizens of this country strongly disagree with them on their interpretation, they will find that they will not be taken seriously and become irrelevant. Not that this isn't happening to some extent anyway, but their authority and power is derived from the ordinary citizens and not the other way around.
Debates of this matter are reasonable to make, and to gain the opinion of ordinary citizens is not only healthy, but absolutely necessary. What ordinary people think the constitution means will ultimately translate into people elected into Congress and the U.S. Presidency, as well as future appointments to the Supreme Court.
The last time SCOTUS ignored the will of ordinary voters and decided to act on suposed judicial principles was Dred Scott v. Sanford. That has been universally declared by current members of the SCOTUS as a terrible decision, but the judges at the time certainly thought it was good policy. I predict that if the current justices made such a narrow interpretation of the 2nd ammendment today such as these DC lawyers want to push into law, that it would have very similar consequences as the Dred Scott decision. And be as universally derided 100 years into the future.
That sounds to me much more like an old software system that has been hacked and prodded so much, with an initial lousy architechture design to boot, that any attempt to work on it tends to create more bugs than it fixes.
I've been in that situation, and I've (successfully) advocated a full from-scratch rewrite with formal software engineering principles to design a well thought-out architechture.
Of course that costs some serious money and manpower, but it moves some systems forward a full generation when done properly. When done poorly, of course, it can be worse than the original system, which is why it is a huge gamble that some bean counter managers prefer not to make.
That and you have to be able to bring in the old databases and be able to do a transition from the old system to the new system in a smooth manner. That is perhaps the toughest challenge of all, especially when something like a sales tracking tool is updated 24/7/365 like you are describing.
I've built software communications systems that were backward compatable for equipment over 20 years old, but it was a real challenge, particularly when the other computer systems had a completely different internal hardware architechture and a custom operating system (always something to avoid in some ways!) I did that so seamlessly that my immediate supervisor (after my previous boss quit) didn't even know that the capability was even in the software for backward compatability.
As far as my experience with COBOL, all I remember was that it was a very, very wordy programming language that tended to use more characters for an expression than similar statements in other programming languages. Otherwise, good code is the same in almost all programming languages.
COBOL is also the only programming language I got an "F" in for handing in assignments. I made the unforgivable sin of coming up with an original algorithm that the professor hadn't thought about which used fewer instructions and fewer CPU cycles to complete than the "standard" format being taught in the class. I got it changed to an "A" by arguing with the department head showing that the output was identicle with all of the rest of the students and that clearly it was original software instead of something plagurized from another student. Only in a COBOL class would such a comedy even be permitted.
There are a number of source for the information I was quoting. By far the best "original" source of information about the early history of IC production can be found at:
i d=393
/. story about the Apollo Guidance Computer and an attempt to completely recreate it as a part of a home simulator. For details about this project, you can look at this website for some much futher information:
http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_catalog.html?item_
This is a lecture given by none other than Gordon Moore (of Moore's Law fame) that goes into the history of ICs.
There was also some time about (about a year or so, perhaps a little longer) a
http://klabs.org/history/build_agc/
There is other information that I've picked up over the years as well, but these are two sources to get you started if you are really interested in some of the early history of the Apollo mission computers. Of course Wikipedia is also available with some other outstanding information if you look up "Apollo Guidance Computer", particularly if you read through the sources to generate the Wikipedia article.
You also forgot that the whole Apollo program, particularly getting to the Moon with Apollo 11, was blessed and sanctified by St. John the Divine, of Massachusetts, who was martyred in Dallas, Texas and whitewashed any project he was associated with, most especially going to the Moon. In short, it was political suicide to vote against it.
The only way this program could have a similar impact is if Air Force One was shot down over Baghdad by an Iranian missile, and even then I don't think George W. Bush would carry the same degree of martyrdom as JFK had in the 1960's. And even then all such an attack would do is ensure that the USA would be in Iraq for the next 100 years, as Bush is not really as strongly associated with going to Mars as JFK was associated with going to the Moon.
BTW, withdrawing from the earlier "Moon Treaty" is still an option by the U.S. government and was one of the provisions of the treaty. The U.S. government merely has to announce publicly and to the other signatory parties that they intend to withdraw from the treaty and afterward the treaty will have no effect.
The Outer Space Treaty, while considered currently "international law", was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, particularly when some Sci-Fi fans got the message to their senators that it was a horrible idea to ratify the treaty. Only the most die-hard liberals hoping for international peaceful space exploration even follow the concepts of that treaty anyway, nor is there any enforcement authority over the provisions of the treaty... particularly for private citizens who don't pay attention to such trivial details.