oh, college supports free-spirited individualism -- so long as it is the approved extreme left-wing collectivist form of free-spirited individualism performed with in the confines of a campus-approved group of individuals espousing only campus-approved beliefs.
If you aren't there to receive teaching, then you might as well not be there at all.
I mean, if the professor isn't going to do me any good, I might as well save the money and learn it on my own. Who needs formal "education" that includes no educating?
sadly, the more basic law that stealing power lines while they are still connected is highly correlated with premature death hasn't had much impact, apparently.
You might be able to patent an algorithm, or the use of a computer to perform a specific function in a specific manner, but you certainly can not patent code itself.
The code is an embodiment of the invention. You patent the invention, not the embodiment.
As an aside, I wonder if an argument could be made to invalidate their patents on the grounds that their fear of useful teaching of their own invention being made public is an indication that they themselves do not believe that the patents represent sufficient information to teach one of ordinary skill in the art.
Here would be my (still broken, but probably better) approach to this:
1) All bills must include the full text of any section that they amend -- however trivial the amendment. This is because many really bad bills hide their badness by reading like a diff of the entire code. You can't read them at all, so you don't know what they do.
2) The current length of the code in sections, sentences, lines, words, and characters is to be determined. For each of these metrics, the adoption of all new bills must either have a net-zero effect (except maybe sections, which can be allowed to be a net-zero, but never a net-increase). At no time should the number of sections, sentences, lines, words, or characters increase due to the passage of a bill. Every time a new bill that decreases one of these metrics passes, the new value becomes the ceiling. Over time, this will lead to shorter and shorter code.
Congress will eventually adapt and learn to write laws in tighter language with abbreviations and shorthand, but even then there will be a limit to what they can accomplish, since every new bill must remove at least one character from the length of the law.
3) Just to make things reasonable, take the length, in characters and words, of the longest novel that reached any position on the NY Times best-seller list in 2009, and declare that these lengths serve as a floor, and that new bills will never be required to reduce either metric below these thresholds. If you think that is too small, pick a nice multiplier (maybe 2 or 3?) and apply that to the length of said novel.
4) Now the easiest way to game the system is by cramming everything into one supermassive bill, crafting byzantine legislative proceedings that provide the equivalent of debate-and-binding-vote on making amendments to the supermassive bill, and then passing the then-open supermassive bill only once per session or when there is an emergency. So, to limit that, the sum of all words changed, added, removed, or moved by a bill must not exceed some reasonable number (say 30,000 -- about 100 pages in paperback-book format). If you like, have a similar restriction on character count.
5) Finally, to close one last obvious loophole, require that no character within a bill may be any character other than a capital letter, lowercase letter, digit, comma, period, colon, semicolon, parenthesis, or section-symbol (or, if you want, you could say, any standard printing character that is part of 7-bit ASCII -- though that provides more encoding space). Additionally requiring that all such characters be represented in the same font, color, and font size, and in fact that all instances of a character must look identical in all respects. (To decrease encoding space... you don't want a law that defines meanings for subtle differences in characters and then uses the rest of the codespace full of laws that are encoded in wonky character adjustments)
This system is still broken, because ultimately the problem is that we can't trust anybody to be the person with the authority to make the decisions, and every system is open to gamesmanship.
And, of course, this system is, ultimately, way too complicated and fairly silly. But if we could implement it, it would still be an improvement.
Though I just thought of a different system with a similar goal.
1) At the beginning of every session of Congress, the code shall be divided into 535 contiguous parts of equal size. These parts shall be distributed randomly to the members of Congress. Beginning with the first such part and continuing in sequence until all parts are completed, each member of Congress shall read aloud on the floor of their respective house, their section. Each other member of said house will be required to transcribe said reading without access to a visual copy of the medium, writing only with a ball-point pen upon plain lined college-ruled paper. The reader shall read with sufficient volume and clarity that each member is able to create an accurate transcr
It is equally unamazing the extent to which CNN and NBC push for deficit reduction only when the Republicans are in power.
CNN, NBC, FNC, and, frankly, almost everybody on the planet suffers from My Guy syndrome to some extent. Especially when Your Guy provides you with the kind of pork you want, and The Other Guy only wastes money on pork that goes to People You Hate
The main benefit of these programs is that at any time, in any asset, there is a buyer that will take an unlimited quantity (at some price), a seller that will provide an unlimited quantity (at some price), and that these two prices have a very small spread.
Except when they seize up.
Incidentally, almost all of the damage that these entities cause could be eliminated if everybody (or even just almost everybody) agreed to stop entering market orders and stop-loss orders, using only instead limit orders and stop-loss-limit orders with reasonable limits.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
I notice how this doesn't say "except when it upsets certain people" or "except when we really don't like it"
Actually, it is stated as an absolute, with no possibility of exception, for "the greater good" or any other reason.
Actually, according to the developer discussion, this isn't a bug. They did it on purpose. They actually saved all of the sites that you made site-specific settings changes to.
They thought that the "convenience" of a better UI would outway the privacy risk of having the sites you visited after explicitly selecting privacy-mode saved in plain text on the file system.
As far as awareness goes for cancer, I think the most important thing would be awareness of not-scary treatments for early-detected cancer.
Why?
I know only 1 person who died from cancer.
I know many people who have undergone insane tormenting treatments for their not-early-detected cancer. Chemo, surgeries, and all sorts of terrible stuff involving massive amounts of disfigurement and pain, and still only moderate survival rates.
If I think that "finding cancer" means huge suffering and then dying anyway in 2-5 years, and not detecting the cancer means dying in about the same 2-5 years but without all of the torturous treatments in between... argues pretty well for not looking, doesn't it.
We need to get the word out about how treatable certain cancers are when caught early and how much less debilitating these treatments are when you catch it "in time"
The reason that #4 precedes #5 is that if warming is, in fact, happening, and it will have either no significant consequences or on balance more positive consequences, then it is irrelevant that it is caused by humans, because it is not a bad thing.
It seems that, as a people, we've decided to be weak and powerless. In other words, to die. Just watch our movies and television.
We no longer have awesome epics of humanity going out to the stars and doing great things. We have epic movies about how humanity's presence on foreign worlds is a scourge. Practically every movie that shows the future of earth shows a brown, dead planet that humans have wrecked so badly that nothing (except cockroaches and cute, lovable, garbage-smashing robots) can survive in.
This scares me way more than the possibility that the sea might rise a few feet over the next 100 years.
I also am not a believer in Anthropogenic Global Warming. I'm not convinced one way or the other. I suspect that sufficient evidence to reach a reasonable conclusion exists. I doubt we could "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" one way or the other -- we seem to understand too little still -- but we could probably make a fairly convincing statement. Unfortunately, bad political motivations on both sides (environmental extremism on one side, and drill, baby, drill [for lack of a better name] on the other side) for the evidence to be clearly and accurately portrayed. Most [vocal] players in this space are partisans and not scientists (even if they are "scientists" if they are partisans then they are not doing "science")
But, I have a rough explanation of the answer to one of your questions.
> How, specifically, do we know this?
Those graphs of global mean temperature that you've seen bandied about? Well, the temperature data come from a variety of sources.
We have temperature data in some areas that go back to 1850-1880. The number of weather stations and the accuracy of the measurements have improved in the last 160 years, but we have direct measurements for this period. This is called the "instrumental period." It is probably pretty safe to assume that, for measurements taken from the same weather station, the data are sufficiently accurate measurements of temperature at that station.
Any records that you see from before 1850-1880 are proxies. We have found several data sources that we have data for (or can measure today) that appear to be reasonable proxies for temperature in an area. Not being a climate scientist or expert in this area, I can't tell you whether they are highly accurate proxies or not. Maybe somebody else can weigh in on that. I'm not saying that they are not accurate. I have no information, and I haven't seen any significant evidence one way or the other.
According to Wikipedia, sources such as ice cores, tree-ring widths, borehole temperatures and others are providing proxy temperature data for about the last 2000 years in the northern hemisphere, and a briefer period in the southern hemisphere and the tropics. These records are at least qualitatively backed by human history records... basically, human writings that survive today that in some way mention the weather or climate of a given region at a given time. These records are generally considered accurate only to annual averages.
Temperature records from 2000 years ago to roughly 800,000 years ago are estimated based on measurements from antarctic ice cores. These records do not provide detail about short time frames... measurements using these refer to periods of time in kiloyears. Presumably, they are believed to provide a reconstruction of temperature with some degree of accuracy over wide swaths of time.
Beyond 800,000 years? dunno. There is a graph out there of the last 5 million years. I have no idea what backs it.
Unfortunately, these different sources are generally drawn onto a single graph with only one line. Probably because this graph has 2 useful properties (i) it is easily read by people with no scientific background whatsoever and (ii) it visually represents the desired outcome (showing that the earth is warming faster than ever before)
A more honest graph that used the ice cores, for example, would run all the way from 800 kyr ago to today using only the proxy data from the ice core. Then another, separate graph (or line on the same graph) showing data from 2000 years ago to today using only tree-ring-width data, and then finally a third line from 1850ish to today using only temperature data measured from weather stations that have been in continuous operation for that time -- and ideally using only stations that are in geographic areas that have not been changed substantially (the whole "urban heat island" thing).
Incidentally, if any of you out there are in possession of such a graph and can back up its sources (or provide me links to raw data that backs up those sources) I'd be interested in looking at them. It wouldn't, by itself, convince me... but it'd help a lot.
This happens for any SATA chipset (or other Mass Storage Controller) that hadn't gotten a WHQL-approved driver out before the release to manufacturing of the OS.
Windows XP setup [boot-from-CD, for installing on machines without an OS already installed] could only load drivers during the initial setup phase from driver descriptors stored in files called "A:\TXTSETUP.OEM"
Generally, this had to be done only for hard-disk controllers, because anything else could wait until after the OS was bootstrapped -- but if you had a SATA/RAID controller that didn't have drivers built in, you'd get a BSOD with "Inaccessible Boot Device" if you didn't have your floppy driver.
I bought that game used from a game-rental type shop. It was missing that page.
That was such a pain in the ass. I couldn't "just google it" back then... in the end, I think I called their product support line... they told me that I was supposed to call the 900-number "game hints hotline" (only $3.95 per minute!), but eventually they just told me.
Vista, the pile of problems that it is, took thousands of people about 6 years to create.
It would have been simply infeasible to increase the work by 10x (since 10x as many people couldn't do 10x the work -- overhead and all -- we're talking probably at least 15x - 20x increase in cost to develop, and probably more elapsed time regardless of the number of engineers).
Even if it costs a trillion dollars, spread over 10 years, to fix things that could have been prevented with the 10x effort up front, it simply wouldn't have been possible.
Ultimately, we would all have to settle for slower innovation and simpler products.
So far, the market has decided that a somewhat-buggy, vulnerable, but cheap, advanced, and rapidly developed product is more valuable than an expensive, simple, but bulletproof application for most people's needs.
For some things, it is probably worthwhile to scale back expectations of complexity and innovation to increase invulnerability and guarantee correctness. Software running on the space shuttle or a nuclear sub strikes me as belonging to this category.
But, for right now... I wouldn't pay $2500-$5000 per seat for an operating system that was as advanced and capable as Windows 7, but which had zero crash bugs and zero security vulnerabilities. (and similar outsized pricing on other software that I use)
Nor would I be willing to pay today's prices for secure versions of 10+-years-ago software when the same prices could get me modern software.
Until we can find a way to decrease the comparative cost of building provably-secure systems (versus what is available with rapid development and "best efforts"), it isn't going to happen for most software.
Slashdot Mirror
Dell, Microsoft, and a handful of others have been sued in the past (and lost their suits), for failure to provide this.
Naturally, pay a $25,000 "license termination fee".
Or a $250,000,000 "improper disposal fee"
oh, college supports free-spirited individualism -- so long as it is the approved extreme left-wing collectivist form of free-spirited individualism performed with in the confines of a campus-approved group of individuals espousing only campus-approved beliefs.
If you aren't there to receive teaching, then you might as well not be there at all.
I mean, if the professor isn't going to do me any good, I might as well save the money and learn it on my own. Who needs formal "education" that includes no educating?
sadly, the more basic law that stealing power lines while they are still connected is highly correlated with premature death hasn't had much impact, apparently.
I am suddenly compelled to post one of these bad boys:
http://xkcd.com/526/
You, in fact, can not patent code.
You might be able to patent an algorithm, or the use of a computer to perform a specific function in a specific manner, but you certainly can not patent code itself.
The code is an embodiment of the invention. You patent the invention, not the embodiment.
Well, at least, as a cadaver, he would be unlikely to sign any new laws.
That would be a 100000% improvement over any other possible option likely to appear on any ballot in any race anywhere.
I'd vote for Reagan's corpse too.
In fact, the whole purpose of patents it to teach an individual of ordinary skill in the appropriate art how to produce the invention.
So:
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=5&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=%22landmark+digital%22&OS=%22landmark+digital%22&RS=%22landmark+digital%22
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=%22landmark+digital%22&OS=%22landmark+digital%22&RS=%22landmark+digital%22
Go read how they made what they made.
As an aside, I wonder if an argument could be made to invalidate their patents on the grounds that their fear of useful teaching of their own invention being made public is an indication that they themselves do not believe that the patents represent sufficient information to teach one of ordinary skill in the art.
Here would be my (still broken, but probably better) approach to this:
1) All bills must include the full text of any section that they amend -- however trivial the amendment. This is because many really bad bills hide their badness by reading like a diff of the entire code. You can't read them at all, so you don't know what they do.
2) The current length of the code in sections, sentences, lines, words, and characters is to be determined. For each of these metrics, the adoption of all new bills must either have a net-zero effect (except maybe sections, which can be allowed to be a net-zero, but never a net-increase). At no time should the number of sections, sentences, lines, words, or characters increase due to the passage of a bill. Every time a new bill that decreases one of these metrics passes, the new value becomes the ceiling. Over time, this will lead to shorter and shorter code.
Congress will eventually adapt and learn to write laws in tighter language with abbreviations and shorthand, but even then there will be a limit to what they can accomplish, since every new bill must remove at least one character from the length of the law.
3) Just to make things reasonable, take the length, in characters and words, of the longest novel that reached any position on the NY Times best-seller list in 2009, and declare that these lengths serve as a floor, and that new bills will never be required to reduce either metric below these thresholds. If you think that is too small, pick a nice multiplier (maybe 2 or 3?) and apply that to the length of said novel.
4) Now the easiest way to game the system is by cramming everything into one supermassive bill, crafting byzantine legislative proceedings that provide the equivalent of debate-and-binding-vote on making amendments to the supermassive bill, and then passing the then-open supermassive bill only once per session or when there is an emergency. So, to limit that, the sum of all words changed, added, removed, or moved by a bill must not exceed some reasonable number (say 30,000 -- about 100 pages in paperback-book format). If you like, have a similar restriction on character count.
5) Finally, to close one last obvious loophole, require that no character within a bill may be any character other than a capital letter, lowercase letter, digit, comma, period, colon, semicolon, parenthesis, or section-symbol (or, if you want, you could say, any standard printing character that is part of 7-bit ASCII -- though that provides more encoding space). Additionally requiring that all such characters be represented in the same font, color, and font size, and in fact that all instances of a character must look identical in all respects. (To decrease encoding space... you don't want a law that defines meanings for subtle differences in characters and then uses the rest of the codespace full of laws that are encoded in wonky character adjustments)
This system is still broken, because ultimately the problem is that we can't trust anybody to be the person with the authority to make the decisions, and every system is open to gamesmanship.
And, of course, this system is, ultimately, way too complicated and fairly silly. But if we could implement it, it would still be an improvement.
Though I just thought of a different system with a similar goal.
1) At the beginning of every session of Congress, the code shall be divided into 535 contiguous parts of equal size. These parts shall be distributed randomly to the members of Congress. Beginning with the first such part and continuing in sequence until all parts are completed, each member of Congress shall read aloud on the floor of their respective house, their section. Each other member of said house will be required to transcribe said reading without access to a visual copy of the medium, writing only with a ball-point pen upon plain lined college-ruled paper. The reader shall read with sufficient volume and clarity that each member is able to create an accurate transcr
You can't have 22 different telecoms all running wires
Indeed. That's why once the government stopped enforcing the monopoly on telecommunication, private entrepreneurs invented wireless telecom.
It is not.
It is equally unamazing the extent to which CNN and NBC push for deficit reduction only when the Republicans are in power.
CNN, NBC, FNC, and, frankly, almost everybody on the planet suffers from My Guy syndrome to some extent. Especially when Your Guy provides you with the kind of pork you want, and The Other Guy only wastes money on pork that goes to People You Hate
The main benefit of these programs is that at any time, in any asset, there is a buyer that will take an unlimited quantity (at some price), a seller that will provide an unlimited quantity (at some price), and that these two prices have a very small spread.
Except when they seize up.
Incidentally, almost all of the damage that these entities cause could be eliminated if everybody (or even just almost everybody) agreed to stop entering market orders and stop-loss orders, using only instead limit orders and stop-loss-limit orders with reasonable limits.
The problem is that the people doing the drafting don't want these problems to go away.
They benefit greatly from being able to say whatever is convenient, do whatever is convenient, and then later claim whatever intent is convenient.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
I notice how this doesn't say "except when it upsets certain people" or "except when we really don't like it"
Actually, it is stated as an absolute, with no possibility of exception, for "the greater good" or any other reason.
Actually, according to the developer discussion, this isn't a bug. They did it on purpose. They actually saved all of the sites that you made site-specific settings changes to.
They thought that the "convenience" of a better UI would outway the privacy risk of having the sites you visited after explicitly selecting privacy-mode saved in plain text on the file system.
<Insert cliche about how I hate people that THIS something, but that I'm going to do it anyway> ..There... much better...
Oh, yeah.
THIS
1000 times THIS!
I dunno. I am a pretty smart guy, and I found it pretty hard.
Though I guess my difficulty was more that I was really bad at it. I took many other "harder" classes that seemed much easier to me.
That whole idea of different kinds of intelligence or something.
You are totally on to something.
As far as awareness goes for cancer, I think the most important thing would be awareness of not-scary treatments for early-detected cancer.
Why?
I know only 1 person who died from cancer.
I know many people who have undergone insane tormenting treatments for their not-early-detected cancer. Chemo, surgeries, and all sorts of terrible stuff involving massive amounts of disfigurement and pain, and still only moderate survival rates.
If I think that "finding cancer" means huge suffering and then dying anyway in 2-5 years, and not detecting the cancer means dying in about the same 2-5 years but without all of the torturous treatments in between... argues pretty well for not looking, doesn't it.
We need to get the word out about how treatable certain cancers are when caught early and how much less debilitating these treatments are when you catch it "in time"
The reason that #4 precedes #5 is that if warming is, in fact, happening, and it will have either no significant consequences or on balance more positive consequences, then it is irrelevant that it is caused by humans, because it is not a bad thing.
I am worried about this too.
It seems that, as a people, we've decided to be weak and powerless. In other words, to die. Just watch our movies and television.
We no longer have awesome epics of humanity going out to the stars and doing great things. We have epic movies about how humanity's presence on foreign worlds is a scourge. Practically every movie that shows the future of earth shows a brown, dead planet that humans have wrecked so badly that nothing (except cockroaches and cute, lovable, garbage-smashing robots) can survive in.
This scares me way more than the possibility that the sea might rise a few feet over the next 100 years.
I'm not a climate scientist.
I also am not a believer in Anthropogenic Global Warming. I'm not convinced one way or the other. I suspect that sufficient evidence to reach a reasonable conclusion exists. I doubt we could "prove beyond a reasonable doubt" one way or the other -- we seem to understand too little still -- but we could probably make a fairly convincing statement. Unfortunately, bad political motivations on both sides (environmental extremism on one side, and drill, baby, drill [for lack of a better name] on the other side) for the evidence to be clearly and accurately portrayed. Most [vocal] players in this space are partisans and not scientists (even if they are "scientists" if they are partisans then they are not doing "science")
But, I have a rough explanation of the answer to one of your questions.
> How, specifically, do we know this?
Those graphs of global mean temperature that you've seen bandied about? Well, the temperature data come from a variety of sources.
We have temperature data in some areas that go back to 1850-1880. The number of weather stations and the accuracy of the measurements have improved in the last 160 years, but we have direct measurements for this period. This is called the "instrumental period." It is probably pretty safe to assume that, for measurements taken from the same weather station, the data are sufficiently accurate measurements of temperature at that station.
Any records that you see from before 1850-1880 are proxies. We have found several data sources that we have data for (or can measure today) that appear to be reasonable proxies for temperature in an area. Not being a climate scientist or expert in this area, I can't tell you whether they are highly accurate proxies or not. Maybe somebody else can weigh in on that. I'm not saying that they are not accurate. I have no information, and I haven't seen any significant evidence one way or the other.
According to Wikipedia, sources such as ice cores, tree-ring widths, borehole temperatures and others are providing proxy temperature data for about the last 2000 years in the northern hemisphere, and a briefer period in the southern hemisphere and the tropics. These records are at least qualitatively backed by human history records... basically, human writings that survive today that in some way mention the weather or climate of a given region at a given time. These records are generally considered accurate only to annual averages.
Temperature records from 2000 years ago to roughly 800,000 years ago are estimated based on measurements from antarctic ice cores. These records do not provide detail about short time frames... measurements using these refer to periods of time in kiloyears. Presumably, they are believed to provide a reconstruction of temperature with some degree of accuracy over wide swaths of time.
Beyond 800,000 years? dunno. There is a graph out there of the last 5 million years. I have no idea what backs it.
Unfortunately, these different sources are generally drawn onto a single graph with only one line. Probably because this graph has 2 useful properties
(i) it is easily read by people with no scientific background whatsoever and
(ii) it visually represents the desired outcome (showing that the earth is warming faster than ever before)
A more honest graph that used the ice cores, for example, would run all the way from 800 kyr ago to today using only the proxy data from the ice core. Then another, separate graph (or line on the same graph) showing data from 2000 years ago to today using only tree-ring-width data, and then finally a third line from 1850ish to today using only temperature data measured from weather stations that have been in continuous operation for that time -- and ideally using only stations that are in geographic areas that have not been changed substantially (the whole "urban heat island" thing).
Incidentally, if any of you out there are in possession of such a graph and can back up its sources (or provide me links to raw data that backs up those sources) I'd be interested in looking at them. It wouldn't, by itself, convince me... but it'd help a lot.
This happens for any SATA chipset (or other Mass Storage Controller) that hadn't gotten a WHQL-approved driver out before the release to manufacturing of the OS.
Windows XP setup [boot-from-CD, for installing on machines without an OS already installed] could only load drivers during the initial setup phase from driver descriptors stored in files called "A:\TXTSETUP.OEM"
Generally, this had to be done only for hard-disk controllers, because anything else could wait until after the OS was bootstrapped -- but if you had a SATA/RAID controller that didn't have drivers built in, you'd get a BSOD with "Inaccessible Boot Device" if you didn't have your floppy driver.
Yes, I f$#&% remember.
I bought that game used from a game-rental type shop. It was missing that page.
That was such a pain in the ass. I couldn't "just google it" back then... in the end, I think I called their product support line... they told me that I was supposed to call the 900-number "game hints hotline" (only $3.95 per minute!), but eventually they just told me.
Vista, the pile of problems that it is, took thousands of people about 6 years to create.
It would have been simply infeasible to increase the work by 10x (since 10x as many people couldn't do 10x the work -- overhead and all -- we're talking probably at least 15x - 20x increase in cost to develop, and probably more elapsed time regardless of the number of engineers).
Even if it costs a trillion dollars, spread over 10 years, to fix things that could have been prevented with the 10x effort up front, it simply wouldn't have been possible.
Ultimately, we would all have to settle for slower innovation and simpler products.
So far, the market has decided that a somewhat-buggy, vulnerable, but cheap, advanced, and rapidly developed product is more valuable than an expensive, simple, but bulletproof application for most people's needs.
For some things, it is probably worthwhile to scale back expectations of complexity and innovation to increase invulnerability and guarantee correctness. Software running on the space shuttle or a nuclear sub strikes me as belonging to this category.
But, for right now... I wouldn't pay $2500-$5000 per seat for an operating system that was as advanced and capable as Windows 7, but which had zero crash bugs and zero security vulnerabilities. (and similar outsized pricing on other software that I use)
Nor would I be willing to pay today's prices for secure versions of 10+-years-ago software when the same prices could get me modern software.
Until we can find a way to decrease the comparative cost of building provably-secure systems (versus what is available with rapid development and "best efforts"), it isn't going to happen for most software.