I'm not sure how much of Scully's brand building was really responsible for Apple's loyal following. The major driver of customer loyalty was the technology itself.
Scully let the entire company run wild. The financial operations within the company were ludicrous. For example, customer service got bank all extended warranties against its profitability but manufacturing had to pay the warranty cost. As a result customer service division sold extended warranties for every possible unit no matter how old or in what condition.
Apple did grow fat under Scully but frankly I think that was inertia. He never had a real feel or passion for the technology in my opinion. Under Scully, Apple stopped being a central player in the computer industry and evolved towards its current niche (but highly visible and innovative) player it is today.
Actually, he had this idea that each group would monitor quality as the product developed. This might have worked except Apple had fragmented in mutually hostile fiefdoms under Scully. Worse, the financial structure within the company meant that the cost of failures of one fiefdom got billed to another. For example, the cost of the failure of plastics in the 5300 wasn't billed to the Powerbook group which designed the unit (and chose the plastics) but to manufacturing.
Gill changed a lot the dysfunctional financial stuff (for which he received little credit) but he could not bring the fiefs under control. Jobs did this by lopping off heads. Only he had the moral authority to do so without causing a talent flight.
Spindler (*spit*) was a German and a German trained engineer. I couldn't believe someone of that background could so destroy a company's quality control.
I can't confirm if he ever hid under his desk but I do know that many people believe he actively avoided them so they could not give him bad news. (He also had a reputation for shooting the messenger.)
Apple's Great Quality Meltdown
on
Top 10 Apple Flops
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A list of Apple's greatest mistakes must include the company wide product quality failure that occurred under Michael Spindler (*spit*).
Every major product shipped in late 95-early 96 under Spindler (*spit*) had a major flaw requiring recall or replacement.
System 7.5, the 6200 logic board, the plastics on the Powerbook 5300, flaming batteries on powerbooks, video cables on several all-in-one models, and many other flaws. I worked in Apple Tech support at the time and it was hell.
These were not failures of design but they were severe failures in execution, specifically Spindler's (*spit*) dismantling of all quality control groups and procedures within the company. The "Great Quality Implosion", as veterans call it, would have killed any normal company. Only Apple's near fanatical consumer base saved the company.
Under Scully, Apple fragmented in dozens of little fiefdoms, none of whom really cooperated with each other. He really wasn't at the helm of the company. The company really just costed under his tenure. When the rough times hit, the company lacked the cohesion and discipline to really respond.
Of course, Sully was a GOD compared to Spindler (*Spit*).
Perhaps we could free up the articles by explicitly providing funds for the peer review in the original grant. That would remove one of the major impediments to providing free articles.
Of course, we would have to come up with some means of (1) selecting the peers on an ad hoc basis and (2) maintaining the peers anonymity. Both of which are non-trivial task.
One of the more interesting questions in economics is why decentralized forms of economic management like cooperatives or the old Syndicalist ideas never become widespread.
It would seem at first that an employee owned and managed business would easily out compete more proprietary ones. For example, employee owned businesses don't have to fire people when times get thin. Everybody just takes a pay cut and keeps working. The co-op can maintain the same output as before at a lower price.
Yet employee owned firms are very rare despite numerous attempts to create them over many years and in many different legal and economic environments. Studies have shown that such forms of organization fail due to phenomenon which we would call flamewars and forking. In short, politics either paralyzes the firm or causes factions to leave.
FOSS succeeds to the degree it does largely due the non-zero sum nature of its products. Forking causes only a dilution of developer time not the division of physical assets. Even so, excessive forking kills products. FOSS can stave off, but not eliminate, the inherent threats poised by decentralized management.
There is some tip point where creative give-and-take gives way to flamewars and where forking leads not to greater diversity and innovation but to a fatal dilution of effort and brand.
"The report says this point will be two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750..."
I would find this report a little more credible if they didn't use 1750 as they're base line year. 1750 is one of the three coldest years in the "Little Ice Age" 1450-1850 a period when temperatures dropped to the lowest point seen since the end of the last ice age. Both the Thames and New York harbor froze solid. IIRC, the other two coldest years where 1695 and 1815, the last caused by massive volcanic eruption leading to "the year without a summer" In short, they chose a distinctive and unique year for their baseline. Its like raising an alarm about flooding because a year with normal rain is shows rainfall totals far above those in a year of severe drought.
In general, much of the Global Warming hysteria relies on people not understanding that a five century stretch of unusual cold preceded the last 150 years of "unusual" warming.
As far as I have been able to tell, none of the these elaborate computerized climate models on which we are asked to make life and death decisions has been tested against the real world to see if they could accurately reproduce the climate of the past.
For example, if we had a model that claimed to predict the climate for the next 100 years, we could test it by plugging in the climate data for 1905 and running it forward to see if we get output that matches the actual climate of the past 100 years. If it did (and did so repeatedly), we could be fairly certain that the model could predict the next 100 years.
I have dug through numerous such reports without seeing any indication that the original researches tested their models. Until they do, I say we don't make wrenching economic changes based on their say-so.
1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA. Where: W: Weather D: Debt d: Money due in January pay T: Time since Christmas Q: Time since failed quit attempt M: General motivational levels NA: The need to take action
But what are the units? What the hell number does one plug in for W,D,M or N?. Has somebody actually created a unitary measurement for each those factors? Is there a "weathertron" measurement that I missed in all the horsepower, newtons and pascals in physics class? Do we end up with dimensionless number or do we get our bad days measured in money times motivation divided by weather?
Is information newsworthy if only 1 person is interested in it? How about a million? Some number in between? Is an individual a public figure if 10 people know them or a million? The answer to those questioned used to be only "a million" because the institutional media only dealt with issues of interest to a large cross section of society.
Our current law is predicated on the media arising from institutions and not individuals. It assumes that the shield laws will only apply to reports about major public figures and institutions. The idea that shield laws would apple to your pissed off neighbor rooting in your garbage and publishing what he finds on his web site never entered into the design of those laws.
It is not that I don't think that shield laws shouldn't apply to the internet, rather it is that I do not think that shield laws should apply to anybody unless the information deals with a crime, safety hazard or something similar scale.
As a practical matter the one-to-many nature of old media limited the potential damage that could be done. Institutional media would not waste energy revealing the personal information of individuals or the plans of small business. The law reflected that practical consideration. Shield laws like California's for example, protect people who explicitly publish "periodically" but don't protect somebody who just writes letters to a few friends. Publishers and their were a minority elite, granted special privileges that were denied ordinary individuals. (I think this was a very bad precedent to set by the way)
Basically, the technological limitation of old media let us become lazy with our law. We relied on the institutional nature of old media to prevent abuses of the shield law. Now those technological limitations have ended and we will have to face the consequences.
I expect that one consequence of these types of leaks is that eventually violation of NDA and other such contracts will be made into a criminal matter.
Rumors sites will have to first check that the person providing the information is legally entitled to it.
In the internet age who is a journalist? Everybody is a potential journalist. Who is a public figure? Could be anybody. Is Cowboy Neil a public figure? He is on slashdot. What is newsworthy? Is any company information "newsworthy?" How about the product plans of small software company comprised of two guys in a garage? Can the guy they hire to do their product web page freely sell their information to anybody else on the entire web?
"how different is Nick dePlume's journalism from what Woodward and Bernstein were doing to uncover Watergate?"
Woodward et al were uncovering political corruption and outright crimes. Nick de Plume is providing entertainment for money. His fencing of stolen information helps no one but himself. Nobody is going to die if they don't know what Apple's hot new thing is a week before they announce it.
The very triviality of the information stolen makes it more not less important that the legal restrictions be enforced. Once we create an environment where people with access to private data can steal it without consequence it will inevitably lead to gross violations of individual privacy.
The ultimate ramification of these cases isn't whether citizen journalists (meaning anyone with a website or blog) will have the same privileges granted "professional" journalists but rather whether any of us will every have any information privacy at all.
If every individual has a right to publish stolen information with no expectation that they will ever have to reveal how they got that stolen information, then no one's information, no matter how private or trivial to the public interest, will be safe
Currently, personal and institutional information is protected in two ways: First, access to the information is limited to selected individuals. It is this limitation, enforced by technology like passwords, encryption and physical isolation, that most people think of as information security. The second protection is the contractual and legal obligation that people with access to the information have to not misuse it.
No matter how elaborate the technological and procedural protections for everyone's information, at some point that information gets viewed by a human being. If we have no legal means of holding those individuals accountable then information security, and the privacy it brings, is a dead letter. Granting everyone, from private individuals to vast commercial interests, the right to disseminate stolen information destroys the second protection utterly. Anyone with access to protected information can steal it and perhaps even sell it with little expectation they will be caught.
What we have here is a tag team of privacy violation. The thief steals the information and then the publisher "fences" it. Shielding the thief as a "source" could open the floodgates for information theft. Today, we see the violation of Apple's NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) but the same legal concept could just as well apply to an individual's medical and financial data. Even if the actual theft were theoretically illegal, how could one prosecute if the person disseminating your private information had a legal right to protect the identity of the thief?
The internet changes all the rules. The old style press shield laws won't work in the internet era.
Cars are marketed as they are because the technology has reached the point where all the marginal value, and therefor the profit, lays not in the technology of the vehicle but in its styling and social functions.
For the ordinary car buyer, the functional technologies in the car are largely interchangeable from brand to brand. Many people, especially in the demographics who respond to mass media advertisement in general, make their purchasing decision based on how they believe the vehicle will help their social life. As a consequence, car ads portray the vehicle in social situations or in activities that will attract attention.
"...producing more energy is not a viable long term goal; only conserving energy is..."
This reflects a profound ignorance of the way that technological progress works.
If you told someone in 1880 that the New York of 2004 would have a population of 8 million that would have said, "that is totally impossible! Do you have any idea how much horse manure a city of 8 million people would produce?"
Likewise, the 1880 individual would not believe that individual transports capable of routine travel at a 100kph would be possible. They would say, "Do you have any idea how much coal each vehicle would have to burn! Millions of such vehicles not only consume all the worlds coal but would blanket the entire planet in a cloud of soot!"
The more advanced the technology the less energy it takes to perform an equivalent task. A light bulb produces less waste heat to produce the equivalent lumens than does an open flame.
"Conserving" energy just means condemning the majority of humanity to needless suffering and death. The real solution is to keep creating technologies that provide greater benefit to more people with decreasing environmental impact.
Diatomic hydrogen is very rare in the natural environment but can catalyze many reactions. There is no telling what effect on air quality, soil chemistry, material erosion etc may result from the leakage of large amounts of hydrogen from a large scale hydrogen-fuel system.
Every technology has its unexpected negative consequences.
I think Murphy's tongue was planted firmly in cheek when he wrote his article but an easy explanation for the disparity lays in the markets served by the respective platforms.
The Macs core markets are education, publishing and "independent creative professionals" i.e. writers, graphic artist etc. . It's a population that spends a great deal of it's time communicating in writing for money as opposed to core markets in the PC world who communicate with numbers in the form of spreadsheets and databases.
The more profound bias is the idea that well articulated writing reflects an underlying high degree of "intelligence" (whatever that is) when it really just reflects specialization. People who write a lot get good at it regardless of how dumb they are otherwise and people who write very little do not get good at it no matter how much they excel intellectually in other areas.
Actually, malpractice lawsuits predate the era the government sanction and regulation by several hundred years. It is not the authority of the state that defines malpractice but rather the general practices of a professional group. You do not have to demonstrate that a doctor or lawyer broke any law or regulation to successfully sue for malpractice, you must simply demonstrate they operated outside of accepted practice.
Professionals certified each other long before the government took any interest. In fact, most state sponsored professional standards are a mere legal gloss on the standards of private associations. It is in the interest of responsible members of a profession that they can be readily identified by the lay consumers of their work as such. I think something similar will evolve for programmers.
Your example of a college student and the buffer overflow would not constitute malpractice. Mistakes everybody makes aren't malpractice. Malpractice isn't about the actual result of the work performed but rather HOW the work was preformed. If a doctor treats a patient using methods known to be dangerous they can be held accountable. Likewise, programmers who use methods and designs known to be dangerous should likewise be held accountable.
Microsoft used methods known to be dangerous in the design of IE, Outlook and other products. Most of the severe security problems resulted from design decision universally recognized as dangerous when they were made. Microsoft just did not care. They assumed their market dominance would allow them to escape any serious consequent and so far they have been correct. Law and the general proffesion of programming has not caught up with them.
Even though the software is provided "as-is" and one cannot sue if it fails in anyway, I think a case could be made for suing on the basis of malpractice.
Malpractice means "bad practice" and the concept differs significantly from product warranty. Doctors, Lawyers, accountants and other similar professionals are sued based not on outcome but on the methods and procedures they followed to reach that outcome. A Doctor is not contractually obligated to cure you nor an a lawyer obligated to win your case but they are obligated to follow broadly accepted standards of method and procedure. If they do not and a negative outcome occurs they can then be held liable. No other standard is possible as no Doctor can guarantee a cure nor a lawyer a victory in court.
Similarly, no software provider can guarantee that their products are free of bugs or other defects. Too much of actual process of running software lays outside the control of any single provider. Software providers can't predict how their product will fair until it actually meets the real world
But software providers could be legally required to follow standard practices of design and development and be held accountable if they do not.
Microsoft made conscious design decisions that opened up severe security holes in their products even though they were warned before hand the problem would occur. They did so for marketing reason even though every security expert warned at the time it was a bad practice.
In short, MS needs to be held accountable not for the actual broken software they released but for the studied disregard for the basic "good practices" of secure reliable design that created the flawed software in the first place.
I am not sure how "exaggerated" the danger of communism was. Communist murder more people than all other political movements combined, including the Fascist.
In the case of Southeast Asia, more people died in the two years following the fall of Saigon and the triumph of Communism than died in the previous 15 years of anti-communist warfare.
I am waiting for a movie where the disaster arises from the machinations of a cynical political class who create continuous hysteria about unending series of hypothetical cataclysms that can can only be forestalled by huge increases in government power.
In this movie, millions of worlds poorest and most vulnerable die horribly when the economic systems that keep them alive are disrupted by Ivory tower plans of the world's frivileged elite.
The ironic twist at the end of the movie comes when it is reveled decades latter that massive economic dislocations that killed all those people where made in response to exaggerated dangers based on flimsy scientific evidence. All those people died for nothing.
We could call it "The Energy Crises part II: This time it's personal"
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure how much of Scully's brand building was really responsible for Apple's loyal following. The major driver of customer loyalty was the technology itself. Scully let the entire company run wild. The financial operations within the company were ludicrous. For example, customer service got bank all extended warranties against its profitability but manufacturing had to pay the warranty cost. As a result customer service division sold extended warranties for every possible unit no matter how old or in what condition. Apple did grow fat under Scully but frankly I think that was inertia. He never had a real feel or passion for the technology in my opinion. Under Scully, Apple stopped being a central player in the computer industry and evolved towards its current niche (but highly visible and innovative) player it is today.
Actually, he had this idea that each group would monitor quality as the product developed. This might have worked except Apple had fragmented in mutually hostile fiefdoms under Scully. Worse, the financial structure within the company meant that the cost of failures of one fiefdom got billed to another. For example, the cost of the failure of plastics in the 5300 wasn't billed to the Powerbook group which designed the unit (and chose the plastics) but to manufacturing.
Gill changed a lot the dysfunctional financial stuff (for which he received little credit) but he could not bring the fiefs under control. Jobs did this by lopping off heads. Only he had the moral authority to do so without causing a talent flight.
Spindler (*spit*) was a German and a German trained engineer. I couldn't believe someone of that background could so destroy a company's quality control.
I can't confirm if he ever hid under his desk but I do know that many people believe he actively avoided them so they could not give him bad news. (He also had a reputation for shooting the messenger.)
A list of Apple's greatest mistakes must include the company wide product quality failure that occurred under Michael Spindler (*spit*).
Every major product shipped in late 95-early 96 under Spindler (*spit*) had a major flaw requiring recall or replacement.
System 7.5, the 6200 logic board, the plastics on the Powerbook 5300, flaming batteries on powerbooks, video cables on several all-in-one models, and many other flaws. I worked in Apple Tech support at the time and it was hell.
These were not failures of design but they were severe failures in execution, specifically Spindler's (*spit*) dismantling of all quality control groups and procedures within the company. The "Great Quality Implosion", as veterans call it, would have killed any normal company. Only Apple's near fanatical consumer base saved the company.
Under Scully, Apple fragmented in dozens of little fiefdoms, none of whom really cooperated with each other. He really wasn't at the helm of the company. The company really just costed under his tenure. When the rough times hit, the company lacked the cohesion and discipline to really respond.
Of course, Sully was a GOD compared to Spindler (*Spit*).
No, Apple was still manufacturing them in 1992 when I joined the company. I remember we had a little party when they stopped.
Actually, Apple was still manufacturing Apple IIe's when I joined the company in 1992. You could only get through the education channel though.
Perhaps we could free up the articles by explicitly providing funds for the peer review in the original grant. That would remove one of the major impediments to providing free articles.
Of course, we would have to come up with some means of (1) selecting the peers on an ad hoc basis and (2) maintaining the peers anonymity. Both of which are non-trivial task.
One of the more interesting questions in economics is why decentralized forms of economic management like cooperatives or the old Syndicalist ideas never become widespread.
It would seem at first that an employee owned and managed business would easily out compete more proprietary ones. For example, employee owned businesses don't have to fire people when times get thin. Everybody just takes a pay cut and keeps working. The co-op can maintain the same output as before at a lower price.
Yet employee owned firms are very rare despite numerous attempts to create them over many years and in many different legal and economic environments. Studies have shown that such forms of organization fail due to phenomenon which we would call flamewars and forking. In short, politics either paralyzes the firm or causes factions to leave.
FOSS succeeds to the degree it does largely due the non-zero sum nature of its products. Forking causes only a dilution of developer time not the division of physical assets. Even so, excessive forking kills products. FOSS can stave off, but not eliminate, the inherent threats poised by decentralized management.
There is some tip point where creative give-and-take gives way to flamewars and where forking leads not to greater diversity and innovation but to a fatal dilution of effort and brand.
Might be a PH.d thesis in that for somebody
I would find this report a little more credible if they didn't use 1750 as they're base line year. 1750 is one of the three coldest years in the "Little Ice Age" 1450-1850 a period when temperatures dropped to the lowest point seen since the end of the last ice age. Both the Thames and New York harbor froze solid. IIRC, the other two coldest years where 1695 and 1815, the last caused by massive volcanic eruption leading to "the year without a summer" In short, they chose a distinctive and unique year for their baseline. Its like raising an alarm about flooding because a year with normal rain is shows rainfall totals far above those in a year of severe drought.
In general, much of the Global Warming hysteria relies on people not understanding that a five century stretch of unusual cold preceded the last 150 years of "unusual" warming.
As far as I have been able to tell, none of the these elaborate computerized climate models on which we are asked to make life and death decisions has been tested against the real world to see if they could accurately reproduce the climate of the past.
For example, if we had a model that claimed to predict the climate for the next 100 years, we could test it by plugging in the climate data for 1905 and running it forward to see if we get output that matches the actual climate of the past 100 years. If it did (and did so repeatedly), we could be fairly certain that the model could predict the next 100 years.
I have dug through numerous such reports without seeing any indication that the original researches tested their models. Until they do, I say we don't make wrenching economic changes based on their say-so.
Okay so of formula is:
1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA. Where:
W: Weather
D: Debt
d: Money due in January pay
T: Time since Christmas
Q: Time since failed quit attempt
M: General motivational levels
NA: The need to take action
But what are the units? What the hell number does one plug in for W,D,M or N?. Has somebody actually created a unitary measurement for each those factors? Is there a "weathertron" measurement that I missed in all the horsepower, newtons and pascals in physics class? Do we end up with dimensionless number or do we get our bad days measured in money times motivation divided by weather?
I
Is information newsworthy if only 1 person is interested in it? How about a million? Some number in between? Is an individual a public figure if 10 people know them or a million? The answer to those questioned used to be only "a million" because the institutional media only dealt with issues of interest to a large cross section of society. Our current law is predicated on the media arising from institutions and not individuals. It assumes that the shield laws will only apply to reports about major public figures and institutions. The idea that shield laws would apple to your pissed off neighbor rooting in your garbage and publishing what he finds on his web site never entered into the design of those laws.
It is not that I don't think that shield laws shouldn't apply to the internet, rather it is that I do not think that shield laws should apply to anybody unless the information deals with a crime, safety hazard or something similar scale. As a practical matter the one-to-many nature of old media limited the potential damage that could be done. Institutional media would not waste energy revealing the personal information of individuals or the plans of small business. The law reflected that practical consideration. Shield laws like California's for example, protect people who explicitly publish "periodically" but don't protect somebody who just writes letters to a few friends. Publishers and their were a minority elite, granted special privileges that were denied ordinary individuals. (I think this was a very bad precedent to set by the way) Basically, the technological limitation of old media let us become lazy with our law. We relied on the institutional nature of old media to prevent abuses of the shield law. Now those technological limitations have ended and we will have to face the consequences.
Rumors sites will have to first check that the person providing the information is legally entitled to it.
In the internet age who is a journalist? Everybody is a potential journalist. Who is a public figure? Could be anybody. Is Cowboy Neil a public figure? He is on slashdot. What is newsworthy? Is any company information "newsworthy?" How about the product plans of small software company comprised of two guys in a garage? Can the guy they hire to do their product web page freely sell their information to anybody else on the entire web?
"how different is Nick dePlume's journalism from what Woodward and Bernstein were doing to uncover Watergate?"
Woodward et al were uncovering political corruption and outright crimes. Nick de Plume is providing entertainment for money. His fencing of stolen information helps no one but himself. Nobody is going to die if they don't know what Apple's hot new thing is a week before they announce it.
The very triviality of the information stolen makes it more not less important that the legal restrictions be enforced. Once we create an environment where people with access to private data can steal it without consequence it will inevitably lead to gross violations of individual privacy.
If every individual has a right to publish stolen information with no expectation that they will ever have to reveal how they got that stolen information, then no one's information, no matter how private or trivial to the public interest, will be safe
Currently, personal and institutional information is protected in two ways: First, access to the information is limited to selected individuals. It is this limitation, enforced by technology like passwords, encryption and physical isolation, that most people think of as information security. The second protection is the contractual and legal obligation that people with access to the information have to not misuse it.
No matter how elaborate the technological and procedural protections for everyone's information, at some point that information gets viewed by a human being. If we have no legal means of holding those individuals accountable then information security, and the privacy it brings, is a dead letter. Granting everyone, from private individuals to vast commercial interests, the right to disseminate stolen information destroys the second protection utterly. Anyone with access to protected information can steal it and perhaps even sell it with little expectation they will be caught.
What we have here is a tag team of privacy violation. The thief steals the information and then the publisher "fences" it. Shielding the thief as a "source" could open the floodgates for information theft. Today, we see the violation of Apple's NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) but the same legal concept could just as well apply to an individual's medical and financial data. Even if the actual theft were theoretically illegal, how could one prosecute if the person disseminating your private information had a legal right to protect the identity of the thief?
The internet changes all the rules. The old style press shield laws won't work in the internet era.
For the ordinary car buyer, the functional technologies in the car are largely interchangeable from brand to brand. Many people, especially in the demographics who respond to mass media advertisement in general, make their purchasing decision based on how they believe the vehicle will help their social life. As a consequence, car ads portray the vehicle in social situations or in activities that will attract attention.
This reflects a profound ignorance of the way that technological progress works.
If you told someone in 1880 that the New York of 2004 would have a population of 8 million that would have said, "that is totally impossible! Do you have any idea how much horse manure a city of 8 million people would produce?"
Likewise, the 1880 individual would not believe that individual transports capable of routine travel at a 100kph would be possible. They would say, "Do you have any idea how much coal each vehicle would have to burn! Millions of such vehicles not only consume all the worlds coal but would blanket the entire planet in a cloud of soot!"
The more advanced the technology the less energy it takes to perform an equivalent task. A light bulb produces less waste heat to produce the equivalent lumens than does an open flame.
"Conserving" energy just means condemning the majority of humanity to needless suffering and death. The real solution is to keep creating technologies that provide greater benefit to more people with decreasing environmental impact.
Every technology has its unexpected negative consequences.
The Macs core markets are education, publishing and "independent creative professionals" i.e. writers, graphic artist etc. . It's a population that spends a great deal of it's time communicating in writing for money as opposed to core markets in the PC world who communicate with numbers in the form of spreadsheets and databases.
The more profound bias is the idea that well articulated writing reflects an underlying high degree of "intelligence" (whatever that is) when it really just reflects specialization. People who write a lot get good at it regardless of how dumb they are otherwise and people who write very little do not get good at it no matter how much they excel intellectually in other areas.
Professionals certified each other long before the government took any interest. In fact, most state sponsored professional standards are a mere legal gloss on the standards of private associations. It is in the interest of responsible members of a profession that they can be readily identified by the lay consumers of their work as such. I think something similar will evolve for programmers.
Your example of a college student and the buffer overflow would not constitute malpractice. Mistakes everybody makes aren't malpractice. Malpractice isn't about the actual result of the work performed but rather HOW the work was preformed. If a doctor treats a patient using methods known to be dangerous they can be held accountable. Likewise, programmers who use methods and designs known to be dangerous should likewise be held accountable.
Microsoft used methods known to be dangerous in the design of IE, Outlook and other products. Most of the severe security problems resulted from design decision universally recognized as dangerous when they were made. Microsoft just did not care. They assumed their market dominance would allow them to escape any serious consequent and so far they have been correct. Law and the general proffesion of programming has not caught up with them.
Even though the software is provided "as-is" and one cannot sue if it fails in anyway, I think a case could be made for suing on the basis of malpractice. Malpractice means "bad practice" and the concept differs significantly from product warranty. Doctors, Lawyers, accountants and other similar professionals are sued based not on outcome but on the methods and procedures they followed to reach that outcome. A Doctor is not contractually obligated to cure you nor an a lawyer obligated to win your case but they are obligated to follow broadly accepted standards of method and procedure. If they do not and a negative outcome occurs they can then be held liable. No other standard is possible as no Doctor can guarantee a cure nor a lawyer a victory in court. Similarly, no software provider can guarantee that their products are free of bugs or other defects. Too much of actual process of running software lays outside the control of any single provider. Software providers can't predict how their product will fair until it actually meets the real world But software providers could be legally required to follow standard practices of design and development and be held accountable if they do not. Microsoft made conscious design decisions that opened up severe security holes in their products even though they were warned before hand the problem would occur. They did so for marketing reason even though every security expert warned at the time it was a bad practice. In short, MS needs to be held accountable not for the actual broken software they released but for the studied disregard for the basic "good practices" of secure reliable design that created the flawed software in the first place.
I am not sure how "exaggerated" the danger of communism was. Communist murder more people than all other political movements combined, including the Fascist. In the case of Southeast Asia, more people died in the two years following the fall of Saigon and the triumph of Communism than died in the previous 15 years of anti-communist warfare.
In this movie, millions of worlds poorest and most vulnerable die horribly when the economic systems that keep them alive are disrupted by Ivory tower plans of the world's frivileged elite.
The ironic twist at the end of the movie comes when it is reveled decades latter that massive economic dislocations that killed all those people where made in response to exaggerated dangers based on flimsy scientific evidence. All those people died for nothing.
We could call it "The Energy Crises part II: This time it's personal"