Personally, I think RIAA ought to spend a lot of money prosecuting file swappers and aggressively going after individuals who have MP3's on their home computers. They have already won one Pyrrhic victory with Napster; I think a few more will do unto them that which they richly deserve.
Negative results are always important results in Science, as opposed to snake oil sales. Researchers owe their institution and those who support that institution (like taxpayers) their best effort -- they do not owe them positive results. Any institution who would take punative measures against a researcher for honest negative results is a poor place to research in the first place.
The existance of a crowd of sycophants to "cold fusion" is a reflection on those people personally, not on their field of inquiry. If anything seriously bad came of the Pons/Fleishman fiasco, it was that certain avenues of investigation were made into cognito non grata and researchers who wanted to investigate these claims into pariahs in the "scientific establishment."
I wish them luck, but more importantly, I wish them to be as careful as possible, and to accurately report their results, irrespective of what results they achieve.
Nice Show, Obsolete Data
on
The Rise of CSI
·
· Score: 5, Informative
While the modus operandi of the show is stimulating and thought provoking, the facts presented are sometimes from some parallel universe. I'm a licensed EPA inspector, and sometimes the writers of this show come up with things that might have been feasible thirty years ago, but aren't plausible in our modern safety-oriented society. This leads me to believe that the writers include among them some old fart (from a fellow OFC* member) who hasn't let factuality come in the way of a good spin. Perhaps he (she?) is an out-of-work political speech writer.
I'm all for using clever scientific methods to knock off troublesome momos, but using stuff that has been unobtainable for twenty years stretches credibility a bit. While that bothers me personally, a worse possibility is causing people who aren't knowledgable (like network TV watchers) to want our government to institute even nastier safety restrictions to solve problems that have actually been fixed for decades.
Whoooopie. I'm so excited I could just lift a finger in celebration. The "next article" finger to be exact.
Borland was a Godsend back in DOS days, when the Microsoft platform was unreliable and probably the least compatible C compiler ever invented. Those of us who were doing development work on MouseyDos spent our hard earned dollars on Turbo C, Borland C, release after release.
Then along came Windows and competing products from other vendors. Borland provided us with an extensible object framework better than anything that Microsoft had to offer. And then, something happened. All of a sudden, Borland was in bed with Microsoft, and those of us who worked with ObjectWindows, or (horrors) that "other" platform were abandoned like poor relatives at a party.
I personally give Borland a share of the blame for the extension of the Microsoft monopoly and the eradication of that "other" platform.
And now, they're going to bring out a product for Linux.
Well, friends, I won't spend a single cent on a Borland platform for Linux. Linux already has a mature tool chain available (more than one, actually) and in my humble opinion, Borland's products are unreliable. They are unreliable for the same reason every other proprietary product is unreliable; one never knows if tomorrow that product will even exist. If I find serious errors with the product, will Borland fix them, or will they once again decide that politics or bribery rule, and abandon their product (and me) to their own interests?
No, friend. I greet Borland's announcement of Linux support with all the enthusiasm of Borland's last six years of announcements. After spending thousands of dollars on their products only to be left standing in the rain, I will never, ever, buy another Borland product again.
Revolutions, even electronic ones, move with all the speed and relentnessness of a glacier. There is no one stroke, one event, one demonstration that begins and ends a revolutionary movement. Paradigm shifts always take time, and in the beginning, the results are always disappointing.
None of this means that a revolution is not in progress. Have you not seen the evidence already? It's there for those who would look. Already the first shoots of a society based on free information exchange are poking up from the snowfall.
Want evidence? Of course you do - otherwise you wouldn't be reading this in the first place.
Look at the flavor of politics for the early signs. Consider the reason for legislation like the CDA, The DMCA, the SSSCA... Why bother? Well, the short answer is that already the
missing
revolution is starting to erode the power of those who would rule over us. This frantic legislation, in the USA and elsewhere, seeks to suffocate the very growth of individual liberties that is such a threat to the bodies politic and corporate.
It appears that the United States Government has taken to hiring all those former East-Germans who worked for the Stasi, the bureau of state security. World over, they were known as the very epitome of state surveillance of their own citizenry. It now seems as though the FBI has decided to usurp that lofty position, and become the preeminant repository of every sneak, thief, spy, and eavesdropper that they can find.
In the words of Gore Vidal (not usually one of my favorite people), "Now that the Great Red Menace is gone, the government can now turn its attention to the real enemy, which is now, and always has been, the people."
I'm glad to see someone at Microsoft stepping up to the plate, so to speak, to try and provide a comprehensible tool for nonprofessional users of their products. I am actually a little surprized that they released such a product at all, on the theory that their lawyers must have warned them that by releasing a cleanup tool, they have perforce admitted to having a problem in the first place. Kudos to Microsoft, who (for once) have placed the quality of their product ahead of the veracity of their legal department.
Robert Goddard had a good idea, but he held it close to himself and absolutely refused to look at work being done elsewhere. Over the years after his first attempts, he continued to make attempts to get his little candle to work, while others who had a slightly less vapid case of NIH (not invented here) were dropping explosives on London, a couple tons at a time.
He was a selfish, egotistical mean little man, and his attitude resulted in his being remembered for his funny little rocket that almost would.
Clearly, the Brits have decided that hyphens are stylish when it comes to things e-lectronic. However, I do not feel that one should permit one solitary island nation to colour our opinionnes on such ubiquitous issues. Therefore, I have lent my support to the less fustian venacular, and have penned off this post whilst drinking my morning tea.
These companies have ridiculous business plans designed around the idea that people are willing to pay forever for a "service" of nominal value. If this were true, broadcast television stations would have been charging their subscribers a service fee for the last fifty years.
And the idea that the solution to this "problem" is litigation ranges from absurd to positively subversive. It is flatly ludicrous to expect a government to protect faulty business models by shoving legislation down the throat of the consumer. I cannot even begin to comprehend the logic that places used car salesmen in the position of writing legislation that turns a fee-for-service into a tax.
Somehow, in this country, businesses have forgotten that success depends upon delivering a service or product at a price that benefits both the provider and the consumer of the service. Instead, greedy marketing type pinheads have decided that what is necessary is to scam customers into paying good money for items of marginal value.
The proper "solution" for a lousy business plan is bankruptcy.
Musicrypt has missed the point. If music can be copied and shared, it will be copied and shared. Huge charges for prerecorded music came about when recording and duplication called for million-dollar physical plants - and like it or not, those days are over.
It's not that people will steal things just because they can - though of course some will - it's simply that a whole lot of people look at a performing group that has made tens of millions off of a song or a CD, and simply figure (rightly or wrongly) that a few million dollars ought to be enough, and that the five cents they potentially deny an artist by downloading a copy of one of their songs isn't materially going to affect their lifestyle.
Of course, the lifestyle that will be affected most in the near future will be that of RIAA executives - their free ride is coming to an end and they are in the unenvyable position of stable managers trying to outlaw the horseless carriage a hundred years ago. Their cause is lost; they just don't yet know it.
Artists, on the other hand, can still make a decent living on prerecorded music. In a recent visit to Phoenix, I came across a slew of CD's published by relatively unknown artists under handwritten labels, all selling well at five dollars per disk. One wonders if these lesser names know something that their famous bretheren do not... They know that most people will pay a nominal fee for prerecorded music, especially if, like many of the CD's I examined, the material is already in MP3 format, ready to compute. Since the actual cost of producing a real CD (not a CD-W) is around five cents, one would think that current performing artists could easily be competative with the price of hard disk space needed to store their wares.
Let us not lose perspective on who is stealing from whom. When a user copies an MP3, even against copyrights, they are costing that artist a nickel. Every time an artist sells a CD under RIAA auspices, the RIAA is raking about ten bucks. Back in the days when it took tens of millions of dollars to cut an album, this might have made sense. These days, any geek with a computer can handle the technical end of the business.
Copyrights as we know them, expecially on works of art, are as dead as buggy whip manufacturers.
If someone with a moderately technical background and a wad of money wanted to help the open source community in a fundamental way, they might consider what I refer to as Open Patents.
One could hire a gaggle of lawyers, and begin filing patent applications over every variety of technical contrivance embodied in the collective open source pool. These patents would then become public property, granted under auspices of an agreement based upon the principles of CopyLeft.
The purpose of such patents would be twofold. First, they would be defensive patents, against corporate hoarding, as it were. Second, and perhaps more important, they should serve as a guide to people who wish to impliment whatever concept that the patent protects. This idea occurred to me whist reading about the court action re: DeCSS. It seems that the defendant's attorneys included the entire text of the DeCSS algorithm in the public court documents. This is a splendid idea, and fits well into the scheme of patents. Such patents should include an appendix that describes in detail how the concept was implimented. The actual source code need not be included, but salient concepts about what the code must do, what kind of things caused problems, and the solutions thereto.
I have recently realized that Open Source is just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of communal, cooperative efforts that will eventually lead us to become a collective intelligence. This is a new, and wonderful thing. I look forward to interesting times. -- Norm Reitzel (Blue Water Ventures)
The "factory" version has better jobs support, and includes support for tcl/tk, sorta kinda. On the down side, I think that pdksh is more robust and better maintained than the AT&T version.
However, I agree with your sentiments. When I read this announcement, my thoughts were, essentially, "So what? We've been distributing pdksh for a decade." More importantly, the public domain shell is available on far more platforms than the AT&T shell. Notice the MicroSoftCentric distribution based upon nmake - not even upon AT&T's own (original) make.
Patents, per se, aren't bad. What is bad is the abuse perpetrated by clever lawyers, people who have been educated to ignore what might be right and wrong, and think in terms of whether or not something is legal.
Fifteen years ago, I fixed code (Yes, in Cobol) that would have rated post-1999 calls incorrectly. I fixed this problem by noting that the program was running in the 1980's, so every pre-1980 date was clearly and obviously a 2000 date. Recently, some clever IP lawyer has managed to get a patent on this obvious technique, under the name "windowing". Presumably, could this legal thief figure out who I worked for those fifteen years ago, that company would have to pay royalties on this new patent.
The problem isn't the patents; it's the patent office and the patent lawyers, and in general those humans who believe that because they are good at manipulating our flawed legal system, they deserve their seven figure incomes. In my own very personal opinion, they deserve to be acquainted with the scaffold -- this may be the single thing the French got definitively correct.
ABC News is clueless. They have another article posted debunking the idea that online stores are cheaper than bricks and mortar, but get this: They went to B&M stores like Bath and Body, then priced the Same Item from the online version of the Same Store. Guess what, the prices were identical! Doh.
Toys R Us has an online store because somewhere in their organization, there is a "Mee To" dolt. They didn't expect quite so many orders; after all, how many geeks and nerds can there be online?
The etailers whose only business is online -- including all the ones from whom I ordered -- all managed to get their products here on time and intact. I did nearly all my Christmas shopping from this very keyboard, including some orders placed as late as December 21, all without problem.
Let me restate that, for ABC's benefit: I received 100% of my orders on time and intact.
I think for Christmas what I really need to do is take ABC News out of my Bookmark file.
You know perfectly well what they're up to. Microsoft is going to drop Java and start using this "other" language that isn't Java, but just looks a lot like Java. And then they're going to do what they did with C, and add a million methods that are totally incompatible with Java, and even with the concept of Java. While they're at it, they'll poke twenty holes in the security, under the guise of making it perform well. Finally, they'll "fix" Internet Exploder so it will work with these "other language" applets and not with Java itself.
My disclaimer: I'm all for free speech. I've been a card carrying ACLU member for a decade, from before it was chic to be an ACLU member.
I came across this site a few weeks ago. It is clearly a political site, up to and including the fundraising pitch. What is not clear at first read is that it is not a GWB fundraising site.
Free speech is one thing, but to actively pass oneself off as something one is not, and then to collect political funds from people intent on donating to a cause (good or bad) that you do not represent - that is not free speech; that is misrepresentation at a minimum, and is potentially fraud in the legal sense.
Politics in America have been becoming less civil by the election. Regardless of which party one favors, recognise that we are on a slippey slope, and at the bottom of that slope is insurrection. For a hundred and fifty years the United States has avoided what so many other countries have faced - politics of the bullet. This site is one more example of the very disturbing trend towards victory at any cost.
I have real trouble with this question; not so much with the answer, which is obviously the user of the software, but with the fact that the question even needs to be asked.
Before the trivial flames start, I'm not talking about cracker software specifically designed to break into other systems, but those terabytes of tools built by the modern equivalent of neolithic flint chippers. These things are Tools, after all. They are the flint axe of the information age.
It would shock me to know that a flint axe was never used to shatter the skull of a fellow Homo, but this fact is not even germane to a discussion of whether or not this implement was a feature of neolithic civilization. The flint axe - and flint knives, and needles, and hammers - made this civilization what it was, a big step up from naked, shivering apes hiding in the savannah.
Software is Yet Another Tool, a step on the road to the evolution of our civilization. It is not good, nor evil; it just is. Whatever it may eventually mean to us as a society, the information revolution is already well underway. If anything, it resembles the great human tsunami that swept across Europe subsequent to the invention of the printing press; for good or for evil, that event changed the nature of civilization and all of the relationships among genus Homo forever.
Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. I'd give a lot -- sell the house, maybe -- for a chance to take my favorite girl to Zero G and see what comes up. Or goes down.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think RIAA ought to spend a lot of money prosecuting file swappers and aggressively going after individuals who have MP3's on their home computers. They have already won one Pyrrhic victory with Napster; I think a few more will do unto them that which they richly deserve.
DifferentLY. Please.
Negative results are always important results in Science, as opposed to snake oil sales. Researchers owe their institution and those who support that institution (like taxpayers) their best effort -- they do not owe them positive results. Any institution who would take punative measures against a researcher for honest negative results is a poor place to research in the first place.
The existance of a crowd of sycophants to "cold fusion" is a reflection on those people personally, not on their field of inquiry. If anything seriously bad came of the Pons/Fleishman fiasco, it was that certain avenues of investigation were made into cognito non grata and researchers who wanted to investigate these claims into pariahs in the "scientific establishment."
I wish them luck, but more importantly, I wish them to be as careful as possible, and to accurately report their results, irrespective of what results they achieve.
I'm all for using clever scientific methods to knock off troublesome momos, but using stuff that has been unobtainable for twenty years stretches credibility a bit. While that bothers me personally, a worse possibility is causing people who aren't knowledgable (like network TV watchers) to want our government to institute even nastier safety restrictions to solve problems that have actually been fixed for decades.
Ok, it's a nit, but it bugs me.
* Old Farts Club
Well, Borland is going to 'support' Linux.
Whoooopie. I'm so excited I could just lift a finger in celebration. The "next article" finger to be exact.
Borland was a Godsend back in DOS days, when the Microsoft platform was unreliable and probably the least compatible C compiler ever invented. Those of us who were doing development work on MouseyDos spent our hard earned dollars on Turbo C, Borland C, release after release.
Then along came Windows and competing products from other vendors. Borland provided us with an extensible object framework better than anything that Microsoft had to offer. And then, something happened. All of a sudden, Borland was in bed with Microsoft, and those of us who worked with ObjectWindows, or (horrors) that "other" platform were abandoned like poor relatives at a party.
I personally give Borland a share of the blame for the extension of the Microsoft monopoly and the eradication of that "other" platform.
And now, they're going to bring out a product for Linux.
Well, friends, I won't spend a single cent on a Borland platform for Linux. Linux already has a mature tool chain available (more than one, actually) and in my humble opinion, Borland's products are unreliable. They are unreliable for the same reason every other proprietary product is unreliable; one never knows if tomorrow that product will even exist. If I find serious errors with the product, will Borland fix them, or will they once again decide that politics or bribery rule, and abandon their product (and me) to their own interests?
No, friend. I greet Borland's announcement of Linux support with all the enthusiasm of Borland's last six years of announcements. After spending thousands of dollars on their products only to be left standing in the rain, I will never, ever, buy another Borland product again.
Not ever.
None of this means that a revolution is not in progress. Have you not seen the evidence already? It's there for those who would look. Already the first shoots of a society based on free information exchange are poking up from the snowfall.
Want evidence? Of course you do - otherwise you wouldn't be reading this in the first place.
Look at the flavor of politics for the early signs. Consider the reason for legislation like the CDA, The DMCA, the SSSCA... Why bother? Well, the short answer is that already the
- missing
revolution is starting to erode the power of those who would rule over us. This frantic legislation, in the USA and elsewhere, seeks to suffocate the very growth of individual liberties that is such a threat to the bodies politic and corporate.It's coming, friends. Don't doubt it.
Have patience.
In the words of Gore Vidal (not usually one of my favorite people), "Now that the Great Red Menace is gone, the government can now turn its attention to the real enemy, which is now, and always has been, the people."
Welcome, UStasi.
I'm glad to see someone at Microsoft stepping up to the plate, so to speak, to try and provide a comprehensible tool for nonprofessional users of their products. I am actually a little surprized that they released such a product at all, on the theory that their lawyers must have warned them that by releasing a cleanup tool, they have perforce admitted to having a problem in the first place. Kudos to Microsoft, who (for once) have placed the quality of their product ahead of the veracity of their legal department.
Maybe somebody should build a vbs virus that distributes deCSS. Just for grins.
Robert Goddard had a good idea, but he held it close to himself and absolutely refused to look at work being done elsewhere. Over the years after his first attempts, he continued to make attempts to get his little candle to work, while others who had a slightly less vapid case of NIH (not invented here) were dropping explosives on London, a couple tons at a time.
He was a selfish, egotistical mean little man, and his attitude resulted in his being remembered for his funny little rocket that almost would.
It's eMail.
Good will my ass.
These companies have ridiculous business plans designed around the idea that people are willing to pay forever for a "service" of nominal value. If this were true, broadcast television stations would have been charging their subscribers a service fee for the last fifty years.
And the idea that the solution to this "problem" is litigation ranges from absurd to positively subversive. It is flatly ludicrous to expect a government to protect faulty business models by shoving legislation down the throat of the consumer. I cannot even begin to comprehend the logic that places used car salesmen in the position of writing legislation that turns a fee-for-service into a tax.
Somehow, in this country, businesses have forgotten that success depends upon delivering a service or product at a price that benefits both the provider and the consumer of the service. Instead, greedy marketing type pinheads have decided that what is necessary is to scam customers into paying good money for items of marginal value.
The proper "solution" for a lousy business plan is bankruptcy.
It's not that people will steal things just because they can - though of course some will - it's simply that a whole lot of people look at a performing group that has made tens of millions off of a song or a CD, and simply figure (rightly or wrongly) that a few million dollars ought to be enough, and that the five cents they potentially deny an artist by downloading a copy of one of their songs isn't materially going to affect their lifestyle.
Of course, the lifestyle that will be affected most in the near future will be that of RIAA executives - their free ride is coming to an end and they are in the unenvyable position of stable managers trying to outlaw the horseless carriage a hundred years ago. Their cause is lost; they just don't yet know it.
Artists, on the other hand, can still make a decent living on prerecorded music. In a recent visit to Phoenix, I came across a slew of CD's published by relatively unknown artists under handwritten labels, all selling well at five dollars per disk. One wonders if these lesser names know something that their famous bretheren do not... They know that most people will pay a nominal fee for prerecorded music, especially if, like many of the CD's I examined, the material is already in MP3 format, ready to compute. Since the actual cost of producing a real CD (not a CD-W) is around five cents, one would think that current performing artists could easily be competative with the price of hard disk space needed to store their wares.
Let us not lose perspective on who is stealing from whom. When a user copies an MP3, even against copyrights, they are costing that artist a nickel. Every time an artist sells a CD under RIAA auspices, the RIAA is raking about ten bucks. Back in the days when it took tens of millions of dollars to cut an album, this might have made sense. These days, any geek with a computer can handle the technical end of the business.
Copyrights as we know them, expecially on works of art, are as dead as buggy whip manufacturers.
One could hire a gaggle of lawyers, and begin filing patent applications over every variety of technical contrivance embodied in the collective open source pool. These patents would then become public property, granted under auspices of an agreement based upon the principles of CopyLeft.
The purpose of such patents would be twofold. First, they would be defensive patents, against corporate hoarding, as it were. Second, and perhaps more important, they should serve as a guide to people who wish to impliment whatever concept that the patent protects. This idea occurred to me whist reading about the court action re: DeCSS. It seems that the defendant's attorneys included the entire text of the DeCSS algorithm in the public court documents. This is a splendid idea, and fits well into the scheme of patents. Such patents should include an appendix that describes in detail how the concept was implimented. The actual source code need not be included, but salient concepts about what the code must do, what kind of things caused problems, and the solutions thereto.
I have recently realized that Open Source is just the tip of the iceberg of the kind of communal, cooperative efforts that will eventually lead us to become a collective intelligence. This is a new, and wonderful thing. I look forward to interesting times. -- Norm Reitzel (Blue Water Ventures)
The "factory" version has better jobs support, and includes support for tcl/tk, sorta kinda. On the down side, I think that pdksh is more robust and better maintained than the AT&T version.
However, I agree with your sentiments. When I read this announcement, my thoughts were, essentially, "So what? We've been distributing pdksh for a decade." More importantly, the public domain shell is available on far more platforms than the AT&T shell. Notice the MicroSoftCentric distribution based upon nmake - not even upon AT&T's own (original) make.
Did Pokemon #65 ever say Geller was a fraud? Or is it just that #65 is a whole lot better at spoon bending than our favorite Israeli?
A hundred million, give or take a spoonful?
Supersnail has it exactly right.
Patents, per se, aren't bad. What is bad is the abuse perpetrated by clever lawyers, people who have been educated to ignore what might be right and wrong, and think in terms of whether or not something is legal.
Fifteen years ago, I fixed code (Yes, in Cobol) that would have rated post-1999 calls incorrectly. I fixed this problem by noting that the program was running in the 1980's, so every pre-1980 date was clearly and obviously a 2000 date. Recently, some clever IP lawyer has managed to get a patent on this obvious technique, under the name "windowing". Presumably, could this legal thief figure out who I worked for those fifteen years ago, that company would have to pay royalties on this new patent.
The problem isn't the patents; it's the patent office and the patent lawyers, and in general those humans who believe that because they are good at manipulating our flawed legal system, they deserve their seven figure incomes. In my own very personal opinion, they deserve to be acquainted with the scaffold -- this may be the single thing the French got definitively correct.
-- Norm Reitzel
ABC News is clueless. They have another article posted debunking the idea that online stores are cheaper than bricks and mortar, but get this: They went to B&M stores like Bath and Body, then priced the Same Item from the online version of the Same Store. Guess what, the prices were identical! Doh.
Toys R Us has an online store because somewhere in their organization, there is a "Mee To" dolt. They didn't expect quite so many orders; after all, how many geeks and nerds can there be online?
The etailers whose only business is online -- including all the ones from whom I ordered -- all managed to get their products here on time and intact. I did nearly all my Christmas shopping from this very keyboard, including some orders placed as late as December 21, all without problem.
Let me restate that, for ABC's benefit: I received 100% of my orders on time and intact.
I think for Christmas what I really need to do is take ABC News out of my Bookmark file.
-- Norm Reitzel
You know perfectly well what they're up to. Microsoft is going to drop Java and start using this "other" language that isn't Java, but just looks a lot like Java. And then they're going to do what they did with C, and add a million methods that are totally incompatible with Java, and even with the concept of Java. While they're at it, they'll poke twenty holes in the security, under the guise of making it perform well. Finally, they'll "fix" Internet Exploder so it will work with these "other language" applets and not with Java itself.
Like you said, it's too easy.
My disclaimer: I'm all for free speech. I've been a card carrying ACLU member for a decade, from before it was chic to be an ACLU member.
I came across this site a few weeks ago. It is clearly a political site, up to and including the fundraising pitch. What is not clear at first read is that it is not a GWB fundraising site.
Free speech is one thing, but to actively pass oneself off as something one is not, and then to collect political funds from people intent on donating to a cause (good or bad) that you do not represent - that is not free speech; that is misrepresentation at a minimum, and is potentially fraud in the legal sense.
Politics in America have been becoming less civil by the election. Regardless of which party one favors, recognise that we are on a slippey slope, and at the bottom of that slope is insurrection. For a hundred and fifty years the United States has avoided what so many other countries have faced - politics of the bullet. This site is one more example of the very disturbing trend towards victory at any cost.
I have real trouble with this question; not so much with the answer, which is obviously the user of the software, but with the fact that the question even needs to be asked.
Before the trivial flames start, I'm not talking about cracker software specifically designed to break into other systems, but those terabytes of tools built by the modern equivalent of neolithic flint chippers. These things are Tools, after all. They are the flint axe of the information age.
It would shock me to know that a flint axe was never used to shatter the skull of a fellow Homo, but this fact is not even germane to a discussion of whether or not this implement was a feature of neolithic civilization. The flint axe - and flint knives, and needles, and hammers - made this civilization what it was, a big step up from naked, shivering apes hiding in the savannah.
Software is Yet Another Tool, a step on the road to the evolution of our civilization. It is not good, nor evil; it just is. Whatever it may eventually mean to us as a society, the information revolution is already well underway. If anything, it resembles the great human tsunami that swept across Europe subsequent to the invention of the printing press; for good or for evil, that event changed the nature of civilization and all of the relationships among genus Homo forever.
Heaven accursed fornicating barristers...
Ought to line 'em up and puncture them with high velocity metallic projectiles.
Don't let anybody tell you otherwise. I'd give a lot -- sell the house, maybe -- for a chance to take my favorite girl to Zero G and see what comes up. Or goes down.