Except for equation writing and the like, but it seems to me that in my classes, I always spent too much time writing down what the professor was saying to pay any attention to what was being said. Taht was with pen and paper. With a laptop, I may have had more time to think about it as I can type much much much faster than I can write. The only professor who's class I truly followed had coursenotes pre-printed that we had to buy. There were a few blanks and room to write a couple of equations for a derivation to keep us involved, but 99.99% of notes were there. As a result, all the classroom time was spent following and understanding what was being said. I actually think that pen and paper is WORSE than the laptop approach.
I'd have to say that the charting tool is the weak point in OOo. Very weak. The best thing that can be said about it, is that it allows you to have the first column as data labels for X-Y scatter plots where the second column ix the X. It sure beats the Excel "now you have to change the labels one by one manually". I sure has come in handy when I wanted to quickly ascertain that the pile layout I calculated on the fly was good by having it plotted with the label of each pile indicated. You could also map cities with their names beside them and many other nice things.
Another good point is how you can easily use image files for the markers of the data series... but can still easily revert back to the original system markers. That is something I never managed to figure out how to do in Excel (the reverting back thing).
That being said, the charts seriously need to allow the user to specify independently the x and y range (and why not the label range) of each data series independently. Oh, for quick chart building, using the current behaviour as the default is OK... but you should be able to have the X to the right of your y if you so wish.... and not all the series sharing the same X column if you don't want to.
Another problem is the lack of styles for charts. OOo has styles for everything, but there is no way to quickly change the formatting of a chart. You have to change every bloody Title, scale numbering, chart background on every chart that you ever do. This is just dreadful.
Just wanted to point out that lower factor of safety is used for STEEL than for concrete because steel is more reliably produced. Sorry about the typo.
Nope. Cracks develop in materials subjected to tensile stresses or bending moments (where on the outside of the curvature there are tensile stresses). Soils are only designed for shear strength as obviously most soils have no tensile strength (unless they are cemented). Cracks were not the problem in the levees. For the record, most dams are earth dams, too.,
The problem of piping and erosion is not stress-related. It's all about the pore water pressure and the permeability of the soil (under the levee) or water flow (when overtopping). There were no "cracks" to cause the failure. Either the flow of water that overtopped the levee caused erosion of the top of the levee, where more water gushed out, eroding even more material thus breaching it, or the buildup of pressure in the channel caused enough flow below the levees (the cutoff wall was too short in places) which caused liquefaction on the ouside of the levee (quick sand anyone?) which undermined the foundation and the levvee collapsed. Cutoff walls are imporant in the design of water retaining structues.
Re:My inner Materials scientist just got shot.
on
Tracking the Cracks
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Where the heck are you getting this idea that concrete is more regular than glass? You seem to be talking of a laboratory prepared CEMENT mixture. Yes, certainly if you prepare glass and cement in a laboratory condition, your hardened cement is likely to be more regular. There are, many considerations that makes this untrue for real life construction.
The first thing to understand is that concrete is NOT cement. Concrete is a MIXTURE of cement and agregate. You can use all kinds of things for agregate, gravel and sand being the most common. Sometimes some fly ash from blast furnaces is added. Engineers normally use lower factors of safety for concrete than steel because the uncertainties are greater. When you test concrete to failure, sometimes the fractuers cut across the agregate grains where the cement bond was stronger than the agregate, other times it will follow a path around strong agregate particles.
The other thing to know about concrete is that is it NOT made in a factory, under controlled industrial conditions and unit testing. Sure, you may get your concrete mixed at a concrete plant and the trucks, but eventually it has to get to the field. Then it must be placed... and the experience and professionalism of the workers is very variable. Furthermore, concrete needs to cure in place. The water content of the concrete during this stage is important since it needs water for the chemical reactions to harden the concrete. But then again there is an optimum value. The chemical reaction is also helped by high temperatures. So weather conditions and placement conditions will affect the final product.
And of course, portland cement is a strong alkali. It can actually react with the agregates themselves which can build up stresses and cause cracks inside the concrete independently of external stresses. You may have witnessed this alkali-aggregate reactivity in concrete if you see cracks in concrete that seem to be humid, even what it hasn't been raining, and somtimes oozing a bit of white foam.
In final analysis concrete is a highly nonuniform construction material.
It can also added that most of your levees, and most likely the sections that failed, are probably earthworks. Therefore whatever the uniformity or lack thereof of the concrete, it would have done nothing for the leveees. Cracks are only meaningful in materials that need resist tensile or bending stresses. Needless to say, that is NOT how earthworks are desined.
I believe the factor of safety for stell structures is in the order of 1.5. As for earthworks the factor of safety can be up to 3. A factor of safety of 10 is not needed. But you DO have to maintain the structures so they are still at their designed capacity.
I don't have the details about the New Orleans levees, but I honestly doubt cracking had anything to do with it. Such huge works are rarely made of expensive materials such as concrete. It's just too huge. Usually only the sections of levees protecting the most "critical" areas would be expected to be made of concrete. Most of it would be made of earth. This seems to be validated by
some info that can be found on the levee failures
Katrina's storm surge overtopped some sections. The cascade eroded soils from the base of the landward side of some levee sections, causing them to fail.
In sections where the surge didn't overtop levee segments, water percolated under the sheet pilings through layers of peat, sand, and clay and bubbled up on the other side. Ivor van Heerden, a marine scientist at Louisiana State University, noted that these failures tended to occur where the pilings were driven only 10 or 11 feet into the ground. Where pilings were driven 25 feet, the levees kept the water at bay. Indeed, he expressed concern that this percolation may have weakened other sections of the levee system that appear to have survived Katrina.
The junctions between different kinds of levees were often weak. "If it's earth versus concrete, the earth will lose," Dr. Nicholson noted.
Levees made from fill or dredge material from canals were more likely to fail if they lacked significant patches of marshland in front of them to blunt the effects of the incoming storm surge
One thing that you need to do when building any kind of water retaining structure is to have your impermeable cutoff wall deep enough to prevent percolation of water when the water is at its maximum. Either the water level was maintained higher than the levee height (which would have been difficult since the water would just have overtopped the levee... unless the whole area beyond the levee was already flooded, but then the water on the other side would have prevented that kind of percolation and resulting erosion) or the original design assumed the water would never reach the top of the levee. Either that or the flow properties of the underlying soil were compeltely erroneously estimated
In any event, cracking had nothing to do with any of the described failures. The comment in the article was pure "buzzword". I think it's the kind of research that will be of more use to mechanical and structural engineers than to geotechnical engineers.
In summary, the factor of safety was probably good enough to resist the forces applied to the levees. At least in terms of strength it probably was. Where the design seems to have been lacking is in terms of erosion protection. Erosion will weaken an earth structure.
I agree. All that Google does is redirect us to their content. If Google News stopped doing it, I'd probably not be reading a lot of those newspapers (and their content). I'd get a couple of sources like the BBC and CBC and good luck to the rest. I bet they're just as happy getting the advertising money from when I browse their site and see their sponsors. It's not like Google is lifting the entire content of their articles. They would be legitimately pissed then. Google is merely redirecting traffic towards their site. Of course, it's typical of the news industry today... they want to stirr up things just to stir them up. If it means saying "oops" afterwards... well they'll see how it goes THEN.
The page metaphor is good for some things... presenting articles, course notes... printed stuff that need no interactivity. The page metaphor is awful for anything requiring interactivity like e-mail interface, etc. etc. I'm not an advocate to convert EVERYTHING to AJAX. But interactive sites that are meant to behave more like programs definitely need to look into it.
Does Google pay Dividends. Dividends would be a good reward. I agree that stock prices can mean pretty much whatever they want. Dividends is where you measure the success of the company. A company which CANNOT pay dividends isn't doing well. A company that doesn't WANT to pay dividend should probably not be considered as an investment option. That's my point of view anyways. If I were to buy shares, I'd like to make a profit on how well the company is doing, if I invested because of my faith in their business. I wouldn't want it all to be speculation, which depends on how others think it will do, and is pretty much a matter of fad... but most importantly, stock prices are not directly related (sometimes totally unrelated) to the company's ability to do business well.
Ibn Khaldun had a theory, although he used city dwellers and nomads based on his personal experience. The perspective may have been too limiting in terms of the relative "virility" of city dwellers and nomads, but I think the basic premise is not bad and can be generalized:: Those who have lots of wealth, spend more time spending the wealth than creating new wealth. Relatively speaking the poorer people are more productive, becaue they are capable of living with less. In essence we're spoiled brats living off the wealth accumulated by our forebears. Their success is the direct cause of our failure. The eternal dilemma of life.
I'll certainly miss it. Now, it will very likely be eaten up by the huge formula movie churning machine of Disney. So sad. It did bring a lot of new life to animation. I will mourn Pixar.
A free service to consumers could indeed consider such a payment scheme. A service that is already charging the users a fee should not be thinking of making their clients pay to give them a half-service for most websites, and push down their throats some preferred "sponsored" sites. Customers should rightfully feel violated then. You charge the ones, or you charge the others. You're opening yourself to all kinds of lawsuits if you do both. Because I can't imagine PAYING customers sitting idlly by while their PAID service is throttled for some sites. They'd be stupid not to organize a class action (Hint to service providers considering that kind of double payment). Again, offer free broadband and it's another story... although only a very few wide coverage providers could benefit from this. Content providers could not be expect to be coerced to pay for every other joe's ISP. In my uninformed opinion is has little viability.
I always thought that Regional distinctions were wrong, and illegitimate. Even if you want to "protect your IP" and prevent people from copying your product, there is no legitimate reason to prevent someone from buying something in one country and viewing it in another. People can be called upon to move because of work or family. They can bring a present to a family member abroad... maybe because things are cheaper at home. There are so many legitimate reasons for the movies to have to be played in other markets than their destination markets that that kind of protection should plainly be illegal. On the other hand, here we have a beautiful example of karmic retribution. Maybe there is intelligent design after all.
I'm curious to know what the exploit is about that it could have been present in two different implementations? I understand that WINE has implemented the API, so is the vulnerability not an implementation of drawing routines but of the spec of the API itself?
You have to be careful to separate what the researcher says and what the reporter reports though. To the reporter, this is how he understood it.... maybe too much star trek. You gotta read the real journal papers related to the theory if you want to pass judgement.
Alcubierre did come up with a theoretical (if not very practical) way to achieve faster than light speeds that was in agreement with accepted physics.
I'm not a physisit, I don't know what this particular theory is all about. What would be nice is for an enlighted discussion from knowledgeable people who have access to relevant publications.
I hope you're right. Otherwise we might as well start inventing some new language just so we can talk without risk of being sued. But really, MS has no originality when it comes to product names.
I'm conviced that it should hit every version of Windows. I have been embedding wfm for my thesis and proposals win 1998. I had lots of memory problems using either Word or Word Perfect to open those documents. Even with only a few wmfs embedded in Excel, or other third party applications (that were obviously using windows API to render them). Then I switched to StarOffice and the problem vanished... for me. My supervisor, with a much more powerful computer still had trouble. I guessed at the time that it was some kind of memory leak in the Windows rendering engine, and since StarOffice was cross-platform, they were probably using their own code to render it, and not the API. Back then I only thought how nice it was to be using StarOffice instead of constantly rebooting the computer and getting nothing done. I never thought back then that memory leak could mean buffer overflow which could mean security vulnerability. I have the feeling that it's related. Of course I'm not a computer guy.
Obviously the bugs were never fixed from version to version, and I can't believe I'm the only one who noticed that wmf files, which are not supposed to take that much memory compared to raster images could turn into such a nightmare. My supervisor's Word still renders horribly wmf files that show very nicely in OpenOffice. To this day I still include my graphs as raster images for his sake.
I agree that sports makes more money, but it still does not invalidate the parent's strategy:
Here's a hint to programming managers.... Scheduling a sports event is a lot simpler than you think.
Step 1: block an extra hour for the sports event.
Step 2: book sports guests to fill that hour.
Step 3: when (not if) the game runs over, trim the time per person.
Step 4: if it runs -really- long, cut entire interviews.
Step 5: since you've probably paid to have interviews with those folks, tape the interviews off-air at the end.
Step 6: schedule a regular sports follow-up show later in the week and use the interviews taped after the game.
I agree that pleasing there more numerous viewers makes sense. But scheduling it this way does not alienate the remainder of the viewers. Annoying your viewers does nothing to improve your ratings. The parent quote explains a very simple way to keep the majority happy, without annoying the rest. It's a win win situation.
I don't agree about LabView. LabView is a great programming teaching tool. It is a hopeless production programming language. You have to hunt through menus to find the "icon" that represents the function you want to call. I saw an experienced LabView programmer take the better part of half an hour to make a simple control program that would have taken perhaps 5 mintues with a written programming language. Because Words can be remembered... and typed not tracked down through stacked menus, it is much more powerful. Keep LabView where it belongs, in an introduction to programming class, and I will say: it's great Try to put it anywhere else and it gets nothing but curses from me.
In addition to your argument, you can say that with Linux, the user IS the developer. At least many of them are. It's not just security bugs that they can patch, and redistribute. It's the whole thing.
As a kid I was an avid fan of the original show. I have only seen the pilot of the remake, but as far as I know it beats the old show hands down. Characters were more intersting... but most importantly, I felt that my whole universe had gone too when I watched the pilot. They did a very good job at conveying the sense of loss.
As for those who have a problem with the "castrated" characters, I'll just say that the substitutes are plenty hot. 'nough said.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Except for equation writing and the like, but it seems to me that in my classes, I always spent too much time writing down what the professor was saying to pay any attention to what was being said. Taht was with pen and paper. With a laptop, I may have had more time to think about it as I can type much much much faster than I can write. The only professor who's class I truly followed had coursenotes pre-printed that we had to buy. There were a few blanks and room to write a couple of equations for a derivation to keep us involved, but 99.99% of notes were there. As a result, all the classroom time was spent following and understanding what was being said. I actually think that pen and paper is WORSE than the laptop approach.
I'd have to say that the charting tool is the weak point in OOo. Very weak. The best thing that can be said about it, is that it allows you to have the first column as data labels for X-Y scatter plots where the second column ix the X. It sure beats the Excel "now you have to change the labels one by one manually". I sure has come in handy when I wanted to quickly ascertain that the pile layout I calculated on the fly was good by having it plotted with the label of each pile indicated. You could also map cities with their names beside them and many other nice things. Another good point is how you can easily use image files for the markers of the data series... but can still easily revert back to the original system markers. That is something I never managed to figure out how to do in Excel (the reverting back thing). That being said, the charts seriously need to allow the user to specify independently the x and y range (and why not the label range) of each data series independently. Oh, for quick chart building, using the current behaviour as the default is OK... but you should be able to have the X to the right of your y if you so wish.... and not all the series sharing the same X column if you don't want to. Another problem is the lack of styles for charts. OOo has styles for everything, but there is no way to quickly change the formatting of a chart. You have to change every bloody Title, scale numbering, chart background on every chart that you ever do. This is just dreadful.
The Road to Tycho
Just wanted to point out that lower factor of safety is used for STEEL than for concrete because steel is more reliably produced. Sorry about the typo.
Nope. Cracks develop in materials subjected to tensile stresses or bending moments (where on the outside of the curvature there are tensile stresses). Soils are only designed for shear strength as obviously most soils have no tensile strength (unless they are cemented). Cracks were not the problem in the levees. For the record, most dams are earth dams, too.,
The problem of piping and erosion is not stress-related. It's all about the pore water pressure and the permeability of the soil (under the levee) or water flow (when overtopping). There were no "cracks" to cause the failure. Either the flow of water that overtopped the levee caused erosion of the top of the levee, where more water gushed out, eroding even more material thus breaching it, or the buildup of pressure in the channel caused enough flow below the levees (the cutoff wall was too short in places) which caused liquefaction on the ouside of the levee (quick sand anyone?) which undermined the foundation and the levvee collapsed. Cutoff walls are imporant in the design of water retaining structues.
Where the heck are you getting this idea that concrete is more regular than glass? You seem to be talking of a laboratory prepared CEMENT mixture. Yes, certainly if you prepare glass and cement in a laboratory condition, your hardened cement is likely to be more regular. There are, many considerations that makes this untrue for real life construction.
The first thing to understand is that concrete is NOT cement. Concrete is a MIXTURE of cement and agregate. You can use all kinds of things for agregate, gravel and sand being the most common. Sometimes some fly ash from blast furnaces is added. Engineers normally use lower factors of safety for concrete than steel because the uncertainties are greater. When you test concrete to failure, sometimes the fractuers cut across the agregate grains where the cement bond was stronger than the agregate, other times it will follow a path around strong agregate particles.
The other thing to know about concrete is that is it NOT made in a factory, under controlled industrial conditions and unit testing. Sure, you may get your concrete mixed at a concrete plant and the trucks, but eventually it has to get to the field. Then it must be placed... and the experience and professionalism of the workers is very variable. Furthermore, concrete needs to cure in place. The water content of the concrete during this stage is important since it needs water for the chemical reactions to harden the concrete. But then again there is an optimum value. The chemical reaction is also helped by high temperatures. So weather conditions and placement conditions will affect the final product.
And of course, portland cement is a strong alkali. It can actually react with the agregates themselves which can build up stresses and cause cracks inside the concrete independently of external stresses. You may have witnessed this alkali-aggregate reactivity in concrete if you see cracks in concrete that seem to be humid, even what it hasn't been raining, and somtimes oozing a bit of white foam.
In final analysis concrete is a highly nonuniform construction material.
It can also added that most of your levees, and most likely the sections that failed, are probably earthworks. Therefore whatever the uniformity or lack thereof of the concrete, it would have done nothing for the leveees. Cracks are only meaningful in materials that need resist tensile or bending stresses. Needless to say, that is NOT how earthworks are desined.
I believe the factor of safety for stell structures is in the order of 1.5. As for earthworks the factor of safety can be up to 3. A factor of safety of 10 is not needed. But you DO have to maintain the structures so they are still at their designed capacity.
I don't have the details about the New Orleans levees, but I honestly doubt cracking had anything to do with it. Such huge works are rarely made of expensive materials such as concrete. It's just too huge. Usually only the sections of levees protecting the most "critical" areas would be expected to be made of concrete. Most of it would be made of earth. This seems to be validated by some info that can be found on the levee failures
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1103/p02s02-ussc.htm l
One thing that you need to do when building any kind of water retaining structure is to have your impermeable cutoff wall deep enough to prevent percolation of water when the water is at its maximum. Either the water level was maintained higher than the levee height (which would have been difficult since the water would just have overtopped the levee... unless the whole area beyond the levee was already flooded, but then the water on the other side would have prevented that kind of percolation and resulting erosion) or the original design assumed the water would never reach the top of the levee. Either that or the flow properties of the underlying soil were compeltely erroneously estimated
In any event, cracking had nothing to do with any of the described failures. The comment in the article was pure "buzzword". I think it's the kind of research that will be of more use to mechanical and structural engineers than to geotechnical engineers.
In summary, the factor of safety was probably good enough to resist the forces applied to the levees. At least in terms of strength it probably was. Where the design seems to have been lacking is in terms of erosion protection. Erosion will weaken an earth structure.
I agree. All that Google does is redirect us to their content. If Google News stopped doing it, I'd probably not be reading a lot of those newspapers (and their content). I'd get a couple of sources like the BBC and CBC and good luck to the rest. I bet they're just as happy getting the advertising money from when I browse their site and see their sponsors. It's not like Google is lifting the entire content of their articles. They would be legitimately pissed then. Google is merely redirecting traffic towards their site. Of course, it's typical of the news industry today... they want to stirr up things just to stir them up. If it means saying "oops" afterwards... well they'll see how it goes THEN.
The page metaphor is good for some things... presenting articles, course notes... printed stuff that need no interactivity. The page metaphor is awful for anything requiring interactivity like e-mail interface, etc. etc. I'm not an advocate to convert EVERYTHING to AJAX. But interactive sites that are meant to behave more like programs definitely need to look into it.
Does Google pay Dividends. Dividends would be a good reward. I agree that stock prices can mean pretty much whatever they want. Dividends is where you measure the success of the company. A company which CANNOT pay dividends isn't doing well. A company that doesn't WANT to pay dividend should probably not be considered as an investment option. That's my point of view anyways. If I were to buy shares, I'd like to make a profit on how well the company is doing, if I invested because of my faith in their business. I wouldn't want it all to be speculation, which depends on how others think it will do, and is pretty much a matter of fad... but most importantly, stock prices are not directly related (sometimes totally unrelated) to the company's ability to do business well.
Ibn Khaldun had a theory, although he used city dwellers and nomads based on his personal experience. The perspective may have been too limiting in terms of the relative "virility" of city dwellers and nomads, but I think the basic premise is not bad and can be generalized:: Those who have lots of wealth, spend more time spending the wealth than creating new wealth. Relatively speaking the poorer people are more productive, becaue they are capable of living with less. In essence we're spoiled brats living off the wealth accumulated by our forebears. Their success is the direct cause of our failure. The eternal dilemma of life.
I'll certainly miss it. Now, it will very likely be eaten up by the huge formula movie churning machine of Disney. So sad. It did bring a lot of new life to animation. I will mourn Pixar.
A free service to consumers could indeed consider such a payment scheme. A service that is already charging the users a fee should not be thinking of making their clients pay to give them a half-service for most websites, and push down their throats some preferred "sponsored" sites. Customers should rightfully feel violated then. You charge the ones, or you charge the others. You're opening yourself to all kinds of lawsuits if you do both. Because I can't imagine PAYING customers sitting idlly by while their PAID service is throttled for some sites. They'd be stupid not to organize a class action (Hint to service providers considering that kind of double payment).
Again, offer free broadband and it's another story... although only a very few wide coverage providers could benefit from this. Content providers could not be expect to be coerced to pay for every other joe's ISP. In my uninformed opinion is has little viability.
If you read my sig, you know why I want the duc(t/k) tape one.
Infinite loop detected. Program aborted.
I always thought that Regional distinctions were wrong, and illegitimate. Even if you want to "protect your IP" and prevent people from copying your product, there is no legitimate reason to prevent someone from buying something in one country and viewing it in another. People can be called upon to move because of work or family. They can bring a present to a family member abroad... maybe because things are cheaper at home. There are so many legitimate reasons for the movies to have to be played in other markets than their destination markets that that kind of protection should plainly be illegal. On the other hand, here we have a beautiful example of karmic retribution. Maybe there is intelligent design after all.
I'm curious to know what the exploit is about that it could have been present in two different implementations? I understand that WINE has implemented the API, so is the vulnerability not an implementation of drawing routines but of the spec of the API itself?
You have to be careful to separate what the researcher says and what the reporter reports though. To the reporter, this is how he understood it.... maybe too much star trek. You gotta read the real journal papers related to the theory if you want to pass judgement.
Alcubierre did come up with a theoretical (if not very practical) way to achieve faster than light speeds that was in agreement with accepted physics.
I'm not a physisit, I don't know what this particular theory is all about. What would be nice is for an enlighted discussion from knowledgeable people who have access to relevant publications.
I hope you're right. Otherwise we might as well start inventing some new language just so we can talk without risk of being sued. But really, MS has no originality when it comes to product names.
I'm conviced that it should hit every version of Windows. I have been embedding wfm for my thesis and proposals win 1998. I had lots of memory problems using either Word or Word Perfect to open those documents. Even with only a few wmfs embedded in Excel, or other third party applications (that were obviously using windows API to render them). Then I switched to StarOffice and the problem vanished... for me. My supervisor, with a much more powerful computer still had trouble. I guessed at the time that it was some kind of memory leak in the Windows rendering engine, and since StarOffice was cross-platform, they were probably using their own code to render it, and not the API. Back then I only thought how nice it was to be using StarOffice instead of constantly rebooting the computer and getting nothing done. I never thought back then that memory leak could mean buffer overflow which could mean security vulnerability. I have the feeling that it's related. Of course I'm not a computer guy. Obviously the bugs were never fixed from version to version, and I can't believe I'm the only one who noticed that wmf files, which are not supposed to take that much memory compared to raster images could turn into such a nightmare. My supervisor's Word still renders horribly wmf files that show very nicely in OpenOffice. To this day I still include my graphs as raster images for his sake.
Yeah, that's one thing. I thought you couldn't turn a dictionary term into a trademark. How come they get to do what others can't?
I don't agree about LabView. LabView is a great programming teaching tool. It is a hopeless production programming language. You have to hunt through menus to find the "icon" that represents the function you want to call. I saw an experienced LabView programmer take the better part of half an hour to make a simple control program that would have taken perhaps 5 mintues with a written programming language. Because Words can be remembered... and typed not tracked down through stacked menus, it is much more powerful. Keep LabView where it belongs, in an introduction to programming class, and I will say: it's great Try to put it anywhere else and it gets nothing but curses from me.
In addition to your argument, you can say that with Linux, the user IS the developer. At least many of them are. It's not just security bugs that they can patch, and redistribute. It's the whole thing.
As a kid I was an avid fan of the original show. I have only seen the pilot of the remake, but as far as I know it beats the old show hands down. Characters were more intersting... but most importantly, I felt that my whole universe had gone too when I watched the pilot. They did a very good job at conveying the sense of loss. As for those who have a problem with the "castrated" characters, I'll just say that the substitutes are plenty hot. 'nough said. :)