I think it depends on the industry. Case-in-point; my C++ instructor was a Ski Patrol type at Copper Mountain (a Colorado ski resort) and once in an irrelevant aside told us how, at any given time, every major ski resort is fighting at least a dozen different lawsuits brought on by people who hit a tree in some out-of-bounds area, in spite of EULA type gibberish on the back of every ski pass (and the off-limits signs, and the rope or fence they had to jump over, and the innate danger in a sport that involves strapping one or more slabs of wood/plastic to one's feet then sliding rapidly down a hill). But ski resorts have deep pockets and history shows that they can survive these legal tussles, no matter how idiotic. Whereas, the software industry is new enough (and profitable enough) that lawmakers are taking a "don't kill the golden goose" approach and passing stunningly bad laws to "protect" an industry that, IMHO, needs to be shaken up instead (as in "Bad code! No biscuit!" instead of "Bad code! Too bad I clicked through the EULA.").
P.J. O'Rourke summarized this neatly in his Eat the Rich book; "You buy stock because you think other people will think this stock is worth more later than you think it's worth now. Economists call this - in a rare example of comprehensive economist terminology - the 'Greater Fool Theory'." I think I'll re-read this instead of picking up a new book that states the same thing without being deliberately funny...
I have recently had an intranet web design project dropped on me (I made the mistake of picking up an HTML intro book and a reference book and foolishly left them on my desk at work) and years of writing little utility scripts for users helped me in the thinking about the web page from the user end. I've caught myself making a number of rookie mistakes (an, no doubt, I will find many more before this project is done), so I will end up picking up this book. But my biggest concern at this point is a growing awareness of the maintenance nightmare that I'm creating. And this is just for a couple dozen interlinked pages.
Open question: can anyone recommend a good book or site that focuses on the maintenance side of web design?
I find myself wondering, as I code an HREF to the same page for the tenth time, what happens when I need to change the file name? Is there some sort symbolic I can define on my main page that will be available to sub-pages? The "Visual Quickstart" book I picked up was good for a quick start, but lacking in substance when it came to long-term considerations. This is just one of a number of areas of potential rudeness, and I have a bad feeling that there are many more that my ignorance has obscured. Help!
An "alternative" radio station here in Denver KTCL is setting up a summer concert called "the Big Adventure 2000" and...
A Portion of this years proceeds once again benefit the Columbine Never Forgotten Fund. Scholarships in the names of the 13 we lost at Columbine last year.
There are many extant charities that formed as a result of this tragedy; the hard part is going to be picking one (or more)...
I picked up Populous for my Atari ST (a decade and a half ago) and wasted many many many hours causing floods and earthquakes and what-not. It's kinda cool to find that the creator is not some arrogant God's-gift-to-gaming twit. Too bad the interview was short and full of fluff...
...(aside from the fact that this is still vaporware) that every 49 days you'd have to buy new MRAM for your Windows machine...
All right, I couldn't resist a cheap shot at Bill. I'm not real proud of it, but I'd probably do it again.
On a more serious note; I've heard of "magnetic" memory research before and I'm wondering how M. Parkin has gotten aroud the speed issues that have plagued these efforts in the past...Is it just a matter of size that keeps the growth/collapse of the magnetic fields brief?
There was an anime Starship Troopers series about eight years ago. There was that fscking awful movie, and now a CGI series (that i've not seen yet). From these examples and your post, it seems like no one has ever read the book.
virtues like blind obedience, jingoism, militarism, and all the fun of being a gun-toting redneck
In response to this, I can only say, "Huh?" You may have read a book about all of the above, but I read (and re-read many times) one about growing up and leadership and duty and honor and personal responsibility. Obedience was forced down the MI's throats during boot, not because of a gleeful disregard for individual liberty, but because training is expensive; asking questions or ignoring orders in combat can get you and your squad-mates dead. The jingoism puzzles me greatly; in the context of the book, a military response was a direct response to a first strike by the "bugs"; I suspect that had Mr. Heinlein tried to write about how we humans tried to get a diplomatic settlement after that, it would have made for a very brief novel. The militarism was inevitable, again in the context of the book, since the main character was part of the "Mobile Infantry" during war-time, it would be hard to avoid a military viewpoint. As for the "fun", yeah, boot-camp is a blast. And watching your friends getting killed is a hoot. And hearing about your family getting nuked; what a riot. Never once, in multiple readings, have I gotten the impression that Mr. Rico "enjoyed" and of the violence that he felt necessary to dispense.
Keep in mind that this was originally published a couple years before the average American had ever heard of Viet Nam (1959, I think). The military had lost face in Korea, but they were still big winners in the WWII bowl. And forget coed shower scenes; while Heinlein had no problems with writinig about sex, pretty much before any other SF writer tried it (like a couple years later in Stranger in a Strange Land), Starship Troopers was originally published (in serial form, I think) in Boy's Life which was (and still is?) a magazine targeted at boy scouts...
Back on topic: I pretty much gave up on Voyager after the Star Trek: Smackdown episode a month ago. While I think an "early years" series has potential (less machina es deus fixes), I'm sure Rick Berman and company will track down that potential and beat it to a pulp before any filming gets started...
I found three on The Very Big Online Bookstore and found the fourth on Abebooks. They are (maybe in order) The Wizardry Consulted, The Wizardry Cursed, The Wizardry Quested and The Wizard's Bane by Rick Cook. Fun stuff; and this PDA brings us on step closer to making SF^H^H fantasy a reality...
Thank God I wasn't the only wretch who wasted time filling the landscape with chests. And I financed a lot of cool weaponry slaughtering the inhabitants of Dawn over and over again.
But I realized it was time to stop when I found myself, having filled every possible landmass with chests, filling the sea with captured pirate ships. (You have to trap the whirlpool first. Tricky!) I still have an Atari ST version with the "filled with chests" save on it...
Re:Typical C|Net Picks
on
Hoax-a-go-go!
·
· Score: 1
Really! I mean, there's absolutely no sport in hoaxing AOL users...
I'm surprised that the M$ "A monopoly? Us?" hoax didn't make the list...
Yeah, nuclear rockets have a lot of potential. But what's really sad is that we had high impulse nuclear rockets in test back in the 60's. A couple of the speakers at last year's Mars Society Conference had a number of speakers who were involved in those studies and they all had the same, depressing message; they (and their experience) won't be around forever. If we stall research into nuclear propulsion for much longer, we will have to re-learn everything that they learned 30 years ago 'cause their experience will be retired or dead....
I find it ironic that M. Sterling thinks of rockets as way low on the "coolness" scale...
In the 50's and 60's, transistors were the thing to the average consumer. Imagine, a device that could replace bulky vacuum tubes, yet was smaller, cheaper and had a much lower power consumption. Why, you could build an AM radio that would fit in the palm of your hand! The idea of integrated circuits was around, but not considered necassary for any consumer electronics. Then along came NASA and the Apollo program, trying to fit more and more control and monitoring systems in a smaller space. Five years later, consumers had access to hand-held calculators. Five or ten years after that, consumers could buy their own home computers. From there, computers snowballed, driven by market pressures instead of Federal whim and now we have Jar Jar Binks and Palm VII's and the internet and so on... So those "uncool" rockets that Sterling slams are directly responsible for his royalties.
From a financial and even technological perspective, Iridium may have been a major failure, but his Luddite attitude is unwarrented. So long as someone learned from Iridium's mistakes, it was not a total waste... Having a big name science fiction writer declare such efforts "uncool" is disappointing.
Last I heard, shuttle payloads were about $10,000 a pound.
A great deal of that expense is tied up in just being the shuttle; i.e. a monopolistic government run program that is a sad example of what goes wrong when designing by committee (but that's another rant). A commercial, competetive space-booster market would (eventually) drive payload costs down, just like prices have gone down on PC's (e.g. my first hard drive cost me $500 used, and had a (then) huge 20M capacity).
I can't think of any mineral that is even near that expensive.
Actually, there are some possibilities; deuterium and tritium may be available in (relatively) high concentrations on Mars and are worth more, gram for gram, than just about any precious metal/gemstone. There are other commercial possibilities that people have been pondering on for years; G. Harry Stine wrote The Third Industrial Revolution back in the late 70's, and more recently, Robert Zubrin answered a lot of "why bother?" questions in Entering Space. So, while mining might not be enough to get commercial space exploration going, there are other possibilities. The biggest trick now is to get NASA to facilitate commercial ventures instead of obstructing (yet another rant).
Maybe NASA is trying to do a little fundraising. So? Every government program does this. But, in spite of public support, NASA programs are damn near always the first on the chopping block because supporting NASA politically does not create votes like hysteria about guns and drugs and internet perverts does.
Besides, the estimate for "fixing" the Polar Lander only ran about $10 million; small change in government terms.
Mind you, I'd rather see NASA get out of the exploration business and instead encourage private and/or commercial efforts, but that doesn't alter the fact that they are accomplishing incredible stuff on a progressively leaner and leaner budget...
On the one hand, I got a big kick out of actually building tangible things with a lot of trial-and-error and I can't see a CAD system capturing that... OTOH a CAD system would not (necassarily) be limited to a fixed number of pieces, and some of the things I always wanted to build but didn't have the parts for could at least be visuallized...
On the gripping hand, I didn't so much outgrow Legos as I escaped one of many expensive and time-consuming habits. I really don't need this kind of encouragement...
They can have my DVD player when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers...
Besides, while I've owned one of these since the last/. article, I'm not registered. (Though, if they got real insistent, they could track me through Circuit City and my credit card.... Hmmm, time to hole up in Montana.)
Plus, I don't want intereactivity in my fictional stores... what will this lead to?
Back in the late 80's, Marc Stiegler wrote a book called David's Sling. While it was published in "book" form (long since out of print), it was also available in a form to be read with a Macintosh 'Hypercard'. In the latter form, one could read the story in a traditional linear fashion, or switch viewpoints, or branch off to links about specific topics, etc. I didn't have a Mac myself, but I did find someone (only one someone) who did and had read the hypertext form, and he thought it was a much better way to present the story. (The paper version was pretty good too.)
When I check out/., I don't start from the top and read the first story first post and work my way to the end; I pick out the stories that interest me, read the posts, branch off to an occaisional link, etc. The web gives us the ability to do the same with fiction, but the only example of this I can think of is over a decade old.
Serialized fiction where people provide their input into the work?
Actually, we used to do this on BBS's back in the 80's and it was a lot of fun.
Maybe the amount of money lost is not large, but it can still be enough to make or break a company, or at least influence its decisions.
A long time ago, back when Windows was still a "new thing", I owned an Atari ST. It was a very capable computer, running on the same 68000 chip that drove the Amiga and Macintosh of the time, with a GUI (in ROM) that outperformed Windows dramatically. But various factors, including its low price (and the implication that the owner was of limited means), Atari's legacy as game machine manufacturers and the extensive piracy on the Atari 400/800 platforms pretty much frightened away any business application developers, and led the game developers to rely on elaborate (and often annoying) copy protection schemes. (Atari managed "Power Without the Price" by buying cheap components; I had a number of legitimately purchased games that required tweaking of my drive speed in order for them to manage the gymnastics required of them by the copy protection.)
The moral? Piracy may not cause as much harm as the corporations claim, but it does cause harm.
OTOH, while some software is developed for fun or personal fulfillment, most is create in anticiaption of making money. Until that last part changes, piracy will continue to be an issue (and continue to be surrounded by hyperbole). Maybe there is a way to reconcile the ideas of "Information wants to be free" with "I spent three years working on that code and I'll be damned if I'll just stand here while some kid downloads it for free."
Which was worse, the tepid "acting", the hackneyed Von Daniken(sp?) plot, the bad science or the endless fscking product placements?
The closest to a fully developed character was Gary Sinise's, and that was only two dimensional (grieving over his dead wife, or in awe of the Martian dog and pony show).
The "plot" was familiar to anyone who's read (or even heard of) Chariot of the Gods; i.e. mankind was "seeded" on Earth by an alien race. Even if the trailers hadn't given that away, it would still have been a complete non-surprise.
Oh the science. This was painful. At times it looked like they had thought things through (this is the only Mars movie aside from 2001 that I can think of that actually aknowledged the 4 to 20 minute time-lag on radio transmissions). But most of the time they just blew things off for the sake of transparent drama:
Wind on Mars - The atmospheric pressure on Mars is less than 1% of that on Earth; the kinetcs of martian wind are such that a hurricane-speed wind on Mars would "push" things like a light breeze at 1 atmoshpere. No flapping ropes, no humans being flung (even at the 1/3 gravity they failed to notice) and no real concern about the major storm brewing.
Conservation of momentum - When whats-her-name hurtles towards her soon-to-be-ex-husband, she stops(!) when her fuel guage hits the 50% mark. Ignoring the fact that she stopped (relative to the spare vehicle) without using up any additional fuel, what happened to Newton's first law? Once she stopped accelerating, whe should have continued move towards Time Robbins' character, only to find that decelerating herself and her husband would have taken more than twice the fuel that getting her up to speed did.
There's many more of those, but they've been touched on by other posts...
Are product placements really necassary? I thought The Truman Show would have embarrassed Hollywood enough to take it easy on these for at least a couple years.
In summary, the pretty pictures are featured prominently in the trailers; the rest of the film just isn't worth it...
(I had to go straight home from the theater and plug in 2001 just to get the metaphorical bad taste out of my mouth.)
Re:Programmer's Code of Ethics
on
Database Nation
·
· Score: 1
I think that in this day and age, "I just work here" has ceased to be an adequate excuse.
That depends on where you work; sadly, my current employees will accept a "Klaus Barbie defense" (i.e. "I was just following orders!") for just about anything. I haven't seen anything real heinous justified with that yet, but I can see it happening. (Fortunately I'm bailing in a few months to finish my degree and get me a real job...)
As far as the programming ethics goes, maybe now is a good time to promote such an idea. In the past, marketroids and other such "savants" would decide when code was "good enough" to ship, despite protests from the coders. Nowadays, it seems like the market is favoring the coders enough that one could dig their feet in and make it stick. (Actually I did this the other day when I told my new PHB that my latest kludge wasn't going to be ready until after I get back from vacation, 'cause I refused to slam-dunk a solution that would just cause problems further on down the road. It was a terrific feeling when he backed down.) The trick is going to be picking your battles; I think of coding as a kind of art (with 4GL's being the equivalent of paint-by-numbers) and, as an art student friend of mine once quoted (source unknown), "Art is never finished, only abandoned".
Damn. I would think that 6 billion current (and billions more in the past tense) examples of "prior art" would be enough to discourage the patent office...
Slashdot Mirror
I think it depends on the industry. Case-in-point; my C++ instructor was a Ski Patrol type at Copper Mountain (a Colorado ski resort) and once in an irrelevant aside told us how, at any given time, every major ski resort is fighting at least a dozen different lawsuits brought on by people who hit a tree in some out-of-bounds area, in spite of EULA type gibberish on the back of every ski pass (and the off-limits signs, and the rope or fence they had to jump over, and the innate danger in a sport that involves strapping one or more slabs of wood/plastic to one's feet then sliding rapidly down a hill). But ski resorts have deep pockets and history shows that they can survive these legal tussles, no matter how idiotic. Whereas, the software industry is new enough (and profitable enough) that lawmakers are taking a "don't kill the golden goose" approach and passing stunningly bad laws to "protect" an industry that, IMHO, needs to be shaken up instead (as in "Bad code! No biscuit!" instead of "Bad code! Too bad I clicked through the EULA.").
P.J. O'Rourke summarized this neatly in his Eat the Rich book; "You buy stock because you think other people will think this stock is worth more later than you think it's worth now. Economists call this - in a rare example of comprehensive economist terminology - the 'Greater Fool Theory'." I think I'll re-read this instead of picking up a new book that states the same thing without being deliberately funny...
I have recently had an intranet web design project dropped on me (I made the mistake of picking up an HTML intro book and a reference book and foolishly left them on my desk at work) and years of writing little utility scripts for users helped me in the thinking about the web page from the user end. I've caught myself making a number of rookie mistakes (an, no doubt, I will find many more before this project is done), so I will end up picking up this book. But my biggest concern at this point is a growing awareness of the maintenance nightmare that I'm creating. And this is just for a couple dozen interlinked pages.
Open question: can anyone recommend a good book or site that focuses on the maintenance side of web design?
I find myself wondering, as I code an HREF to the same page for the tenth time, what happens when I need to change the file name? Is there some sort symbolic I can define on my main page that will be available to sub-pages? The "Visual Quickstart" book I picked up was good for a quick start, but lacking in substance when it came to long-term considerations. This is just one of a number of areas of potential rudeness, and I have a bad feeling that there are many more that my ignorance has obscured. Help!
An "alternative" radio station here in Denver KTCL is setting up a summer concert called "the Big Adventure 2000" and...
There are many extant charities that formed as a result of this tragedy; the hard part is going to be picking one (or more)...
I picked up Populous for my Atari ST (a decade and a half ago) and wasted many many many hours causing floods and earthquakes and what-not. It's kinda cool to find that the creator is not some arrogant God's-gift-to-gaming twit. Too bad the interview was short and full of fluff...
All right, I couldn't resist a cheap shot at Bill. I'm not real proud of it, but I'd probably do it again.
On a more serious note; I've heard of "magnetic" memory research before and I'm wondering how M. Parkin has gotten aroud the speed issues that have plagued these efforts in the past...Is it just a matter of size that keeps the growth/collapse of the magnetic fields brief?
There was an anime Starship Troopers series about eight years ago. There was that fscking awful movie, and now a CGI series (that i've not seen yet). From these examples and your post, it seems like no one has ever read the book.
virtues like blind obedience, jingoism, militarism, and all the fun of being a gun-toting redneck
In response to this, I can only say, "Huh?" You may have read a book about all of the above, but I read (and re-read many times) one about growing up and leadership and duty and honor and personal responsibility. Obedience was forced down the MI's throats during boot, not because of a gleeful disregard for individual liberty, but because training is expensive; asking questions or ignoring orders in combat can get you and your squad-mates dead. The jingoism puzzles me greatly; in the context of the book, a military response was a direct response to a first strike by the "bugs"; I suspect that had Mr. Heinlein tried to write about how we humans tried to get a diplomatic settlement after that, it would have made for a very brief novel. The militarism was inevitable, again in the context of the book, since the main character was part of the "Mobile Infantry" during war-time, it would be hard to avoid a military viewpoint. As for the "fun", yeah, boot-camp is a blast. And watching your friends getting killed is a hoot. And hearing about your family getting nuked; what a riot. Never once, in multiple readings, have I gotten the impression that Mr. Rico "enjoyed" and of the violence that he felt necessary to dispense.
Keep in mind that this was originally published a couple years before the average American had ever heard of Viet Nam (1959, I think). The military had lost face in Korea, but they were still big winners in the WWII bowl. And forget coed shower scenes; while Heinlein had no problems with writinig about sex, pretty much before any other SF writer tried it (like a couple years later in Stranger in a Strange Land), Starship Troopers was originally published (in serial form, I think) in Boy's Life which was (and still is?) a magazine targeted at boy scouts...
Back on topic: I pretty much gave up on Voyager after the Star Trek: Smackdown episode a month ago. While I think an "early years" series has potential (less machina es deus fixes), I'm sure Rick Berman and company will track down that potential and beat it to a pulp before any filming gets started...
...wrap your CPU in alluminum foil. (Double duty: this will also prevent the CIA from accessing your RAM.)
I found three on The Very Big Online Bookstore and found the fourth on Abebooks. They are (maybe in order) The Wizardry Consulted, The Wizardry Cursed, The Wizardry Quested and The Wizard's Bane by Rick Cook. Fun stuff; and this PDA brings us on step closer to making SF^H^H fantasy a reality...
Has anyone run this through the Babelfish?
Thank God I wasn't the only wretch who wasted time filling the landscape with chests. And I financed a lot of cool weaponry slaughtering the inhabitants of Dawn over and over again.
But I realized it was time to stop when I found myself, having filled every possible landmass with chests, filling the sea with captured pirate ships. (You have to trap the whirlpool first. Tricky!) I still have an Atari ST version with the "filled with chests" save on it...
Really! I mean, there's absolutely no sport in hoaxing AOL users...
I'm surprised that the M$ "A monopoly? Us?" hoax didn't make the list...
Yeah, nuclear rockets have a lot of potential. But what's really sad is that we had high impulse nuclear rockets in test back in the 60's. A couple of the speakers at last year's Mars Society Conference had a number of speakers who were involved in those studies and they all had the same, depressing message; they (and their experience) won't be around forever. If we stall research into nuclear propulsion for much longer, we will have to re-learn everything that they learned 30 years ago 'cause their experience will be retired or dead....
I find it ironic that M. Sterling thinks of rockets as way low on the "coolness" scale...
In the 50's and 60's, transistors were the thing to the average consumer. Imagine, a device that could replace bulky vacuum tubes, yet was smaller, cheaper and had a much lower power consumption. Why, you could build an AM radio that would fit in the palm of your hand! The idea of integrated circuits was around, but not considered necassary for any consumer electronics. Then along came NASA and the Apollo program, trying to fit more and more control and monitoring systems in a smaller space. Five years later, consumers had access to hand-held calculators. Five or ten years after that, consumers could buy their own home computers. From there, computers snowballed, driven by market pressures instead of Federal whim and now we have Jar Jar Binks and Palm VII's and the internet and so on... So those "uncool" rockets that Sterling slams are directly responsible for his royalties.
From a financial and even technological perspective, Iridium may have been a major failure, but his Luddite attitude is unwarrented. So long as someone learned from Iridium's mistakes, it was not a total waste... Having a big name science fiction writer declare such efforts "uncool" is disappointing.
A great deal of that expense is tied up in just being the shuttle; i.e. a monopolistic government run program that is a sad example of what goes wrong when designing by committee (but that's another rant). A commercial, competetive space-booster market would (eventually) drive payload costs down, just like prices have gone down on PC's (e.g. my first hard drive cost me $500 used, and had a (then) huge 20M capacity).
Actually, there are some possibilities; deuterium and tritium may be available in (relatively) high concentrations on Mars and are worth more, gram for gram, than just about any precious metal/gemstone. There are other commercial possibilities that people have been pondering on for years; G. Harry Stine wrote The Third Industrial Revolution back in the late 70's, and more recently, Robert Zubrin answered a lot of "why bother?" questions in Entering Space. So, while mining might not be enough to get commercial space exploration going, there are other possibilities. The biggest trick now is to get NASA to facilitate commercial ventures instead of obstructing (yet another rant).
Maybe NASA is trying to do a little fundraising. So? Every government program does this. But, in spite of public support, NASA programs are damn near always the first on the chopping block because supporting NASA politically does not create votes like hysteria about guns and drugs and internet perverts does.
Besides, the estimate for "fixing" the Polar Lander only ran about $10 million; small change in government terms.
Mind you, I'd rather see NASA get out of the exploration business and instead encourage private and/or commercial efforts, but that doesn't alter the fact that they are accomplishing incredible stuff on a progressively leaner and leaner budget...
Damn right! Like I need my loo nagging me about my weight...
On the one hand, I got a big kick out of actually building tangible things with a lot of trial-and-error and I can't see a CAD system capturing that... OTOH a CAD system would not (necassarily) be limited to a fixed number of pieces, and some of the things I always wanted to build but didn't have the parts for could at least be visuallized...
On the gripping hand, I didn't so much outgrow Legos as I escaped one of many expensive and time-consuming habits. I really don't need this kind of encouragement...
They can have my DVD player when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers...
Besides, while I've owned one of these since the last /. article, I'm not registered. (Though, if they got real insistent, they could track me through Circuit City and my credit card.... Hmmm, time to hole up in Montana.)
That's Sturgeon's Law...
Back in the late 80's, Marc Stiegler wrote a book called David's Sling. While it was published in "book" form (long since out of print), it was also available in a form to be read with a Macintosh 'Hypercard'. In the latter form, one could read the story in a traditional linear fashion, or switch viewpoints, or branch off to links about specific topics, etc. I didn't have a Mac myself, but I did find someone (only one someone) who did and had read the hypertext form, and he thought it was a much better way to present the story. (The paper version was pretty good too.)
When I check out /., I don't start from the top and read the first story first post and work my way to the end; I pick out the stories that interest me, read the posts, branch off to an occaisional link, etc. The web gives us the ability to do the same with fiction, but the only example of this I can think of is over a decade old.
Actually, we used to do this on BBS's back in the 80's and it was a lot of fun.
Maybe the amount of money lost is not large, but it can still be enough to make or break a company, or at least influence its decisions.
A long time ago, back when Windows was still a "new thing", I owned an Atari ST. It was a very capable computer, running on the same 68000 chip that drove the Amiga and Macintosh of the time, with a GUI (in ROM) that outperformed Windows dramatically. But various factors, including its low price (and the implication that the owner was of limited means), Atari's legacy as game machine manufacturers and the extensive piracy on the Atari 400/800 platforms pretty much frightened away any business application developers, and led the game developers to rely on elaborate (and often annoying) copy protection schemes. (Atari managed "Power Without the Price" by buying cheap components; I had a number of legitimately purchased games that required tweaking of my drive speed in order for them to manage the gymnastics required of them by the copy protection.)
The moral? Piracy may not cause as much harm as the corporations claim, but it does cause harm.
OTOH, while some software is developed for fun or personal fulfillment, most is create in anticiaption of making money. Until that last part changes, piracy will continue to be an issue (and continue to be surrounded by hyperbole). Maybe there is a way to reconcile the ideas of "Information wants to be free" with "I spent three years working on that code and I'll be damned if I'll just stand here while some kid downloads it for free."
Damn if I know what that way is though...
Which was worse, the tepid "acting", the hackneyed Von Daniken(sp?) plot, the bad science or the endless fscking product placements?
The closest to a fully developed character was Gary Sinise's, and that was only two dimensional (grieving over his dead wife, or in awe of the Martian dog and pony show).
The "plot" was familiar to anyone who's read (or even heard of) Chariot of the Gods; i.e. mankind was "seeded" on Earth by an alien race. Even if the trailers hadn't given that away, it would still have been a complete non-surprise.
Oh the science. This was painful. At times it looked like they had thought things through (this is the only Mars movie aside from 2001 that I can think of that actually aknowledged the 4 to 20 minute time-lag on radio transmissions). But most of the time they just blew things off for the sake of transparent drama:
There's many more of those, but they've been touched on by other posts...
Are product placements really necassary? I thought The Truman Show would have embarrassed Hollywood enough to take it easy on these for at least a couple years.
In summary, the pretty pictures are featured prominently in the trailers; the rest of the film just isn't worth it...
(I had to go straight home from the theater and plug in 2001 just to get the metaphorical bad taste out of my mouth.)
That depends on where you work; sadly, my current employees will accept a "Klaus Barbie defense" (i.e. "I was just following orders!") for just about anything. I haven't seen anything real heinous justified with that yet, but I can see it happening. (Fortunately I'm bailing in a few months to finish my degree and get me a real job...)
As far as the programming ethics goes, maybe now is a good time to promote such an idea. In the past, marketroids and other such "savants" would decide when code was "good enough" to ship, despite protests from the coders. Nowadays, it seems like the market is favoring the coders enough that one could dig their feet in and make it stick. (Actually I did this the other day when I told my new PHB that my latest kludge wasn't going to be ready until after I get back from vacation, 'cause I refused to slam-dunk a solution that would just cause problems further on down the road. It was a terrific feeling when he backed down.) The trick is going to be picking your battles; I think of coding as a kind of art (with 4GL's being the equivalent of paint-by-numbers) and, as an art student friend of mine once quoted (source unknown), "Art is never finished, only abandoned".
Damn. I would think that 6 billion current (and billions more in the past tense) examples of "prior art" would be enough to discourage the patent office...