It's not their religious sensibility. Now, defaming Allah really would be inciting them. The restriction on depictions of Mohammad was to prevent idolatry (and thus perhaps the worship of Mohammad instead of Allah). So, if you're a worshipper, the rule (sort of) is that you don't create images to worship. Now anyone outside the religion isn't bound by those rules (they don't actually believe Allah exists, though they may think Mohammad was a fine upstanding chap, or not). As they're not about to start worshipping either one, what's the problem with creating an image? In this context, the image is exactly that; just an image. Not a focus of worship.
By all means respect sensibilities where they're sane and meaningful (don't deface churches/mosques etc. and yess about how stupid you think religious people may be because they have a faith). Also, expect the same to be shown to you. You don't belittle Allah, they don't say you're not allowed to create images and stories (because images and stories are exactly that to the secular). Now, if I were to draw Mohammad, and someone was to threaten me with it, what does it say about them? The automatic assumption that it's the figure they're thinking of? It's very unlikely to be the real image of Mohammad. Unless it's a chap I know called Mohammad who lives not far away.. I could probably do a fair likeness of him.. Though it's nothing for any religion to get uppity about..
As a secular person, I have the right to draw what I want, where I want, when I want (as long as it damages nobody else's property). Some things people draw make other people think they're a bit of an ass.. But hey.. That's their choice too..
All the management aside (sounds like this server many not suffer from a coding problem; it definitely suffers from a design/management issue though), the "backed up by a major vendor" doesn't even come into it. If you end up with a loose scrabble of.net, asp and whatever other techs Microsoft have released as web development languages over the years, I don't think a call to Microsoft would have helped in the slightest.
Methinks you've been sipping the water the entertainment industry execs drink from. Most people want to contribute. Going to see a spectacular event in rooted deep in the human psyche.. Think your date would enjoy being taken to a cheap burger joint, or a classy restaurant? When you just want something to sate the pangs of hunger, then the cheap burger joint is likely where you'll head. Everything has its place... Having the free content won't break the paid for model. All it means is that the paid for stuff better have a good story, and better be spectacular.. Worst case? You have channels you pay for. That's where you'll find the high cost series.. Paid for by subscriber funds, by people who think it's worth the cash.
It's really only in the minds of the greedy that everyone else is out to stiff them. Most people want to get by reasonably honourably, and actually contribute to the whole; that's what got us through the times before money was even invented, and it'll get us through times after money is deprecated in favour of something more advanced.
Well, how about a system where you have a condition, and pay your insurance diligently for years. Then lose a job, and thus the ability to pay exorbitant rates for your policy away from an employer for a month or two, then don't have the ability to gain any insurance for your existing condition when you attempt to restart the insurance, with the same company? That seems to be how it worked. Blanket saying "You can buy insurance at any point for anything" is not going to be too workable either (due to just paying insurance when you get ill). The workable point is in the middle (in the UK we have National Insurance, which is a tax paid to fund the National Health service, so you have continuity whether you're in work or not).
The problem being, that injury lawsuits are a very good way for the unemployable to make a lot of money fast. You'd be amazed at how many people will happily accept mutilating themselves if they think they'll have a big payout, meaning they'll never have to work, and gain a sum of money that equates to a working lifetime (near enough). If this case is enough to say any powertool without the current best safety measures will land the manufacturers in court, and they companies will have to pay out by precedent of this, then I see a fair rise in the sale of cheap, not-so-safe powertools, a lot of hospitals having similar cases, and a lot of people getting fat payouts.
I'm there with #2, educating people to keep their computers as clean as possible, but the others? I'd never let a spammer near my computers.. That's asking for trouble.. And fining an ISP because an end user doesn't maintain their PC? To bring out the much hated "car analogy", it's like fining the maintainers of a road because a driver using that road has a crash due to not noticing and fixing a bit of damage caused by vandals. Great, by all means encourage ISPs to have 'health checks' on machines (I know mine does, as I've seen them scanning the firewall), but I'd avoid punishing them for something that is way beyond their duties and responsibilities.
There aren't any incentives to honesty. DRM is an attempt to force 'honesty' on you in a draconian way. To date, there's not been a way to do this without inconveniencing honest people. Weirdly, the companies seem to have followed the "it doesn't matter if a thousand innocent people suffer as long as we can catch one guilty", which society has shown over the course of thousands of years simply doesn't work (people rebel against it). The only way to get honesty to play out is to act honestly, and alas, the content industry in general has shown itself to be anything but honest (copyright extensions anyone? They used to be 12 years when it took a good 5-10 years to pass the work around the market, and people still made a good profit from that. When the market can theoretically be saturated in a day, having life + 70 years is not an honest deal). Personally, I hate intrusive DRM with a vengeance, because it is inherently dishonest (you've bought something, but we decide whether we feel like meeting our side of the contract. If we don't then tough). Rather than just use a stick, they should go back to time honoured traditions that used to work (before the 90s), and find a deal that works. Stick and carrot always worked nicely when the bargain was honest; these days, vendors seem to prefer stick or cattle prod, and wonder why people start fighting back.
They got caught out being greedy sods, and for most, their political careers are over now because of it. That's fair punishment (after all, the rules allowed it in most cases; the rules were wrong and they took advantage of that, which is a natural human thing to do in most cases). Overall, I think the expenses scandal was initially good to bring in the open, it's just being overused now.. They've taken their drubbing, and I'll remember it. They need good oversight, and correct rulings. This is a 'small' thing in the grand scheme; they do much worse that I'd rather people kept their eyes on, and not fall for the old magicians' tricks.
Seeing as the money comes from the estates held by the royal family anyway, it's not the State's money "wasted" in the first place. Abolish the monarchy, and the estates would revert to the family.
CRB checks are done by most employers, volunteers and a whole host of other agencies that want a criminal records check. This is the 'valid' method which is quite sane in most respects, and yes, you get a copy of your CRB check. The post was about the "Vetting and barring database" which you'll have to register on if you have formal contact with children more than a couple of times a week. This involves schools, hospitals, taking kids to school if you do the school run, retail outlets (you do serve children under 16 if they appear in your store, don't you?), and in fact, a huge amount of places. There is no disclosure to the applicant about anything that may appear on this, and 'soft intelligenct' (i.e. hearsay) is admissible as evidence in this database. It is sufficient to bar you from a job.
I doubts it's a "right wing troll". Over here in 'sunny' Bristol, UK, there was a great little scandal a while ago, where a black city councilor accused an Asian councilor of being a "coconut" (brown on the outside, white on the inside) as the Asian councilor supported a bill that wasn't stacked towards Asians (though in a pragmatic sense, was geared towards the general wellbeing long term of the city for all people). The big defense of this black councilor was that "she couldn't be racist, because she was black". That was an actual, on the record quote. After having had many witch hunts for racism in the council, this rather more blatant (and on the public record; the "coconut" comment was made in session and thus recorded) event was rapidly swept under the carpet, and the decision of the disciplinary board was that "no action should be taken".
Well, I'm sure I'd love to be absolutely perfect too.. Alas, I know I'm not. With the best will in the world, I'm not going to do everything perfectly every time. So, we know he took it out of the safe area to investigate a prowler. No mention is made of whether or not the rest of the family were around him at that time, or whether 'forgetting' is merely reassuring the wife/aftermath of what you suspect to be someone after you. No background there at all.
I see nothing in there to say he's not fit to live with children; no evidence of that at all. And the amount of times I've seen things that are 'impossible for things to happen', where a highly skilled and regimented person has had a momentary lapse of thought being distracted by something else in a tense situation, and things have gone wrong is quite astounding. Being responsible means that you've done everything you humanly can to mitigate risk through process and mental discipline. This means you're 99.999% safe, and really, that's astoundingly good. Most of the people that say they're 'perfect' can say that only because they're not constantly tested; sometimes it can be that one time you fail in your process that is the one that something goes wrong in. Your argument holds only in a perfect world with perfect concentration and perfect adherence to process. In the real world, it seems to come across as rhetoric.
To answer your points directly:
1) From the story, we're not given enough info to work out whether a felony should be given, so point 1 is moot; you're making assumptions with no evidence of circumstance. If the police examine the evidence and believe he was criminally negligent, then sure.. By all means.. I just refuse to be drawn into a knee jerk reaction without knowing any of the facts.
2 and 3) Definitely with you 100% on that. Responsibility seems rather underrated these days (it all seems to be "I have a right to.." rather than "I undertake the responsibility of..")..
4) I'm not so sure about that.. I know quite a few step parents who love the kids like they were their own. Same as adoptive parents; I'd defy you to go to any adoptive parent and say "You don't love your adopted kid as if it were your own.".
What about: 1) Put bags underground. 2) Plant seeds on there 3) Watch seeds feed on nutrients. 4) Sell food. 5) Profit/ enjoy the fact you've just fed someone crap and see them prosper on it.
There's a little thing in the EULA that states "If the media is faulty, then we'll replace that at your cost for about £15. There are no other warranties of fitness.". Wonder if they've got the balls to claim that "get out of jail free" clause. If they do, wonder how long the company will survive afterwards as sales tank.
"And when was the last time you offered a homeless guy on the street a place to stay?"
That'd be about 1991, in between degrees; still paying out the nose for the first, and prepping up for the second.. To make a little extra cash, I did early morning work cleaning a homeless hostel (trust me, jobs don't get much more crap than that; shaking the blankets on the beds and wondering if crap will fly out, literally, or needles).. Some of the guys there were really unpleasant. Most were pretty good blokes, in hard times.. One was an absolute blast, just had had a complete mental meltdown and hit rock bottom.. He was full of plans to get back into life proper again after getting his head straight.. Ended up hanging out with him for a while, then offered him my spare room for a few months until he got sorted (having a good address as correspondance works a lot better than a homeless hostel for job apps). Took him a few weeks to get a job from there, and after getting the first month's paycheck, he hunted a place for himself.. Guys on the street, like anywhere else, are like anyone else. Some are arses, and some are good guys.. Sometimes, life just deals bad cards and you end up somewhere unpleasant.
I came to the conclusions that most 'users' out there are actually afraid of computers to a fair degree, not understanding them (and really, not needing to either). While everything works just fine, they're happy and content, and can do what they're paid to efficiently (or not, depending on the person). When something breaks, unless a message is very, very gentle, it'll only worsen any mental blocks that may arise through the panic reflex (you say "memory error", and they have no idea how that affects them; is the computer about to burst into flames, is their whole work repository about to vanish, if they press a key, will it break more or fix things and so on). Most of the work I put into error schemes is to keep them calm and make sure they're only told stuff that they'd be expected to understand, not what I'd be expected to understand (a small sub-note at the end, or a link to a secondary dialog with support info gives the tech stuff that'd scare them, but I'd understand). All that goes towards keeping them focussed, and as you put, keeping things in 'main memory' for their mental task schedulers.
Lovely, if you have the time and money to follow formal methods, but usually that's overkill. Which is why most programming languages have error trapping, which allows you to detect errors and handle them gracefully. There are many unknowns that can happen. Hardware failures, memory corruption, OS doing something it shouldn't, the malware on the system is interfering, the vendor changed the API behind the scenes and so on.. You always, always trap for errors, even if you don't expect them. That's what it's all about.
For me, depending on how well I'd know the users, the error messages changed. Things I used to write for departments I was in at the time, or people I knew used to have messages for something going really awry (there was no way this was meant to happen) reading "User error: Please replace user and try again.".
When I was writing bespoke software for clients of mine, I'd be descriptive, and state gently in layman's terms approximately what was going on, why it was likely to have happened, and whether or not I needed to know about it. Errors could be on input sanitizing through "Can't find the database or network" to "Everything has gone catastrophically wrong. Call me now" type of errors. I always found that the general "This is a note you did something wrong" is best handled in page by little icons. Something that you really want to wake someone up to, as a larger issue is in play (can't find the network or some such) warrants a dialog box, with an curvy icon and yellow background, with explanatory messages put simply on it; no 5 page essays, just a simple overview and a link to a 'help page' to help them solve it if possible (even if that is just an explanation followed by 'phone the service desk' at your site). The big problems deserve a spiky looking icon with a red background. Again a simple explanation that says "This is really bad, call someone please"; definitely worth of a message that leaves them understanding that "This Is Bad".
Yeah, but which country? As, for example, a political group in one country uses machines in a second to launch an attack at a third. Retaliation of the weaponised type happens from the third country to the second, leaving countries 2 and 3 smoking ruins, but the first laughing. If you wait long enough to try and piece things together, you'll likely have bigger problems on your hands than retaliation (i.e. keeping afloat).
About storing data will change. Historically, we've stored on paper, stone, or whatever could be inscribed. The 'backups' for data has been more about attempting to 'inscribe' media with the digital info. Perhaps we're entering an era where we'll be trying to keep information 'live' perpetually, with the internet the first attempt at having an active library (though there are currently lots of cracks for information to be lost).
Many of the laws that overly stymie information flow (DMCA etc.), I think, are just a knee jerk reaction in the way printing presses were suppressed, and controlled until everyone realised the benefits of having them opened up.
Still, having the long term offline stores is no bad thing..
A company is bound to report side effects that come to light in trial, and also whether or not it affects the condition it's intended to alleviate. Whether it's better or not than another active ingredient, they don't have to publish in the public domain. If it turns out that it is, they're perfectly at liberty to publish that, though not required. What you'll also see is independant people perform efficacy tests of various brands of treatment to determine just how effective each one is versus the other. Having sat on a Research Ethics committee, I've seen those experiments pass through reasonably frequently to obtain ethical approval.
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It's not their religious sensibility.
Now, defaming Allah really would be inciting them. The restriction on depictions of Mohammad was to prevent idolatry (and thus perhaps the worship of Mohammad instead of Allah). So, if you're a worshipper, the rule (sort of) is that you don't create images to worship.
Now anyone outside the religion isn't bound by those rules (they don't actually believe Allah exists, though they may think Mohammad was a fine upstanding chap, or not). As they're not about to start worshipping either one, what's the problem with creating an image? In this context, the image is exactly that; just an image. Not a focus of worship.
By all means respect sensibilities where they're sane and meaningful (don't deface churches/mosques etc. and yess about how stupid you think religious people may be because they have a faith). Also, expect the same to be shown to you. You don't belittle Allah, they don't say you're not allowed to create images and stories (because images and stories are exactly that to the secular).
Now, if I were to draw Mohammad, and someone was to threaten me with it, what does it say about them? The automatic assumption that it's the figure they're thinking of? It's very unlikely to be the real image of Mohammad. Unless it's a chap I know called Mohammad who lives not far away.. I could probably do a fair likeness of him.. Though it's nothing for any religion to get uppity about..
As a secular person, I have the right to draw what I want, where I want, when I want (as long as it damages nobody else's property). Some things people draw make other people think they're a bit of an ass.. But hey.. That's their choice too..
All the management aside (sounds like this server many not suffer from a coding problem; it definitely suffers from a design/management issue though), the "backed up by a major vendor" doesn't even come into it. .net, asp and whatever other techs Microsoft have released as web development languages over the years, I don't think a call to Microsoft would have helped in the slightest.
If you end up with a loose scrabble of
He was wearing his black hat on Wednesday then.. :)
Silent hammers be damned, the invisible Wikipedia page trumps all the rest of the practical jokes..
Methinks you've been sipping the water the entertainment industry execs drink from.
Most people want to contribute. Going to see a spectacular event in rooted deep in the human psyche..
Think your date would enjoy being taken to a cheap burger joint, or a classy restaurant? When you just want something to sate the pangs of hunger, then the cheap burger joint is likely where you'll head.
Everything has its place... Having the free content won't break the paid for model. All it means is that the paid for stuff better have a good story, and better be spectacular..
Worst case? You have channels you pay for. That's where you'll find the high cost series.. Paid for by subscriber funds, by people who think it's worth the cash.
It's really only in the minds of the greedy that everyone else is out to stiff them. Most people want to get by reasonably honourably, and actually contribute to the whole; that's what got us through the times before money was even invented, and it'll get us through times after money is deprecated in favour of something more advanced.
i is the square root of -1 (imaginary). So people are just imagining that it's 1000. It must be a happy world.
Well, how about a system where you have a condition, and pay your insurance diligently for years. Then lose a job, and thus the ability to pay exorbitant rates for your policy away from an employer for a month or two, then don't have the ability to gain any insurance for your existing condition when you attempt to restart the insurance, with the same company? That seems to be how it worked.
Blanket saying "You can buy insurance at any point for anything" is not going to be too workable either (due to just paying insurance when you get ill). The workable point is in the middle (in the UK we have National Insurance, which is a tax paid to fund the National Health service, so you have continuity whether you're in work or not).
The problem being, that injury lawsuits are a very good way for the unemployable to make a lot of money fast.
You'd be amazed at how many people will happily accept mutilating themselves if they think they'll have a big payout, meaning they'll never have to work, and gain a sum of money that equates to a working lifetime
(near enough).
If this case is enough to say any powertool without the current best safety measures will land the manufacturers in court, and they companies will have to pay out by precedent of this, then I see a fair rise in the sale of cheap, not-so-safe powertools, a lot of hospitals having similar cases, and a lot of people getting fat payouts.
I'm there with #2, educating people to keep their computers as clean as possible, but the others? I'd never let a spammer near my computers.. That's asking for trouble..
And fining an ISP because an end user doesn't maintain their PC? To bring out the much hated "car analogy", it's like fining the maintainers of a road because a driver using that road has a crash due to not noticing and fixing a bit of damage caused by vandals.
Great, by all means encourage ISPs to have 'health checks' on machines (I know mine does, as I've seen them scanning the firewall), but I'd avoid punishing them for something that is way beyond their duties and responsibilities.
There aren't any incentives to honesty. DRM is an attempt to force 'honesty' on you in a draconian way. To date, there's not been a way to do this without inconveniencing honest people.
Weirdly, the companies seem to have followed the "it doesn't matter if a thousand innocent people suffer as long as we can catch one guilty", which society has shown over the course of thousands of years simply doesn't work (people rebel against it).
The only way to get honesty to play out is to act honestly, and alas, the content industry in general has shown itself to be anything but honest (copyright extensions anyone? They used to be 12 years when it took a good 5-10 years to pass the work around the market, and people still made a good profit from that. When the market can theoretically be saturated in a day, having life + 70 years is not an honest deal).
Personally, I hate intrusive DRM with a vengeance, because it is inherently dishonest (you've bought something, but we decide whether we feel like meeting our side of the contract. If we don't then tough).
Rather than just use a stick, they should go back to time honoured traditions that used to work (before the 90s), and find a deal that works. Stick and carrot always worked nicely when the bargain was honest; these days, vendors seem to prefer stick or cattle prod, and wonder why people start fighting back.
They got caught out being greedy sods, and for most, their political careers are over now because of it.
That's fair punishment (after all, the rules allowed it in most cases; the rules were wrong and they took advantage of that, which is a natural human thing to do in most cases).
Overall, I think the expenses scandal was initially good to bring in the open, it's just being overused now.. They've taken their drubbing, and I'll remember it. They need good oversight, and correct rulings. This is a 'small' thing in the grand scheme; they do much worse that I'd rather people kept their eyes on, and not fall for the old magicians' tricks.
Seeing as the money comes from the estates held by the royal family anyway, it's not the State's money "wasted" in the first place. Abolish the monarchy, and the estates would revert to the family.
CRB checks are done by most employers, volunteers and a whole host of other agencies that want a criminal records check. This is the 'valid' method which is quite sane in most respects, and yes, you get a copy of your CRB check.
The post was about the "Vetting and barring database" which you'll have to register on if you have formal contact with children more than a couple of times a week. This involves schools, hospitals, taking kids to school if you do the school run, retail outlets (you do serve children under 16 if they appear in your store, don't you?), and in fact, a huge amount of places.
There is no disclosure to the applicant about anything that may appear on this, and 'soft intelligenct' (i.e. hearsay) is admissible as evidence in this database. It is sufficient to bar you from a job.
I doubts it's a "right wing troll". Over here in 'sunny' Bristol, UK, there was a great little scandal a while ago, where a black city councilor accused an Asian councilor of being a "coconut" (brown on the outside, white on the inside) as the Asian councilor supported a bill that wasn't stacked towards Asians (though in a pragmatic sense, was geared towards the general wellbeing long term of the city for all people).
The big defense of this black councilor was that "she couldn't be racist, because she was black". That was an actual, on the record quote.
After having had many witch hunts for racism in the council, this rather more blatant (and on the public record; the "coconut" comment was made in session and thus recorded) event was rapidly swept under the carpet, and the decision of the disciplinary board was that "no action should be taken".
Well, I'm sure I'd love to be absolutely perfect too.. Alas, I know I'm not. With the best will in the world, I'm not going to do everything perfectly every time.
So, we know he took it out of the safe area to investigate a prowler. No mention is made of whether or not the rest of the family were around him at that time, or whether 'forgetting' is merely reassuring the wife/aftermath of what you suspect to be someone after you. No background there at all.
I see nothing in there to say he's not fit to live with children; no evidence of that at all. And the amount of times I've seen things that are 'impossible for things to happen', where a highly skilled and regimented person has had a momentary lapse of thought being distracted by something else in a tense situation, and things have gone wrong is quite astounding.
Being responsible means that you've done everything you humanly can to mitigate risk through process and mental discipline. This means you're 99.999% safe, and really, that's astoundingly good. Most of the people that say they're 'perfect' can say that only because they're not constantly tested; sometimes it can be that one time you fail in your process that is the one that something goes wrong in.
Your argument holds only in a perfect world with perfect concentration and perfect adherence to process. In the real world, it seems to come across as rhetoric.
To answer your points directly:
1) From the story, we're not given enough info to work out whether a felony should be given, so point 1 is moot; you're making assumptions with no evidence of circumstance. If the police examine the evidence and believe he was criminally negligent, then sure.. By all means.. I just refuse to be drawn into a knee jerk reaction without knowing any of the facts.
2 and 3) Definitely with you 100% on that. Responsibility seems rather underrated these days (it all seems to be "I have a right to.." rather than "I undertake the responsibility of..")..
4) I'm not so sure about that.. I know quite a few step parents who love the kids like they were their own. Same as adoptive parents; I'd defy you to go to any adoptive parent and say "You don't love your adopted kid as if it were your own.".
What about:
1) Put bags underground.
2) Plant seeds on there
3) Watch seeds feed on nutrients.
4) Sell food.
5) Profit/ enjoy the fact you've just fed someone crap and see them prosper on it.
Thought it would have been brought to you by the people who gave you Wii..
There's a little thing in the EULA that states "If the media is faulty, then we'll replace that at your cost for about £15. There are no other warranties of fitness.".
Wonder if they've got the balls to claim that "get out of jail free" clause. If they do, wonder how long the company will survive afterwards as sales tank.
"And when was the last time you offered a homeless guy on the street a place to stay?"
That'd be about 1991, in between degrees; still paying out the nose for the first, and prepping up for the second.. To make a little extra cash, I did early morning work cleaning a homeless hostel (trust me, jobs don't get much more crap than that; shaking the blankets on the beds and wondering if crap will fly out, literally, or needles).. Some of the guys there were really unpleasant. Most were pretty good blokes, in hard times.. One was an absolute blast, just had had a complete mental meltdown and hit rock bottom.. He was full of plans to get back into life proper again after getting his head straight.. Ended up hanging out with him for a while, then offered him my spare room for a few months until he got sorted (having a good address as correspondance works a lot better than a homeless hostel for job apps). Took him a few weeks to get a job from there, and after getting the first month's paycheck, he hunted a place for himself..
Guys on the street, like anywhere else, are like anyone else. Some are arses, and some are good guys.. Sometimes, life just deals bad cards and you end up somewhere unpleasant.
I came to the conclusions that most 'users' out there are actually afraid of computers to a fair degree, not understanding them (and really, not needing to either). While everything works just fine, they're happy and content, and can do what they're paid to efficiently (or not, depending on the person).
When something breaks, unless a message is very, very gentle, it'll only worsen any mental blocks that may arise through the panic reflex (you say "memory error", and they have no idea how that affects them; is the computer about to burst into flames, is their whole work repository about to vanish, if they press a key, will it break more or fix things and so on).
Most of the work I put into error schemes is to keep them calm and make sure they're only told stuff that they'd be expected to understand, not what I'd be expected to understand (a small sub-note at the end, or a link to a secondary dialog with support info gives the tech stuff that'd scare them, but I'd understand).
All that goes towards keeping them focussed, and as you put, keeping things in 'main memory' for their mental task schedulers.
Data is pants.
Lovely, if you have the time and money to follow formal methods, but usually that's overkill. Which is why most programming languages have error trapping, which allows you to detect errors and handle them gracefully.
There are many unknowns that can happen. Hardware failures, memory corruption, OS doing something it shouldn't, the malware on the system is interfering, the vendor changed the API behind the scenes and so on.. You always, always trap for errors, even if you don't expect them. That's what it's all about.
For me, depending on how well I'd know the users, the error messages changed. Things I used to write for departments I was in at the time, or people I knew used to have messages for something going really awry (there was no way this was meant to happen) reading "User error: Please replace user and try again.".
When I was writing bespoke software for clients of mine, I'd be descriptive, and state gently in layman's terms approximately what was going on, why it was likely to have happened, and whether or not I needed to know about it. Errors could be on input sanitizing through "Can't find the database or network" to "Everything has gone catastrophically wrong. Call me now" type of errors.
I always found that the general "This is a note you did something wrong" is best handled in page by little icons.
Something that you really want to wake someone up to, as a larger issue is in play (can't find the network or some such) warrants a dialog box, with an curvy icon and yellow background, with explanatory messages put simply on it; no 5 page essays, just a simple overview and a link to a 'help page' to help them solve it if possible (even if that is just an explanation followed by 'phone the service desk' at your site).
The big problems deserve a spiky looking icon with a red background. Again a simple explanation that says "This is really bad, call someone please"; definitely worth of a message that leaves them understanding that "This Is Bad".
The answer to your troll is no.
The next question is are you stupid or just unpleasant?
Yeah, but which country? As, for example, a political group in one country uses machines in a second to launch an attack at a third. Retaliation of the weaponised type happens from the third country to the second, leaving countries 2 and 3 smoking ruins, but the first laughing.
If you wait long enough to try and piece things together, you'll likely have bigger problems on your hands than retaliation (i.e. keeping afloat).
About storing data will change. Historically, we've stored on paper, stone, or whatever could be inscribed. The 'backups' for data has been more about attempting to 'inscribe' media with the digital info.
Perhaps we're entering an era where we'll be trying to keep information 'live' perpetually, with the internet the first attempt at having an active library (though there are currently lots of cracks for information to be lost).
Many of the laws that overly stymie information flow (DMCA etc.), I think, are just a knee jerk reaction in the way printing presses were suppressed, and controlled until everyone realised the benefits of having them opened up.
Still, having the long term offline stores is no bad thing..
A company is bound to report side effects that come to light in trial, and also whether or not it affects the condition it's intended to alleviate.
Whether it's better or not than another active ingredient, they don't have to publish in the public domain. If it turns out that it is, they're perfectly at liberty to publish that, though not required.
What you'll also see is independant people perform efficacy tests of various brands of treatment to determine just how effective each one is versus the other. Having sat on a Research Ethics committee, I've seen those experiments pass through reasonably frequently to obtain ethical approval.