Virtual Thought

Interesting article on Wired proposing an economic model for secure software… Some jackass had said that we should make coders liable for security holes and open them up for lawsuit by users. The Wired article says make the company liable.

Ever actually read a EULA? The company isn’t liable for anything that happens to you because of the software, nothing, not a penny… and the software doesn’t belong to you anyway and usually can be removed from your leaseship with a word from the manufacturing company. Time to end all that.

Or is it? Can you imagine the class-action lawsuit against Microsoft for, say, the Slammer worm? Would the result of that lawsuit put Microsoft out of business? Where would that leave all of that shareholder money dumped into R&D? Do the benefits of accountability really justify the near-certainty litigiousness in the early 21st century United States?

I’m up for it and think we should not only try this but use some of that legal momentum to re-examine the standard EULA, too. By all means, don’t make the coders liable or you’ll just have really fast turnover on programmers and no real change in the status quo. If the companies were liable for the products they produce (what a concept) then they might start taking user needs seriously.

Okay… here we go.

So you combine a new iPod with its ability to do video (why oh why didn’t I wait for a video iPod) with Google Maps or Google Earth and what do you get?

You get a website that allows users to enter two addresses… the website will generate a little movie of the drive there on a map and produce a podcast (or something similar) that contains that dynamically generated movie… the user will download it into their iPod and will then drive away with their nifty little dynamic map, trying not to kill themselves as they drive along looking at their iPod.

Wouldn’t that be fuckin’ sweet?

So I wanted to get the SDL working on my Mac at home so I can tinker with game programming in either Python or Ruby.

My preference would be Ruby since I think the language is cooler… but both RuDL and Ruby_SDL kept giving me this weird NSInternalInconsistencyException that I didn’t know what to do with… “Huh,” I thought. “These projects must not be very stable yet.”

Then, using Fink I started installing Pygame and started getting a similar problem even though Pygame had been working the previous week! (I had downloaded it from somewhere but wanted to get latest) WTF!! Turns out, more specifically, that the problem was in making windows… going fullscreen worked just fine. It was making windows that was causing the problem.

Thank God for the Interweb. This guy used this post to diagnose what was wrong with my finky installation of pygame. So, once I’d made the simple change in my init python script in pygame… voila!

Makes me want to go find RuDL and Ruby-sdl in my trash and see if I can’t fix’em.

BTW, the code I had to hack is this:

from objc import loadBundleFunctions
import AppKit
import Foundation
+ if not AppKit.NSApp():
+ AppKit.NSApplicationLoad()
except ImportError:
raise ImportError(“PyObjC 1.2 or later is required to use pygame on Mac OS X”)

The +s indicate where you should add the lines and eventually I’ll get around to fixing my site so I can display code properly (indenting and all that). Whew!

This has made my day.

Among the winners are Genesis iii, 16 (“God said to the woman [after she was beguiled by the serpent]: ‘I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’ ”) and, “Such symbolic language [as used in Revelations] must be respected for what it is, and is not to be interpreted literally.”

Holy shit. This is a tremendous step into the last century for the Catholic church (not being that snarky… I don’t think there’s been enough of this century for us to get a sense of the zeitgeist).

Thank God.

The title is more titillating than the reality.

And I just got that too.

Anyway, Southwest airlines booted a woman for wearing a politically charged t-shirt bearing the word ‘fuck.’ I’m just glad that, given our litigious times, she’s only suing for airfare, car rental fee, and gas compensation… no one-million-for-pain-and-suffering here.

I have two favorite parts of this story: the woman’s shirt is described as having “a phrase similar to the popular film title ‘Meet the Fockers,’” which is great… and the fact that Southwest said “We’re just complying with FAA regulations!” and the FAA said, “We don’t have regulations about t-shirts!”

Land of freedom.

Microsoft has a patent application out there foolishly patenting the ‘is not’ operator.

Let me write this another way: this patent is full of shit.

Join me in this Google bomb… please. ( =