Right, simplest way to maximise the number of people who stay.

give them something immediate which they can do and see a result.

Get them thinking about other things they'd like to do.

It could be as simple as getting people to design some 3d objects then dropping them into garrys mod and letting people play with them.

Immediate small success is more important than technical significance

some basic scripting perhaps, the sort people can build on later without any setup like bash for linux/mac and vbscript for windows (even if VBscript is a horrible language)

It depends on how you think about it.

a crypto nerd will talk about a search space, there's nothing physically stopping the police from reading the data other than the vast search space of possible keys.

on the other hand a journalist explaining things for laypeople will often compare crypto to a safe.

In the former case it's like saying

"we suspect this person of murder, we can't demand he show us where the bodies are because of the 5th but we can order him to step into a room alone and put a pin in the map where the bodies are buried, we will then not use his testimony against him but will use any evidence gathered from that location."

in the latter case you can be ordered to provide physical records like account and such, a judge can order you to open a safe or unlock a door.

actually it looks like it was in use until microsoft deployed the legal attack drones.

2003:
http://web.archive.org/web/20031225193949/http://xboxone.com/

2011:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110207201840/http://xboxone.com/

it looks like someone had a perfectly legit site and used it for over a decade. then Microsoft decided that they wanted the domain name but didn't want to pay for it.

Yep, this is the common workaround. The construction firm get a maintenance contract of some kind for a year or sometimes 5 years. They are of course paid for that or it's factored into the original price.

Still, don't sign off on water pipes being fine if they're not actually there because that still then becomes an alteration after work has been signed off rather than a bug/snag.

yep, and your comment is relevant how?

if you'd missed the problem for a couple of years it would have been beyond the point when they'd do it for free. you were expected to find any problems in a reasonable time.

If your complaint was that it was good but wasn't quite perfect, not crooked but a stitch here and here which definitely aren't straight. they'd tell you to go to hell or pay out of pocket.

It's common practice in every real field.

if you hire a construction firm to build an office block you go in, or hire someone else to go in and create a list of snags or problems which they can find and the firm you hired to build the block fix them. once you've signed off it doesn't matter if you didn't notice that one floor was missing all it's water pipes. (real example)

you've inspected the job and signed it off. If you want a change or find a problem after that you have to hire them or someone else to do it.

unless of course you specify it in the contract. but that'll likely cost you extra.

I don't think you quite grasp the scale of "expensive" in this case.

Even with modern processes it can still come to hundreds of dollars per line to actually be certain.

http://www.mail-archive.com/sc-l@securecoding.org/msg01278.html

Though that only covers making sure it does what you think it should do, it doesn't cover making sure what you think it should be doing is what the client thought they were telling you it should be doing.

What you actually want is code which *probably*
  has very few bugs which you can create for a sane price and at a sensible speed because most clients want their software this year, not 10 years from now.

There's always a tradeoff.

There's no such thing as non trivial bug free code. only code which has not been tested in enough circumstances.

No. really. Even limiting it to just security related bugs with an author who put an insane amount of work into making it bug free who knew exactly what he wanted with no communication with a client bugs still turn up when code is exposed to the real world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmail

Totally bug free code is insanely expensive to write in even small amounts so you're basically having the developers spin the wheel, if your clients do massive amounts of testing they end up working for months unpaid. if they do little testing and can live with lots of little bugs then the Dev gets a good deal.

Here's a sane solution to your problem: pay for bug fixing.

nope, it's worse than that.

Notice how the only thing that is sworn to is that Scumsucker is the agent of Sleazebag.

They do not have to swear that they own the copyright. They can believe it on the basis that the magic 8 ball told them so and are not committing perjury.

On the other hand a counter notice legally requires you to swear a lot of things under penalty of perjury, far more than the initial notice.

the law is an ass.

You can't confiscate them but you can track them if you know the history of some of the bitcoins in their possession. Problem is that there's nothing stopping someone from passing those bitcoins through a thousand anonymous parties connecting over Tor then trading them with others for other bitcoins before cashing them out or exchanging them for something.

he examiners are supposed to be at least familiar with the area. of ordinary skill in the art as it were.

if they cannot understand a patent then how could they build what it describes. so if they cannot understand it then it's not meeting the goal of patents: ie disclosing how something works.

not always but when it's a government crash weapons program the odds aren't good.

That some of that crap is left over from the Manhattan project.

My solution: give them fish and fruits and vegetables.

Please, go ahead. Oh. wait. you're not actually going to *do* that. you'd just like to.

I can just imagine you sitting on a balcony watching starving people: "they don't have bread? Let them eat cake"

Yes that would be a nice solution for everyone in the world to get a mixed and balanced diet.

But your lot have been too incompetent to pull that off for the last century.
You've been failing hard and other people have been suffering for your failure.

If you're even a half way decent human being don't stand in the way of other trying to solve a problem hurting hundreds of thousands of people when you can't solve it yourself.

no. it isn't.

you've been lied to.

There was a famous case where a farmer in such a position sprayed his crops with roundup to select the ones which had picked up the roundup resistant gene then grew his next crop from those that survived thinking he was being really smart and pulling one over on monsanto. The courts threw the book at him for taking the piss and sided with monsanto.

Farmers who by pure chance end up with a few plants with monsantos crops genes are fine. You tend to hear half the story on sites like naturalnews.

You only care about people in your own country?
You sound like a *lovely* person.

http://www.goldenrice.org/Content4-Info/info.php

"In developing countries 500,000 people, mainly children, become blind every year, 50% of whom die within a year of becoming blind. Nearly nine million children die of malnutrion every year. Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) severely affects their immune system, hence it is involved in many of these children's deaths in the guise of multiple diseases."

"The major micronutrient deficiencies in the world are iron, zinc, and vitamin A. VAD is prevalent among the poor who depend mainly on rice for their daily energy uptake, because rice grains do not contain any Î-carotene (provitamin A), which our body could in turn convert into vitamin A. Dependence on rice as the predominant food source, therefore, necessarily leads to VAD, which has the most severe effects on children and pregnant women. For the 400 million rice-consuming poor the medical consequences are severe: impaired vision, all the way to irreversible blindness, impaired epithelial integrity, exposing the affected individuals to infections, reduced immune response, impaired haematopoiesis (blood cell formation) and impaired skeletal growth, among other debilitating afflictions. Rice containing provitamin A could substantially alleviate the problem."