A friend of mine use to work for Sony in Germany. They had a similar thing there. They would be disciplined for checking e-mail after work hours due to German labor laws. If you checked e-mail, it was considered overtime work. She said they went so far as to have security walk thru the building asking people to leave after 5:00pm.

Also it was illegal to work on Sunday or Holidays. Again, checking email would qualify you as working, so they were very strict about remote VPN access on those days unless it was absolutely required.

I'm not sure if Germany has relaxed these rules in recent years. If they haven't then the no-email after work sounds like they are trying to confirm with the law, not that they are trying to be nice.

The FAA is still trying to figure out how to integrate UAS's. (They are not called UAV's in the FAA NAS system).

Many legal issues remain:
- Enforcing see and avoid rules required in VFR flight
- Defining standards for communication with aircraft
- Who do you enforce rules with a violation when there is an accident if there is no pilot
- How to handle technical issues such as loss of control / software failure, physical issues such as loss of a trim type control, flap system, etc.
- Weather issues such as high winds, icing

As a pilot and somebody active in aviation software, I'm interested to see where things go here. The reason the military has been able to fly UAV's is because they don't have any rules. Do whatever you want. But in the civil area, we have rules because we choose to protect ourselves from our government and others.

BTW, the item where I said it was using A LOT of water. Doesn't look like water after looking more. And it's growing. If you zoom in the north end has expanded.

Right now it's measuring in at 72sq MILES of land use (12 miles long x 6 miles wide). That thing is HUGE whatever it is.

Even has a corporate headquarters type buildings ( 40.468196,90.860839 ), large cooling towers that are 125ft wide (40.462246,90.859235), truck depot (40.478358,90.877597).

More "QR Codes": 40.458638,93.390827
Bunkers near the wierd lines: 40.46294,93.372341
fake runways/bases: 40.472416,93.5079
Bomb (cluster?) hits on that base: 40.489307,93.500476
Fake houses/city that have been hit; 40.413766,93.583812
Some form of ULF or other low frequency communication array? 40.413766,93.583812
Some odd town: 40.108521,93.993434
Chemical or other plant that is using A LOT of water in the middle of the desert: 40.108521,93.993434

The same argument can be said about racing games. You can crash into walls going 100MPH and just bounce off.

The people vs. car thing is a little different but comes down to the same thing. In the car world, a manufacturer doesn't want their car to ever be seen as inferior or have damage to the car. In the war model, we want to always be rewarded for shooting the gun. Negative feedback is bad.

The reality is that until we start enforcing negative feedback we are encouraging and training a new generation of people that will lack a sense of duty and responsibility and instead will lack a certain understanding of right and wrong.

I was a software development manager for a few years in this very industry working for one of the top companies.

Doing things like Bates stamping is pretty straight forward. That's really so that when you exchange documents, and versions of those documents, you can refer to them in your filings. The real issue is conversion of the documents. These days most people are OK with PDF files. Amazingly, most law firms also use TIF files (FAX type encoding, 100dpi) for most of their work. Bates numbering will just stamp a number onto each page/image. Bates comes from the Bates Stamper that was invented in 1891. It was a mechanical hand stamper that incremented by one digit each time you stamped.

Law firms are actually pretty particular about their software. One of the reasons is that if your discovery process is challenged, you have to be able to defend it. This is where having a company represent their product and be able to have it be defensible. How did you convert the word doc to a PDF? How did you index it to identify it as responsive/privileged/etc? Also, most of the time they are under a time crunch to produce documents. When you are under a time crunch, you can't afford to wait for an open source patch. You would be laughed out of court and sanctioned. So you depend on companies to provide support for this.

I can see FOSS being used by companies (we used some), but, it's not a solution that you can take to court.

Just like how do you use a Pen in space, Russia came up with a simple answer. A pencil.

Why on earth (and space) are they trying to fix the carbonation problem. Put in some Cranberry juice with Vodka and you have a great drink. No carbonation. No problem.

Simple.

Industries that have failed or may fail that face the same problem as this post include Aviation (they gained some protection from Congress via the 1984 GARA act), Education (teachers have to make their plans dumbed down for all, cut field trips due to liability issues, etc), Medicine (the cost of medical care is high because of the liability costs for valid care that somebody may have got a different opinion on).

The American Tort Reform Association has a good short writeup on the Impacts on the Economy due to current Tort laws.

It's only a matter of time until it comes to programming/computers.

Features, although great, cost you time and money (It's time and labor or T&L in my world). T&L represents development, QA, documentation, training, support, and long term maintenance from those teams as well.

Once you have a feature, you expect to have it forever. From Waynes World, Garth said it right. "We fear change. Change is Evil!". We can give you a different way to do it, or take away a feature. But who wants that?

BTW, the original comments ability to get some Invader Zim into a topic. Classic. Love JTHM.

I'll have to see if I get any more crashes. I can add audio crashes (audio noise/crackling, then openGL app lockup).

The one true benefit, I have a Dell XPS 630, and since I haven't finished writing my Nvidia EDA drivers, the fan speed was reset and is no longer on full blast. hehe.

Unfortunately when I installed Ubuntu, I let it go with the recommended single /dev/hda1 partition that was 100%. Back in my old UNIX days, I normally would have had a small ~2GB /, ~4GB /usr, ~20GB /var, and allocated the rest under /home. But, being that everyone seemed to have been running full / partitions for desktops, I did that. WOOOPS!

I've thought about reinstalling everything. As you see above, I've always locked down my partitions for good reason. Reallocating a few OS partitions is no problem.

On a side note, I also had a custom 2.6.28 kernel as I was working on developing a USB driver for the NVIDIA ESA device support (which is really just HID 1.1, but, Linux is not HID 1.08 compliant). Getting closer, but, I'm really having to reimplement HID 1.11 so I'm trying to decide if I should implement it as a USB replacement for the kernel or as a HIDDEV/RAW type module.

Troubles... yes... Switching back to Windows.. Hell no! (I booted into my old Vista drive to upgrade my iPhone to 3.0... that took 30 minutes to boot and open ITunes! Screw that!)