Jinn of Quality and Risk

Good article on computer games and the graphical desktop revolution in IEEE Spectrum, August 2002 (pp. 42-47; unfortunately, access to past issues seems to require IEEE membership). We [now] have the fundamental tools necessary to be doing games that are a simulation of the world says John Carmack, lead programmer and cofounder of Id Software (Mesquite, Texas). 

The bit density of disk drives is doubling every year, which means that it is growing faster than the transistor population of microprocessor chips (which still obeys Moore's law, i.e. doubling every 18 months). By 2010, a single disk drive will hold 50 terabytes, the equivalent of 8000 DVD movies. By that time, PDAs will be more powerful than today's desktop computers. If the duration of copyright protection had remained 14 years (as it originally was) all movies (and TV programmes) made until 1995 would be in the public domain in 2010, i.e. they would be freely viewed and copied. 

The controversy over the UCITA has been growing in past years. The basic problem with it is that it is an attempt to abolish common law rights around sales contracts, and substitute licensing contracts that give customers few rights, if any. The UCITA attacks four key legal doctrines that normally underlie commercial transactions that involve intellectual property: first sale (allows you to sell a used product or to give it away); fair use (allows you to reverse-engineer other manufacturers' products); free market competition (allows you to know the contract terms before buying a product, and to publish the results of benchmark studies); and minimum fairness standards (prevents enforcement of unreasonable license terms).

Since many manufactured products include a growing proportion of embedded hardware and software, the UCITA could be used to prevent the sale of e.g. used cars, coffee machines, and dishwashers. ["UCITA: A Disaster In Progress," IEEE Spectrum, August 2002, pp. 13-15] 

When a company announces US $1 billion in restructuring costs and 10 000 layoffs, the outgoing CEO shouldn't still be getting a multimillion-dollar guarantee on the cash-in value of his stock options. When two companies conclude a controversial merger and 15 000 people are laid off, top executives don't deserve hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses. [IEEE Spectrum Lines, Unemployment Hits Home, August 2002]

In the US, the average CEO is paid between $9 and $13 million, the equivalent salary of about 100-150 engineers (based on the median IEEE member salary, $93 000). The 10 highest-paid US CEOs in 2001 (seven of them from technology companies) were paid about $1.7 billion — enough to employ almost 20 000 qualified, experienced engineers. Are CEOs so much more competent, effective, and innovative than engineers?