Fiction, so far; next year's regulations:

The administration, citing national security, and law enforcement's need to identify and seize weapons that could be carried by criminals, today instituted new controls on clothing. Criminals, said Mr. Clinton, are well known to hide weapons in their clothing. Billions of dollars and thousands of lives are lost annually to crime committed under such protection, and the security of the nation itself is under attack.

Accordingly, the Clinton administration announced today a new review process for certification of clothing. Only clothing that has been evaluated by the Bureau of External Apparel (BXA) and approved for domestic use, can be purchased after December 30, 1997. All such "approved clothing" will have to meet the following requirements:

1. It is tight, and form-fitting, to make weapon identification easier for law enforcement.
2. It is transparent, so that any hidden weapons may be clearly visible to law enforcement.

Clinton said that semi-opaque clothing would be available if the wearer demonstrates his qualifications to own such articles. The proof required would be a credit check, a check of criminal records indicating no felony convictions and a sworn personal statement acknowledging penalties that would be assessed for abuse. Persons with secret clearances, and law enforcement officers, as well as all Federal government employees, will be exempt from the regulations.

While sceptics expressed concern over the loss of privacy and the intrusion upon the personal effects of citizens, Mr. Clinton acccused them of supporting criminality and the continuation of the pain and suffering caused by criminals carrying weapons. Mr. Clinton cited the horror of the recent criminal assault at a local McFoodles Restaurant, and a announced the new law from the Topeka City Morgue, using the casket of a murdered child as a podium. When asked why all citizens must comply with the regulations, he said that Americans should have a sense of community and should sacrifice their selfish interests in favor of improving the security of everyone. He bit his lip to restrain his tears as he jogged his notes on the casket.

When asked if wearing clothing doesn't hinder or reduce certain crime, such as assault on females, rape and indecent exposure, and protect the health of citizens from the elements, the president said that research was underway to find solutions for those problems. Transparent, but highly insulating materials that were developed in the space program could be transferred to such use, he said, and the FDA would soon announce mandatory medications that would surpress certain dangerous hormones, even as the BATF will bring to market the first sperm taggant for simplifying tracking of sex criminals. "We continue to have the security of Americans foremost in all that we do.", he said.

Also illegalized was the participation of any US citizen in the design of clothing that may be manufactured outside the US, unless that clothing is transparent and form-fitting. The textile and apparel industries have not objected, nor have privacy interests. It is believed that they have been required to demonstrate public support for this new policy, or risk loss of their business licenses, and a tax surcharge on profits. The Department of the Treasury announced new regulations which would change the depreciation basis for textile plant fixed assets to 120 years, from the current 10, for manufacturers who are deemed to show a lack of public support for the plan. The few remaining privacy interest groups remain beleagured with their IRS audits, lawsuits regarding non-profit status, and criminal prosecutions of their officers and directors.

The FBI has long been an advocate of ending the protection that opaque clothing provides to criminals, but the recent development of lighter, lower cost weapons made them act at this time, said FBI Director Craig Livingstone. Ms. Livingstone joined him at the FBI offices to make the announcement. The implementation of the new regulations will end the fashion-magazine speculation as to her real hair coloring, once and for all.

Mr. Clinton pointed out that the regulations were not substantially different in intent nor effect from the cryptography regulations that were imposed last December 30, 1996. Those regulations also aimed at controlling the ability to hide criminal activity, and were imposed on all Americans (except Federal agencies and employees), and supported by international treaties, some of which are still secret, which insured that even totalitarian dictatorships would have the support of the US in gaining access to all communications and files of their subjects.

Film at 11.

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king summoned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"

One advisor, an Electrical Engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster," he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The advisor, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantifies its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."

The second advisor, a software developer, immediately recognised the danger of such short-sighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years."

"With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialise this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialisation process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard- boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelette classes."

"The ham and cheese omelette class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without multiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create the proper object and send a message to the object that says, 'Cook yourself.' The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs."

"Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too."

"We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message 'Booting UNIX v.8.3' appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market.) Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook."

"Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel Pentium with 48MB of memory, a 1.2GB hard disk, and a SVGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multiple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap."

The king wisely had the software developer beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.