IIRC, time-of-day metering is generally required by the electric company if you install any sort of solar panel setup. That's one reason solar panels can save so much money. On top of charging you lower rates in the mornings or evenings (depending on time of year) when you're home and are likely to be using the most power, you're also adding power into the grid when power is at its most expensive (during the day when all f the businesses have their air conditioning on.
A big part of the money behind Photoshop is corporate use. Most companies won't risk pirating software; it only takes one angry, laid-off employee to call the BSA and cause lots of problems. Most individuals tend to buy Elements.
Incorrect. Women are not immune to the color blindness gene. Most (but not all) forms of color blindness are sex-linked traits. That means that a woman has two of the relevant gene, while a man only has one. The color-blindness gene is recessive, so a woman is color-blind only if either A. her father is color-blind and her mother is color-blind, or B. with 50% probability if her father is color-blind and her mother is a carrier. A man would be color-blind if his mother is color-blind, or with 50% probability if his mother is a carrier.
Thus, in males, the probability of a person exhibiting this trait is approximately equal to the percentage of colorblind copies of that gene in the general population, while in females, it is proportional to the square of that percentage. Thus, it occurs in 8% of the population, and should occur on the order of.64% of the female population. In practice, it actually occurs a little less frequently in the female population than that (about.4%), but I'm not sure what causes that additional discrepancy.
Only if the phone has a built-in USB connector. For most phones, you have to unplug the phone from the cable and the cable from the brick, which is not significantly different from unplugging the phone from the cable and the brick from the wall.
The only way I know of cor the so-called "vampire draw" to be "100% eliminated" is through a mechanical switch. Any circuit that detects the presence of a device on the other end must necessarily draw power from somewhere, and the device sure isn't going to provide it over USB. That's a violation of the spec. AFAIK, the USB device doesn't output any signal on the wire until interrogated by the host.
And even if you got past that somehow, you would still have some sort of trickle power available to power the power-switching circuit itself.
So basically the only way I can imagine this working is if they did something like putting a microswitch inside the USB connector, which is fine as long as you remember to unplug the cable at night, but that's hardly any different than unplugging the charger. You're just moving the problem a little farther down.
Am I missing something, or are these claims exaggerated somewhat?
You're making a common mistake---specifically, you're failing to acknowledge the difference between commercial piracy and noncommercial piracy.
When it comes to noncommercial piracy, most software companies have seen dramatic increases in sales when they get rid of copy protection, which utterly flies in the face of your theory. Why does this happen? Because people suddenly can pirate it, try it, and a percentage of those people then turn around and buy it. Either way, that percentage tends to be substantially greater than the percentage who would blindly buy it if they could not pirate it. Every study I've ever seen on this subject has shown that noncommercial piracy increases sales revenue, and that is true whether you're talking about software or music or DVDs or any other content.
By contrast, you might be able to argue that commercial piracy in China has restricted the growth of legitimate software in China. Of course, this only occurs because large-scale commercial piracy has little regulation. Manufacturing of counterfeit hardware is similarly loosely regulated. The reason people in China buy the fakes so frequently, however, is not merely to save money; there are two main reasons why people buy fakes:
For many, it is because they do not know the difference. The fakes in hardware can be very believable if you've never encountered the real thing. This is why commercial piracy can significantly hurt the market for the real thing, whether you're talking about software or hardware, particularly when purchasing occurs over the Internet.
For others, it is because they cannot afford the real thing. And this is also the main reason that people pirate software.
The bigger problem here is that products cannot reasonably be sold at different prices in different markets without huge import tariffs. Otherwise, people will just grey-market the things, and you've lost your more expensive market. This is equally true for software as it is for hardware. The driving force behind piracy is to produce a low-cost equivalent for markets that cannot afford the original, which means it has precisely the same driving force as most other counterfeiting, and with largely the same results. In markets that can afford the original, the majority of buyers get the real thing, and the majority of people who get the counterfeit product would not have purchased the real thing at all. The exceptions are people who don't know that they are buying fakes (which is almost never the case for noncommercial piracy).
In the case of software, however, piracy (commercial fakes good enough to fool people notwithstanding) actually is less harmful than counterfeiting in other areas because of the need for interoperability. A fake iPod need not interoperate with a real iPod. A pirated copy of Word is most likely going to interact with documents produced by many other copies of Word. Thus, even pirated copies of software can create significant income in other markets.
For example, Windows is massively pirated in China, and so is Office, but most people in China would not be able to afford paid copies of Office. That's okay, though, because every business in the U.S. that does business with China does pay for copies of Office as part of doing business with those Chinese companies. Were pirated versions not available, those Chinese companies would use open source equivalents and U.S. companies would be forced to use those open source equivalents instead of buying copies of Office. Therefore, Chinese piracy of software benefits Microsoft's bottom line, albeit not to the degree that selling licensed copies in China would, were it feasible to do so without cannibalizing U.S. markets.
This means content creators first off have something more to worry about theft and counterfeiting: there's no way to lock up your shit, and there's no barrier to entry for huge-scale counterfeiting. Sure, someone could produce a CISCO switch copy; but manufacturing a million of them and displacing CISCO? How about making 100,000,000 cracked copies of Windows XP available for digital download?
I've read stories about Chinese fake iPod models coming out within a few weeks of the original products. The barrier to large-scale counterfeiting is largely the fear of getting caught even with physical products. Most OEM makers aren't going to take the risk of installing fake stuff, the statistical majority of people don't download copies of software instead of buying it due to the prevalence of trojans, etc. In short, counterfeiting concerns are not really unique to software.
Since you mentioned Cisco, there was a huge Cisco counterfeiting ring that was recently busted and some $78 million worth of fake equipment was recovered (about.2% of Cisco's annual revenue). Could it displace the real thing? Probably not, but neither could counterfeit copies of WIndow, for the reasons stated previously.
The original developer didn't get anywhere near $60 unless the game sold for close to $200. The original retailer got $60. Of that, they probably gave about $40 to their distributor, who in turn gave about $20 to the game publisher. These numbers are all approximate, of course.
I think you're way overestimating the profit to the manufacturer on the initial sale. I'm not sure in software, but in most industries, channel costs are somewhere around 60-65%, IIRC. So for a $60 game, the publisher gets about $21-24. If they sell the DLC at $15, they're making almost as much money on resale as they did on the original game.
The next logical step, then, is to eliminate the retail chain entirely. At that point, they could sell copies at $20, still average more money per copy than before, and sell a lot more copies in total.
The problem is that content creators think that their works are somehow "special" and unlike physical objects. As long as we as a society continue to play into that delusion, they will continue to believe this, will continue to believe that their efforts to undermine the resale market are productive, and will continue to believe that any loss in sales due to those efforts are caused by piracy. Until they hit rock bottom, they will have no reason to question their delusion.
When you deal with delusional people, there is no reasoning with them; they are well beyond that point. All you can really do is isolate them where they can do no harm. Stop buying products that try to restrict resale, then write them a letter to tell them why you decided not to buy their products. Then wait for those companies to die off and for new companies run by saner people to emerge from the ashes. Buy their products instead.
Now you might be asking yourself why you wrote the letter if the companies won't change. Well, a few of them might, but that's not the reason for the letter; the people reading your letters likely have no say in the matter, or else the policies would change. The reason for the letter is that the people who read your letter are the ones who are still going to be out there on the ground and in the trenches starting up the new companies that replace these companies, giving advice about what works and what doesn't, being the voices of reason. So at least in the long term, the letters help, albeit not with the products and companies currently out there.
It may be a long painful journey, but the only way to fix most companies is to run them out of business and start over. Just say no to single-use downloadable content.
How many studies do you need? I've linked to half a dozen in this thread that all draw the same basic conclusion.... Someone can almost certainly find a flaw in any study, but after eight or ten such studies, you really have to wonder if they're looking for flaws to support an agenda rather than because there's any real possibility that those completely different flaws all just happened to skew the results of all these studies in the same direction.
Glucose absorption is regulated by your body using insulin. Fructose is not. Thus, pure fructose is significantly worse than HFCS. Pretty much every study I've ever seen has conclusively shown that fructose is the worst of the sugars, and that it is converted more easily to fat than any other sugar.
Right now, they aren't compressing at all, apparently. 140 characters * 31 bits per character is 4,340 bits, so if they are only getting 4200 bits, they're doing slightly worse than completely uncompressed data here. I'm guessing they have a signature on the front end that loses a few bits.
The question is whether they are using random data or data from real-world sources. If the latter, you might be able to construct a compressor that picks the best of a few hundred compression schemes, then pick the one that got the most data in within 139 characters, and use the 140th 31 bits to encode which scheme you used. If you get lucky and the data happens to be one of the types you're expecting (e.g. uncompressed image data), then you could easily get substantial lossless compression (2:1 should be a piece of cake).
On the other hand, if the source data is truly random (or nearly so, e.g. bytes from the middle of a bzip2 file), then the winner will be equally random, so there's no point in wasting your time being inventive. Instead, just rig the competition by creating a billion Twitter accounts and using the username as additional data bytes.
And, of course, if the person doing the compression can pick the source data, then I can tweet the contents of the Library of Congress with one URL....
I'm not certain. Maybe your power company's metering is set up to penalize you when you have a highly reactive load, and that you're cutting off all your resistive loads that previously balanced things out a bit. Do you mostly use CFLs? Or perhaps the power company's metering intentionally penalizes houses that draw more heavily from one side of the transformer so that people won't do that. (That said, I can't imagine why they would do that; once you get past the building transformer, it's the same load either way, and up to the building transformer, it's your problem if it fails, so unless they under-specify the building transformers themselves, that seems a little silly.)
Another possibility would be that your building ground is inadequate. If you have, say, a bunch of devices with linear regulators (as opposed to switching regulators), they dissipate more power at higher source voltages. If the voltage sags because the ground has gone high because of other devices putting current into a poor ground, they will draw less power. When those other devices stop raising the ground reference, the linear regulators would draw more current. So the requirement would be that the other devices would have to draw less power than the extra current draw from the linear regulators. Perhaps you shut off a bunch of cheap CFLs that draw high VA but draw low wattage (or other reactive loads).
That said, I'm grasping at straws here; IANAEE; IJPOOSD. It's certainly very odd.
There's some confusion here, and unfortunately, you're both right. The true definition of a phase is the time delay of an electrical signal. By definition, when you go through a building transformer, you get two AC voltages that are effectively 180 degrees out of phase. Thus, by any reasonable standard of electronics, households have two-phase power.
Unfortunately, when it comes to electrical power generation, the term "phase" is commonly overloaded to refer not to any arbitrary phase, but to specific phases (0 degrees, 120 degrees, and 240 degrees) of three-phase power as seen in high-voltage distribution lines. So in that respect, each household gets only a single phase.
I would argue that the people saying home power is two-phase power are more technically correct, but calling it two-phase power does risk confusion with another, obsolete two-phase power system that had two phases that were 90 degrees apart, so it's probably best that folks avoid using such terms and instead describe these household phases as being the two legs of your building transformer instead.
<insurance_adjuster>Hey, we said earthquake-proof. We didn't say it was volcano-proof. Besides, you'll specifically note in the fine print that we disclaim responsibility for all damages due to acts of God.</insurance_adjuster>
Ah, but sucrose is broken down into fructose and glucose over a period of time. By contrast, free fructose is ready to absorb immediately. It's would not be at all surprising for the body to absorb bound and unbound fructose at different rates as a result of the extra processing required before bound fructose can be absorbed.
And now, with this study, we can state with a fair degree of certainty that the AMA was wrong. So now, hopefully, this will put to rest the question of whether the rise in HFCS has caused the temporally coincident rise in obesity in the U.S. (which was previously only suspected due to correlation) so researchers can focus on the more important question of why the body treats it differently.
But it won't. This isn'tthefirststudy that has suggested a strong causal link between HFCS and obesity. This one will be ignored by the nay-sayers just like all the others. (Note that some of those links aren't to studies, but rather to papers about the studies, etc., but the links in their references are staggering.) *sigh*
Having dealt with GoDaddy in the past (it took less than a month from setting up the hosting account to me threatening to sue them for breach), I'm pretty certain that the reason has nothing to do with doing right by their customers, so that pretty much leaves the alternatives; when you eliminate the unimaginable, whatever remains must be the case....:-D
My guess would be that it would take too much effort to add this to their purchasing system. They seem utterly incapable of making even simple changes to that system, which tells me that it's probably an unholy mess....
The problem is that the day the U.S. Government successfully make anything fraud-proof is the day a (suidae) sus domestica obtains an aviation license.
Unfortunately, being the U.S. Government, they will no doubt pull the same sort of stupidity that made social security numbers a nightmare---specifically, treating this new token as an unforgeable piece of information, thus ensuring that anything verified with this identifier is not subject to scrutiny or correction even when fraud has clearly occurred.
Basically, to them, "fraud-proof" just means "good enough that we can ignore the problems without the peasants revolting".
Ah, but all this efficiency assumes that they'll be sane and will use switching regulators. Linear regulators are ten for a buck in quantities.:-D
Wow, does that make me cynical, or what?
You are right that running around low single digit volts isn't efficient. That said, I thought you were suggesting running the actual silicon on 12V, which would be way worse....
Stepping down to a volt or two at the drive level is perfectly fine. It certainly does mean that you can get away with smaller wires without incurring appreciable voltage drop. On the other hand, the current drain from these things is probably so low that I'm not sure if it will make enough difference to worry about.:-)
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IIRC, time-of-day metering is generally required by the electric company if you install any sort of solar panel setup. That's one reason solar panels can save so much money. On top of charging you lower rates in the mornings or evenings (depending on time of year) when you're home and are likely to be using the most power, you're also adding power into the grid when power is at its most expensive (during the day when all f the businesses have their air conditioning on.
A big part of the money behind Photoshop is corporate use. Most companies won't risk pirating software; it only takes one angry, laid-off employee to call the BSA and cause lots of problems. Most individuals tend to buy Elements.
Incorrect. Women are not immune to the color blindness gene. Most (but not all) forms of color blindness are sex-linked traits. That means that a woman has two of the relevant gene, while a man only has one. The color-blindness gene is recessive, so a woman is color-blind only if either A. her father is color-blind and her mother is color-blind, or B. with 50% probability if her father is color-blind and her mother is a carrier. A man would be color-blind if his mother is color-blind, or with 50% probability if his mother is a carrier.
Thus, in males, the probability of a person exhibiting this trait is approximately equal to the percentage of colorblind copies of that gene in the general population, while in females, it is proportional to the square of that percentage. Thus, it occurs in 8% of the population, and should occur on the order of .64% of the female population. In practice, it actually occurs a little less frequently in the female population than that (about .4%), but I'm not sure what causes that additional discrepancy.
Only if the phone has a built-in USB connector. For most phones, you have to unplug the phone from the cable and the cable from the brick, which is not significantly different from unplugging the phone from the cable and the brick from the wall.
The only way I know of cor the so-called "vampire draw" to be "100% eliminated" is through a mechanical switch. Any circuit that detects the presence of a device on the other end must necessarily draw power from somewhere, and the device sure isn't going to provide it over USB. That's a violation of the spec. AFAIK, the USB device doesn't output any signal on the wire until interrogated by the host.
And even if you got past that somehow, you would still have some sort of trickle power available to power the power-switching circuit itself.
So basically the only way I can imagine this working is if they did something like putting a microswitch inside the USB connector, which is fine as long as you remember to unplug the cable at night, but that's hardly any different than unplugging the charger. You're just moving the problem a little farther down.
Am I missing something, or are these claims exaggerated somewhat?
You're making a common mistake---specifically, you're failing to acknowledge the difference between commercial piracy and noncommercial piracy.
When it comes to noncommercial piracy, most software companies have seen dramatic increases in sales when they get rid of copy protection, which utterly flies in the face of your theory. Why does this happen? Because people suddenly can pirate it, try it, and a percentage of those people then turn around and buy it. Either way, that percentage tends to be substantially greater than the percentage who would blindly buy it if they could not pirate it. Every study I've ever seen on this subject has shown that noncommercial piracy increases sales revenue, and that is true whether you're talking about software or music or DVDs or any other content.
By contrast, you might be able to argue that commercial piracy in China has restricted the growth of legitimate software in China. Of course, this only occurs because large-scale commercial piracy has little regulation. Manufacturing of counterfeit hardware is similarly loosely regulated. The reason people in China buy the fakes so frequently, however, is not merely to save money; there are two main reasons why people buy fakes:
The bigger problem here is that products cannot reasonably be sold at different prices in different markets without huge import tariffs. Otherwise, people will just grey-market the things, and you've lost your more expensive market. This is equally true for software as it is for hardware. The driving force behind piracy is to produce a low-cost equivalent for markets that cannot afford the original, which means it has precisely the same driving force as most other counterfeiting, and with largely the same results. In markets that can afford the original, the majority of buyers get the real thing, and the majority of people who get the counterfeit product would not have purchased the real thing at all. The exceptions are people who don't know that they are buying fakes (which is almost never the case for noncommercial piracy).
In the case of software, however, piracy (commercial fakes good enough to fool people notwithstanding) actually is less harmful than counterfeiting in other areas because of the need for interoperability. A fake iPod need not interoperate with a real iPod. A pirated copy of Word is most likely going to interact with documents produced by many other copies of Word. Thus, even pirated copies of software can create significant income in other markets.
For example, Windows is massively pirated in China, and so is Office, but most people in China would not be able to afford paid copies of Office. That's okay, though, because every business in the U.S. that does business with China does pay for copies of Office as part of doing business with those Chinese companies. Were pirated versions not available, those Chinese companies would use open source equivalents and U.S. companies would be forced to use those open source equivalents instead of buying copies of Office. Therefore, Chinese piracy of software benefits Microsoft's bottom line, albeit not to the degree that selling licensed copies in China would, were it feasible to do so without cannibalizing U.S. markets.
You have now. Nice to meet you.
I've read stories about Chinese fake iPod models coming out within a few weeks of the original products. The barrier to large-scale counterfeiting is largely the fear of getting caught even with physical products. Most OEM makers aren't going to take the risk of installing fake stuff, the statistical majority of people don't download copies of software instead of buying it due to the prevalence of trojans, etc. In short, counterfeiting concerns are not really unique to software.
Since you mentioned Cisco, there was a huge Cisco counterfeiting ring that was recently busted and some $78 million worth of fake equipment was recovered (about .2% of Cisco's annual revenue). Could it displace the real thing? Probably not, but neither could counterfeit copies of WIndow, for the reasons stated previously.
The original developer didn't get anywhere near $60 unless the game sold for close to $200. The original retailer got $60. Of that, they probably gave about $40 to their distributor, who in turn gave about $20 to the game publisher. These numbers are all approximate, of course.
I think you're way overestimating the profit to the manufacturer on the initial sale. I'm not sure in software, but in most industries, channel costs are somewhere around 60-65%, IIRC. So for a $60 game, the publisher gets about $21-24. If they sell the DLC at $15, they're making almost as much money on resale as they did on the original game.
The next logical step, then, is to eliminate the retail chain entirely. At that point, they could sell copies at $20, still average more money per copy than before, and sell a lot more copies in total.
If it says "full retail", then that constitutes price fixing, which is usually illegal.
The problem is that content creators think that their works are somehow "special" and unlike physical objects. As long as we as a society continue to play into that delusion, they will continue to believe this, will continue to believe that their efforts to undermine the resale market are productive, and will continue to believe that any loss in sales due to those efforts are caused by piracy. Until they hit rock bottom, they will have no reason to question their delusion.
When you deal with delusional people, there is no reasoning with them; they are well beyond that point. All you can really do is isolate them where they can do no harm. Stop buying products that try to restrict resale, then write them a letter to tell them why you decided not to buy their products. Then wait for those companies to die off and for new companies run by saner people to emerge from the ashes. Buy their products instead.
Now you might be asking yourself why you wrote the letter if the companies won't change. Well, a few of them might, but that's not the reason for the letter; the people reading your letters likely have no say in the matter, or else the policies would change. The reason for the letter is that the people who read your letter are the ones who are still going to be out there on the ground and in the trenches starting up the new companies that replace these companies, giving advice about what works and what doesn't, being the voices of reason. So at least in the long term, the letters help, albeit not with the products and companies currently out there.
It may be a long painful journey, but the only way to fix most companies is to run them out of business and start over. Just say no to single-use downloadable content.
How many studies do you need? I've linked to half a dozen in this thread that all draw the same basic conclusion.... Someone can almost certainly find a flaw in any study, but after eight or ten such studies, you really have to wonder if they're looking for flaws to support an agenda rather than because there's any real possibility that those completely different flaws all just happened to skew the results of all these studies in the same direction.
Definitely legal at least in parts of Europe. I've seen yogurt with HFCS in Italy as recently as summer of '08.
Except that pure glucose syrup also doesn't cause as much weight gain as an unbound mixture of glucose and fructose (a.k.a. HFCS).
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/reprint/88/6/1733S.pdf
Glucose absorption is regulated by your body using insulin. Fructose is not. Thus, pure fructose is significantly worse than HFCS. Pretty much every study I've ever seen has conclusively shown that fructose is the worst of the sugars, and that it is converted more easily to fat than any other sugar.
Right now, they aren't compressing at all, apparently. 140 characters * 31 bits per character is 4,340 bits, so if they are only getting 4200 bits, they're doing slightly worse than completely uncompressed data here. I'm guessing they have a signature on the front end that loses a few bits.
The question is whether they are using random data or data from real-world sources. If the latter, you might be able to construct a compressor that picks the best of a few hundred compression schemes, then pick the one that got the most data in within 139 characters, and use the 140th 31 bits to encode which scheme you used. If you get lucky and the data happens to be one of the types you're expecting (e.g. uncompressed image data), then you could easily get substantial lossless compression (2:1 should be a piece of cake).
On the other hand, if the source data is truly random (or nearly so, e.g. bytes from the middle of a bzip2 file), then the winner will be equally random, so there's no point in wasting your time being inventive. Instead, just rig the competition by creating a billion Twitter accounts and using the username as additional data bytes.
And, of course, if the person doing the compression can pick the source data, then I can tweet the contents of the Library of Congress with one URL....
I'm not certain. Maybe your power company's metering is set up to penalize you when you have a highly reactive load, and that you're cutting off all your resistive loads that previously balanced things out a bit. Do you mostly use CFLs? Or perhaps the power company's metering intentionally penalizes houses that draw more heavily from one side of the transformer so that people won't do that. (That said, I can't imagine why they would do that; once you get past the building transformer, it's the same load either way, and up to the building transformer, it's your problem if it fails, so unless they under-specify the building transformers themselves, that seems a little silly.)
Another possibility would be that your building ground is inadequate. If you have, say, a bunch of devices with linear regulators (as opposed to switching regulators), they dissipate more power at higher source voltages. If the voltage sags because the ground has gone high because of other devices putting current into a poor ground, they will draw less power. When those other devices stop raising the ground reference, the linear regulators would draw more current. So the requirement would be that the other devices would have to draw less power than the extra current draw from the linear regulators. Perhaps you shut off a bunch of cheap CFLs that draw high VA but draw low wattage (or other reactive loads).
That said, I'm grasping at straws here; IANAEE; IJPOOSD. It's certainly very odd.
There's some confusion here, and unfortunately, you're both right. The true definition of a phase is the time delay of an electrical signal. By definition, when you go through a building transformer, you get two AC voltages that are effectively 180 degrees out of phase. Thus, by any reasonable standard of electronics, households have two-phase power.
Unfortunately, when it comes to electrical power generation, the term "phase" is commonly overloaded to refer not to any arbitrary phase, but to specific phases (0 degrees, 120 degrees, and 240 degrees) of three-phase power as seen in high-voltage distribution lines. So in that respect, each household gets only a single phase.
I would argue that the people saying home power is two-phase power are more technically correct, but calling it two-phase power does risk confusion with another, obsolete two-phase power system that had two phases that were 90 degrees apart, so it's probably best that folks avoid using such terms and instead describe these household phases as being the two legs of your building transformer instead.
<insurance_adjuster>Hey, we said earthquake-proof. We didn't say it was volcano-proof. Besides, you'll specifically note in the fine print that we disclaim responsibility for all damages due to acts of God.</insurance_adjuster>
Ah, but sucrose is broken down into fructose and glucose over a period of time. By contrast, free fructose is ready to absorb immediately. It's would not be at all surprising for the body to absorb bound and unbound fructose at different rates as a result of the extra processing required before bound fructose can be absorbed.
And now, with this study, we can state with a fair degree of certainty that the AMA was wrong. So now, hopefully, this will put to rest the question of whether the rise in HFCS has caused the temporally coincident rise in obesity in the U.S. (which was previously only suspected due to correlation) so researchers can focus on the more important question of why the body treats it differently.
But it won't. This isn't the first study that has suggested a strong causal link between HFCS and obesity. This one will be ignored by the nay-sayers just like all the others. (Note that some of those links aren't to studies, but rather to papers about the studies, etc., but the links in their references are staggering.) *sigh*
Having dealt with GoDaddy in the past (it took less than a month from setting up the hosting account to me threatening to sue them for breach), I'm pretty certain that the reason has nothing to do with doing right by their customers, so that pretty much leaves the alternatives; when you eliminate the unimaginable, whatever remains must be the case.... :-D
My guess would be that it would take too much effort to add this to their purchasing system. They seem utterly incapable of making even simple changes to that system, which tells me that it's probably an unholy mess....
The problem is that the day the U.S. Government successfully make anything fraud-proof is the day a (suidae) sus domestica obtains an aviation license.
Unfortunately, being the U.S. Government, they will no doubt pull the same sort of stupidity that made social security numbers a nightmare---specifically, treating this new token as an unforgeable piece of information, thus ensuring that anything verified with this identifier is not subject to scrutiny or correction even when fraud has clearly occurred.
Basically, to them, "fraud-proof" just means "good enough that we can ignore the problems without the peasants revolting".
I'm just waiting for the inevitable joke about another gas giant that was renamed in 2620 to end those stupid jokes once and for all....
Ah, but all this efficiency assumes that they'll be sane and will use switching regulators. Linear regulators are ten for a buck in quantities. :-D
Wow, does that make me cynical, or what?
You are right that running around low single digit volts isn't efficient. That said, I thought you were suggesting running the actual silicon on 12V, which would be way worse....
Stepping down to a volt or two at the drive level is perfectly fine. It certainly does mean that you can get away with smaller wires without incurring appreciable voltage drop. On the other hand, the current drain from these things is probably so low that I'm not sure if it will make enough difference to worry about. :-)