True, true. I really should have said that Apple is the owner; but makes it very difficult for its vassals to enforce any restrictions on their vassals. Everyone is supposed to be a direct vassal of Apple, with only the most token support given to situations where somebody wants to farm out a large quantity of iPads to people under their organizational control.
Umm, this article is about 'gas' as in 'natural gas', not as in 'gasoline'.
And, as it happens, one of the things that utilities like about combined cycle gas turbine units is that (by power plant standards) you can knock 'em together extremely quickly and cheaply, and once constructed, you can ramp them up and down very quickly indeed.
It's kind of nuts that natural gas is cheap enough that these things would be competing with base-load units; but natural gas plants have been the peaking-load choice for years.
It sounds like the school districts (either because their IT staff are monumental idiots, or, probably more likely, because nobody budgeted in anything for "device management" because 'Hey, iPads are easy!') were just using Exchange activesync restrictions, which are... more or less worth what you pay. Delete the (probably boring) school email account, and away you go. By Fucking Design.
The various Apple-blessed 'MDM' services (either 3rd party contract types, or in-house on the ridiculous hardware that Apple calls 'servers' these days) are incrementally more robust; but iPads are fundamentally aimed at 'user-is-owner' scenarios, with Apple occasionally throwing a crumb and a contemptuous sneer in the direction of anything else.
(Incidentally, that's one thing that surprises me about 'WinRT'. Microsoft, fuck man, You Could Have Had The Tablet With Native Active Directory Support. But you didn't. You voluntarily removed that feature. Are you totally insane? That's one area, at least, where you could have blown the pitiful excuses for 'device management' in the competing ecosystems to hell and back; but no. Not a default, not even an option you can buy... What were you thinking?)
I suspect that you could do it (if nothing else, cheat: anti-drug vaccines are a big area of research, so you can probably find somebody to sell you antibodies targeted at any of the major ones, at which point you smear it on a slide and work out a means of detecting antibody/antigen binding...); but that would probably be a good way to discover the other major virtue of animal olfactory systems:
With rather limited exceptions (certain contact anesthetics will temporarily knock the sense of smell offline, cocaine included if memory serves, and contact with something nasty enough to physically damage the sensory cells: eg. occupational ammonia exposure, squirting zinc solutions up your nose, will eventually toast the sense of smell entirely), organisms are pretty good at self-cleaning. Once exposure to a scent stops, the olfactory system is back and ready for action in short order. Whether this is because it employs some fancy non-binding mechanism, or because 'cells' are the closest things to sci-fi nanites that we know of, I don't know; but it works.
Antibody or chemical-reaction based systems are inherently consumable, and such specialized electronic gas sensors as do exist can be vulnerable to 'poisoning' by environmental contaminants. (Among the more obnoxious, catalytic methane sensors are poisoned by silicone vapors, as found in about a zillion elastomers, lubricants, and all sorts of other things. Just something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself in a coal mine... A poisoned methane sensor is indistinguishable from a methane sensor that just isn't detecting any methane, so replace regularly and avoid sparks and open flames.)
I find it remarkable and interesting that we still can't or at least not easily produce eith sensors the sniffing capabilities of these critters.
Aside from the fact that the answer would more or less inevitably involve some you-have-fun-fabricating-that micro to nanoscale arrangement of chemical receptors, we labor under the considerable difficulty that we don't really know how scent works.
With something like sight, it's possible to work more or less entirely independently of any real understanding of the eye, human or otherwise, because things like 'primary colors' and color mixing actually work pretty well at handling a wide variety of real-world problems and are simple enough that a decent art curriculum probably covered them before you finished high school. There are certainly horrible complexities ('metallic' isn't a color; but it certainly is a recognizable optical phenomenon, also, please characterize any deviations from the expected result when I take the idealized 24-bit RGB image displayed on my non-ideal 8-bit RBG monitor and send it over to my printer, using CMYK inks...); but 'just put a photosensitive material behind an array of R G and B filters' does actually work. If you proceed to brute-force the hell out of it, it works even better.
With something like scent, we know about plenty of strong and distinctive scents; but nothing 'primary'. Mixing is somewhere between unintuitive and pure black magic, prediction from chemical structures(even if perfectly well defined and provided in whatever form you prefer) is quite difficult outside of a few very well known areas, it's a total mess. Certainly, our ability to (cheaply and quickly, and from very small samples) analyze chemicals in the environment isn't as advanced as we would like; but even if it were, it's not as though we can see ourselves progressing toward the smelloscope, with some technical limitations (as we could in the early days of photography, were basically everything sucked; but basically everything was also precisely analogous to its better-refined contemporary chemical film systems), we'd just be better at identifying molecules flying around in the air.
At this rate, in 50 years we'll be carrying them around and debating if personal linear-accelerator-guns are covered under the 2nd amendment.
"The only way to stop a bad guy with a linear accelerator is a good guy with a linear accelerator. Or, um, a layer of lead, DU, tungsten, or some other fairly dense material, of appropriate thickness. Wait, did I mention lead? Where was I?"
Riiiiiight, because anyone in their right mind is gonna click a random link ending in.dmg... Aka, a Mac disk image file, commonly used for distributing software.
Hey, if you think that it's diseased, don't mount it. Did you skip sex ed or something?
Give me an efficient source of neutron flux and I can stop collecting smoke detectors. I'm kidding obviously, but if this is cheaper than collecting radium watch hands we may soon have more "Nuclear boy scouts" on our hands.
On the plus side, not all neutron generators are polite enough to stop generating when you cut the power, so it might be an improvement.
I'm a trifle surprised that they'd be using some fancy laser apparatus in this situation:
There are aspects of nuclear decommissioning (if memory serves, some lucky sucker got to deal with the 'eh, we don't know what this is, so we'll just weld it into barrels and leave it for the future' supply stored at Hanford, much of which was virulently radioactive, some, which one is always a surprise, also chemically unpleasant and/or explosive) where you can't get away with the heat, open flames, and vaporized-bits-getting everywhere that you see with lasers, various cutting torches, or high powered saws. For that sort of thing, you have somewhat exotic toys like liquid nitrogen cutting jets.
If you are allowed to expose the sample to ridiculous temperatures and open flames, though, why expensive lasers rather than boring (and mature and relatively cheap) cutting torches or thermic lances?
Being concerned with endocrine disruptors has no 'political correctness' problem. Hell, being worried about bisphenol A was practically a lifestyle choice just recently. Now, if you think that your primary problem is hormonal contraceptives, you might have an accuracy problem; but there are broad swaths of commonly used chemicals that make endocrinologists nervous. They tend to have influential users who really appreciate the shareholder value of being able to just dump them in the nearest waterway, so good luck with any progress in the area; but it isn't hard to find science types who will back you up.
What's the cost of banning this stuff? It's banned in the EU, so it's clear that it doesn't kill the industry, though it certainly will shift more consumption to vegetables and other meats. I'm not sure that's a bad thing for society, either.
Depends on which ones you are talking about: 'Endocrine disruptor' is a very, very broad category, covering chemicals used in a whole bunch of industries, united only by the fact that their similarity to various endogenous hormones gives considerable reason for concern.
It clearly isn't a safe default assumption (since it was wrong in this case); but biochemistry is loaded with "Oh, yeah, this molecule is a pain in the ass to synthesize, unless you have this totally elegant catalytic protein, as organisms that use it do" and has fewer well known examples of 'Eh, breaks down under UV; but it'll be fine once the radiation stops'.
There are chemical equilibria designed explicitly for that purpose (self-darkening sunglasses contain one such, whose UV-exposure product is blackish and whose default product is transparent); but it is a bit of a surprise to see a biologically active molecule doing it.
So, in the future, terrorists will sacrifice considerable amounts of operational secrecy because they are wannabe-mediagenic attention whores?
Isn't this a terribly convenient development, for everyone except the wannabe-mediagenic attention whores who are currently paid by news channels to bloviate mindlessly on the minimal information available 24/7, without pause, until substantive information becomes available, which terrifies them and drives them back to celebrity gossip?
"The first is that there is no known mechanism for most of the effects reported in the literature. Without this mechanism a real science based approach is impossible."
That's a bit strong, isn't it? We've spent how long now have either absolutely no clue or fancy-dubiously-verifiable-math to explain this 'gravity' nonsense, without appreciable harm to many of the disciplines that include it as a major part of their theoretical structure...
Sure, having to do your testing along the lines of statistical survey-and-infer isn't ideal; but it's hardly handwaving nescience. Doesn't mean that all science done that way is worth anything, any of it could be and some probably is crap; but (if anything) given the vast universe of possibility, statistical inference work is one of your few hopes of narrowing down the areas where you need to dig in and go hunting for mechanisms.
The other day I caught a bit of a documentary on the zombie craze. It ended with the head of some zombie research institute saying something along the lines that deep down, they view the zombie appocolypse as a metaphor for any disaster, manmade or natural. The same tactics, supplies, and training you need for a zombie outbreak can also be used to survive another hurricane Katrina.
Zombie survival fantasies are also about the most tactful way to work through your serious interest in gunning down shambling hordes of your abhuman inferiors, without attracting social condemnation or law-enforcement interest.
This is not to say that all zombie enthusiasts are doing this, many are indeed, harmless LARPer types who are guilty only of perhaps not knowing when a premise is no longer amusing; but if you do happen to suspect that the Racial Holy War is looming, and negroid looter swarms will emerge from their slums to march on the exurbs any day now, a little fretting about 'zombies' is a good way to get your feet wet without making yourself a total pariah in polite company.
True, though it wouldn't be rocket surgery (and I'd hope they would already have done so) to establish 'baseline' values by looking at water without known inputs from agricultural or industrial sources, and comparing those baselines with ones that do. Shoddy work gets done in science, as anywhere; but 'negative controls' aren't exactly an alien concept.
I assume that there simply weren't as many endocrine disruptors in the wild, so it was less of an issue over evolutionary time; but for (modestly complex) chemicals to be photosensitive enough to degrade; but suitably structurally favored to have more than a remote probability of being created by the recombination of their breakdown products is rather interesting...
Would it be in any way adaptive for hormones themselves(which disruptors are often very similar to, hence the ability to neatly disrupt the endocrine system) to have this level of durability, or is it much more likely that it's mere chance, biologically irrelevant until we started pumping the things out on an industrial scale?
What's a "partial port"? Does it run in an emulator or something?
A good question. I assumed that it meant that not all options, facilities, or codecs are ported yet - but it is not clear from the release notes.
I'd be more inclined to suspect that it hasn't been bodged into the...um...wonderful new Win8/RT UI-formerly-known-as-metro yet. VLC's codecs and whatnot have already been ported to just about anything with the power to support them and a compiler to suit; but their enthusiasm for artisinally crafted platform specific UIs is less significant.
If it's partly server side, the file you download after paying can be digitally marked with your identifying information and when thousands of copies of that turn up in the hands of third parties or on a torrent, they can go after the person who paid for it for illegal file sharing.
True enough, which creates the embarrassing perverse incentive for the hypothetical release group to pay with the credentials of the most hapless, sympathetic, ma_and_pa_clueless@AOL.com people they can find, just to see if the rightsholder will take the bait and sue the ostensible leakers...
This is a step back. This will be exploited/cracked/patched to hell and back, especially if the bulk is kept client-side. This is DRM. Every lock is built around the key, nothing is perfectly secure.
I hope it helps the artists though, i know musicians everywhere get fucked severely by the "record companies".
Theoretically (especially for 'release promotion' type stuff, where longevity is not a concern and awful 'analytics' people are probably salivating over the numbers) the plan might call for a server-side component(which would allow both tracking of interested users and allow the bittorrent-distributed component to be incomplete and thus not crackable on its own). That wouldn't stop the trivial redistribution of de-crippled copies once one person takes one for the team and complies with the demands of the package; but if 99% is distributed as a torrent, for cost reasons, and the last 1% has to be obtained from the TLS-authenticated server of the distributing party, it might not be possible to open the package without jumping through whatever hoops that server stipulates. Not that it really matters, though, since it's either all client-side, and thus breakable, probably easily, or it's partially server-side, in which case you just need one good copy in the wild and then you distribute that.
Well, either there is a crappy DRM scheme (which won't actually stop anybody for very long) or there isn't, in which case people won't be stopped at all.
Wow, bullying, in the boy scouts? I'm utterly shocked. Who would have though an organization full of teenage asshole testosterone pumps would be susceptible to bullying?
This was bullying by the boy scouts, an even less shocking phenomenon.
(If anything, the boy scouts, and similar organizations in other countries, have actually chilled out considerably since the bad old days in the fires of psychotic European ultra-nationalism. They still skew right on god and gays; but the 'direct feeder into the armed might of The State' vibe has been toned down considerably)
Not that it mattered to the P4-area contest(where desktop OSes and workloads would remain 32 bit for quite some time to come, and RAM fairly expensive); but the A64 was a real smack in the face for IA64...
Intel has their grand, big-iron-class, future-of-enterprise-computing 64-bit architecture, then AMD pops up "Hi guys, who wants a 64-bit CPU, fully backwards compatible with your 32-bit x86 code and pretty damn fast at that, for only slightly more than the price of a nice desktop CPU?"
Boom. Headshot. Game over man, game over.
The overclockable 2.4-2.8 Northwoods kept up on the 32 bit side at the time, and Intel has since swallowed their pride and put out some genuinely brutal 'EMT64' parts; but IA64 was buried beyond hope.
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True, true. I really should have said that Apple is the owner; but makes it very difficult for its vassals to enforce any restrictions on their vassals. Everyone is supposed to be a direct vassal of Apple, with only the most token support given to situations where somebody wants to farm out a large quantity of iPads to people under their organizational control.
Umm, this article is about 'gas' as in 'natural gas', not as in 'gasoline'.
And, as it happens, one of the things that utilities like about combined cycle gas turbine units is that (by power plant standards) you can knock 'em together extremely quickly and cheaply, and once constructed, you can ramp them up and down very quickly indeed.
It's kind of nuts that natural gas is cheap enough that these things would be competing with base-load units; but natural gas plants have been the peaking-load choice for years.
It sounds like the school districts (either because their IT staff are monumental idiots, or, probably more likely, because nobody budgeted in anything for "device management" because 'Hey, iPads are easy!') were just using Exchange activesync restrictions, which are... more or less worth what you pay. Delete the (probably boring) school email account, and away you go. By Fucking Design.
The various Apple-blessed 'MDM' services (either 3rd party contract types, or in-house on the ridiculous hardware that Apple calls 'servers' these days) are incrementally more robust; but iPads are fundamentally aimed at 'user-is-owner' scenarios, with Apple occasionally throwing a crumb and a contemptuous sneer in the direction of anything else.
(Incidentally, that's one thing that surprises me about 'WinRT'. Microsoft, fuck man, You Could Have Had The Tablet With Native Active Directory Support. But you didn't. You voluntarily removed that feature. Are you totally insane? That's one area, at least, where you could have blown the pitiful excuses for 'device management' in the competing ecosystems to hell and back; but no. Not a default, not even an option you can buy... What were you thinking?)
I see 'Wall Street analysts' and 'meltdown' in the same sentence. I should probably just bend over and subsidize somebody, to get it over with, right?
Who's it going to be this time?
I suspect that you could do it (if nothing else, cheat: anti-drug vaccines are a big area of research, so you can probably find somebody to sell you antibodies targeted at any of the major ones, at which point you smear it on a slide and work out a means of detecting antibody/antigen binding...); but that would probably be a good way to discover the other major virtue of animal olfactory systems:
With rather limited exceptions (certain contact anesthetics will temporarily knock the sense of smell offline, cocaine included if memory serves, and contact with something nasty enough to physically damage the sensory cells: eg. occupational ammonia exposure, squirting zinc solutions up your nose, will eventually toast the sense of smell entirely), organisms are pretty good at self-cleaning. Once exposure to a scent stops, the olfactory system is back and ready for action in short order. Whether this is because it employs some fancy non-binding mechanism, or because 'cells' are the closest things to sci-fi nanites that we know of, I don't know; but it works.
Antibody or chemical-reaction based systems are inherently consumable, and such specialized electronic gas sensors as do exist can be vulnerable to 'poisoning' by environmental contaminants. (Among the more obnoxious, catalytic methane sensors are poisoned by silicone vapors, as found in about a zillion elastomers, lubricants, and all sorts of other things. Just something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself in a coal mine... A poisoned methane sensor is indistinguishable from a methane sensor that just isn't detecting any methane, so replace regularly and avoid sparks and open flames.)
I find it remarkable and interesting that we still can't or at least not easily produce eith sensors the sniffing capabilities of these critters.
Aside from the fact that the answer would more or less inevitably involve some you-have-fun-fabricating-that micro to nanoscale arrangement of chemical receptors, we labor under the considerable difficulty that we don't really know how scent works.
With something like sight, it's possible to work more or less entirely independently of any real understanding of the eye, human or otherwise, because things like 'primary colors' and color mixing actually work pretty well at handling a wide variety of real-world problems and are simple enough that a decent art curriculum probably covered them before you finished high school. There are certainly horrible complexities ('metallic' isn't a color; but it certainly is a recognizable optical phenomenon, also, please characterize any deviations from the expected result when I take the idealized 24-bit RGB image displayed on my non-ideal 8-bit RBG monitor and send it over to my printer, using CMYK inks...); but 'just put a photosensitive material behind an array of R G and B filters' does actually work. If you proceed to brute-force the hell out of it, it works even better.
With something like scent, we know about plenty of strong and distinctive scents; but nothing 'primary'. Mixing is somewhere between unintuitive and pure black magic, prediction from chemical structures(even if perfectly well defined and provided in whatever form you prefer) is quite difficult outside of a few very well known areas, it's a total mess. Certainly, our ability to (cheaply and quickly, and from very small samples) analyze chemicals in the environment isn't as advanced as we would like; but even if it were, it's not as though we can see ourselves progressing toward the smelloscope, with some technical limitations (as we could in the early days of photography, were basically everything sucked; but basically everything was also precisely analogous to its better-refined contemporary chemical film systems), we'd just be better at identifying molecules flying around in the air.
At this rate, in 50 years we'll be carrying them around and debating if personal linear-accelerator-guns are covered under the 2nd amendment.
"The only way to stop a bad guy with a linear accelerator is a good guy with a linear accelerator. Or, um, a layer of lead, DU, tungsten, or some other fairly dense material, of appropriate thickness. Wait, did I mention lead? Where was I?"
Riiiiiight, because anyone in their right mind is gonna click a random link ending in .dmg... Aka, a Mac disk image file, commonly used for distributing software.
Hey, if you think that it's diseased, don't mount it. Did you skip sex ed or something?
Give me an efficient source of neutron flux and I can stop collecting smoke detectors. I'm kidding obviously, but if this is cheaper than collecting radium watch hands we may soon have more "Nuclear boy scouts" on our hands.
On the plus side, not all neutron generators are polite enough to stop generating when you cut the power, so it might be an improvement.
I'm a trifle surprised that they'd be using some fancy laser apparatus in this situation:
There are aspects of nuclear decommissioning (if memory serves, some lucky sucker got to deal with the 'eh, we don't know what this is, so we'll just weld it into barrels and leave it for the future' supply stored at Hanford, much of which was virulently radioactive, some, which one is always a surprise, also chemically unpleasant and/or explosive) where you can't get away with the heat, open flames, and vaporized-bits-getting everywhere that you see with lasers, various cutting torches, or high powered saws. For that sort of thing, you have somewhat exotic toys like liquid nitrogen cutting jets. If you are allowed to expose the sample to ridiculous temperatures and open flames, though, why expensive lasers rather than boring (and mature and relatively cheap) cutting torches or thermic lances?
Being concerned with endocrine disruptors has no 'political correctness' problem. Hell, being worried about bisphenol A was practically a lifestyle choice just recently. Now, if you think that your primary problem is hormonal contraceptives, you might have an accuracy problem; but there are broad swaths of commonly used chemicals that make endocrinologists nervous. They tend to have influential users who really appreciate the shareholder value of being able to just dump them in the nearest waterway, so good luck with any progress in the area; but it isn't hard to find science types who will back you up.
What's the cost of banning this stuff? It's banned in the EU, so it's clear that it doesn't kill the industry, though it certainly will shift more consumption to vegetables and other meats. I'm not sure that's a bad thing for society, either.
Depends on which ones you are talking about: 'Endocrine disruptor' is a very, very broad category, covering chemicals used in a whole bunch of industries, united only by the fact that their similarity to various endogenous hormones gives considerable reason for concern.
It clearly isn't a safe default assumption (since it was wrong in this case); but biochemistry is loaded with "Oh, yeah, this molecule is a pain in the ass to synthesize, unless you have this totally elegant catalytic protein, as organisms that use it do" and has fewer well known examples of 'Eh, breaks down under UV; but it'll be fine once the radiation stops'.
There are chemical equilibria designed explicitly for that purpose (self-darkening sunglasses contain one such, whose UV-exposure product is blackish and whose default product is transparent); but it is a bit of a surprise to see a biologically active molecule doing it.
And the Mumbai guys were coordinating over BBM... Probably the last time RIM was on the winning side of anything.
So, in the future, terrorists will sacrifice considerable amounts of operational secrecy because they are wannabe-mediagenic attention whores? Isn't this a terribly convenient development, for everyone except the wannabe-mediagenic attention whores who are currently paid by news channels to bloviate mindlessly on the minimal information available 24/7, without pause, until substantive information becomes available, which terrifies them and drives them back to celebrity gossip?
"The first is that there is no known mechanism for most of the effects reported in the literature. Without this mechanism a real science based approach is impossible."
That's a bit strong, isn't it? We've spent how long now have either absolutely no clue or fancy-dubiously-verifiable-math to explain this 'gravity' nonsense, without appreciable harm to many of the disciplines that include it as a major part of their theoretical structure...
Sure, having to do your testing along the lines of statistical survey-and-infer isn't ideal; but it's hardly handwaving nescience. Doesn't mean that all science done that way is worth anything, any of it could be and some probably is crap; but (if anything) given the vast universe of possibility, statistical inference work is one of your few hopes of narrowing down the areas where you need to dig in and go hunting for mechanisms.
The other day I caught a bit of a documentary on the zombie craze. It ended with the head of some zombie research institute saying something along the lines that deep down, they view the zombie appocolypse as a metaphor for any disaster, manmade or natural. The same tactics, supplies, and training you need for a zombie outbreak can also be used to survive another hurricane Katrina.
Zombie survival fantasies are also about the most tactful way to work through your serious interest in gunning down shambling hordes of your abhuman inferiors, without attracting social condemnation or law-enforcement interest.
This is not to say that all zombie enthusiasts are doing this, many are indeed, harmless LARPer types who are guilty only of perhaps not knowing when a premise is no longer amusing; but if you do happen to suspect that the Racial Holy War is looming, and negroid looter swarms will emerge from their slums to march on the exurbs any day now, a little fretting about 'zombies' is a good way to get your feet wet without making yourself a total pariah in polite company.
True, though it wouldn't be rocket surgery (and I'd hope they would already have done so) to establish 'baseline' values by looking at water without known inputs from agricultural or industrial sources, and comparing those baselines with ones that do. Shoddy work gets done in science, as anywhere; but 'negative controls' aren't exactly an alien concept.
I assume that there simply weren't as many endocrine disruptors in the wild, so it was less of an issue over evolutionary time; but for (modestly complex) chemicals to be photosensitive enough to degrade; but suitably structurally favored to have more than a remote probability of being created by the recombination of their breakdown products is rather interesting...
Would it be in any way adaptive for hormones themselves(which disruptors are often very similar to, hence the ability to neatly disrupt the endocrine system) to have this level of durability, or is it much more likely that it's mere chance, biologically irrelevant until we started pumping the things out on an industrial scale?
What's a "partial port"? Does it run in an emulator or something?
A good question. I assumed that it meant that not all options, facilities, or codecs are ported yet - but it is not clear from the release notes.
I'd be more inclined to suspect that it hasn't been bodged into the...um...wonderful new Win8/RT UI-formerly-known-as-metro yet. VLC's codecs and whatnot have already been ported to just about anything with the power to support them and a compiler to suit; but their enthusiasm for artisinally crafted platform specific UIs is less significant.
If it's partly server side, the file you download after paying can be digitally marked with your identifying information and when thousands of copies of that turn up in the hands of third parties or on a torrent, they can go after the person who paid for it for illegal file sharing.
True enough, which creates the embarrassing perverse incentive for the hypothetical release group to pay with the credentials of the most hapless, sympathetic, ma_and_pa_clueless@AOL.com people they can find, just to see if the rightsholder will take the bait and sue the ostensible leakers...
This is a step back. This will be exploited/cracked/patched to hell and back, especially if the bulk is kept client-side. This is DRM. Every lock is built around the key, nothing is perfectly secure. I hope it helps the artists though, i know musicians everywhere get fucked severely by the "record companies".
Theoretically (especially for 'release promotion' type stuff, where longevity is not a concern and awful 'analytics' people are probably salivating over the numbers) the plan might call for a server-side component(which would allow both tracking of interested users and allow the bittorrent-distributed component to be incomplete and thus not crackable on its own). That wouldn't stop the trivial redistribution of de-crippled copies once one person takes one for the team and complies with the demands of the package; but if 99% is distributed as a torrent, for cost reasons, and the last 1% has to be obtained from the TLS-authenticated server of the distributing party, it might not be possible to open the package without jumping through whatever hoops that server stipulates. Not that it really matters, though, since it's either all client-side, and thus breakable, probably easily, or it's partially server-side, in which case you just need one good copy in the wild and then you distribute that.
Well, either there is a crappy DRM scheme (which won't actually stop anybody for very long) or there isn't, in which case people won't be stopped at all.
So, sounds like bullshit to me either way.
Wow, bullying, in the boy scouts? I'm utterly shocked. Who would have though an organization full of teenage asshole testosterone pumps would be susceptible to bullying?
This was bullying by the boy scouts, an even less shocking phenomenon.
(If anything, the boy scouts, and similar organizations in other countries, have actually chilled out considerably since the bad old days in the fires of psychotic European ultra-nationalism. They still skew right on god and gays; but the 'direct feeder into the armed might of The State' vibe has been toned down considerably)
Not that it mattered to the P4-area contest(where desktop OSes and workloads would remain 32 bit for quite some time to come, and RAM fairly expensive); but the A64 was a real smack in the face for IA64...
Intel has their grand, big-iron-class, future-of-enterprise-computing 64-bit architecture, then AMD pops up "Hi guys, who wants a 64-bit CPU, fully backwards compatible with your 32-bit x86 code and pretty damn fast at that, for only slightly more than the price of a nice desktop CPU?"
Boom. Headshot. Game over man, game over.
The overclockable 2.4-2.8 Northwoods kept up on the 32 bit side at the time, and Intel has since swallowed their pride and put out some genuinely brutal 'EMT64' parts; but IA64 was buried beyond hope.