Are you surprised that the number is high, or that the number is low?
Personally, what I'd love to know is whether the FBI was being lazy with those 3,000(if we can do it with or without a court order, why go to the judge?) or whether they had 3,000 active bugs for investigations so flimsy that they couldn't find a judge to sign...
The former wouldn't be good, but would be unsurprising and fairly banal. Doing paperwork when you don't have to is a fairly rare psychological disorder, after all. The latter, on the other hand, would be 'uncomfortably retro' behavior on the FBI's part, hearkening back to their historically loose adherence to petty matters of law and due process.
If they are just on a fishing expedition, they'll probably assume that the device has failed/fallen off into a drainage ditch/whatever and call it a day.
If they are actually interested in you, it is quite likely that the same fine upstanding men with guns who installed the device will, shall we say, 'schedule a service call' at whatever place and time seems most likely based on tracking data from before you discovered the device...
If it has come to the point where you have a GPS bug on your car, they've probably already established the trivial details like your name, place of residence, record(if any), etc. They don't know exactly what you do every day, hence the bug; but unless you want to go into hardcore fugitive mode, checking up on the bug will just be a matter of motivation.
TFA, annoying but not terribly surprisingly, is light on that particular detail. They have a bit of he-said/she-said, an anecdote or two, and vague references to unnamed experts who have opinions, many mixed to negative, about the quality of the evaluation data.
A few related articles describe the approach, in broad terms, as being a statistical exercise where a class' future expected outcome is derived from their past scores on the state standardized test and then the delta between the actual outcome and the predicted outcome is used to judge the effect of the teacher on the students.
Depending on the dataset and the math, that isn't necessarily nonsense; but you'd need the details to know. The union, for its part, doesn't seem to have any more detailed information on what metrics they would prefer available; but has a number of serious reservations about this one. Given that Bill Gates, normally more of a 'charter-schools-and-metrics' kind of guy, dropped by to write an op-ed decrying the release as deeply counterproductive, I'm inclined to suspect that the union's position(while it may well have a core of old bats who think that 'seniority' is just fine, thanks, especially for them) isn't fighting just because they don't like the results...
I'm not personally familiar enough with any of the players involved to say anything specific, and the NYT is presently quite light on details.
I wonder, actually... Google offers hosted email packages that use your domain, branding, and whatnot, for business and EDU users. I wonder what they would charge to do a migration of Hotmail users to their backend... Not exactly a call microsoft would make; but it'd be interesting to hear the response from the Google sales rep, once they'd had a chance to pick their jaw up from the floor...
While I detest the notion that a report of that sort would be kept secret from the people who are paying for, and entrusting their children to, those being reported on, I would be quite interested to know whether the evaluations are actually worthwhile, useless, or even worse than useless.
As with the story about Australia pruning academics who didn't push papers fast enough that we discussed yesterday, there are a lot of bad ways to measure teacher effectiveness. Unfortunately, these include many of the easy ones and many of the popular ones.
Teachers aren't mystically unquantifiable flowers; but in a world where people can, with a straight face, propose 'Hey, just tot up their students' scores on the standardized test! Now you know which teachers are good!' without any sort of correction for such minor matters as 'student demographics' it is hard to be uniformly optimistic about teacher evaluations...
The other, broader, consideration is whether the teachers should feel justified in complaining about the level of public scrutiny that they are being subjected to relative to other state functionaries in positions of trust and authority... While there is a good argument to be made that teachers' job performance is a matter of public importance, I wonder if you could get a detailed evaluation of a NYC cop's record as easily as you could an NYC English teacher?
Too permanent, I suspect. We appear to prefer our torture procedures to be easily repeatable as many times as deemed necessary.
Now, cycling the patient through an administration of heroin followed by an administration of Naloxone(superb for treating opiate overdoses; but kicks you into full-on withdrawl fast)...
While heroin has never struck me as a terribly wise drug of choice, the notion of deliberately provoking an immune response to an opiate seems crazy risky...
We have a fairly extensive endogenous opioid system, with a variety of opioids and opioid receptors, in place and the results of immune system intereference with that would be... likely very unpleasant. If I were of the Mengele school of experimental medicine, I'd be fascinated to learn exactly what flavor of 'very unpleasant'; but I'm guessing that the ethics of that would be pretty shaky.
Unless I'm much mistaken, every device on that list is locked down by design. The success of that lockdown varies slightly; but they all derive their intentions from the unpleasant history of 'Conditional Access' set top box devices. There are hacks of varying completeness and difficulty for some of them; but they are all hostile by design from the bootloader up, so that's a cat-and-mouse thing at best.
On the plus side, the cost and power budget of implementing a comparatively open system(ie. a dinky Atom board has a binary BIOS; but at least its a closed firmware that is designed to boot anything a normal x86 system would, unlike the Boxee or GoogleTV, which are Atom-based but notably hostile, and a rasberry pi has a proprietary GPU firmware blob; but doesn't attempt to control user behavior) has fallen substantially in recent years; but any purpose-built system sold as supporting the various streaming services or DRM systems is going to be hostile, period.
While developing new ones would certainly be nice, we should really be going after the low-hanging fruit and cracking down, hard, on the present overuse in veterinary applications. Unpopular among the direct beneficiaries, certainly; but cheap per-capita and a guaranteed way of improving the efficacy of the drugs we already have, not just the ones we hope to develop...
Anybody who uses the phrase "digital natives" without a heavy dose of irony can usually be safely ignored.
Are there cases where dragging physical metaphors into computing is brutally-old-and-busted? Sure; but making MP3 players with UIs consisting of elaborate(but non-resizeable) bitmaps renditions of 1970s stereo gear was a moronic idea back in the 90s, just as it is now. Outside of agonizing over-literal nonsense like that, 'real life inspirations' seem to take two forms, neither obviously outmoded:
1. Remnants in name only: Your email client likely still has an 'inbox' and an 'outbox' because, at some point, somebody actually had two boxes on their desk. Guess what, it doesn't matter. The computerized abstractions have gained so many features(instant search, threading, sort-by-whatever-you-want, etc, etc.) that they bear almost no relation to their physical counterpart. They have to be called something, so the legacy name is harmless enough.
2. Borrowings that make sense because people want them: Y'know why stuff exists in 'real life'? Because people wanted them it. If they wanted the dead-tree version, they will probably want an electronic one, as well. Once that gets built, it will eventually be polished(having features added and archaisms removed) until it moves into category #1.)
This argument also seems to implicitly overstate the number of things that are somehow fundamentally digital. There are a lot of (mostly failed) ideas involving the dissemination of information in surprisingly modern ways within the constraints of antique media. Making variants of these ideas actually not fail this time will be a change; but it won't be one fundamentally tied to the internet(in anything other than an economic sense).
Of course not. How could quality be going down if the metric we are using because it is easy and convenient is going up? That would be difficult to model and therefore unthinkable. Why, it might even require me to have some subject-matter knowledge in the areas that my human resources do! I am way too focused on lining my bookshelf with copies of books about management fads for shit like that.
It depends on what you mean by 'discharged'. Some battery chemistries do, indeed, die(or at least suffer severe capacity damage) if 'discharged' in the sense of 'take a bare cell, connect to a resistor of suitable value until current drops to zero'. The high performance lithium cell chemistries certainly are rather touchy, and even humbled old lead-acid will start to sulfate if left discharged like that for any length of time... However, because that is a trivially bad thing, such batteries are hidden behind a management circuit that will delclare the battery 'discharged' and refuse to provide any further output well before the physically destructive discharge level is hit.
If Tesla actually built multi-kilodollar battery packs that allow their cells to run below safe discharge levels, somebody at Tesla needs a beating. If, however, this story is 'rechargable battery pack must be recharged and possibly recalibrated after running 'flat' as defined by the management circuit!', then the writer needs a beating.
The tight computer integration(and tight manufacturer/dealer grip on diagnostic details beyond the bare minimum ODBC stuff) reeks of pure profiteering; but there is a more defensible trade-off when it comes to mechanical damage:
Some, to be sure, is plain bullshit: 'bumper' ought to mean 'part designed to absorb minor bumps' not 'expensive piece of plastic with some chrome vacuum deposited on it'. However, many of the changes to the body designs, that do have the unfortunate, er, impact, of causing the car to crumple like a paper bag also have the convenient effect of eating the force that would traditionally have reduced the driver to a layer of extra-chunky meat sauce on the dashboard.
Given the relative costs of mechanics and trauma surgeons, and the present impossibility of just buying a new one if your body is a write-off, sacrificial engineering isn't all bad...
TFA appears to emphasize the shrinking delta between the best and the worst(as well as the gradual decline of the average number of problems per 100 vehicles). 92 issues per 100 cars certainly isn't something you'd want out of your satellites; but for fairly modest definitions of 'problem' isn't too terribly surprising for complex mechanical devices, relatively cheap, in the hands of unskilled users.
The big news is not that the absolute reliability of the best-in-class has changed that much, though it has improved a touch; but that the average quality of the junk has increased quite sharply, narrowing the reliability gap considerably.
In-car 'infotainment' and navigation systems are now becoming more common, so what we have gained in mechanical reliability we can make up in the endless sorrow of interacting with dubious software...
Ok. Somebody is completely off-their-head nuts, either the author or the people he is writing about(and I have my suspicions about the author...)
To the best of my knowledge, nobody pitches this 'cloud storage' stuff as a replacement for local storage, unless they are also selling some hosted software-as-a-vendor-lock-in 'solution'. It's a sufficiently overwhelmingly bad idea that nobody even tries. So, what exactly is he wasting an article on?
Yup, SATA drives are cheap and reasonably zippy. Y'know what's less cheap, more complex, and not as zippy? Good Backups, including offsite. And that, (along with the web hosting and CDN focused stuff) is what the 'cloud' people are selling. No shit delivering files over the internet with a 200ms round-trip and a teeny pipe isn't going to replace the local storage or a network share a couple of GigE hops away. Replace that balky tape library the next time it conks out, though? Not certain; but much more conceivable...
There seems to be some sort of fetish for 'respect', most commonly(but not entirely exclusively) exhibited by those people who've never deserved a dose of it in their lives. I don't know exactly why this crops up; but it definitely does. It's bad enough when those people demand respect for themselves regardless of desert and sometimes by force; but when they give up on that and hitch their self worth to a god or a flag or something they become truly insufferable.
After the apotheosis of Jobs, the reality distortion field was so intensified that space and time itself operate differently within the confines of his mortuary temple. Anybody within the sanctum operates as an innovator-outside-of-time. They may appear to release specific developments at specific points in the pitifully linear 'history' experienced by the unenlightened; but they(how this works is a Holy Mystery; but it is so)are simultaneously are perpetually innovating beyond time, have already invented all technologies worth inventing, and will invent all technologies worth inventing.
Human history is, in fact, simply a mortal's-eye-view of the bestowal of gifts of innovation on various Chosen at various times. The patent office is simply recognizing this.
It isn't so much a 'problem' as 'the direct intent' of using outlandish numbers.
If you hope to walk out with $500 million, starting at 'Eleventy Billion' and allowing yourself to be negotiated down is likely to work better than starting at 100 million and attempting to work up.
Frankly, both Oracle and Google should just stop fighting immediately and dedicate their effort to reverse-engineering this judge's apparently superb garbage-collecting algorithms...
In my (admittedly not-comprehensive experience) the more expensive the software the more likely that the 'DRM' was fairly minimal; but the greater the risk of real lawyers really going after you, personally, not as part of some shock-and-awe attempt fishing expedition...
For software that expensive, the sorts of ghastly DRM that get used on consumers and their $60 EA shovelware are mostly going to piss off your customers, their tech people, and your phone support drones. As much as this isn't the correct Slashdot answer, 'Bring in the lawyers' is likely both the best and least alienating technique.
That said, BSA bullshit tactics make more enemies than friends, you Do Not Want a situation where somebody who would be just fine with cutting the check fails to do so because license tracking is byzantine and then gets jumped. Similarly, you burn both legal hours and goodwill hitting people who aren't customers-who-underpay or customers-not-paying. If some warez kiddie is downloading it to justify his 6TB piracy server, or somebody's English class documentary is getting cut on your software instead of iMovie, that may be 'piracy'; but it isn't exactly a potential sale...
Do what you can to make license tracking and compliance easy(speaking as "IT" we have no enthusiasm for being the go-to piracy hatchetman when the higher-ups want to save some cash, so even token DRM can be useful in that it allows us to shrug and say 'Oh, sorry, I tried to install 5 extra copies, like you asked; but I can't get it to activate, and I read on CNET that bittorrent is a haven of viruses and rootkits.' if asked. However, at the same time, I'll be damned if I have to grovel through some mess of PDFs attached to vendor emails to figure out exactly how many 'Foo' licenses I have, whether they are 'person', 'seat', 'network', concurrent' CAL, whatever, and then grovel through N computers to figure out where the software is installed. Sometime I do, because sometimes it's my job; but it isn't at the top of the list(either of what I like to do, or of 'things I could be doing that would make users happier now'). If that is set, the honest and ethically-lazy-but-risk-averse customers are covered.
If you have people doing serious business stuff with cracked copies, nuke 'em from orbit. As for the rest of the cracked versions out there, it is unlikely that trying to win an arms race against people who crack software for fun is going to be profitable, and it is similarly unlikely that any amount of force is going to convert casual pirates without commercial use for your product into customers(worst case, they never give you a dime and get some use out of your product; best case, they get experience now and buy later; but you'll be lucky to make back the legal fees if you try to extract by force now...)
Slashdot Mirror
Are you surprised that the number is high, or that the number is low?
Personally, what I'd love to know is whether the FBI was being lazy with those 3,000(if we can do it with or without a court order, why go to the judge?) or whether they had 3,000 active bugs for investigations so flimsy that they couldn't find a judge to sign...
The former wouldn't be good, but would be unsurprising and fairly banal. Doing paperwork when you don't have to is a fairly rare psychological disorder, after all. The latter, on the other hand, would be 'uncomfortably retro' behavior on the FBI's part, hearkening back to their historically loose adherence to petty matters of law and due process.
If they are just on a fishing expedition, they'll probably assume that the device has failed/fallen off into a drainage ditch/whatever and call it a day.
If they are actually interested in you, it is quite likely that the same fine upstanding men with guns who installed the device will, shall we say, 'schedule a service call' at whatever place and time seems most likely based on tracking data from before you discovered the device...
If it has come to the point where you have a GPS bug on your car, they've probably already established the trivial details like your name, place of residence, record(if any), etc. They don't know exactly what you do every day, hence the bug; but unless you want to go into hardcore fugitive mode, checking up on the bug will just be a matter of motivation.
TFA, annoying but not terribly surprisingly, is light on that particular detail. They have a bit of he-said/she-said, an anecdote or two, and vague references to unnamed experts who have opinions, many mixed to negative, about the quality of the evaluation data.
A few related articles describe the approach, in broad terms, as being a statistical exercise where a class' future expected outcome is derived from their past scores on the state standardized test and then the delta between the actual outcome and the predicted outcome is used to judge the effect of the teacher on the students.
Depending on the dataset and the math, that isn't necessarily nonsense; but you'd need the details to know. The union, for its part, doesn't seem to have any more detailed information on what metrics they would prefer available; but has a number of serious reservations about this one. Given that Bill Gates, normally more of a 'charter-schools-and-metrics' kind of guy, dropped by to write an op-ed decrying the release as deeply counterproductive, I'm inclined to suspect that the union's position(while it may well have a core of old bats who think that 'seniority' is just fine, thanks, especially for them) isn't fighting just because they don't like the results...
I'm not personally familiar enough with any of the players involved to say anything specific, and the NYT is presently quite light on details.
I wonder, actually... Google offers hosted email packages that use your domain, branding, and whatnot, for business and EDU users. I wonder what they would charge to do a migration of Hotmail users to their backend... Not exactly a call microsoft would make; but it'd be interesting to hear the response from the Google sales rep, once they'd had a chance to pick their jaw up from the floor...
For the good of all mankind, they should really just replace 'Games for Windows Live' with a link to Steam...
In this case, he 'goed'; but I(arguably) 'goaded'...
Dumbass. It's "goed thru".
While I detest the notion that a report of that sort would be kept secret from the people who are paying for, and entrusting their children to, those being reported on, I would be quite interested to know whether the evaluations are actually worthwhile, useless, or even worse than useless.
As with the story about Australia pruning academics who didn't push papers fast enough that we discussed yesterday, there are a lot of bad ways to measure teacher effectiveness. Unfortunately, these include many of the easy ones and many of the popular ones.
Teachers aren't mystically unquantifiable flowers; but in a world where people can, with a straight face, propose 'Hey, just tot up their students' scores on the standardized test! Now you know which teachers are good!' without any sort of correction for such minor matters as 'student demographics' it is hard to be uniformly optimistic about teacher evaluations...
The other, broader, consideration is whether the teachers should feel justified in complaining about the level of public scrutiny that they are being subjected to relative to other state functionaries in positions of trust and authority... While there is a good argument to be made that teachers' job performance is a matter of public importance, I wonder if you could get a detailed evaluation of a NYC cop's record as easily as you could an NYC English teacher?
Come to think of it, the 'LG XULRunner' would actually be a better-than-average name for a cellphone...
Too permanent, I suspect. We appear to prefer our torture procedures to be easily repeatable as many times as deemed necessary.
Now, cycling the patient through an administration of heroin followed by an administration of Naloxone(superb for treating opiate overdoses; but kicks you into full-on withdrawl fast)...
While heroin has never struck me as a terribly wise drug of choice, the notion of deliberately provoking an immune response to an opiate seems crazy risky...
We have a fairly extensive endogenous opioid system, with a variety of opioids and opioid receptors, in place and the results of immune system intereference with that would be... likely very unpleasant. If I were of the Mengele school of experimental medicine, I'd be fascinated to learn exactly what flavor of 'very unpleasant'; but I'm guessing that the ethics of that would be pretty shaky.
The news is mostly bad on that score.
Unless I'm much mistaken, every device on that list is locked down by design. The success of that lockdown varies slightly; but they all derive their intentions from the unpleasant history of 'Conditional Access' set top box devices. There are hacks of varying completeness and difficulty for some of them; but they are all hostile by design from the bootloader up, so that's a cat-and-mouse thing at best.
On the plus side, the cost and power budget of implementing a comparatively open system(ie. a dinky Atom board has a binary BIOS; but at least its a closed firmware that is designed to boot anything a normal x86 system would, unlike the Boxee or GoogleTV, which are Atom-based but notably hostile, and a rasberry pi has a proprietary GPU firmware blob; but doesn't attempt to control user behavior) has fallen substantially in recent years; but any purpose-built system sold as supporting the various streaming services or DRM systems is going to be hostile, period.
While developing new ones would certainly be nice, we should really be going after the low-hanging fruit and cracking down, hard, on the present overuse in veterinary applications. Unpopular among the direct beneficiaries, certainly; but cheap per-capita and a guaranteed way of improving the efficacy of the drugs we already have, not just the ones we hope to develop...
Anybody who uses the phrase "digital natives" without a heavy dose of irony can usually be safely ignored.
Are there cases where dragging physical metaphors into computing is brutally-old-and-busted? Sure; but making MP3 players with UIs consisting of elaborate(but non-resizeable) bitmaps renditions of 1970s stereo gear was a moronic idea back in the 90s, just as it is now. Outside of agonizing over-literal nonsense like that, 'real life inspirations' seem to take two forms, neither obviously outmoded:
1. Remnants in name only: Your email client likely still has an 'inbox' and an 'outbox' because, at some point, somebody actually had two boxes on their desk. Guess what, it doesn't matter. The computerized abstractions have gained so many features(instant search, threading, sort-by-whatever-you-want, etc, etc.) that they bear almost no relation to their physical counterpart. They have to be called something, so the legacy name is harmless enough.
2. Borrowings that make sense because people want them: Y'know why stuff exists in 'real life'? Because people wanted them it. If they wanted the dead-tree version, they will probably want an electronic one, as well. Once that gets built, it will eventually be polished(having features added and archaisms removed) until it moves into category #1.)
This argument also seems to implicitly overstate the number of things that are somehow fundamentally digital. There are a lot of (mostly failed) ideas involving the dissemination of information in surprisingly modern ways within the constraints of antique media. Making variants of these ideas actually not fail this time will be a change; but it won't be one fundamentally tied to the internet(in anything other than an economic sense).
Of course not. How could quality be going down if the metric we are using because it is easy and convenient is going up? That would be difficult to model and therefore unthinkable. Why, it might even require me to have some subject-matter knowledge in the areas that my human resources do! I am way too focused on lining my bookshelf with copies of books about management fads for shit like that.
It depends on what you mean by 'discharged'. Some battery chemistries do, indeed, die(or at least suffer severe capacity damage) if 'discharged' in the sense of 'take a bare cell, connect to a resistor of suitable value until current drops to zero'. The high performance lithium cell chemistries certainly are rather touchy, and even humbled old lead-acid will start to sulfate if left discharged like that for any length of time... However, because that is a trivially bad thing, such batteries are hidden behind a management circuit that will delclare the battery 'discharged' and refuse to provide any further output well before the physically destructive discharge level is hit.
If Tesla actually built multi-kilodollar battery packs that allow their cells to run below safe discharge levels, somebody at Tesla needs a beating. If, however, this story is 'rechargable battery pack must be recharged and possibly recalibrated after running 'flat' as defined by the management circuit!', then the writer needs a beating.
The tight computer integration(and tight manufacturer/dealer grip on diagnostic details beyond the bare minimum ODBC stuff) reeks of pure profiteering; but there is a more defensible trade-off when it comes to mechanical damage:
Some, to be sure, is plain bullshit: 'bumper' ought to mean 'part designed to absorb minor bumps' not 'expensive piece of plastic with some chrome vacuum deposited on it'. However, many of the changes to the body designs, that do have the unfortunate, er, impact, of causing the car to crumple like a paper bag also have the convenient effect of eating the force that would traditionally have reduced the driver to a layer of extra-chunky meat sauce on the dashboard.
Given the relative costs of mechanics and trauma surgeons, and the present impossibility of just buying a new one if your body is a write-off, sacrificial engineering isn't all bad...
TFA appears to emphasize the shrinking delta between the best and the worst(as well as the gradual decline of the average number of problems per 100 vehicles). 92 issues per 100 cars certainly isn't something you'd want out of your satellites; but for fairly modest definitions of 'problem' isn't too terribly surprising for complex mechanical devices, relatively cheap, in the hands of unskilled users.
The big news is not that the absolute reliability of the best-in-class has changed that much, though it has improved a touch; but that the average quality of the junk has increased quite sharply, narrowing the reliability gap considerably.
In-car 'infotainment' and navigation systems are now becoming more common, so what we have gained in mechanical reliability we can make up in the endless sorrow of interacting with dubious software...
Ok. Somebody is completely off-their-head nuts, either the author or the people he is writing about(and I have my suspicions about the author...)
To the best of my knowledge, nobody pitches this 'cloud storage' stuff as a replacement for local storage, unless they are also selling some hosted software-as-a-vendor-lock-in 'solution'. It's a sufficiently overwhelmingly bad idea that nobody even tries. So, what exactly is he wasting an article on?
Yup, SATA drives are cheap and reasonably zippy. Y'know what's less cheap, more complex, and not as zippy? Good Backups, including offsite. And that, (along with the web hosting and CDN focused stuff) is what the 'cloud' people are selling. No shit delivering files over the internet with a 200ms round-trip and a teeny pipe isn't going to replace the local storage or a network share a couple of GigE hops away. Replace that balky tape library the next time it conks out, though? Not certain; but much more conceivable...
There seems to be some sort of fetish for 'respect', most commonly(but not entirely exclusively) exhibited by those people who've never deserved a dose of it in their lives. I don't know exactly why this crops up; but it definitely does. It's bad enough when those people demand respect for themselves regardless of desert and sometimes by force; but when they give up on that and hitch their self worth to a god or a flag or something they become truly insufferable.
Apple's behavior is perfectly fair:
After the apotheosis of Jobs, the reality distortion field was so intensified that space and time itself operate differently within the confines of his mortuary temple. Anybody within the sanctum operates as an innovator-outside-of-time. They may appear to release specific developments at specific points in the pitifully linear 'history' experienced by the unenlightened; but they(how this works is a Holy Mystery; but it is so)are simultaneously are perpetually innovating beyond time, have already invented all technologies worth inventing, and will invent all technologies worth inventing.
Human history is, in fact, simply a mortal's-eye-view of the bestowal of gifts of innovation on various Chosen at various times. The patent office is simply recognizing this.
It isn't so much a 'problem' as 'the direct intent' of using outlandish numbers.
If you hope to walk out with $500 million, starting at 'Eleventy Billion' and allowing yourself to be negotiated down is likely to work better than starting at 100 million and attempting to work up.
Frankly, both Oracle and Google should just stop fighting immediately and dedicate their effort to reverse-engineering this judge's apparently superb garbage-collecting algorithms...
In my (admittedly not-comprehensive experience) the more expensive the software the more likely that the 'DRM' was fairly minimal; but the greater the risk of real lawyers really going after you, personally, not as part of some shock-and-awe attempt fishing expedition...
For software that expensive, the sorts of ghastly DRM that get used on consumers and their $60 EA shovelware are mostly going to piss off your customers, their tech people, and your phone support drones. As much as this isn't the correct Slashdot answer, 'Bring in the lawyers' is likely both the best and least alienating technique.
That said, BSA bullshit tactics make more enemies than friends, you Do Not Want a situation where somebody who would be just fine with cutting the check fails to do so because license tracking is byzantine and then gets jumped. Similarly, you burn both legal hours and goodwill hitting people who aren't customers-who-underpay or customers-not-paying. If some warez kiddie is downloading it to justify his 6TB piracy server, or somebody's English class documentary is getting cut on your software instead of iMovie, that may be 'piracy'; but it isn't exactly a potential sale...
Do what you can to make license tracking and compliance easy(speaking as "IT" we have no enthusiasm for being the go-to piracy hatchetman when the higher-ups want to save some cash, so even token DRM can be useful in that it allows us to shrug and say 'Oh, sorry, I tried to install 5 extra copies, like you asked; but I can't get it to activate, and I read on CNET that bittorrent is a haven of viruses and rootkits.' if asked. However, at the same time, I'll be damned if I have to grovel through some mess of PDFs attached to vendor emails to figure out exactly how many 'Foo' licenses I have, whether they are 'person', 'seat', 'network', concurrent' CAL, whatever, and then grovel through N computers to figure out where the software is installed. Sometime I do, because sometimes it's my job; but it isn't at the top of the list(either of what I like to do, or of 'things I could be doing that would make users happier now'). If that is set, the honest and ethically-lazy-but-risk-averse customers are covered.
If you have people doing serious business stuff with cracked copies, nuke 'em from orbit. As for the rest of the cracked versions out there, it is unlikely that trying to win an arms race against people who crack software for fun is going to be profitable, and it is similarly unlikely that any amount of force is going to convert casual pirates without commercial use for your product into customers(worst case, they never give you a dime and get some use out of your product; best case, they get experience now and buy later; but you'll be lucky to make back the legal fees if you try to extract by force now...)