I also never found a position paper advocating a conquest of the middle east and theft of their oil. For pity sake, americans want to buy the mideast's oil, not seize it (if the US military seriously wanted to take it, there'd be little to stop them... but that's not how americans see themselves on the world stage).
This is what both liberals and conspiracists in the Middle East always forget. If we were seriously interested in *conquest* of the Middle East, we could. Easily. There'd be none of this restraint in Fallujah -- we'd just fire bomb the city and then kill whoever tried to escape or was left. We wouldn't even have a prison at Abu Gharib; we'd just kill anyone that got in our way. That's conquest.
While disgusted by the general direction and many of the specifics of the Iraq war, I'm having misgivings about our hearts and minds tactics for the very reason that our restraint is taken as evidence by insurgents as weakness and a lack of will to fight back, which only encourages more insurgency, not less.
I suspect that if the Army had shown a merciless Iron Hand in the immediate aftermath of the war -- shoot-on-sight curfews, round-ups, summary trials and executions -- we would have instilled a level of fear-based respect we don't have now, not to mention preservation of infrastructure and law and order.
Of course it's too late now. Suppression of the insurgency just breeds more insurgency at this point, while not suppressing it only emboldens the existing insurgency.
It's wholly focused on technical legal compliance rather than compliance with the spirit of laws as well.
It reminds me of a little kid eating cookies before dinner when he's been told that cookies are for after dinner. When caught, the kid complains of his innocence by saying (a) these are biscuits, not cookies, or (b) our dinner was late tonight, and technically it's after dinner for most people, or (c) since cookies are food, and we eat food for dinner, then I was actually eating dinner.
All the answers are technically right and perhaps within some kind of technical compliance, but clearly the goal wasn't compliance with the idea that you don't eat cookies until after dinner, it was compliance aimed at justifying his own desire for cookies.
There was a great article in a business mag about two months ago detailing this thinking. They were talking about tax shelters, and it's considered a valid defense to demonstrate that your lawyer said it was OK, and lawyers are making bank with this long, technical analysis that claim that the shelters are OK. Due to some case obscure law, lawyers are immune from prosecution for providing advice (even if the advice is flawed and designed to further an essentially fraudulent activity). If the tax shelter user is caught, he pays back taxes with penalties, but no criminal charges are filed because he can wave his "legal compliance" memo like a Get Out of Jail Free card, pay the fine with his illegal windfall, and move on to the next shelter scheme.
Business needs to stop figuring out how they can perpetrate fraud while still being in technical compliance of the law, and actually figure out how to do business while being in the spirit of the law.
...so typical, it almost seems like a troll. I believe this is what the grandparent poster was looking for.
but if Apple doesn't patent this some other company might. Given Apple's involment in the open source community with Darwin, http://www.opensource.apple.com/ , I would rather see them with a patent for this than some company based on patents only.
This is the usual Apple apology. Apple is the "good" company, and otherwise "bad" behavior is OK for them to pursue, since an evil company might patent it first, and we all know that Apple never does anything evil. Oh, and they're involved in open source, too, which makes them even more of a "good" company, unlike some other evilcompanies who aren't involved in supporting open source at all.
It's all fairly typical of the excuse making by Apple followers who otherwise masquerade as FOSS zealots in other threads.
How about this: Whenever a corporation is "fined" for breaking the law, require them to issue new stock equal to the amount of fine. This stock is issued to the SEC who mandates all stock purchases must be made from this pool at the stock's price when the fine was announced; no privately held stock can be sold until this newly issued stock is sold to realize the cash value of the fine. Prohibit the company from buying its own stock for one year. An added bonus penalty for eggregious cases would be to require them to expense the issued stock as well.
This punishes the company by reducing its share price, which price increases cannot easily make up -- it'd be unrealistically complicated to translate this kind of penalty into an operating expense. It also can depress the share price by diluting the share pool, effectively punishing shareholders who were the ultimate beneficiaries of the illegal behavior.
Prohibiting the corporation or its officers from buying their own stock for one year prevents them from buffering investors from the penalty by buying the stock with their illegal cash and effectively un-diluting the share pool.
Have walls comprised of 3-5 different materials, varying from undeformable (bunkers) to easily deformable (interior plaster or wood), and have the deformation be in chunks, using graphics to simulate the randomness of a hole actually blown in a building. Material strength could be meshed against the strength and number of projectile hits to determine when a chunk was blown out.
Buildings could be 'built' of material mixes such that only a few would actually collapse, and they could collapse in a 'planned' manner such that you actually substituted a collapsed building for an uncollapsed building when it happened, perhaps randomizing a couple of different possible collapse scenerios to ensure that they didn't collapse the same way each time.
Even if it was only usable on limited structures, it could have a decent impact on tactical behavior -- wrecking ladders and stairs to deny high points, eliminating cover to expose firing positions, allow easily defended positions to be breeched, and so on.
Even MOHAA has some windows that are "boarded up" and can be shot out. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to extend this concept to at least interior and some exterior walls.
I play a lot of Medal of Honor and the player damage isn't very realistic, although there are some mods that claim to increase it.
What really makes the game unrealistic is the lack of deformable environments. You can duck behind a plaster wall and have two guys open up with a BAR and an RPG and you're totally safe. A group of enemies will take cover in a building that gets hit with a ton of RPGs and grenades and they're never threatened.
The buildings should totally fall apart; they should have holes blown in them, stairs fall apart, fires started. You should get shot through walls and floors. And so on.
They've done an OK job with the weapons out of the box, although I still think that the sniper rifle is far too easy. Having actually fired numerous scoped weapons hunting, it's NEVER that easy, and the kill zone on a deer is a lot bigger than the kill zone on a man. And then there's the question of why a.30-06 sniper rifle kills a guy with one shot, but a.30 BAR round which is virtually identical to the the round used in the sniper rifle takes numerous hits to kill someone.
Even with the overly generous assumption you would have 420 1-Mhz bands, doesn't a metropolitan area suddenly become an area where "2 Khz ought to be enough for everyone"? Or am I missing something?
I'm presumimg that we're talking about ranges between radios of at least 10 miles, otherwise its still got an infrastructure/last mile problem to create smaller transmission ranges.
Or am I missing something about this? It seems like you'd want at least a couple of Ghz or a cell structure to ensure that there was bandwidth aplenty.
Not too mention more wars, possibly world wars, as the countries which need, or perceive the need (like China) for this energy look to take it away from those (USA?) who control it...
I've been told by people that know more than I do about geopolitical strategy that we're already in a competition for oil with China, which is one reason why they seem to be so willing to sell Silkworm missles to the Iranians.
But as far as the rest of it goes, my guess is that basic supply and demand economics will take care of any oil shortages. Oil will still be expensive, but we'll take buses instead of driving, ride trains instead of airplanes and so on. Economics will force grossly inefficient uses of oil to something else and it will get used for things its irreplaceable for.
And then I wonder about stuff like biodiesel or other organic fuel sources, let alone coal gassification, solar, wind, etc.
(although in Europe we're trying to create a single market, we'll always have the issues with different languages and cultures).
I'm sure many will mod me into oblivion for saying this, but in the U.S. we're working on accomplishing this, too. Instead of encouraging our immigrants to learn English and assimilate, we instead promote bilingualism under the misguided notion that it promotes diversity, when it actually discourages assimilation and limits immigrants opportunities to the lowest end of the economic spectrum, since without a "push" to learn English they never do become bilingual.
A friend's grandmother was an immigrant from Poland. She said that she learned English not because it was around her, but because it was seen as a badge of honor to speak English. As a teenager when she's shop with some of her older sisters, she would occasionally try to ask them questions in Polish at the counter with a salesperson. Her sisters would either ignore her or tell her to speak English.
Like it or not, there was a strong social pressure to become an English speaker. Diversity and bilingualists have attempted to eliminate this pressure (it's alternatively xenophobic, racist, or just simply bigoted). If they continue succeeding, we'll end up like Europe, or worse, a Balkanized country divided by language. History demonstrates that nations do not stay healthy divided by language and culture -- the term isn't called "Balkanized" for nothing. Switzerland is the only country I can think that's made it work, everywhere else it always leads to division at best and bloodshed at worst.
I plan to have my son learn Spanish at the earlist possible age, since even in Minneapolis, it's impossible to hold even a basic functional conversation with many service workers, since they don't speak *any* English. I don't understand how non-Spanish speakers even manage in Southern California, but not living there I don't have a great feel for the Anglo/Latino cultural divide.
Let's assume the total cost of manufacturing and handling by Disney is $1, the shipping, handling and customer service expense is $2. That leaves them with a tidy $7 profit on a $20 disc you already bought. Since it's Thursday and I feel generous, I'll assume they ship you a brand new shrinkwrapped copy and cut their margin to $5.
Which is still huge, considering that they don't have any marketing, merchandising or retail expenses associated with that particular copy.
Last I checked, the FOSS geeks control very little. People who don't know/care about controlling software seem to be increasing the control they do have exponentially.
I wonder if they have the granularity for pay-per-thrust. Most slashdotters could then consider their "quick reaction time" to be a financial advantage.
Throttling is an interesting idea, but tricky to implement. You could conceivably whitelist known good addresses and throttle everyone else, but how do you throttle non whitelist email?
I'm presuming that spammers like to bulk as many messages as possible per connection, so you might give an inbound server full bandwidth for the first message and then logarithmically smaller bandwidth for each subsequent message. This could possibly mire their mail senders, although they may also dynamically open new send processes as their outbound bandwidth becomes available.
If they send them individually, it might make sense to keep a list of IPs associated with incoming mail, and the more messages an IP has sent, the slower its incoming bandwidth is. This could be punishing for non-whitelisted email senders, and may require a lot of operator oversight to not be a big problem.
All of these things would require a direct interaction between the MTA and the system's packet shaping interface, which would also likely make it hugely complicated, since each platform would have a different one.
I guess I worry that online music sales are new enough that even Apple's head start and #1 status aren't a given; cut them off and somebody like WalMart or some other player will step in.
I'd just hate to say Apple's rather benign system get submarined over something stupid like Playfair, and end up leaving us with WMA or worse.
On the other hand, if it was WMA that was widely being cracked, to the chagrin of someone as evil as Walmart, I'd be "Go Hackers! Fuck the RIAA and Wal-Mart", since I care for none of them.
I don't feel that much better about Apple as a *corporation*, but I do feel as if they're currently the snake that's been charmed.
First of all, Steve Jobs went on CNN that DRM was largely BS and any system could be and would be cracked. How do you get more sincere than that?
Says versus does. Apple has implemented, and defended its DRM system through at least one iteration of attack. Steve may personally believe that DRM is BS and will be cracked, but from a business perspective he isn't doing that. He's defending the DRM system. Hey may go on CNN and say he thinks DRM is lame and that information wants to be free, but he does to work and makes sure that DRM gets done.
Second, the whole "What's Good For Apple is Good For America" that you Macinistas state as a fact is hardly a common opinion, even among Mac users.
The goal as I see it for the future of music is an online system that is based around extremely limited DRM systems. Apple's system isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than one based on other highly proprietary formats, including WMA which is tied to a company who'd like to do away with other choices for OS as well. Mess with Apple's model at this point enough and we WILL see less of Apple's rather benevolent DRM and more hardware-dependent DRM, a lot higher costs, and much less choice.
Sure, the "enemy" is always any DRM or rights restricting system; however, you're dreaming if you think that there will ever be a DRM-less music format.
OK, I'll admit up front that this is highly tinfoil hat, but I think it's kind of interesting to explore.
Anyway, the PlayFair people are promoting this as a fair use tool, and the software and the concept are logically consistant. But! What if they are operating under a "false flag"?
It's possible that they could be:
(a) Representing a disident wing of the RIAA. This wing dislikes Apple's DRM (too easy to convert back to MP3, too easily cracked AAC protection, etc), Apple itself, Steve Jobs personally, or they back another system/entity, or just don't like online sales at all (like outsourcing, they view it as the beginning of the end). Playfair is a way to undermine the DRM and, hence, undermine Apple/iTunes.
(b) Representing another entity competing with IMS. Make Apple's system look bad to the RIAA and you can undermine Apple's position with RIAA and strengthen your "better" version.
(c) Apple itself. With music stores popping up faster than zits on a 13 year old, and other DRM systems portable to more competing portables, Apple plays a phone game of tit-for-tat with the Playfair developers to keep the RIAA going. As long as sales stay up, RIAA is placated and Apple's system attracts a critical mindshare leadership for its simple crackability (ala Apex DVD players).
I know that they're all probably not true, but it's an interesting theory. RIAA and others chase mysterious "hackerz", meanwhile a hidden agenda is advanced.
Anybody seen my hat? It's kind of metallic and shiny.
Personally I think iTunes was about as reasonable an online music setup as we're ever likely to see, barring some significant change in the business tactics of the music industry.
Doing something to make Apple's apparent respect for the industry's "IP rights" look less than sincere appears to be kind of foolish, and a great way to damage what is a pretty reasonable setup. Price increases or a desire by the industry to embrace a more draconian DRM structure that doesn't allow for an easy copying loophole like iTunes' just seems short sighted.
I worked at a University PR office after college, and we had a student flunky whose job it was to program 6 VCRs to record a slew of local news programs and then scan the recordings for stories about the University.
I can imagine that there a ton of possible uses similar to this in the low-end commercial side. And then there's hard-core sports fans who want to watch *all* the games, and so on.
The fact that the U.S. government has, since WW II, been so deeply involved in conspiratorial activity unfortunately gives a certain amount of creedence to conspiracies.
I like my 20gig 3G iPod, but the battery life is nothing short of an embarassment. I would gladly add less than 2 ounces and 25 cc to increase the battery life. I feel lucky if I can really get 8 hours of my iPod or even 2 1.5 hour sessions over a period of days without charging.
What's most distressing about the iPod isn't necessarily the lack of long runtime but the lack of charge holding ability. I'll use my iPod, from a full charge, for about 45 minutes and then carefully shut it down and lock the controls. I'll pick it up 2-4 days later and it's at a third of a charge or less, despite not being used. I'm not sure what it's doing when apparently off, but it uses a ton of power.
I've had it for less than 4 months and it's displayed this behavior since it's been new. Adding a whopping 25cc worth of battery would be great and there's no way it would damage the iPod's ergonomics at all. Until then, it's something that pretty much always needs to be tied to a power source.
No, seriously. In the "$Daypart of the Dead" movies, the people always are in bare shouldered clothes. With a suit like that and a machete, you could do some serious damage and not worry about getting bit.
I have a friend who has gotten more and more "involved" in the chemtrails phenomenon, and despite my best efforts to convince him otherwise (both factually and logically) he refuses to believe otherwise. I used to think it was a kind of tongue-in-cheek joke, but since he's started building "emitters" (large bits of copper tubing encasing helical copper wound-crystals, titanium shavings..) and claiming their power attracts forced entry into his house and black helicopters I'm kind of convinced he's slipping into a delusional paranoia.
Factual rebuttals are always refuted by claims of faked evidence or collusion based on the political/military capabilities of the people behind the phenomenon. You can't refute this -- if the person believes that the contra-evidence is faked and it can be logically fit into the conspiracy as a whole, it just reinforecs the conspiracy.
Logical rebuttals at least cause a pause, since asking how the government is able to maintain an effective, secret program that requires the participation of tens of thousands of people and billions in expenses and equipment when the CIA/FBI/Military/et al fail so spectacularly to maintain even minimal secrecy over other aspects of their operations is tough one to counter.
Regardless, there are just too many conspiracists with too much time on their hands to ever be satisfied with factual, logical explanations. In the case of the Mars rovers, it's all too easy to just deny that stuff even happened, just as they've been doing with the moon missions for decades.
In some ways the Internet makes it worse. It used to be that a conspiracy theorist focused on a single conspiracy (ie, Kennedy's assassination). Nowadays, they have access to so many conspiracies that they all get tied together, and are all part of a conspiracy universe that is self-referential and self-reinforcing.
I can only presume that the conspiracies fill some social/psychological vacuum that religion has failed to do so in modern society, that, or whatever they're putting in the water is breeding paranoia....
Failure to meet demand is as much a problem as excessive supply. This is mitigated in some situations by the uniqueness of the product. However, while only Apple sells Macintosh, the marginal utility of having a Mac isn't the same as the marginal utility of, say, a cancer drug or some other product that has no other replacement. From an economic perspective, Apple's Mac doesn't have much if any marginal utility over an equivilent PC.
So for Apple, excessive waits for new customers is largely a negative. There are some people in some situations for whom a Mac is necessary, but for a lot of people the wait and higher cost may weight to heavily, causing them to buy (another) PC, at less cost.
Slashdot Mirror
I also never found a position paper advocating a conquest of the middle east and theft of their oil. For pity sake, americans want to buy the mideast's oil, not seize it (if the US military seriously wanted to take it, there'd be little to stop them... but that's not how americans see themselves on the world stage).
This is what both liberals and conspiracists in the Middle East always forget. If we were seriously interested in *conquest* of the Middle East, we could. Easily. There'd be none of this restraint in Fallujah -- we'd just fire bomb the city and then kill whoever tried to escape or was left. We wouldn't even have a prison at Abu Gharib; we'd just kill anyone that got in our way. That's conquest.
While disgusted by the general direction and many of the specifics of the Iraq war, I'm having misgivings about our hearts and minds tactics for the very reason that our restraint is taken as evidence by insurgents as weakness and a lack of will to fight back, which only encourages more insurgency, not less.
I suspect that if the Army had shown a merciless Iron Hand in the immediate aftermath of the war -- shoot-on-sight curfews, round-ups, summary trials and executions -- we would have instilled a level of fear-based respect we don't have now, not to mention preservation of infrastructure and law and order.
Of course it's too late now. Suppression of the insurgency just breeds more insurgency at this point, while not suppressing it only emboldens the existing insurgency.
It's wholly focused on technical legal compliance rather than compliance with the spirit of laws as well.
It reminds me of a little kid eating cookies before dinner when he's been told that cookies are for after dinner. When caught, the kid complains of his innocence by saying (a) these are biscuits, not cookies, or (b) our dinner was late tonight, and technically it's after dinner for most people, or (c) since cookies are food, and we eat food for dinner, then I was actually eating dinner.
All the answers are technically right and perhaps within some kind of technical compliance, but clearly the goal wasn't compliance with the idea that you don't eat cookies until after dinner, it was compliance aimed at justifying his own desire for cookies.
There was a great article in a business mag about two months ago detailing this thinking. They were talking about tax shelters, and it's considered a valid defense to demonstrate that your lawyer said it was OK, and lawyers are making bank with this long, technical analysis that claim that the shelters are OK. Due to some case obscure law, lawyers are immune from prosecution for providing advice (even if the advice is flawed and designed to further an essentially fraudulent activity). If the tax shelter user is caught, he pays back taxes with penalties, but no criminal charges are filed because he can wave his "legal compliance" memo like a Get Out of Jail Free card, pay the fine with his illegal windfall, and move on to the next shelter scheme.
Business needs to stop figuring out how they can perpetrate fraud while still being in technical compliance of the law, and actually figure out how to do business while being in the spirit of the law.
...so typical, it almost seems like a troll. I believe this is what the grandparent poster was looking for.
but if Apple doesn't patent this some other company might. Given Apple's involment in the open source community with Darwin, http://www.opensource.apple.com/ , I would rather see them with a patent for this than some company based on patents only.
This is the usual Apple apology. Apple is the "good" company, and otherwise "bad" behavior is OK for them to pursue, since an evil company might patent it first, and we all know that Apple never does anything evil. Oh, and they're involved in open source, too, which makes them even more of a "good" company, unlike some other evil companies who aren't involved in supporting open source at all.
It's all fairly typical of the excuse making by Apple followers who otherwise masquerade as FOSS zealots in other threads.
How about this: Whenever a corporation is "fined" for breaking the law, require them to issue new stock equal to the amount of fine. This stock is issued to the SEC who mandates all stock purchases must be made from this pool at the stock's price when the fine was announced; no privately held stock can be sold until this newly issued stock is sold to realize the cash value of the fine. Prohibit the company from buying its own stock for one year. An added bonus penalty for eggregious cases would be to require them to expense the issued stock as well.
This punishes the company by reducing its share price, which price increases cannot easily make up -- it'd be unrealistically complicated to translate this kind of penalty into an operating expense. It also can depress the share price by diluting the share pool, effectively punishing shareholders who were the ultimate beneficiaries of the illegal behavior.
Prohibiting the corporation or its officers from buying their own stock for one year prevents them from buffering investors from the penalty by buying the stock with their illegal cash and effectively un-diluting the share pool.
Why are they so complicated?
Have walls comprised of 3-5 different materials, varying from undeformable (bunkers) to easily deformable (interior plaster or wood), and have the deformation be in chunks, using graphics to simulate the randomness of a hole actually blown in a building. Material strength could be meshed against the strength and number of projectile hits to determine when a chunk was blown out.
Buildings could be 'built' of material mixes such that only a few would actually collapse, and they could collapse in a 'planned' manner such that you actually substituted a collapsed building for an uncollapsed building when it happened, perhaps randomizing a couple of different possible collapse scenerios to ensure that they didn't collapse the same way each time.
Even if it was only usable on limited structures, it could have a decent impact on tactical behavior -- wrecking ladders and stairs to deny high points, eliminating cover to expose firing positions, allow easily defended positions to be breeched, and so on.
Even MOHAA has some windows that are "boarded up" and can be shot out. It doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to extend this concept to at least interior and some exterior walls.
I play a lot of Medal of Honor and the player damage isn't very realistic, although there are some mods that claim to increase it.
.30-06 sniper rifle kills a guy with one shot, but a .30 BAR round which is virtually identical to the the round used in the sniper rifle takes numerous hits to kill someone.
What really makes the game unrealistic is the lack of deformable environments. You can duck behind a plaster wall and have two guys open up with a BAR and an RPG and you're totally safe. A group of enemies will take cover in a building that gets hit with a ton of RPGs and grenades and they're never threatened.
The buildings should totally fall apart; they should have holes blown in them, stairs fall apart, fires started. You should get shot through walls and floors. And so on.
They've done an OK job with the weapons out of the box, although I still think that the sniper rifle is far too easy. Having actually fired numerous scoped weapons hunting, it's NEVER that easy, and the kill zone on a deer is a lot bigger than the kill zone on a man. And then there's the question of why a
Even with the overly generous assumption you would have 420 1-Mhz bands, doesn't a metropolitan area suddenly become an area where "2 Khz ought to be enough for everyone"? Or am I missing something?
I'm presumimg that we're talking about ranges between radios of at least 10 miles, otherwise its still got an infrastructure/last mile problem to create smaller transmission ranges.
Or am I missing something about this? It seems like you'd want at least a couple of Ghz or a cell structure to ensure that there was bandwidth aplenty.
Not too mention more wars, possibly world wars, as the countries which need, or perceive the need (like China) for this energy look to take it away from those (USA?) who control it...
I've been told by people that know more than I do about geopolitical strategy that we're already in a competition for oil with China, which is one reason why they seem to be so willing to sell Silkworm missles to the Iranians.
But as far as the rest of it goes, my guess is that basic supply and demand economics will take care of any oil shortages. Oil will still be expensive, but we'll take buses instead of driving, ride trains instead of airplanes and so on. Economics will force grossly inefficient uses of oil to something else and it will get used for things its irreplaceable for.
And then I wonder about stuff like biodiesel or other organic fuel sources, let alone coal gassification, solar, wind, etc.
(although in Europe we're trying to create a single market, we'll always have the issues with different languages and cultures).
I'm sure many will mod me into oblivion for saying this, but in the U.S. we're working on accomplishing this, too. Instead of encouraging our immigrants to learn English and assimilate, we instead promote bilingualism under the misguided notion that it promotes diversity, when it actually discourages assimilation and limits immigrants opportunities to the lowest end of the economic spectrum, since without a "push" to learn English they never do become bilingual.
A friend's grandmother was an immigrant from Poland. She said that she learned English not because it was around her, but because it was seen as a badge of honor to speak English. As a teenager when she's shop with some of her older sisters, she would occasionally try to ask them questions in Polish at the counter with a salesperson. Her sisters would either ignore her or tell her to speak English.
Like it or not, there was a strong social pressure to become an English speaker. Diversity and bilingualists have attempted to eliminate this pressure (it's alternatively xenophobic, racist, or just simply bigoted). If they continue succeeding, we'll end up like Europe, or worse, a Balkanized country divided by language. History demonstrates that nations do not stay healthy divided by language and culture -- the term isn't called "Balkanized" for nothing. Switzerland is the only country I can think that's made it work, everywhere else it always leads to division at best and bloodshed at worst.
I plan to have my son learn Spanish at the earlist possible age, since even in Minneapolis, it's impossible to hold even a basic functional conversation with many service workers, since they don't speak *any* English. I don't understand how non-Spanish speakers even manage in Southern California, but not living there I don't have a great feel for the Anglo/Latino cultural divide.
The law forbids targets of national security letters to disclose that they have received one.
Joseph K. called. He wants to know if you know anything about his trial.
$10 is kind of a ripoff.
Let's assume the total cost of manufacturing and handling by Disney is $1, the shipping, handling and customer service expense is $2. That leaves them with a tidy $7 profit on a $20 disc you already bought. Since it's Thursday and I feel generous, I'll assume they ship you a brand new shrinkwrapped copy and cut their margin to $5.
Which is still huge, considering that they don't have any marketing, merchandising or retail expenses associated with that particular copy.
Last I checked, the FOSS geeks control very little. People who don't know/care about controlling software seem to be increasing the control they do have exponentially.
[...]or anywhere else.
I actually wouldn't mind a search engine that gave definitive negative results. I could stop looking and move onto something else.
I wonder if they have the granularity for pay-per-thrust. Most slashdotters could then consider their "quick reaction time" to be a financial advantage.
Throttling is an interesting idea, but tricky to implement. You could conceivably whitelist known good addresses and throttle everyone else, but how do you throttle non whitelist email?
I'm presuming that spammers like to bulk as many messages as possible per connection, so you might give an inbound server full bandwidth for the first message and then logarithmically smaller bandwidth for each subsequent message. This could possibly mire their mail senders, although they may also dynamically open new send processes as their outbound bandwidth becomes available.
If they send them individually, it might make sense to keep a list of IPs associated with incoming mail, and the more messages an IP has sent, the slower its incoming bandwidth is. This could be punishing for non-whitelisted email senders, and may require a lot of operator oversight to not be a big problem.
All of these things would require a direct interaction between the MTA and the system's packet shaping interface, which would also likely make it hugely complicated, since each platform would have a different one.
I guess I worry that online music sales are new enough that even Apple's head start and #1 status aren't a given; cut them off and somebody like WalMart or some other player will step in.
I'd just hate to say Apple's rather benign system get submarined over something stupid like Playfair, and end up leaving us with WMA or worse.
On the other hand, if it was WMA that was widely being cracked, to the chagrin of someone as evil as Walmart, I'd be "Go Hackers! Fuck the RIAA and Wal-Mart", since I care for none of them.
I don't feel that much better about Apple as a *corporation*, but I do feel as if they're currently the snake that's been charmed.
First of all, Steve Jobs went on CNN that DRM was largely BS and any system could be and would be cracked. How do you get more sincere than that?
Says versus does. Apple has implemented, and defended its DRM system through at least one iteration of attack. Steve may personally believe that DRM is BS and will be cracked, but from a business perspective he isn't doing that. He's defending the DRM system. Hey may go on CNN and say he thinks DRM is lame and that information wants to be free, but he does to work and makes sure that DRM gets done.
Second, the whole "What's Good For Apple is Good For America" that you Macinistas state as a fact is hardly a common opinion, even among Mac users.
The goal as I see it for the future of music is an online system that is based around extremely limited DRM systems. Apple's system isn't perfect, but it's a damn sight better than one based on other highly proprietary formats, including WMA which is tied to a company who'd like to do away with other choices for OS as well. Mess with Apple's model at this point enough and we WILL see less of Apple's rather benevolent DRM and more hardware-dependent DRM, a lot higher costs, and much less choice.
Sure, the "enemy" is always any DRM or rights restricting system; however, you're dreaming if you think that there will ever be a DRM-less music format.
OK, I'll admit up front that this is highly tinfoil hat, but I think it's kind of interesting to explore.
Anyway, the PlayFair people are promoting this as a fair use tool, and the software and the concept are logically consistant. But! What if they are operating under a "false flag"?
It's possible that they could be:
(a) Representing a disident wing of the RIAA. This wing dislikes Apple's DRM (too easy to convert back to MP3, too easily cracked AAC protection, etc), Apple itself, Steve Jobs personally, or they back another system/entity, or just don't like online sales at all (like outsourcing, they view it as the beginning of the end). Playfair is a way to undermine the DRM and, hence, undermine Apple/iTunes.
(b) Representing another entity competing with IMS. Make Apple's system look bad to the RIAA and you can undermine Apple's position with RIAA and strengthen your "better" version.
(c) Apple itself. With music stores popping up faster than zits on a 13 year old, and other DRM systems portable to more competing portables, Apple plays a phone game of tit-for-tat with the Playfair developers to keep the RIAA going. As long as sales stay up, RIAA is placated and Apple's system attracts a critical mindshare leadership for its simple crackability (ala Apex DVD players).
I know that they're all probably not true, but it's an interesting theory. RIAA and others chase mysterious "hackerz", meanwhile a hidden agenda is advanced.
Anybody seen my hat? It's kind of metallic and shiny.
Personally I think iTunes was about as reasonable an online music setup as we're ever likely to see, barring some significant change in the business tactics of the music industry.
Doing something to make Apple's apparent respect for the industry's "IP rights" look less than sincere appears to be kind of foolish, and a great way to damage what is a pretty reasonable setup. Price increases or a desire by the industry to embrace a more draconian DRM structure that doesn't allow for an easy copying loophole like iTunes' just seems short sighted.
I worked at a University PR office after college, and we had a student flunky whose job it was to program 6 VCRs to record a slew of local news programs and then scan the recordings for stories about the University.
I can imagine that there a ton of possible uses similar to this in the low-end commercial side. And then there's hard-core sports fans who want to watch *all* the games, and so on.
The fact that the U.S. government has, since WW II, been so deeply involved in conspiratorial activity unfortunately gives a certain amount of creedence to conspiracies.
I like my 20gig 3G iPod, but the battery life is nothing short of an embarassment. I would gladly add less than 2 ounces and 25 cc to increase the battery life. I feel lucky if I can really get 8 hours of my iPod or even 2 1.5 hour sessions over a period of days without charging.
What's most distressing about the iPod isn't necessarily the lack of long runtime but the lack of charge holding ability. I'll use my iPod, from a full charge, for about 45 minutes and then carefully shut it down and lock the controls. I'll pick it up 2-4 days later and it's at a third of a charge or less, despite not being used. I'm not sure what it's doing when apparently off, but it uses a ton of power.
I've had it for less than 4 months and it's displayed this behavior since it's been new. Adding a whopping 25cc worth of battery would be great and there's no way it would damage the iPod's ergonomics at all. Until then, it's something that pretty much always needs to be tied to a power source.
No, seriously. In the "$Daypart of the Dead" movies, the people always are in bare shouldered clothes. With a suit like that and a machete, you could do some serious damage and not worry about getting bit.
I have a friend who has gotten more and more "involved" in the chemtrails phenomenon, and despite my best efforts to convince him otherwise (both factually and logically) he refuses to believe otherwise. I used to think it was a kind of tongue-in-cheek joke, but since he's started building "emitters" (large bits of copper tubing encasing helical copper wound-crystals, titanium shavings..) and claiming their power attracts forced entry into his house and black helicopters I'm kind of convinced he's slipping into a delusional paranoia.
Factual rebuttals are always refuted by claims of faked evidence or collusion based on the political/military capabilities of the people behind the phenomenon. You can't refute this -- if the person believes that the contra-evidence is faked and it can be logically fit into the conspiracy as a whole, it just reinforecs the conspiracy.
Logical rebuttals at least cause a pause, since asking how the government is able to maintain an effective, secret program that requires the participation of tens of thousands of people and billions in expenses and equipment when the CIA/FBI/Military/et al fail so spectacularly to maintain even minimal secrecy over other aspects of their operations is tough one to counter.
Regardless, there are just too many conspiracists with too much time on their hands to ever be satisfied with factual, logical explanations. In the case of the Mars rovers, it's all too easy to just deny that stuff even happened, just as they've been doing with the moon missions for decades.
In some ways the Internet makes it worse. It used to be that a conspiracy theorist focused on a single conspiracy (ie, Kennedy's assassination). Nowadays, they have access to so many conspiracies that they all get tied together, and are all part of a conspiracy universe that is self-referential and self-reinforcing.
I can only presume that the conspiracies fill some social/psychological vacuum that religion has failed to do so in modern society, that, or whatever they're putting in the water is breeding paranoia....
Failure to meet demand is as much a problem as excessive supply. This is mitigated in some situations by the uniqueness of the product. However, while only Apple sells Macintosh, the marginal utility of having a Mac isn't the same as the marginal utility of, say, a cancer drug or some other product that has no other replacement. From an economic perspective, Apple's Mac doesn't have much if any marginal utility over an equivilent PC.
So for Apple, excessive waits for new customers is largely a negative. There are some people in some situations for whom a Mac is necessary, but for a lot of people the wait and higher cost may weight to heavily, causing them to buy (another) PC, at less cost.