The public sector would be just as good at developing drugs as it would be at making cars and televisions (see Union, Soviet).
You falsely assume that the only alternative to using patents to reward successfull innovators is to use stately funded labs. If that where the case, it migth indeed be that patents would be the lesser evil.
Luckily there's an infinite number of choises, those are only 2, and 2 poor ones at that.
A better idea is to combine the best of both worlds. For example trough a bounty-system.
Post a bounty for a drug with a specified set of problems. Increase the bounty for problems you're more interested in solving. Private sector are free to compete with oneanother in developing the drugs. Public sector are free to use the finished drugs without any licensing-fees or similar.
Python is ok even if you don't want to do objects, it has, and allows (encourages perhaps even) OO-programming, but it's perfectly possible and reasonable to program small to medium imperative programs in python, like in C.
e) You don't have to spend 90%+ of your energy lifting fuel.
f) You only need to climb up, the needed orbital velocity will be imparted by the beanstalk.
A traditional rocket mostly lifts fuel. You launch thousands of tonnes and end up with a ton or so in orbit. A climber on the other hand has to lift only the cargo and the climber itself, *not* the fuel for the climber.
Also, getting the orbital speed from the beanstalk saves you some energy. At geosynch the orbital speed is around 3 km/s, so for every 1000 kg of cargo you save on this alone 1250 kwh.
You limit it something along the lines of the large majority of industrialized countries who have universal healthcare. You actually sit down and discuss, on general terms, just what treatment make sense under which circumstances.
No, there's no easy answer to that. Deal with it. The fact that a question ain't simple doesn't mean a workable compromise can't be found.
So, for example, Germany (which has private health-insurance, but the catalogue of included benefits are standardised and equal for all at the normal plan) they'll pay for up to 3 tries of ex-vitro fertilization if a couple is childless. Should it be 0 ? Or unlimited ? Or 10 ? You're free to argue any of these, you're also free to vote for politicians who argue any of these. And last, but not least, you're free to pay for additional attempts out of your own pocket if you decide you want it even though it's not covered.
Norway, in contrast has a government-funded (which just means tax-funded reall) program where criteria for membership are trivial: You must be legally in norway, and it must be for a period longer than a year. That's it. Assuming you fulfill those criteria, you get full access to the standard catalogue of treatments.
Here too, you can pay by yourself for stuff that ain't covered, precisely like in the USA you can pay for yourself for stuff your insurance doesn't cover, if you decide it's worth it to you.
I've never even heard of them existing in Norway either. Not saying it doesn't, but normal its certainly not. Could be that certain very responsible positions demand it, air-traffic controller say.
Sunlight is actually *not* "truly parallell", nor close enough to make no difference. If that was the fact, the sun would look like a point in the sky, not a disc.
Actually, the sun is something like half a degree across, as viewed from earth. Yes it's very far away, but it also has a large diameter.
Half a degree ain't trivial, if you reflect sunligth at a ship 300m away say, you'd get an image of the sun 2.7 meters across. That's not, in my opinion small enough to be ignorable in the sense of being practically equivalent to a focused spot.
Beats me. I don't even see how that gets trough truth in advertising laws in the USA.
In Norway, it's perfectly legally established that "free" or "gratis" means *without*compensation*.
Buy 2 gadgets, get third one free. That's not free, nor gratis. It may be *included*, but it sure as hell ain't free.
What bugs me even more is that not only does this blatant lying shit slip trough the truth in advertising laws, but even worse: Advertisers still believe (correctly or not) that there's people out there who doesn't instantly look trough the bullshit and recognize that they're being lied to.
I never figured why lying to your customer, in a way that makes it a certanity that a large majority of the customers will *realize* that you're lying to them is a good idea.
Are people so used to this that they don't even react with disgust ?
Yes, it can be done, by brute force, by testing the responses to all possible input.
Actually, not even this works. Atleast not for devices that accept unlimited lengths of input.
Besides, *even* if the breathalyzer accepted *only* a press of the "Go" button, and had *no* other inputs, how do you verify that tapping "........." on the Go-button won't cause the next tested person to automatically be assumed intoxicated ?
The fact that most people can't examine the source for themselves is irrelevant. Most people also cannot analyse DNA, evaluate a fingerprint-match, read and correctly interpret law, evaluate the speed needed to deform a car in a certain way or or or.
But without this ruling we had a situation where essentially:
You risk paying fines or going to jail if the little box says you where intoxicated.
How the box works is a secret.
Neither you, nor your lawyer nor your expert witness is allowed to examine the workings of the box.
That's unacceptable. You've got a rigth to confront the evidence against you. That required you to know exactly what that evidence is, so that you (or your lawyer) can point out weaknesses in the evidence, for example.
The logical conclusion is that evidence of any kind that is collected by closed-source software, and that is not independently verifiable is not evidence at all, but instead merely the empty claim of a uncheckable device.
There's significant non-white minorities from those countries which used to have colonies in Africa and elsewhere, and also, offocurse, newer immigrants of various types. France for example has quite a few people with african roots.
Smaller countries need to realize that under unified economic policy, they will benifit from the wealth of the larger states more than they will suffer from less power.
Except, offcourse, the smaller states in the EU are generally *richer* than the bigger ones, not the other way around as you seem to believe.
Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Belgium, all sub-10-million inhabitants and all enjoying a higher standard of living and a better financial situation overall than say UK, France, and Germany (which are like 50 million plus inhabitants)
Actually, as I'm sure you understood, I meant the doctor can no longer inform your parents about things you tell the doctor, or things the doctor discovers on his/her own. In other words, you've got the rigth to privacy in medical matters, which isn't true for a younger child: the parents *will* be told whether the child wants that to happen or not if the doctor finds it prudent. (in some situations they're even required by law, for example if a girl under 15 is pregnant. If she is 15-16 it's up to the doctor after evaluating the situation, if she's over 16 he *can't* tell the parents unless the girl consents.)
Yes,parents should be responsible and put the computer where they can see what the kids are doing. But let's face it, some of these scum bags talk a pretty convicing game and it's easy to see how kids who are generally non to savvy, would fall for sweet talk.
Talk can only do a limited amount of harm. If your kids know and follow the simple rule of always bringing along an adult to a first meeting with someone they know from the net, it'll help a lot.
No, nothing is foolproof, get over it, your child will be exposed to risk even if you let him/her live in a padded cell.
Closing Yahoo chat for "minors" do *not* in any way make children safer, because:
There's about 10*7 other chatrooms the children can use instead.
It's not all that difficult to lie about age on a signup-form.
Chat is just one of literally dozens of ways of communicating online.
Aditionally, you gotta ask if the gain stay in proportion to the loss. Sure, outlawing cars would save thousands of traffic-dead children (and adults!) every year, doesn't mean it's nessecarily a smart thing to do.
This is simply done so that Yahoo can say they're not responsible. They want to avoid bad PR associated with "child meets pedo after chatting on yahoo" kind of news. They're covering their own back, not actually changing the risks of children in any significant way.
Not that it matters, but I'm the father of a young child, so don't try that "spoken like a non-parent" stuff on me.
Are you suggesting that parents should sit with their kids for every minute of computer use? Because I don't see any other level of involvement that is going to be effective.
Don't be silly. I know everyone goes gaga and turns their brain off when someone mentions children and "online-predators" but this does not change the facts that:
Atleast 95% of the abused children are abused by someone they know well, the "don't talk to strangers" thing doesn't really make much sense.
Even just talking openly with your children so they know they can talk to you if something bothers them or they have questions is a great help.
Fears are not equal to risk. In actual fact your child is something like 1000 times more likely being killed by a car-accident as being in any way abused by a "stranger on the internet"
That said, there *are* simple rules that children should follow. Bring an adult along the first time you meet someone from the Internet is one of those rules.
Seeing a naked breast is not going to harm anyone not already terminally harmed by religios bullshit. Most children see their first naked breast at age 2 minutes, here in Europe most of them continue seeing naked breasts regularily trough their entire lives I don't know what's so damaging about it.
How come "adult material" in US-speak seem to mean "anything remotely related to sex", while chainsaw-massacre III is seemingly a non-issue? (witness the.xxx TLD bruhaha)
By the way, I say this as the father of a small child, so don't think for even a microsecond that I don't care about the wellbeing of children. I just don't care for wrongheded paranoia, that's all. There's no reason you need to sit with your child at the computer the entire time. You should however, in my opinion have an idea what the child is doing and sometimes discuss it with the child.
When is someone an adult? In my opinion, you need to draw a line somewhere, and the age of 18 seems appropriate to me.
It's not "one" line, but a lot of lines. A person isn't either "fully adult" or "100% child", in the real world people develop gradually over years and are given more and more responsibility both by law and by their parents (assuming the parents aren't idiots)
For example, in Norway (other countries have different age-limits, but the general principle is the same) there's quite a few different age-limits, some of which are:
A person over 12s wish should be (by the court) given significant weigth when it comes to deciding where to live after a divorce.
A person over 15 can hold own jobs, and are free to themselves spend cash they earn.
A person over 15 can by themselves join or leave any legal club, organisation or religion.
A person over 15 can also select which school they'll attend.
A person over 16 can consent to sex.
The doctor can no longer inform your parents when you'er over 16. You're free to, on your own, refuse medical treatment, or ask for it.
A person over 18 can buy tobacco, beer and wine.
A person over 18 can enter any legal contract, and vote at elections.
A person over 20 can buy hard liquor, and be prime-minister.
OK, so 18 may be the most significant of these dates, but it's not an "on/off" switch, nor should it be.
You need a clueful photo-developer. Dunno about the US. I'm in Norway and use Europhoto, they support picture upload and ordering over email, web, ftp, scp and even have a command-line client for unix.
Thus selecting in konq, rigth-clicking and selecting "Action/Order prints" require nothing more than a 3-line shellscript. ( echo "What size ?"; read $size; europhoto_upload -s $size -n 1 "$@" basically.)
I'm sorry that I have no experience with unix-friendly printshops in the US, I'm sure they'll exist, but I wouldn't know which ones it is. Look around I guess.
No it isn't. The cost of a studio capable of recording professional-quality music has fallen by atleast 2 orders of magnitude in the last few decades. Some of my favourite CDs would cost less than $5000 to record if you paid for the studio-time at the studio where they are recorded.
Musicians aren't (generally!) stupider than other people. They're not selling their souls in order to avoid investing $5000 in something they believe in.
The labels do however to a disturbing degree control the traqditional supply-chain aswell as most of the important channels of advertising, such as radio. Read up on payola.
They could trivially store more if they wanted to, it must just be that there's no ROI on storing online data older than a year or so.
You can buy a terabyte of harddisk-capacity for like $500 these days. So 500TB, while sounding impressive is actually disks for $250.000. Storage requires more than just the raw disks. A rule of thumb that often works out ok is to add an order of magnitude to convert "raw disc" into "enterprise storage", that still mean a cost in the ballpark of 2-3 million.
Assuming your numbers are accurate, to finance this storage in a week, they'd need to take maybe 2 cents from every customer that week.
Furthermore, 59KB to store info from *one* customer for *one* week should be plenty. a 64-bit integer to index into their table of items is plenty. (a 32-bit would do, they don't have, nor will they ever have 4*10**9 products, but you design these things with space to grow) A typical shopping would then need to store only maybe 50 of these integers each with qantity, along with time-and-date and which store and so on. Should be trivial in 1KB. That leaves atleast 1, possibly 2 orders of magnitude for various indexes and other data.
I agree that noone can store "all" their data. (depending on your definitions of "data" offcourse), but storing a complete record of *all* transactions that has ever taken place in your company is trivial, even for WalMart.
I agree with the privacy-thing. Makes sense for some kinds of photos in particular.
The inconvenience, gas, time and so on however is silly. You seem to assume that one can only order photos printed at a bircks-and-mortar store and have to fetch the result there too.
In reality, ordering a copy of a selection of photos is as simple as selecting them in konq, rigth-click and select "Order photos", then fill in what size and what number I want and click Go. All done in maybe a minute, much *quicker* and easier than printing myself. (which requires finding and inserting photo-paper, making sure there's enough ink, and then printing the pictures one by one.)
The results are in my mailbox the following morning assuming I ordered by noon, if not, the day after.
This method works only against seeds, and even then only limited.
You see, a BitTorrent-client in download-mode will use tit-for-tat, meaning it'll upload more frequently to other peers that extend the same courtecy the other way.
So a peer that only downloads, and never lets you download something you want will basically only be able to get data from the seeds, or if your upload-capacity isn't filled with feeding "real" clients.
You could steal some bandwith from the seeds, but even they tend to use round-robin or some other way of distributing the uploads, which means that even if you had so many fake clients that you where half the swarm, you'd still manage only to decrease the seed-upload part by half. Given that most swarms are dominated by peer-upload over seed-upload this would be hardly noticeable.
All the ones I know of here have far too few hoops, and they are quite ineffective. I want a system where, even if I give my account number AND a password to someone, it still doesn't give them access to my account.
My bank migth satisfy you then. Skandiabanken.no
Even if I gave you my login and password, you'd still not be able to do anything at all, because additionally you need a digital certificate that is stored encrypted on my computer.
So let's say you broke into my computer and aditionally stole this certificate. In my case it's encrypted using the password for the bank, so you'd be able to decrypt it and now you can log in.
However you *still* can't make a transaction pretending to be me, because transactions must be authorised by a TAN, a one-time transaction-authorisation-number. Those I have on a paper-list next to my computer.
It's not that effortful to use actually. To log in, all I need is username and password, like in the US. Whenever I transfer money I do need to enter a one-time TAN and then pencil the used one out of my list. OK, so this migth add 5 seconds to the time I need to make a transaction.
Personally I find the tradeoff perfectly acceptable.
You overestimate the problem. It seems that you think such a system could only be cracked technologically. Fact is, all it requires is *one* person to get an account with a fake or stolen ID, buy 100 movies and realease them all on BitTorrent.
Yeah, sure, the I.D watermark will tell that the movies where distributed by Granny Smith who doesn't have either a computer or any kind of internet, but which got her purse stolen a week ago. Or the distribution was done by Daffy Duck, as the copy here of this real-looking ID clearly shows.
It's sorta like in parts of Europe the government requires telecom-carriers to collect real name-and-adress of all their customers, meaning you "can't" buy a anonymous prepaid cellphone.
In reality offcourse, you can get one completely anonymously from a zillion sources, even the telecom-companies themselves only require you to email a scan of some sorta ID if you buy from them online. All it takes is an hour with the Gimp and you've got your prepaid-phone, properly registered to Daffy Duck. (ok, so that name would probably look suspicious, if someone human is involved in the loop, but a fake plausible-sounding one wouldn't)
Bruce Schneier said it best: Trying to make bits non-copyable is sort of like trying to make water not wet.
What they're trying to do is fundamentally impossible to acomplish.
They want players (millions of them!) to be able to play the discs without requiring a network-connection.
At the same time, they want the info needed for decoding the discs (the key basically) to remain secret.
These two wishes are mutually exclusive. You cannot distribute a key in millions of copies in equally many different physical devices and expect that *noone* will ever manage to somehow extract one of those keys.
Now, using multiple keys for different manufacturers help, but only a little. If you use say 1000 different keys and one of them are compromised, what will you do ? Turn 1/1000 of the existing players into paperweigths ? Recall and "update" them ? You're talking hundreds of thousands of players, or millions of players if it's the key in a popular brand....
Tamper-proof hardware helps a little, but it increases the cost of the players so the pressure to drop it will be large. (witness the current crop of $30 DVD-players)
Furthermore, every tamper-"proofing" can be broken, it's just harder. If a chip is sensitive to ligth, you can pry it open in darkness. If oxygene reacts with a chemical and destroys it on dismantling, you can dismantle it in a nitrogen-atmosphere. If the chip stays intact only aslong as a positive pressure of 20 atmospheres is maintained around it, you can open it in a pressure-tank. You get the idea.
Yes, sure, for lots of people the popcorn belongs to the experience.
When I go a lot less than I used to the theatre these days, it has to do with the fact that atleast where I live that experience has degraded, at the same time that alternative experiences have become better. A typical night at the movies migth go something like this:
Arrive 15 minutes before the movie which is supposed to start at 20:00.
Stand 10 minutes in line. Get the preordered tickets.
Buy overpriced low-quality snacks.
Enter theatre.
Find seat, confirm they *still* haven't done anything about the 20 year old chairs.
Wait until 10-15 minutes after 20:00
Sit trough 15-20 minutes of non-stop advertising. The annoying type. Those that are too lame to be worth expensive tv-time, or that advertises products which you cannot advertise in tv. (tobacco mainly) 15-20 minutes of advertising for tobacco and vodka is *exactly* what I want when I take my son to the theatre to watch say ice-age....
Sit trough 5 minutes of insulting "anyone who downloads anything from the internet is a thieving pirate and should be shot on sight." all the time knowing that *your* money is funding the crap.
Watch movie.
For some reason the above deal appeals to me more and more seldom. It happens just *too* oft that I decide to go to the theatre and regret the whole thing, even in cases where the movie as such is ok.
The price ain't the issue. The lack of *entertainment* is. I pay to have fun. I expect to be treated with respect, not subjected to insulting crap.
I *happily* paid $150 to watch "Cats" at the theatre in Berlin. It was worth every penny. Guess what:
The show started on time.
There was no comercials of any type.
There was no "you are a thieving pirate" crap.
The seats where excellent.
The people working at the theatre actually care about service. There's a staffed wardrobe. The toilets are modern and clean. If you have a request, they'll bend over backwards to fulfill it.
Paying is not a problem. Paying for *crap* is a problem.
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You falsely assume that the only alternative to using patents to reward successfull innovators is to use stately funded labs. If that where the case, it migth indeed be that patents would be the lesser evil.
Luckily there's an infinite number of choises, those are only 2, and 2 poor ones at that.
A better idea is to combine the best of both worlds. For example trough a bounty-system.
Post a bounty for a drug with a specified set of problems. Increase the bounty for problems you're more interested in solving. Private sector are free to compete with oneanother in developing the drugs. Public sector are free to use the finished drugs without any licensing-fees or similar.
e) You don't have to spend 90%+ of your energy lifting fuel.
f) You only need to climb up, the needed orbital velocity will be imparted by the beanstalk.
A traditional rocket mostly lifts fuel. You launch thousands of tonnes and end up with a ton or so in orbit. A climber on the other hand has to lift only the cargo and the climber itself, *not* the fuel for the climber.
Also, getting the orbital speed from the beanstalk saves you some energy. At geosynch the orbital speed is around 3 km/s, so for every 1000 kg of cargo you save on this alone 1250 kwh.
No, there's no easy answer to that. Deal with it. The fact that a question ain't simple doesn't mean a workable compromise can't be found.
So, for example, Germany (which has private health-insurance, but the catalogue of included benefits are standardised and equal for all at the normal plan) they'll pay for up to 3 tries of ex-vitro fertilization if a couple is childless. Should it be 0 ? Or unlimited ? Or 10 ? You're free to argue any of these, you're also free to vote for politicians who argue any of these. And last, but not least, you're free to pay for additional attempts out of your own pocket if you decide you want it even though it's not covered.
Norway, in contrast has a government-funded (which just means tax-funded reall) program where criteria for membership are trivial: You must be legally in norway, and it must be for a period longer than a year. That's it. Assuming you fulfill those criteria, you get full access to the standard catalogue of treatments.
Here too, you can pay by yourself for stuff that ain't covered, precisely like in the USA you can pay for yourself for stuff your insurance doesn't cover, if you decide it's worth it to you.
I've never even heard of them existing in Norway either. Not saying it doesn't, but normal its certainly not. Could be that certain very responsible positions demand it, air-traffic controller say.
Actually, the sun is something like half a degree across, as viewed from earth. Yes it's very far away, but it also has a large diameter. Half a degree ain't trivial, if you reflect sunligth at a ship 300m away say, you'd get an image of the sun 2.7 meters across. That's not, in my opinion small enough to be ignorable in the sense of being practically equivalent to a focused spot.
In Norway, it's perfectly legally established that "free" or "gratis" means *without*compensation*.
Buy 2 gadgets, get third one free. That's not free, nor gratis. It may be *included*, but it sure as hell ain't free.
What bugs me even more is that not only does this blatant lying shit slip trough the truth in advertising laws, but even worse: Advertisers still believe (correctly or not) that there's people out there who doesn't instantly look trough the bullshit and recognize that they're being lied to.
I never figured why lying to your customer, in a way that makes it a certanity that a large majority of the customers will *realize* that you're lying to them is a good idea.
Are people so used to this that they don't even react with disgust ?
Actually, not even this works. Atleast not for devices that accept unlimited lengths of input.
Besides, *even* if the breathalyzer accepted *only* a press of the "Go" button, and had *no* other inputs, how do you verify that tapping "... ... ..." on the Go-button won't cause the next tested person to automatically be assumed intoxicated ?
But without this ruling we had a situation where essentially:
That's unacceptable. You've got a rigth to confront the evidence against you. That required you to know exactly what that evidence is, so that you (or your lawyer) can point out weaknesses in the evidence, for example.
The logical conclusion is that evidence of any kind that is collected by closed-source software, and that is not independently verifiable is not evidence at all, but instead merely the empty claim of a uncheckable device.
That's DoD prices, they always seem to have a zero more than seems reasonable, sometimes more. (there's been a few $500 toilet-seats and $300 hammers)
The current prices for similar glass-armor are quite high too, at $3 or so a square inch that Hummer windshield is still going to cost around $5000.
There's significant non-white minorities from those countries which used to have colonies in Africa and elsewhere, and also, offocurse, newer immigrants of various types. France for example has quite a few people with african roots.
Except, offcourse, the smaller states in the EU are generally *richer* than the bigger ones, not the other way around as you seem to believe.
Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Belgium, all sub-10-million inhabitants and all enjoying a higher standard of living and a better financial situation overall than say UK, France, and Germany (which are like 50 million plus inhabitants)
Actually, as I'm sure you understood, I meant the doctor can no longer inform your parents about things you tell the doctor, or things the doctor discovers on his/her own. In other words, you've got the rigth to privacy in medical matters, which isn't true for a younger child: the parents *will* be told whether the child wants that to happen or not if the doctor finds it prudent. (in some situations they're even required by law, for example if a girl under 15 is pregnant. If she is 15-16 it's up to the doctor after evaluating the situation, if she's over 16 he *can't* tell the parents unless the girl consents.)
Talk can only do a limited amount of harm. If your kids know and follow the simple rule of always bringing along an adult to a first meeting with someone they know from the net, it'll help a lot.
No, nothing is foolproof, get over it, your child will be exposed to risk even if you let him/her live in a padded cell.
Closing Yahoo chat for "minors" do *not* in any way make children safer, because:
Aditionally, you gotta ask if the gain stay in proportion to the loss. Sure, outlawing cars would save thousands of traffic-dead children (and adults!) every year, doesn't mean it's nessecarily a smart thing to do.
This is simply done so that Yahoo can say they're not responsible. They want to avoid bad PR associated with "child meets pedo after chatting on yahoo" kind of news. They're covering their own back, not actually changing the risks of children in any significant way.
Not that it matters, but I'm the father of a young child, so don't try that "spoken like a non-parent" stuff on me.
Don't be silly. I know everyone goes gaga and turns their brain off when someone mentions children and "online-predators" but this does not change the facts that:
By the way, I say this as the father of a small child, so don't think for even a microsecond that I don't care about the wellbeing of children. I just don't care for wrongheded paranoia, that's all. There's no reason you need to sit with your child at the computer the entire time. You should however, in my opinion have an idea what the child is doing and sometimes discuss it with the child.
It's not "one" line, but a lot of lines. A person isn't either "fully adult" or "100% child", in the real world people develop gradually over years and are given more and more responsibility both by law and by their parents (assuming the parents aren't idiots)
For example, in Norway (other countries have different age-limits, but the general principle is the same) there's quite a few different age-limits, some of which are:
OK, so 18 may be the most significant of these dates, but it's not an "on/off" switch, nor should it be.
Thus selecting in konq, rigth-clicking and selecting "Action/Order prints" require nothing more than a 3-line shellscript. ( echo "What size ?"; read $size; europhoto_upload -s $size -n 1 "$@" basically.)
I'm sorry that I have no experience with unix-friendly printshops in the US, I'm sure they'll exist, but I wouldn't know which ones it is. Look around I guess.
No it isn't. The cost of a studio capable of recording professional-quality music has fallen by atleast 2 orders of magnitude in the last few decades. Some of my favourite CDs would cost less than $5000 to record if you paid for the studio-time at the studio where they are recorded.
Musicians aren't (generally!) stupider than other people. They're not selling their souls in order to avoid investing $5000 in something they believe in.
The labels do however to a disturbing degree control the traqditional supply-chain aswell as most of the important channels of advertising, such as radio. Read up on payola.
You can buy a terabyte of harddisk-capacity for like $500 these days. So 500TB, while sounding impressive is actually disks for $250.000. Storage requires more than just the raw disks. A rule of thumb that often works out ok is to add an order of magnitude to convert "raw disc" into "enterprise storage", that still mean a cost in the ballpark of 2-3 million.
Assuming your numbers are accurate, to finance this storage in a week, they'd need to take maybe 2 cents from every customer that week.
Furthermore, 59KB to store info from *one* customer for *one* week should be plenty. a 64-bit integer to index into their table of items is plenty. (a 32-bit would do, they don't have, nor will they ever have 4*10**9 products, but you design these things with space to grow) A typical shopping would then need to store only maybe 50 of these integers each with qantity, along with time-and-date and which store and so on. Should be trivial in 1KB. That leaves atleast 1, possibly 2 orders of magnitude for various indexes and other data.
I agree that noone can store "all" their data. (depending on your definitions of "data" offcourse), but storing a complete record of *all* transactions that has ever taken place in your company is trivial, even for WalMart.
The inconvenience, gas, time and so on however is silly. You seem to assume that one can only order photos printed at a bircks-and-mortar store and have to fetch the result there too.
In reality, ordering a copy of a selection of photos is as simple as selecting them in konq, rigth-click and select "Order photos", then fill in what size and what number I want and click Go. All done in maybe a minute, much *quicker* and easier than printing myself. (which requires finding and inserting photo-paper, making sure there's enough ink, and then printing the pictures one by one.)
The results are in my mailbox the following morning assuming I ordered by noon, if not, the day after.
You see, a BitTorrent-client in download-mode will use tit-for-tat, meaning it'll upload more frequently to other peers that extend the same courtecy the other way.
So a peer that only downloads, and never lets you download something you want will basically only be able to get data from the seeds, or if your upload-capacity isn't filled with feeding "real" clients.
You could steal some bandwith from the seeds, but even they tend to use round-robin or some other way of distributing the uploads, which means that even if you had so many fake clients that you where half the swarm, you'd still manage only to decrease the seed-upload part by half. Given that most swarms are dominated by peer-upload over seed-upload this would be hardly noticeable.
My bank migth satisfy you then. Skandiabanken.no
Even if I gave you my login and password, you'd still not be able to do anything at all, because additionally you need a digital certificate that is stored encrypted on my computer.
So let's say you broke into my computer and aditionally stole this certificate. In my case it's encrypted using the password for the bank, so you'd be able to decrypt it and now you can log in.
However you *still* can't make a transaction pretending to be me, because transactions must be authorised by a TAN, a one-time transaction-authorisation-number. Those I have on a paper-list next to my computer.
It's not that effortful to use actually. To log in, all I need is username and password, like in the US. Whenever I transfer money I do need to enter a one-time TAN and then pencil the used one out of my list. OK, so this migth add 5 seconds to the time I need to make a transaction.
Personally I find the tradeoff perfectly acceptable.
Yeah, sure, the I.D watermark will tell that the movies where distributed by Granny Smith who doesn't have either a computer or any kind of internet, but which got her purse stolen a week ago. Or the distribution was done by Daffy Duck, as the copy here of this real-looking ID clearly shows.
It's sorta like in parts of Europe the government requires telecom-carriers to collect real name-and-adress of all their customers, meaning you "can't" buy a anonymous prepaid cellphone.
In reality offcourse, you can get one completely anonymously from a zillion sources, even the telecom-companies themselves only require you to email a scan of some sorta ID if you buy from them online. All it takes is an hour with the Gimp and you've got your prepaid-phone, properly registered to Daffy Duck. (ok, so that name would probably look suspicious, if someone human is involved in the loop, but a fake plausible-sounding one wouldn't)
This won't be any different.
What they're trying to do is fundamentally impossible to acomplish.
They want players (millions of them!) to be able to play the discs without requiring a network-connection.
At the same time, they want the info needed for decoding the discs (the key basically) to remain secret.
These two wishes are mutually exclusive. You cannot distribute a key in millions of copies in equally many different physical devices and expect that *noone* will ever manage to somehow extract one of those keys.
Now, using multiple keys for different manufacturers help, but only a little. If you use say 1000 different keys and one of them are compromised, what will you do ? Turn 1/1000 of the existing players into paperweigths ? Recall and "update" them ? You're talking hundreds of thousands of players, or millions of players if it's the key in a popular brand....
Tamper-proof hardware helps a little, but it increases the cost of the players so the pressure to drop it will be large. (witness the current crop of $30 DVD-players)
Furthermore, every tamper-"proofing" can be broken, it's just harder. If a chip is sensitive to ligth, you can pry it open in darkness. If oxygene reacts with a chemical and destroys it on dismantling, you can dismantle it in a nitrogen-atmosphere. If the chip stays intact only aslong as a positive pressure of 20 atmospheres is maintained around it, you can open it in a pressure-tank. You get the idea.
When I go a lot less than I used to the theatre these days, it has to do with the fact that atleast where I live that experience has degraded, at the same time that alternative experiences have become better. A typical night at the movies migth go something like this:
For some reason the above deal appeals to me more and more seldom. It happens just *too* oft that I decide to go to the theatre and regret the whole thing, even in cases where the movie as such is ok.
The price ain't the issue. The lack of *entertainment* is. I pay to have fun. I expect to be treated with respect, not subjected to insulting crap.
I *happily* paid $150 to watch "Cats" at the theatre in Berlin. It was worth every penny. Guess what:
Paying is not a problem. Paying for *crap* is a problem.