Give me a break. There are NO, repeat NO medical devices that require constant wireless communication with anything. Otherwise, people would simply keel over in the various Faraday cages that we surround ourselves with throughout the day.
How many faraday cages do you surround yourself with during the day? I can leave my apartment, take the elevator down to the parking garage, hop in my car, drive to work, take the elevator up to the 3rd floor and walk to my office, all without dropping my phone call. (ok, so I've never don't it all in one contiguous call, but I've used my phone on each of those segments individually)
If all you need is space for a network switch and a single server, why not put the server in a desktop case, and put both the rack and the switch on a shelf. Or just keep it in the rackmount case and put it on the shelf.
Or, if you're looking for something to impress your friends when they see your server room, put in whatever it is that impresses your friends. With lots of blue LEDs.
That said, unless you're going to die in this house, installing more than a wiring cupboard seems to be a massive waste of space that would make me want a discount on the future sale of the house.
If you think you're going to die in the house, then maybe your money would be best spent guarding against that death. How about security glass for the windows, perhaps a house wide Exorcism if you think your death will come from supernatural means. A chainsaw or axe may help fend off a zombie invasion. Maybe make the home environment safer - GFCI and AFCI's on every outlet, hardwired and monitored fire alarms, fire sprinklers, sturdy handrails on stairways, shorter stairways with multiple landings to help reduce the consequences of a fall, etc. Maybe stock up on extra first aid supplies, a defibrillator, and, depending on your financial situation, perhaps a small operating room along with appropriate staff.
These seem like a better way to spend your money if you think you're going to die in the house.
Unless that software is necessary for running the heart-lung machine that is keeping you alive, you *do* have a choice - you can choose not to use the service.
Sure, one can choose not to connect to the Internet if, for example, the only ISP serving homes in the area requires proprietary dialer software. But is the act of choosing not to connect to the Internet within the degrees of acceptance of Slashdot's target demographic?
You provided a link to "Overton Window", but not to as description of this proprietary dialer software? Where in the USA (or the World) do you have to run Windows to use your ISP?
You've described some of the more common problems I've witnessed when trying to switch some friends to Linux. In the end, they're still on their Windows and OSX machines.
Until I can get my home setup to print a coupon from coupons.com, Target, and various other coupon sites to our network printer, I can't get my wife off of Windows 7.
Why do coupon sites require special software to print coupons? I can even print USPS shipping labels under Linux. It's just a PDF.
What special features does the coupon printer software provide? Surely it's not an attempt to prevent printing multiple coupons, since even if I couldn't find a way to capture the coupon in a PDF on Windows, I could just scan and copy the one I printed.
* Couldn't stream videos on Netflix, as Netflix requires the Silverlight plugin. * Some web applications require Internet Explorer to work (I know, I HATE proprietary web applications and extensions as much as the next person, but one doesn't always have a choice).
Unless that software is necessary for running the heart-lung machine that is keeping you alive, you *do* have a choice - you can choose not to use the service.
The only service I use regularly that doesn't run in Linux is Netflix, and I don't really care because I don't watch movies on my computer, I watch them through my Netflix enabled Blu-ray player. Amazon Prime video streaming works on Linux and I've watched a grand total of 10 minutes of one video just to try it out and see if it worked.
I haven't run into any MSIE-only webapps that I care about. Even Turbotax works fine in Chrome (despite the warning saying that it may not run well)
Also, my lawyers have reminded me that the contract says nothing about not re-assembling it, or not using all the information gleaned by disassembling it to build a new one. Eeeexcellent.
The auction listing says this:
(THE EX-SEA SHADOW SHALL BE DISPOSED OF BY COMPLETELY DISMANTLING AND SCRAPPING WITHIN THE U.S.A. DISMANTILING IS DEFINED AS REDUCING THE PROPERTY SUCH AS IT HAS NO VALUE EXCEPT FOR ITS BASIC MATERIAL CONTENT.)
I fail to see how you could disassemble it in a way that allows reassembly and still be able to show that you reduced the ship down to where it has no value except its basic material content. I suppose you could melt it down and reshape each piece into its original shape, but that seems more expensive than just building a brand new ship.
I like how they mention that the 23 row by 73 column interpretation is "jumbled garbage". The correct image also looks like jumbled garbage. I especially like the image of a human. How the hell is an alien supposed to figure out what that is without having seen a human before?
It is really expecting a lot out of an alien to receive this signal in all the space they could be looking at, determine that the modulation of the signal corresponds to binary digits, then determine this number of bits is semi-prime and can be arranged in a grid to pictorially represent the data, make sure they arrange it correctly, decipher what is essentially a cave drawing made by a species that may have close to nothing in common with them, and actually care enough to write back.
It would be interesting to release that radio stream in some code breaking challenge to see how easy it is for an earthling to decode the message. Though most of the people that would participate in such an event probably already know about this message.
If there is a lifeform advanced enough to pick up the SETI signals, chances are they've had the technology for thousands of (earth) years. By contrast, just a couple hundred years ago we were reading books by gas lamps and traveling and sending messages by horse and carriage.
Maybe they could organize an expedition to colonize this fertile planet 70 percent covered with liquid water, only 200 LY away? Of course, by that time the original SETI people would be long dead, having gone to their graves happy in the knowledge that they've advanced understanding between alien species...
I doubt there are any resources a spacefaring civilization could find on Earth that they couldn't find much closer to home. Asteroids and comets good sources of water and many metals and other elements. Unless they want fresh meat.
Probably the only reasons to travel 200 light years to visit a developing culture are to study it, befriend it, or annihilate it so it doesn't become a threat later when it becomes more advanced.
Will we ever intentionally send out a beacon advertising our existence, knowing that it would likely take 100 years or more before any potentially inhabited planet would receive it? And if we do think there's other life out there, do we really trust it enough to tell it where we are?
the answer is yes. a long time ago.
Well, that's not really what I asked. A small piece of low speed space junk that has no chance of discovery is not the same as a radio beacon.
Bonehead's response below is exactly what I asked about, but it's interesting that they directed it at a star cluster 25,000 light years away knowing that in 25,000 years it will no longer be there.
Unless we think a civilization is intentionally sending out beacons to the universe, isn't SETI pointless?
As our communications technology improves, it becomes lowered powered (unlike my old 3W car phone, my curren cell phone only puts out 300mW of signal max) and the leakage from hundreds, or thousands, or millions of point sources of RF signals becomes more and more like "white noise" to someone that doesn't know how to decode it thanks to spread spectrum signals and high bandwidth data encoded in the streams.
The days of 100,000+ watt AM radio transmitters will likely end soon, so there won't be nearly as much leakage to the cosmos.
So there's probably a 100 year window in a civilization's development where its unintentional broadcasts are detectable.
Will we ever intentionally send out a beacon advertising our existence, knowing that it would likely take 100 years or more before any potentially inhabited planet would receive it? And if we do think there's other life out there, do we really trust it enough to tell it where we are?
You say that as if you have the money to pay them to pick just one.
No, I say that as someone who has spent years waiting for Linux on the Desktop to be ready, and I keep seeing so much software that is almost, but not quite there. Along with many competing software applications that do nearly the same thing, so it just seems like there's often alot of dilution from competing packages when there could be more cooperation to make one project more polished and usable.
And before you say "It's open source - write it yourself!", I have contributed to Open Source projects, but my contributions have mostly been on the systems tools side, I'm not a desktop applications developer.
I do run Linux on my desktop (both at home and work), but I keep a Windows VM handy for when I need to run a Windows application. I just can't move my boss over to Linux and say "Sorry your spreadsheet macros aren't working in OpenOffice. Here, download Libre Office, maybe it will work better. Wait, no, here's Gnumeric, I heard it has better macro support. No? Well someone online said KSpread might work better, try that one. Here, maybe I can get MS Office to load in Wine, the Wine website says most things sort of work"
I guess I've been out of touch, I thought Openoffice died with Sun and Libreoffice was forked and is the continuation of that product.
Seems like a lot of duplication of effort in maintaining both OpenOffice and LibreOffice and the community would be better off picking one. But then again, the same has been said about KDE versus Gnome.
I'm not sure which is more disturbing, that you know about a site called narcoticnews.com, or that it exists.:)
I didn't follow the link though, I have enough reasons to be on too many lists. I don't need the DEA knocking down my front door to find no drugs. It's expensive to replace a door.:) That, and we'd spend the next two hours trying to catch the cats that went running out. "Make sure you shut... no don't let the cat.. shit, cat got out again."
I think I'd be more worried about the series of Google searches that led me to that site than the mere act of visiting the site. Google tags everything with my identity, but the ISP I'm using doesn't even know my name (though I guess it wouldn't be hard to figure it out with enough traffic snooping)
This would be a great chance for the MPAA to stand up and say "We cannot condone pirating videos, but to show our appreciation for our troops, we're going to send 500,000 free DVD movies to the troops". Then in the fine print, it will say "And all 500,000 are copies of Pluto Nash that were gathering dust in a warehouse".
Not sure if that is correct to say of Google. They seem to ditch most of their products before they even launch so they have no real idea how profitable they would be.
Isn't that the right time to ditch a product? If you don't think it's going to work out, it seems much better to ditch it before you launch it.
"In any case, the wholesale price of cocaine in the USA ranges from $14 to $39 per gram:"
Gee, thanks for telling me what I just told you.
"How else would you represent the price of cocaine in a country if not using averages? "
I wouldn't, there is no price of cocaine in a country...its variable. I was tryin to ridicule that, but you got caught up in semantics.
Right - when you say Cocaine costs $20/gram in the USA, we should accept it as fact (which happens to prove your point). But when prices are quoted for other counties, they are just some ridiculous made up numbers that mean nothing because prices are variable.
About Norway, but they actually have responsible drug policies in Norway and prefer to treat addiction, not vilify it, so I'm sure their price is so high because is so rare anyone in Norway wants cocaine, they can legally get other drugs. I just fail to see how that's proof of anything other than anyone can pull an article out of their ass on the internet.
Sure, that makes perfect sense (?) -- the USA drives up cocaine prices with their insane drug policies, but Norway drives up cocaine prices with their sane drug polices. So if only the USA had more reasonable drug policies, cocaine would be less expensive than in say, Norway , which has sane policies. Oh wait, except that it costs more in Norway because they have more sane policies. So does that mean that USA drug policies keep cocaine cheaper?
I firmly believe the war on drugs is misguided, but your logic isn't proving the point.
Oh and LMFAO at that article you linked, yeah a slideshow of some scenic places tells me a whole lot about how much people pay for cocaine
If you read the captions on the slides, the pricing is right there. I'm sorry that you were distracted by the pretty pictures, I didn't create the slideshow.
Yeah that's end user price I was talking about dealer rates...When you buy a kilo u ain't payin to 120 per gram, not if you intend to make money that is. You're talking about something that doesn't have a real cost to manufacture so at dealer levels they basically define the price at however much they want to move to keep their rep up this week.
Why would you quote prices in gram for volume pricing that's usually purchased in kilos?
In any case, the wholesale price of cocaine in the USA ranges from $14 to $39 per gram:
You may pay less if you're purchasing cut cocaine.
And those numbers look suspiciously like averages...I mean, noones payin for a gram of anything illegal by the dollar, they pay in intervals of 5 because some drug dealers will actually shoot you in the head if you try to give them 1's or change. In other words, this article is bullshit.
You are kidding, right? How else would you represent the price of cocaine in a country if not using averages? Would you just pick the price at some random street corner and use that as the price for the entire country? And then would you convert from whatever currency they use, then round to the nearest 5 US dollars since that's how a street dealer in the USA would price it?
no other country is 1 gram of cocaine worth 20 bucks sorry, but making it so illegal has made it extremely profitable and this, being the USA, makes it irresistible since we're all 100% entirely profit motivated
I've always thought this is one of the biggest holes in the entire system -- all a terrorist has to do is bribe one of the thousands of screeners (or a few of them) in some small airport anywhere in the country, and the terrorist can fly his 10 pound bomb to JFK or any other large airport.
The screener will think he's getting paid $25,000 in cash to smuggle in some drugs, he doesn't even have to know it's a bomb.
That's actually wrong. It indeed slows initial piracy spreading. Numbers, sadly, are in the industry and not in academia.
How does DRM slow down piracy when there are a multitude of programs out there to rip and strip DRM off of DVD's, Blurays, and popular eBook formats?
I've seen a number of new releases for download on the day the Bluray is available, so I could have the movie in my house even faster than Amazon can ship it to me overnight. How is the DRM on the Bluray slowing the initial piracy?
I think the industry is deceiving itself if it thinks DRM is doing anything to stop or slow piracy, all it does is make it harder for legitimate users to use their content. I have a Kindle eReader and a Nook tablet. Each has its advantages in different environments, so why can't I read my purchased book on both readers? If I download a pirated copy, it's got no DRM restrictions and I can easily format-shift it to read it on either device, so the industry has made the pirated copy more valuable to me than the legitimate purchased copy.
Let me tell you about my first Kindle purchase. I paid $12 for a novel that retailed on Amazon at $13.
I read the book, thoroughly enjoyed it and told a friend a couple of days later. She responded by saying she'd love to borrow it. I had to explain that wasn't possible.
So, I saved a dollar.
The publisher saved the cost of printing a paperback book, physically transporting it to Amazon. Amazon saved having the physically store the book in a warehouse and didn't have to pay UPS to deliver it to me.
Once I had read the book, I couldn't lend it or sell it. The bits were used and might as werll be deleted. The publisher and Amazon win again, as there's no second hand market for that purchase.
I have made Kindle purchases since, but I'm much more selective. Typically I'll only do it where I need a book now, or I can be sure it's a book I won't want to share.
It's not because I'm too stingly - I'm still buying books. What I don't want is to lose the rights I have through the first sale doctrine simply because I purchased bits and bytes rather than tree pulp.
Just wait a month or two after the book's release and you can buy the book (including shipping) for half the price of the eBook. And after you and your friend are done reading it, you can sell it again for a dollar or two.
I own both a Kindle and Nook, but I still buy most of my books on paper because they are cheaper.
No it's not. It provides computation engine. When you type
distance to mars in earth radii
Into wolfram alpha, it's not searching for the answer. It's computing the answer.
By contrast a search engine searches for websites based relevant to the words input.
These are totally different things.
Does that mean Google is not a search engine because when I search Google for 2 + 3 it computes "2 + 3 = 5" without searching for pages that contain "2 + 3"?
And when I search for San Francisco on Wolfram Alpha, is it computing the population and other data is presents?
The Kindle DRM removal tools I looked at required running on Windows (or OSX, or depending on what version Kindle, a key might be able to be extracted from the Kindle). First, I don't normally run Windows and I'm not willing to reboot into Windows just to remove DRM so I can use the files I purchased, and second, even if I wanted to run Windows, most of the tools include binaries ( executables and/or DLL's), and I'm unwilling to run a binary cracking tool that I downloaded from some random site on the internet on my computer.
Instead, I downloaded 2 python scripts, one to generate a key, one to decrypt the book. Simple and easy.
Slashdot Mirror
OMG! Think of the Medical Devices!
Give me a break. There are NO, repeat NO medical devices that require constant wireless communication with anything. Otherwise, people would simply keel over in the various Faraday cages that we surround ourselves with throughout the day.
How many faraday cages do you surround yourself with during the day? I can leave my apartment, take the elevator down to the parking garage, hop in my car, drive to work, take the elevator up to the 3rd floor and walk to my office, all without dropping my phone call. (ok, so I've never don't it all in one contiguous call, but I've used my phone on each of those segments individually)
If all you need is space for a network switch and a single server, why not put the server in a desktop case, and put both the rack and the switch on a shelf. Or just keep it in the rackmount case and put it on the shelf.
Or, if you're looking for something to impress your friends when they see your server room, put in whatever it is that impresses your friends. With lots of blue LEDs.
That said, unless you're going to die in this house, installing more than a wiring cupboard seems to be a massive waste of space that would make me want a discount on the future sale of the house.
If you think you're going to die in the house, then maybe your money would be best spent guarding against that death. How about security glass for the windows, perhaps a house wide Exorcism if you think your death will come from supernatural means. A chainsaw or axe may help fend off a zombie invasion. Maybe make the home environment safer - GFCI and AFCI's on every outlet, hardwired and monitored fire alarms, fire sprinklers, sturdy handrails on stairways, shorter stairways with multiple landings to help reduce the consequences of a fall, etc. Maybe stock up on extra first aid supplies, a defibrillator, and, depending on your financial situation, perhaps a small operating room along with appropriate staff.
These seem like a better way to spend your money if you think you're going to die in the house.
Unless that software is necessary for running the heart-lung machine that is keeping you alive, you *do* have a choice - you can choose not to use the service.
Sure, one can choose not to connect to the Internet if, for example, the only ISP serving homes in the area requires proprietary dialer software. But is the act of choosing not to connect to the Internet within the degrees of acceptance of Slashdot's target demographic?
You provided a link to "Overton Window", but not to as description of this proprietary dialer software? Where in the USA (or the World) do you have to run Windows to use your ISP?
You've described some of the more common problems I've witnessed when trying to switch some friends to Linux. In the end, they're still on their Windows and OSX machines.
Until I can get my home setup to print a coupon from coupons.com, Target, and various other coupon sites to our network printer, I can't get my wife off of Windows 7.
Why do coupon sites require special software to print coupons? I can even print USPS shipping labels under Linux. It's just a PDF.
What special features does the coupon printer software provide? Surely it's not an attempt to prevent printing multiple coupons, since even if I couldn't find a way to capture the coupon in a PDF on Windows, I could just scan and copy the one I printed.
* Couldn't stream videos on Netflix, as Netflix requires the Silverlight plugin. * Some web applications require Internet Explorer to work (I know, I HATE proprietary web applications and extensions as much as the next person, but one doesn't always have a choice).
Unless that software is necessary for running the heart-lung machine that is keeping you alive, you *do* have a choice - you can choose not to use the service.
The only service I use regularly that doesn't run in Linux is Netflix, and I don't really care because I don't watch movies on my computer, I watch them through my Netflix enabled Blu-ray player. Amazon Prime video streaming works on Linux and I've watched a grand total of 10 minutes of one video just to try it out and see if it worked.
I haven't run into any MSIE-only webapps that I care about. Even Turbotax works fine in Chrome (despite the warning saying that it may not run well)
Also, my lawyers have reminded me that the contract says nothing about not re-assembling it, or not using all the information gleaned by disassembling it to build a new one. Eeeexcellent.
The auction listing says this:
(THE EX-SEA SHADOW SHALL BE DISPOSED OF BY COMPLETELY DISMANTLING AND SCRAPPING WITHIN THE U.S.A. DISMANTILING IS DEFINED AS REDUCING THE PROPERTY SUCH AS IT HAS NO VALUE EXCEPT FOR ITS BASIC MATERIAL CONTENT.)
I fail to see how you could disassemble it in a way that allows reassembly and still be able to show that you reduced the ship down to where it has no value except its basic material content. I suppose you could melt it down and reshape each piece into its original shape, but that seems more expensive than just building a brand new ship.
I like how they mention that the 23 row by 73 column interpretation is "jumbled garbage". The correct image also looks like jumbled garbage. I especially like the image of a human. How the hell is an alien supposed to figure out what that is without having seen a human before?
It is really expecting a lot out of an alien to receive this signal in all the space they could be looking at, determine that the modulation of the signal corresponds to binary digits, then determine this number of bits is semi-prime and can be arranged in a grid to pictorially represent the data, make sure they arrange it correctly, decipher what is essentially a cave drawing made by a species that may have close to nothing in common with them, and actually care enough to write back.
It would be interesting to release that radio stream in some code breaking challenge to see how easy it is for an earthling to decode the message. Though most of the people that would participate in such an event probably already know about this message.
If there is a lifeform advanced enough to pick up the SETI signals, chances are they've had the technology for thousands of (earth) years. By contrast, just a couple hundred years ago we were reading books by gas lamps and traveling and sending messages by horse and carriage.
Maybe they could organize an expedition to colonize this fertile planet 70 percent covered with liquid water, only 200 LY away? Of course, by that time the original SETI people would be long dead, having gone to their graves happy in the knowledge that they've advanced understanding between alien species...
I doubt there are any resources a spacefaring civilization could find on Earth that they couldn't find much closer to home. Asteroids and comets good sources of water and many metals and other elements. Unless they want fresh meat.
Probably the only reasons to travel 200 light years to visit a developing culture are to study it, befriend it, or annihilate it so it doesn't become a threat later when it becomes more advanced.
ok, but that's not what you asked.
Will we ever intentionally send out a beacon advertising our existence, knowing that it would likely take 100 years or more before any potentially inhabited planet would receive it? And if we do think there's other life out there, do we really trust it enough to tell it where we are?
the answer is yes. a long time ago.
Well, that's not really what I asked. A small piece of low speed space junk that has no chance of discovery is not the same as a radio beacon.
Bonehead's response below is exactly what I asked about, but it's interesting that they directed it at a star cluster 25,000 light years away knowing that in 25,000 years it will no longer be there.
don't know how to break this to you so i'll just say it... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
I think it's safe to say that Voyager (or Pioneer) probes will never be found. Space is big. Very big. Voyager is small. Very small.
I think the Star Trek scenario of a Voyager probe being used as target practice by a Klingon warship is equally likely as it being found at all.
Unless we think a civilization is intentionally sending out beacons to the universe, isn't SETI pointless?
As our communications technology improves, it becomes lowered powered (unlike my old 3W car phone, my curren cell phone only puts out 300mW of signal max) and the leakage from hundreds, or thousands, or millions of point sources of RF signals becomes more and more like "white noise" to someone that doesn't know how to decode it thanks to spread spectrum signals and high bandwidth data encoded in the streams.
The days of 100,000+ watt AM radio transmitters will likely end soon, so there won't be nearly as much leakage to the cosmos.
So there's probably a 100 year window in a civilization's development where its unintentional broadcasts are detectable.
Will we ever intentionally send out a beacon advertising our existence, knowing that it would likely take 100 years or more before any potentially inhabited planet would receive it? And if we do think there's other life out there, do we really trust it enough to tell it where we are?
the community would be better off picking one
You say that as if you have the money to pay them to pick just one.
No, I say that as someone who has spent years waiting for Linux on the Desktop to be ready, and I keep seeing so much software that is almost, but not quite there. Along with many competing software applications that do nearly the same thing, so it just seems like there's often alot of dilution from competing packages when there could be more cooperation to make one project more polished and usable.
And before you say "It's open source - write it yourself!", I have contributed to Open Source projects, but my contributions have mostly been on the systems tools side, I'm not a desktop applications developer.
I do run Linux on my desktop (both at home and work), but I keep a Windows VM handy for when I need to run a Windows application. I just can't move my boss over to Linux and say "Sorry your spreadsheet macros aren't working in OpenOffice. Here, download Libre Office, maybe it will work better. Wait, no, here's Gnumeric, I heard it has better macro support. No? Well someone online said KSpread might work better, try that one. Here, maybe I can get MS Office to load in Wine, the Wine website says most things sort of work"
I guess I've been out of touch, I thought Openoffice died with Sun and Libreoffice was forked and is the continuation of that product.
Seems like a lot of duplication of effort in maintaining both OpenOffice and LibreOffice and the community would be better off picking one. But then again, the same has been said about KDE versus Gnome.
I'm not sure which is more disturbing, that you know about a site called narcoticnews.com, or that it exists. :)
I didn't follow the link though, I have enough reasons to be on too many lists. I don't need the DEA knocking down my front door to find no drugs. It's expensive to replace a door. :) That, and we'd spend the next two hours trying to catch the cats that went running out. "Make sure you shut... no don't let the cat .. shit, cat got out again."
I think I'd be more worried about the series of Google searches that led me to that site than the mere act of visiting the site. Google tags everything with my identity, but the ISP I'm using doesn't even know my name (though I guess it wouldn't be hard to figure it out with enough traffic snooping)
This would be a great chance for the MPAA to stand up and say "We cannot condone pirating videos, but to show our appreciation for our troops, we're going to send 500,000 free DVD movies to the troops". Then in the fine print, it will say "And all 500,000 are copies of Pluto Nash that were gathering dust in a warehouse".
Not sure if that is correct to say of Google. They seem to ditch most of their products before they even launch so they have no real idea how profitable they would be.
Isn't that the right time to ditch a product? If you don't think it's going to work out, it seems much better to ditch it before you launch it.
"In any case, the wholesale price of cocaine in the USA ranges from $14 to $39 per gram:"
Gee, thanks for telling me what I just told you.
"How else would you represent the price of cocaine in a country if not using averages? "
I wouldn't, there is no price of cocaine in a country...its variable. I was tryin to ridicule that, but you got caught up in semantics.
Right - when you say Cocaine costs $20/gram in the USA, we should accept it as fact (which happens to prove your point). But when prices are quoted for other counties, they are just some ridiculous made up numbers that mean nothing because prices are variable.
About Norway, but they actually have responsible drug policies in Norway and prefer to treat addiction, not vilify it, so I'm sure their price is so high because is so rare anyone in Norway wants cocaine, they can legally get other drugs. I just fail to see how that's proof of anything other than anyone can pull an article out of their ass on the internet.
Sure, that makes perfect sense (?) -- the USA drives up cocaine prices with their insane drug policies, but Norway drives up cocaine prices with their sane drug polices. So if only the USA had more reasonable drug policies, cocaine would be less expensive than in say, Norway , which has sane policies. Oh wait, except that it costs more in Norway because they have more sane policies. So does that mean that USA drug policies keep cocaine cheaper?
I firmly believe the war on drugs is misguided, but your logic isn't proving the point.
Oh and LMFAO at that article you linked, yeah a slideshow of some scenic places tells me a whole lot about how much people pay for cocaine
If you read the captions on the slides, the pricing is right there. I'm sorry that you were distracted by the pretty pictures, I didn't create the slideshow.
Yeah that's end user price I was talking about dealer rates...When you buy a kilo u ain't payin to 120 per gram, not if you intend to make money that is. You're talking about something that doesn't have a real cost to manufacture so at dealer levels they basically define the price at however much they want to move to keep their rep up this week.
Why would you quote prices in gram for volume pricing that's usually purchased in kilos?
In any case, the wholesale price of cocaine in the USA ranges from $14 to $39 per gram:
http://www.narcoticnews.com/Cocaine-Prices-in-the-U.S.A.php
While in the UK, you'll pay around 60 US dollars for a gram:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8044275.stm
You may pay less if you're purchasing cut cocaine.
And those numbers look suspiciously like averages...I mean, noones payin for a gram of anything illegal by the dollar, they pay in intervals of 5 because some drug dealers will actually shoot you in the head if you try to give them 1's or change. In other words, this article is bullshit.
You are kidding, right? How else would you represent the price of cocaine in a country if not using averages? Would you just pick the price at some random street corner and use that as the price for the entire country? And then would you convert from whatever currency they use, then round to the nearest 5 US dollars since that's how a street dealer in the USA would price it?
no other country is 1 gram of cocaine worth 20 bucks sorry, but making it so illegal has made it extremely profitable and this, being the USA, makes it irresistible since we're all 100% entirely profit motivated
The USA is high, but not the highest:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/27/how-much-is-cocaine_n_883853.html
$154/g - Norway
$129/g - Finland
$120/g - USA
$104/g - Greece
$104/g - Sweden
$99/g - Italy
$97/g - Austria
$97/g - Ireland
$94/g - Denmark
$87/g - Luxembourg
I've always thought this is one of the biggest holes in the entire system -- all a terrorist has to do is bribe one of the thousands of screeners (or a few of them) in some small airport anywhere in the country, and the terrorist can fly his 10 pound bomb to JFK or any other large airport.
The screener will think he's getting paid $25,000 in cash to smuggle in some drugs, he doesn't even have to know it's a bomb.
That's actually wrong. It indeed slows initial piracy spreading. Numbers, sadly, are in the industry and not in academia.
How does DRM slow down piracy when there are a multitude of programs out there to rip and strip DRM off of DVD's, Blurays, and popular eBook formats?
I've seen a number of new releases for download on the day the Bluray is available, so I could have the movie in my house even faster than Amazon can ship it to me overnight. How is the DRM on the Bluray slowing the initial piracy?
I think the industry is deceiving itself if it thinks DRM is doing anything to stop or slow piracy, all it does is make it harder for legitimate users to use their content. I have a Kindle eReader and a Nook tablet. Each has its advantages in different environments, so why can't I read my purchased book on both readers? If I download a pirated copy, it's got no DRM restrictions and I can easily format-shift it to read it on either device, so the industry has made the pirated copy more valuable to me than the legitimate purchased copy.
Let me tell you about my first Kindle purchase. I paid $12 for a novel that retailed on Amazon at $13.
I read the book, thoroughly enjoyed it and told a friend a couple of days later. She responded by saying she'd love to borrow it. I had to explain that wasn't possible.
So, I saved a dollar.
The publisher saved the cost of printing a paperback book, physically transporting it to Amazon. Amazon saved having the physically store the book in a warehouse and didn't have to pay UPS to deliver it to me.
Once I had read the book, I couldn't lend it or sell it. The bits were used and might as werll be deleted. The publisher and Amazon win again, as there's no second hand market for that purchase.
I have made Kindle purchases since, but I'm much more selective. Typically I'll only do it where I need a book now, or I can be sure it's a book I won't want to share.
It's not because I'm too stingly - I'm still buying books. What I don't want is to lose the rights I have through the first sale doctrine simply because I purchased bits and bytes rather than tree pulp.
Just wait a month or two after the book's release and you can buy the book (including shipping) for half the price of the eBook. And after you and your friend are done reading it, you can sell it again for a dollar or two.
I own both a Kindle and Nook, but I still buy most of my books on paper because they are cheaper.
No it's not. It provides computation engine. When you type
distance to mars in earth radii
Into wolfram alpha, it's not searching for the answer. It's computing the answer.
By contrast a search engine searches for websites based relevant to the words input.
These are totally different things.
Does that mean Google is not a search engine because when I search Google for 2 + 3 it computes "2 + 3 = 5" without searching for pages that contain "2 + 3"?
And when I search for San Francisco on Wolfram Alpha, is it computing the population and other data is presents?
The Kindle DRM removal tools I looked at required running on Windows (or OSX, or depending on what version Kindle, a key might be able to be extracted from the Kindle). First, I don't normally run Windows and I'm not willing to reboot into Windows just to remove DRM so I can use the files I purchased, and second, even if I wanted to run Windows, most of the tools include binaries ( executables and/or DLL's), and I'm unwilling to run a binary cracking tool that I downloaded from some random site on the internet on my computer.
Instead, I downloaded 2 python scripts, one to generate a key, one to decrypt the book. Simple and easy.
http://vivaebooks.blogspot.com/2010/07/ibooks-b-lets-all-get-ignoble.html
Why should I reward Amazon for making harder to crack DRM by buying books from them?