Yeah, that's why I tried digital downloads... of course, back then I struggled to get it working in WINE and installed it so many times it'd fail because of too many activations. This was on a friday, nobody at the game company answered until monday. When they finally got back to me with a process for getting another activation, here's my response (actual quote):
Hello,
Thank you for your response, I found an easier, faster and more permanent (and quite probably illegal, but I don't care) solution to my activation problem though. But don't worry, I'll buy any expansion/sequel too as they're well worth the money.
Regards, [my name]
No response to that. And I did buy the sequel, too. Same stupid one-time activation but I figured I could always get around it if I needed to. As long as it doesn't do low level driver shit like starforce, that shit is permbanned.
Gog has also been selling a number of games recently that aren't old at all, despite their name.
If you search for games newer than 2005 there's 15 and several of those are "reloads", "director's cut", "anniversary edition" etc. of essentially old games so that's down to 11. Of those 5 are from 2006, 5 from 2007 and 1 from 2008 (King's Bounty: The Legend). And if that gets you hooked you'll have to go to another store to get the sequel "King's Bounty: Armored Princess". The one and only game they have that's brand new is The Witcher 2 on preorder. Which is great, but it's still just one game.
I think that most everyone in the general population would think that Nolle is right, and that his attitude typifies the point of view that's pulling America down into technological irrelevance.
FTFY. The US has been poisoned from the top down to only care about the next quarter. No wonder the long term sustainability of the business isn't there.
In a few billion years. Yeah I get it, you want to see it happen but if we take a thousand year hiatus and reboot our space exploration in the year 3000 that won't even amount to a rounding error. And we're still sending out probes, building bigger and better telescopes. We're just not sending fragile meatbags out there.
Single individuals might as well forget it anyway, nobody has a clue what people will like 20-50 years from now and what will largely be forgotten - hell, it's more than hard enough to tell what'll be an instant hit or flop today. Those who can profit are the corporations that vacuum up the market and can average it across all artists, there'll always be an Elvis or Beatles or whatever in every generation.
That was a long rant but I think the short answer is that consumers are a pretty big force to be reckoned with anyway. There's a reason Spotify is in the scandinavian countries where piracy is at its highest. There's a reason he is a MEP from the Pirate Party. I very much doubt you can *force* people to stop pirating, no matter how much you make a mockery of justice. And the courts here will never do a Thomas-Rasset and award 2 million dollars for sharing a few songs. That's what we give to people that have been innocently jailed for 15 years, smashed up real good in car accidents and that sort of thing. Even the four TPB leaders got less than 2 million dollars/person and that is still under appeal and TPB is still running. So they can own the whole playground but they still have to make terms that make the consumers want to play. We're not at the end of the bandwidth revolution, we've really just started. Take a look at this graph. That's the average and mean broadband bandwidth from 2004 and until today here in Norway. It's only going one way - up, up and away. You haven't seen anything yet, when everyone is on 10-100Mbit connections then you'll know true P2P. Also unlike the US "up to" those are pretty much real speeds with no silly caps.
There's a substantial difference between teaching you to reason and teaching you reason in the same way as other academics, inevitably reaching mostly the same conclusions. It is not without reason that academics have been accused of living disconnected from the real world, having convinced themselves that their highly theoretical model of how the world works actually reflects reality. Or perhaps ideological models is the right word, most working men have a more pragmatic approach.
Then again, I'm not so worried about academic people out of touch. Far worse are the career politicians that have never had a "normal" job in their life, all they've done is to work for political organizations. They have some very funny ideas about how the world runs plus an overinflated ego about their own importance. They only decide how to split the cake, they're not the ones baking it.
Sometimes it really is hard to tell though... like how it's possible to read the EM emissions from your screen, that seriously sounds like a full on "the government/aliens are reading my mind" tinfoil hat craziness. Except that it's for real and high-end military installations are shielded.
You never really know what the enemy doesn't have. Sometimes all you can do is infer from things that would otherwise be very odd that maybe they do have some technique you don't detect. Though for the most part they will act like they can't do it and don't know until they really, really need it.
That's the balance of all such covert assets, you don't want to use them unless you have to but if you never use them they make no sense. What any superpower is really capable of you probably won't know until WWIII - and for the most part they'll try not revealing it even then. Any enemy that is predictable in their capabilities and tactics is almost surely going to walk into a deadly trap.
Except that if it wasn't Google, it'd be someone else. It's like the horse and buggy industry singling out Ford. They won't be able to kill the Internet, and that's their real problem.
Or in a crueler interpretation, it might be a way to get your mind off things. At least one person I heard about became something of a workaholic during his divorce, coming home to his big old empty house was a big downer. A girl in her early 20s who learned she had six months to live quit her studies - what was the point? - and spent most of that drunk. If I had an imminent death hanging over me, I'd go crazy. Filling up your day with "normal" activity is a way to stay sane.
Apple's idea is to make a ton of profit on all their hardware. Anything they introduce, they want high margins on. It is designed to be profitable as it is, not to try and drive other business. They tie their products together, but as a way to get you to buy more products.
Seems to me that with the iPhone/iPad and the "30% of everything" you're describing the old Apple. The new Apple seems quite busy making money on software too. Not that I have noticed the hardware getting any cheaper because of it...
Basically you've described a system that every computer manufacturer makes. Why should Apple compete in a crowded market where the margins are pretty thin just to make you happy.
I know Apple is not about to change their mind over a slashdot post but... because they are already different in that it is a Mac. It runs OS X. It uses Mac software, not PC. It doesn't compete with a PC unless you install Windows on it. I've wanted to get a Mac but I think the choices suck. Between the iMac and the Mac Pro there's like the grand canyon of missing "normal" models. Their laptops look normal enough and I guess that's what most people are getting these days. I just don't get why everything have to be so different on the desktop side, though I guess it's because the Mac Pros are overkill for most people who bought them. If Apple gave them a choice, they'd rather just get a normal desktop.
That is why Apple dominates now, but it's not why it dominated then. I remember watching a documentary about the early Apples and Woz was a genius at reducing hardware cost to bring them down to budgets people could afford. He took what would normally cost thousands and cut chips and optimized software to make it cost hundreds. He was by far more essential to Apple then than Jobs' ideas of the user experience.
Today, that's simply not one of Apple's strengths - it probably hasn't been one since sometime in the 80s. There's plenty companies that can match Apple on producing an equivalent hardware platform. In fact, many have been technologically superior to Apple, they just haven't been nice to use. It's not the CPU or GPU or touchscreen or whatever that makes the iPhone/iPad a success and the Macs have gone native with the same Intel processors as most PCs. There's nothing on the technical side that will make or break Apple. I'm sure Woz could do a good job there at something, but he'd never be a very important man.
If you really think 535 individual representatives would be anything other than a complete chaos, you haven't tried it. You would have hundreds of people who'd be voted in on local special interest issues and creating a functional government would be hell. There's a reason most European parliaments have a lower limit of 4-5%, it is because we painfully learned it in the 19th century. Besides, even if you banned formal parties informal cliques of representatives would form anyway.
Pretty much all political systems have a left-right axis, it's just not the only axis. The problem in the US is that because everyone is either democrat or republican so it gets one-dimensional, it's very hard to have dissent across the isle. To take a recent example from Norway, the EU Data Retention Directive was up for voting. Minor parties from the left, center and right voted against it, the major left and right parties got it through. In the US, this would have been one bipartisan bill passed with little effort. Here in Norway it was a 89-80 vote, with parties from the "Socialist Left" (far left) to "The Progress Party" (far right) voting against it. These are people with radically different political views, yet in this case they were on the same side.
Try imagine that the Democrats were split in Liberals, Greens and Democrats, the Republicans split in Tea Party, Libertarians and Republicans with proportional representation. Don't you think US politics would be a lot more interesting as people flowed between them in the polls? That it's not just one left-right battle line, but if they act like asses people go to the liberal party or the tea party? Of course you do get coalition governments and all that follow from that, but it seems there's plenty tension and negotiation going on anyway. It doesn't go away just because you call them all democrats and republicans.
Bought complete series DVD collections for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. Went through seven SG-1 sets in a row. Ended up taking advantage of Amazon shipping out replacements before you return the product so that I could combine four different sets just to get one single set without any unreadable discs. The discs in the factory-sealed package looked like they had been placed in gravel and spun rapidly. Pics or it didn't happen. Then, I had the same problem with the Stargate Atlantis series collection, but I only had to combine two or three sets to get one working set.
I got to admire your patience. I would have asked for a refund and hit the torrents after the second set. Or actually since I'm in Europe I'm usually on the torrents first, several of the box sets I bought could be empty and I'd never know. Which might explain a few things...
I doubt it, in this case I think the megacorporations are more powerful than the US. Non-US companies will give US the finger, US companies will complain their data is exposed to IP theft. Draw up some imaginary number of billions the Chinese will take through industrial espionage and the law is dropped dead. That it happens to protect the average person is just coincidental, but don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
If they're consistent, that also allows warrantless searches of any postal package - and I think they do. Happened to me once here in Norway, the package had a nice sticker saying opened by customs.
The best option is just to have a clean machine and download everything over the Internet. Last I checked there was no such thing as digital customs. Security theater doesn't even being to cover how silly this is.
Yeah, posting the map alone is rather nonsense. If I remember correctly, it's the zone US custom says they can still halt you and search your luggage and vehicle for customs, without any warrant, or at least the ACLU's interpretation of it.
In practice, I suspect it's 100 miles from a land border - not the whole west and east coast - and they will probably have seen you cross the border and sent a patrol out to search you. But in a literal reading of the law, neither is a requirement. In principle they can search you for customs even if you've never been closer than 99.9 miles from the border on mere suspicion.
Evolution measures three things: 1) Ability to reproduce 2) Willingness to reproduce 3) Survival of the offspring
None of those are directly related to intelligence. The sterile tend to weed themselves out of the gene pool no matter what, willingness is a choice and for all practical purposes "every" child grows up these days (with all apologies to those whose children don't).
Intelligence is really just a support function - the wise ones discover fire and invent better clubs and learn about herbs so the tribe survives and their hunt is more successful, but it serves all not them. Just like it serves the tribe to have some be warriors, even though the warrior's life is often brutally cut short. You're not an evolutionary winner, you're an evolutionary sidetrack that is useful pops up from time to time. The winner is the catholic mom with ten kids.
Last statistics I saw, 90% of programmers were employed on in-house projects that are never intended for distribution.
In the traditional sense, no. But you can end up in various issues with subsidiaries/spin-offs/joint ventures/outsourcing/whatever to make sure your software is never legally distributed. And at least in many companies there's our code and licensed code, just because someone can pick up a GPL'd library doesn't make it "their" code. You have to track everywhere it's used so it doesn't end up in anything you DO distribute. That might work for isolated libraries, not so great for random bits of code in your MLOC project. It's certainly a helluva pain if you ever want to sell your software assets, buying a GPL-tainted codebase is damaged goods - even worse if you've lost control and let GPL code spread wildly, then you can't really assume any code is now safe to use for anything else.
Debian seems to be doing quite well, despite not being very commercial. Plus there's quite a few non-profit foundations like Apache, Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, FSF etc. that don't as such exist to become the next Red Hat, but there's no doubt raising enough funds to say it is your day job is a huge advantage. If it's just your hobby outside of work/studies then it takes a lot less to make you give it up. Things like crunch time at work, exam time, spending time with a girlfriend or just life in general taking priority. Besides, people don't come home from one work day and regularly pull another 8 hour shift. Not if they want to live to see 30 anyway. I guess what I wanted to say is I don't think it's "commercial" in the sense of "turning a huge profit" that does it, but as in "I can work on this all day and it pays my bills". But then again, turning a profit is a good way of having money to pay salaries...
It's one thing to have diversity, another to be an unwilling guinea pig to experimental desktops that seemingly do their best to remove any possibility of doing things the old way. The more "innovative" you get, the greater the chances that it will be a mistake. Give people the choice and if it's popular keep it, don't shove everyone on it and say "you'll learn to like it"..
Congrats, you've just described how encrypting something with GPG works. Except when you're just storing so short as a user/pass combo that's actually extra overhead. Or did you think you would encrypt all the passwords at once? And how would you then update one password or add one user? You don't *have* the other passwords as plaintext anymore and you can't recover them - if you could then anyone who rooted your login server could too. Besides, once every password reset is not much at all.
And nobody sees this is easy to implement and perfectly safe. 1. Create a GPG key pair 2. Put the public key on the login server, the private key in a safe. 3. When setting the password, encrypt the plaintext password with the public key.
If law enforcement comes calling, get the encrypted GPG message. Decrypt on a secure offline machine using the key from the safe. There you have it, recoverable passwords with essentially no safety risk that I can see.
Well, if I was to make a simple 2D chart of stores I think my two axis would be price and reputation. Too low prices tend to go with cutting corners, unserious business practices, stock and shipping date cheating, problems with returns and so on. Then there are companies that I consider reputable, as in everything will be in order but their prices are far too high.
I'm not sure I'd rank amazon as #1 but they work well enough and their prices are typically good. That said I typically order DVDs and video games from them, kinda hard to screw that up. They very often have games a lot cheaper than Steam, their weekend sales may be cheap but their overall prices are often high.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's why I tried digital downloads... of course, back then I struggled to get it working in WINE and installed it so many times it'd fail because of too many activations. This was on a friday, nobody at the game company answered until monday. When they finally got back to me with a process for getting another activation, here's my response (actual quote):
Hello,
Thank you for your response, I found an easier, faster and more permanent (and quite probably illegal, but I don't care) solution to my activation problem though. But don't worry, I'll buy any expansion/sequel too as they're well worth the money.
Regards,
[my name]
No response to that. And I did buy the sequel, too. Same stupid one-time activation but I figured I could always get around it if I needed to. As long as it doesn't do low level driver shit like starforce, that shit is permbanned.
Gog has also been selling a number of games recently that aren't old at all, despite their name.
If you search for games newer than 2005 there's 15 and several of those are "reloads", "director's cut", "anniversary edition" etc. of essentially old games so that's down to 11. Of those 5 are from 2006, 5 from 2007 and 1 from 2008 (King's Bounty: The Legend). And if that gets you hooked you'll have to go to another store to get the sequel "King's Bounty: Armored Princess". The one and only game they have that's brand new is The Witcher 2 on preorder. Which is great, but it's still just one game.
I think that most everyone in the general population would think that Nolle is right, and that his attitude typifies the point of view that's pulling America down into technological irrelevance.
FTFY. The US has been poisoned from the top down to only care about the next quarter. No wonder the long term sustainability of the business isn't there.
In a few billion years. Yeah I get it, you want to see it happen but if we take a thousand year hiatus and reboot our space exploration in the year 3000 that won't even amount to a rounding error. And we're still sending out probes, building bigger and better telescopes. We're just not sending fragile meatbags out there.
Single individuals might as well forget it anyway, nobody has a clue what people will like 20-50 years from now and what will largely be forgotten - hell, it's more than hard enough to tell what'll be an instant hit or flop today. Those who can profit are the corporations that vacuum up the market and can average it across all artists, there'll always be an Elvis or Beatles or whatever in every generation.
That was a long rant but I think the short answer is that consumers are a pretty big force to be reckoned with anyway. There's a reason Spotify is in the scandinavian countries where piracy is at its highest. There's a reason he is a MEP from the Pirate Party. I very much doubt you can *force* people to stop pirating, no matter how much you make a mockery of justice. And the courts here will never do a Thomas-Rasset and award 2 million dollars for sharing a few songs. That's what we give to people that have been innocently jailed for 15 years, smashed up real good in car accidents and that sort of thing. Even the four TPB leaders got less than 2 million dollars/person and that is still under appeal and TPB is still running. So they can own the whole playground but they still have to make terms that make the consumers want to play. We're not at the end of the bandwidth revolution, we've really just started. Take a look at this graph. That's the average and mean broadband bandwidth from 2004 and until today here in Norway. It's only going one way - up, up and away. You haven't seen anything yet, when everyone is on 10-100Mbit connections then you'll know true P2P. Also unlike the US "up to" those are pretty much real speeds with no silly caps.
There's a substantial difference between teaching you to reason and teaching you reason in the same way as other academics, inevitably reaching mostly the same conclusions. It is not without reason that academics have been accused of living disconnected from the real world, having convinced themselves that their highly theoretical model of how the world works actually reflects reality. Or perhaps ideological models is the right word, most working men have a more pragmatic approach.
Then again, I'm not so worried about academic people out of touch. Far worse are the career politicians that have never had a "normal" job in their life, all they've done is to work for political organizations. They have some very funny ideas about how the world runs plus an overinflated ego about their own importance. They only decide how to split the cake, they're not the ones baking it.
Sometimes it really is hard to tell though... like how it's possible to read the EM emissions from your screen, that seriously sounds like a full on "the government/aliens are reading my mind" tinfoil hat craziness. Except that it's for real and high-end military installations are shielded.
You never really know what the enemy doesn't have. Sometimes all you can do is infer from things that would otherwise be very odd that maybe they do have some technique you don't detect. Though for the most part they will act like they can't do it and don't know until they really, really need it.
That's the balance of all such covert assets, you don't want to use them unless you have to but if you never use them they make no sense. What any superpower is really capable of you probably won't know until WWIII - and for the most part they'll try not revealing it even then. Any enemy that is predictable in their capabilities and tactics is almost surely going to walk into a deadly trap.
Except that if it wasn't Google, it'd be someone else. It's like the horse and buggy industry singling out Ford. They won't be able to kill the Internet, and that's their real problem.
Or in a crueler interpretation, it might be a way to get your mind off things. At least one person I heard about became something of a workaholic during his divorce, coming home to his big old empty house was a big downer. A girl in her early 20s who learned she had six months to live quit her studies - what was the point? - and spent most of that drunk. If I had an imminent death hanging over me, I'd go crazy. Filling up your day with "normal" activity is a way to stay sane.
Apple's idea is to make a ton of profit on all their hardware. Anything they introduce, they want high margins on. It is designed to be profitable as it is, not to try and drive other business. They tie their products together, but as a way to get you to buy more products.
Seems to me that with the iPhone/iPad and the "30% of everything" you're describing the old Apple. The new Apple seems quite busy making money on software too. Not that I have noticed the hardware getting any cheaper because of it...
Basically you've described a system that every computer manufacturer makes. Why should Apple compete in a crowded market where the margins are pretty thin just to make you happy.
I know Apple is not about to change their mind over a slashdot post but... because they are already different in that it is a Mac. It runs OS X. It uses Mac software, not PC. It doesn't compete with a PC unless you install Windows on it. I've wanted to get a Mac but I think the choices suck. Between the iMac and the Mac Pro there's like the grand canyon of missing "normal" models. Their laptops look normal enough and I guess that's what most people are getting these days. I just don't get why everything have to be so different on the desktop side, though I guess it's because the Mac Pros are overkill for most people who bought them. If Apple gave them a choice, they'd rather just get a normal desktop.
That is why Apple dominates now, but it's not why it dominated then. I remember watching a documentary about the early Apples and Woz was a genius at reducing hardware cost to bring them down to budgets people could afford. He took what would normally cost thousands and cut chips and optimized software to make it cost hundreds. He was by far more essential to Apple then than Jobs' ideas of the user experience.
Today, that's simply not one of Apple's strengths - it probably hasn't been one since sometime in the 80s. There's plenty companies that can match Apple on producing an equivalent hardware platform. In fact, many have been technologically superior to Apple, they just haven't been nice to use. It's not the CPU or GPU or touchscreen or whatever that makes the iPhone/iPad a success and the Macs have gone native with the same Intel processors as most PCs. There's nothing on the technical side that will make or break Apple. I'm sure Woz could do a good job there at something, but he'd never be a very important man.
If you really think 535 individual representatives would be anything other than a complete chaos, you haven't tried it. You would have hundreds of people who'd be voted in on local special interest issues and creating a functional government would be hell. There's a reason most European parliaments have a lower limit of 4-5%, it is because we painfully learned it in the 19th century. Besides, even if you banned formal parties informal cliques of representatives would form anyway.
Pretty much all political systems have a left-right axis, it's just not the only axis. The problem in the US is that because everyone is either democrat or republican so it gets one-dimensional, it's very hard to have dissent across the isle. To take a recent example from Norway, the EU Data Retention Directive was up for voting. Minor parties from the left, center and right voted against it, the major left and right parties got it through. In the US, this would have been one bipartisan bill passed with little effort. Here in Norway it was a 89-80 vote, with parties from the "Socialist Left" (far left) to "The Progress Party" (far right) voting against it. These are people with radically different political views, yet in this case they were on the same side.
Try imagine that the Democrats were split in Liberals, Greens and Democrats, the Republicans split in Tea Party, Libertarians and Republicans with proportional representation. Don't you think US politics would be a lot more interesting as people flowed between them in the polls? That it's not just one left-right battle line, but if they act like asses people go to the liberal party or the tea party? Of course you do get coalition governments and all that follow from that, but it seems there's plenty tension and negotiation going on anyway. It doesn't go away just because you call them all democrats and republicans.
Bought complete series DVD collections for Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis. Went through seven SG-1 sets in a row. Ended up taking advantage of Amazon shipping out replacements before you return the product so that I could combine four different sets just to get one single set without any unreadable discs. The discs in the factory-sealed package looked like they had been placed in gravel and spun rapidly. Pics or it didn't happen. Then, I had the same problem with the Stargate Atlantis series collection, but I only had to combine two or three sets to get one working set.
I got to admire your patience. I would have asked for a refund and hit the torrents after the second set. Or actually since I'm in Europe I'm usually on the torrents first, several of the box sets I bought could be empty and I'd never know. Which might explain a few things...
I doubt it, in this case I think the megacorporations are more powerful than the US. Non-US companies will give US the finger, US companies will complain their data is exposed to IP theft. Draw up some imaginary number of billions the Chinese will take through industrial espionage and the law is dropped dead. That it happens to protect the average person is just coincidental, but don't look a gift horse in the mouth.
If they're consistent, that also allows warrantless searches of any postal package - and I think they do. Happened to me once here in Norway, the package had a nice sticker saying opened by customs.
The best option is just to have a clean machine and download everything over the Internet. Last I checked there was no such thing as digital customs. Security theater doesn't even being to cover how silly this is.
Yeah, posting the map alone is rather nonsense. If I remember correctly, it's the zone US custom says they can still halt you and search your luggage and vehicle for customs, without any warrant, or at least the ACLU's interpretation of it.
In practice, I suspect it's 100 miles from a land border - not the whole west and east coast - and they will probably have seen you cross the border and sent a patrol out to search you. But in a literal reading of the law, neither is a requirement. In principle they can search you for customs even if you've never been closer than 99.9 miles from the border on mere suspicion.
Evolution measures three things:
1) Ability to reproduce
2) Willingness to reproduce
3) Survival of the offspring
None of those are directly related to intelligence. The sterile tend to weed themselves out of the gene pool no matter what, willingness is a choice and for all practical purposes "every" child grows up these days (with all apologies to those whose children don't).
Intelligence is really just a support function - the wise ones discover fire and invent better clubs and learn about herbs so the tribe survives and their hunt is more successful, but it serves all not them. Just like it serves the tribe to have some be warriors, even though the warrior's life is often brutally cut short. You're not an evolutionary winner, you're an evolutionary sidetrack that is useful pops up from time to time. The winner is the catholic mom with ten kids.
Last statistics I saw, 90% of programmers were employed on in-house projects that are never intended for distribution.
In the traditional sense, no. But you can end up in various issues with subsidiaries/spin-offs/joint ventures/outsourcing/whatever to make sure your software is never legally distributed. And at least in many companies there's our code and licensed code, just because someone can pick up a GPL'd library doesn't make it "their" code. You have to track everywhere it's used so it doesn't end up in anything you DO distribute. That might work for isolated libraries, not so great for random bits of code in your MLOC project. It's certainly a helluva pain if you ever want to sell your software assets, buying a GPL-tainted codebase is damaged goods - even worse if you've lost control and let GPL code spread wildly, then you can't really assume any code is now safe to use for anything else.
Debian seems to be doing quite well, despite not being very commercial. Plus there's quite a few non-profit foundations like Apache, Mozilla, KDE, Gnome, FSF etc. that don't as such exist to become the next Red Hat, but there's no doubt raising enough funds to say it is your day job is a huge advantage. If it's just your hobby outside of work/studies then it takes a lot less to make you give it up. Things like crunch time at work, exam time, spending time with a girlfriend or just life in general taking priority. Besides, people don't come home from one work day and regularly pull another 8 hour shift. Not if they want to live to see 30 anyway. I guess what I wanted to say is I don't think it's "commercial" in the sense of "turning a huge profit" that does it, but as in "I can work on this all day and it pays my bills". But then again, turning a profit is a good way of having money to pay salaries...
It's one thing to have diversity, another to be an unwilling guinea pig to experimental desktops that seemingly do their best to remove any possibility of doing things the old way. The more "innovative" you get, the greater the chances that it will be a mistake. Give people the choice and if it's popular keep it, don't shove everyone on it and say "you'll learn to like it"..
Congrats, you've just described how encrypting something with GPG works. Except when you're just storing so short as a user/pass combo that's actually extra overhead. Or did you think you would encrypt all the passwords at once? And how would you then update one password or add one user? You don't *have* the other passwords as plaintext anymore and you can't recover them - if you could then anyone who rooted your login server could too. Besides, once every password reset is not much at all.
And nobody sees this is easy to implement and perfectly safe.
1. Create a GPG key pair
2. Put the public key on the login server, the private key in a safe.
3. When setting the password, encrypt the plaintext password with the public key.
If law enforcement comes calling, get the encrypted GPG message. Decrypt on a secure offline machine using the key from the safe. There you have it, recoverable passwords with essentially no safety risk that I can see.
Well, if I was to make a simple 2D chart of stores I think my two axis would be price and reputation. Too low prices tend to go with cutting corners, unserious business practices, stock and shipping date cheating, problems with returns and so on. Then there are companies that I consider reputable, as in everything will be in order but their prices are far too high.
I'm not sure I'd rank amazon as #1 but they work well enough and their prices are typically good. That said I typically order DVDs and video games from them, kinda hard to screw that up. They very often have games a lot cheaper than Steam, their weekend sales may be cheap but their overall prices are often high.