When he was 1 second old he was in his first year and his first decade. Exactly 10 years later he was nine years old and in his second decade.
One year later he is one year and one second old. Two years later he is two years and one second old. Three years later he is three years and one second old. Four years later he is four years and one second old. Five years later he is five years and one second old. Six years later he is six years and one second old. Seven years later he is seven years and one second old. Eight years later he is eight years and one second old. Nine years later he is nine years and one second old. Ten years later he is ten years and one second old.
Not to belabor the point, but he actually was "in his 9th decade" the second after he turned 79 years old, for the same reason that you are "in your first year" a second after you are born.
Try again: 1st decade = 0 - 9.99999... years old. Add 8 decades and 80 years.
Taken from Corporate America: "substantial amount of code" == one line
Taken by Corporate America: "substantial amount of code" == entire program.
First of all, what the FSFs opinion is on the matter is mostly irrelevant as this is about the meaning of "derived work" in copyright law. The FSF doesn't have the power to define what that is and should a court find the kernel headers are derived then the FSF has no power to grant exceptions on behalf of all the people that have used their license text.
As for the courts, they have gone very far to copyright all kinds of original expression. Short poems, a few notes from a song, short lyrics are all copyrighted. Perhaps not #define MAX( a, b ) if a > b return a else b; but if say there's a loop and you have a choice between C++ style iterator, Java-style iterator or a foreach syntax, that's starting to look a lot like an implementation choice and an original expression. Of course if the choices are few that can be ascribed to coincidence, but not if you consistently make exactly the same choices...
Sooner or later it will come to an end, but it will come slowly as the challenges rise, the costs skyrocket and the benfits are lower due to higher leakages and lifetime issues. And designs will continue to be improved, if you're no longer constantly redesigning it for a tick-tock every two years you can add more dedicated circuits to do special things. Just for example look at the dedicated high def video decoding/encoding/transcoding solutions that have popped up. In many ways it already has stopped in that single-core performance hasn't improved much for a while, it's been all multicore and multithreading of software. Besides, there's plenty other computer-ish inventions to do like laying fiber networks everywhere, mobile devices, display technlogy - the world will still be in significant change 20 years from now. Just perhaps not on the fundamental CPU code / GPU shader level.
3: A thoughtful, well-written and strongly pro-Microsoft comment gets quickly posted and rapidly modded up to +5 4: The rest of slashdot gets to read the article, and it quickly becomes apparent that the early post isn't at all representative of the majority opinion on Slashdot.
Moderation isn't an "Agree/Disagree" vote, I don't know why you think it should be. To me this sounds exactly like how well reasoned minority opinions should be treated to get meaningful discussion.
It's pretty much establish canon that slashdot is extremely anti-Microsoft, like "The only thing Micro$oft would make that wouldn't suck is a vacuum cleaner. It would blow." category. Reality is a lot more complex, many people here probably manage Microsoft servers or desktops and think they're all right. Or at least that the bashing goes too far and that stories need a counterpoint. For a while it was fashionable to say "I know I'll get modded down for this, but..." and appeal to the anti-groupthink. I think pro-MS comments still get some of those, all in all what you describe sounds quite as expected.
Sadly, to many people "freedom" means "the freedom to do what I would approve of". I reject this notion. So long as we are talking about consenting adults, I believe people should be free to do whatever they like. It doesn't matter whether I would do the same, whether I approve of the practice, whether I endorse and support it. Anything else is just a thinly-veiled desire to control other people and force them to be like yourself. What a cowardly and pathetic desire.
Fundamentally, you're saying that a person's personal preference to be gay should override a society's collective preference to not approve gays. Unfortunately we've not been able to promote this into a priniciple. If I dump my trash in the forest, it'll be illegal. We've decided that our collective desire to keep the forest clean should override my personal desire to dump trash. This is a non-trivial problem.
Yes, but internationally the definition varies and is.xxx really.xxx.us? Of course we agree on certain things but let's take this BluRay as example. In Germany that's ok for 16+ year olds, it's not pornography which has an 18yo limit. Would you sell this to a 16yo in the US? My impression would be no.
35-57% support it, they don't list a total figure or the proportion of the three but over 40% is likely. And that is now, if you ask "Was passing the PATRIOT act after 9/11 the right thing to do?" I think you'd find that the general public don't exactly consider it a mistake.
Pfft, we don't need no national power grids! That's socialism! The free market will sort it out!
Actually the electric companies are typically for improved transfer capacity, as long as they're not paying too much for it. That allows them to sell the power some other place where prices are higher then turn around and demand higher prices locally too because reserves are low.
What they don't build is emergency capacity, because to a corporation they typically don't have to care about the consequences except to their bottom line. You saw it a lot in the financial crisis, if it's not profitable to lend money we'll simply stop. That it's choking the rest of the economy doesn't matter. Nor would they ever get to charge the costs either, imagine if in this crisis they said "Finally we ended up using those expensive converters, now to pay them off on this crisis we'll increase prices 10x" and you'd see a lynch mob with torches and pitchforks even in overly polite Japan. It's something people want to have, but they're not willing to pay for it. "The government" has to step in and be the collective responsibility that the country has emergency systems, because the consumers failed to make those demands to the producers.
The PATRIOT act allegedly protects the US against religious terrorists. Hollywood's PATRIOT act allegedly protects the US against economic terrorists aka pirates. I'm not so sure claiming that is a valid comparison is a good strategy....
No, full HD video is not particularly computing intense with dedicated hardware. The Intel Core i5-2500K decodes 5 simultanious 1080p streams according to Anandtech. Hell it even has HDMI 1.4a and 3D support if you're into that, this is "integrated" performance in 2011. I don't know how intensive Photoshop with thousand layers can get, but simple touchups of photos certainly do fine without a discrete GPU.
GPGPU no, but then most users don't do anything computing intense, CPU or GPU. Integrated chipsets handle simple desktop effects quite fine, your FUD is out of date. Problems with higher resolutions? What is this, the 90s?
What, you're suggesting that as long as it doesn't say "Uberl33tSCENERLS" in the filename, that makes it legit to download as it must have been placed on the torrents legitimately?
I'm saying it will almost certainly be obvious from the circumstances, this movie will almost certainly have a public website with the torrent just like Linux distros. Descriptions are likely to link back to it, that's what stuff that is legally on TPB has done. Places like ClearBits (previously LegalTorrents) have been gathering them up and so on. It's not immidiately obvious if an mp3 file is legal or not either, but I still haven't heard anyone seriously use that defense.
Some people are just hilariously naive, like everyone who was quoting the Internet Privacy Act that didn't exist. Hell, even people I talked to that knew it didn't exist seemed to think a cop would read that and go "Oh, I guess I'm not allowed to be here" and disconnect.
Then again, sometimes the law IS that stupid which is why most any big corporation have this huge legal blurb to their outgoing email. Because if you didn't say it's only for the intended recipient, then you might believe it's for the unintended reicipient or uhhh how does that work exactly? But companies have lost cases because the mail didn't say what you could - or rather couldn't - do if you got it in error...
The thing was that when I grew up there was a selection of newspapers, and you picked one (or at most two). Investigative journalism was probably always a loss leader, you filled the rest up with cheap world news, local information that people more than willingly offer and got "free" money on stuff like announcing happenings or schedules, second hand market listings, obituaries and lots of other things that people wanted to put in the paper. You more or less had to have all the bits or people would pick a different newspaper.
Today, I can jump from one online site to the next on a story-by-story basis. Craigslist and eBay and lots of other companies will cherry-pick the lucrative bits and do pure sites based on that. World news? I can get those at the lowest bidder worldwide, being global and all. Before actually there was a value in getting a paper that'd tell you about the earthquake in Japan, today there 2342643 sites willing to tell you about it. So when you get everything else where it's cheapest, investigative journalism has to be its own profit center. The stories they make actually have to sell more than they cost to produce, there's no halo of additional income like there used to be.
That's tough. You see many magazines still do well because they cater to niches. Some financial newspapers still do good, because it's vital the information is fresh and analysis good. The other case is that the other newspapers aren't selling yesterday's news anymore. If an investigative journalist "blows the lid" on a case at 9 AM in one newspaper, by 10 AM all the others will have called someone for comment and made their own arguably legitimate news reporting and by the time it hits the evening news they'll pretty much all have an equally broad covering. So all you get is to work hard then throw it to the sharks who'll all grab their own piece while hopefully still sending a bit of the viewers to your own site. As a vital institution of society it's important, as a business model I'd run for the hills.
And most Linux distros are available on bittorrent, how can you tell wheather this Windows.7.Ultimate.Retail.l33t-haxxors.torrent on The Pirate Bay is legit or not? Oh please...
Well, a lot of famous people WERE weird in some way or another. Average people tend to lead average and balanced lives, which quite frankly limits your potential to be extreme in something and become famous for it. Would Stephen Hawking be the famous scientist if he wasn't a cripple, just as bright but out partying with the girls and worked part time in a store to get money for a car? Probably not. Or look at someone like Perelman, brilliant mathematician, turned down the Fields medal, turned down 1 million dollar in cash and don't even cope well with his fellow mathematicians. And they say many top executives exhibits signs of being sociopaths.
The other thing is that I think there's at least two groups that homeschool, those that homeschool because they feel the current education system is too poor, those people often get a very high quality educations. Then you have all the people that homeschool because they have their own religious/moral teachings they'd like to push instead.
I don't think I'd ever homeschool a child, a private school perhaps but that's quite different and more organized. The school setting itself I think is very healthy for development of social skills and you need good teachers to get high theoretical and practical skills. Though I suppose if you don't have a better alternative....
No, if you have just entered your password (like, because you have just bought a new game and handed the iPhone to the kid) they'll not get any password prompt. It'll be a buy button and it buys, plain and simple. From what I gather that also resets your timeout so kids could play it for a long time racking up charges. It's far from obvious to a child that it's real money and not just fake money - I don't use real dollars when I "buy" something in Monopoly...
"But, AC," you say, "if you add filetype:torrent in the Google search, then you'll also get a bunch of these types of results". Well no shit - that's partially the point though, isn't it? With Google, I have to explicitly tell the search engine that I'm looking for something a little more specific, generally associated with copies/rips/cams of whatever I'm looking for. With IsoHunt, I don't have to.
If you're specifically searching for something where you know you won't find a legitimate copy, it's not strange that the top hits are pirated copies. It's not so different from going to the Bangkok market and search for "Gucci handbags". Just because I make a map of it pointing you to the store I don't take any responsibility for what the store sells, it's just what my market-crawling robot (to improve the analog) read on the sign.
The trouble with the US system is that it'll get worse before it gets better. It's highly unlikely you'll be able to form a party that steals voters evenly from both Democrats and Republicans. So your voters will either have mostly Democrat symphaties and hurt the Democrats the most or have mostly Republican symphaties and hurt the Republicans the most. In a proportional system you'd just make a coalition, in a first past the post system the 45% party beats the 40 + 15% parties, even though they have a great majority of the voters.
You can try making everyone coordinated and jump at once but it just won't happen - this has been a recurring theme on slashdot for as long as I can remember. Below a certain level of votes - much higher in the US than elsewhere - you really do get zero influence. And every time you try starting a new party the craziest of loons show up as well, it's not hard to make a smear campaign unless you scope it down to *this* much change, not just radical "let's rewrite everything" change.
And even if you get a bunch of people going, say those 15% above, 10% from one party and 5% from the other, it's not smooth sailing. Then a bunch of people go "oh fuck we lost the election because of this stupid third party idea" and abandon it. And both parties like it because they know every few elections people will think the grass is greener on the other side and switch between the two indefinitely, so the system won't change.
Which, is pretty reaching considering in some places it's pretty hard not to know who is dealing, and knowing to stay away from them can be a valuable skill. (...) And, they wonder why people aren't always keen to cooperate with police.
Well being a sting people didn't know they were talking to cops. The second part is the difference between knowing and sending them business, I guess it depends on how they asked. It's one to thing to comment on it in conversation, but if you're asked "Dude, do you know how to get some pot around here?" and you say "Look for that red-haired guy who hangs out down by the C building, he always has good stuff." you've done more than comment on what looks like a crack house.
I would not be surprised at all. Many people will get a high-markup item at a small discount than a low-markup item at full price. Because for the most part they're not really informed customers, I've noticed it on some of the "sales" in my local grocery store. Some offers are 20-40% off, others are down from 17.30 to 17.10 with same kind of red sticker but I see people picking much from both. I doubt many people would remember, they just assume that it's cheaper than normal so a good time to buy. Plus I admit it's an attention-dragger, if I sometimes eat that it's like "hey it's a long time since I've eaten that, let's bag one" even though the offer as such is lousy.
Not so obvious --- now you have a much less efficient use of bandwidth to deal with.
Enough to matter? According to my cell phone bill, I had over 100MB of data traffic last month. That's about 10 hours of 24 kbps CBR encoded voice, which is the highest possible CBR setting speex has. If it's on my DSL/cable/whatever line, who cares? Even if I did that 24x7 for a month it'd be 7-8 GB and I'm pretty sure even a teenage girl with mouth diarrhea has to sleep sometimes. If that's what it takes, I don't see CBR as being a dealbreaker.
Slashdot Mirror
When he was 1 second old he was in his first year and his first decade. Exactly 10 years later he was nine years old and in his second decade.
One year later he is one year and one second old.
Two years later he is two years and one second old.
Three years later he is three years and one second old.
Four years later he is four years and one second old.
Five years later he is five years and one second old.
Six years later he is six years and one second old.
Seven years later he is seven years and one second old.
Eight years later he is eight years and one second old.
Nine years later he is nine years and one second old.
Ten years later he is ten years and one second old.
How does it feel to flunk first grade math?
Not to belabor the point, but he actually was "in his 9th decade" the second after he turned 79 years old, for the same reason that you are "in your first year" a second after you are born.
Try again: 1st decade = 0 - 9.99999... years old.
Add 8 decades and 80 years.
Taken from Corporate America: "substantial amount of code" == one line
Taken by Corporate America: "substantial amount of code" == entire program.
First of all, what the FSFs opinion is on the matter is mostly irrelevant as this is about the meaning of "derived work" in copyright law. The FSF doesn't have the power to define what that is and should a court find the kernel headers are derived then the FSF has no power to grant exceptions on behalf of all the people that have used their license text.
As for the courts, they have gone very far to copyright all kinds of original expression. Short poems, a few notes from a song, short lyrics are all copyrighted. Perhaps not #define MAX( a, b ) if a > b return a else b; but if say there's a loop and you have a choice between C++ style iterator, Java-style iterator or a foreach syntax, that's starting to look a lot like an implementation choice and an original expression. Of course if the choices are few that can be ascribed to coincidence, but not if you consistently make exactly the same choices...
Sooner or later it will come to an end, but it will come slowly as the challenges rise, the costs skyrocket and the benfits are lower due to higher leakages and lifetime issues. And designs will continue to be improved, if you're no longer constantly redesigning it for a tick-tock every two years you can add more dedicated circuits to do special things. Just for example look at the dedicated high def video decoding/encoding/transcoding solutions that have popped up. In many ways it already has stopped in that single-core performance hasn't improved much for a while, it's been all multicore and multithreading of software. Besides, there's plenty other computer-ish inventions to do like laying fiber networks everywhere, mobile devices, display technlogy - the world will still be in significant change 20 years from now. Just perhaps not on the fundamental CPU code / GPU shader level.
3: A thoughtful, well-written and strongly pro-Microsoft comment gets quickly posted and rapidly modded up to +5
4: The rest of slashdot gets to read the article, and it quickly becomes apparent that the early post isn't at all representative of the majority opinion on Slashdot.
Moderation isn't an "Agree/Disagree" vote, I don't know why you think it should be. To me this sounds exactly like how well reasoned minority opinions should be treated to get meaningful discussion.
It's pretty much establish canon that slashdot is extremely anti-Microsoft, like "The only thing Micro$oft would make that wouldn't suck is a vacuum cleaner. It would blow." category. Reality is a lot more complex, many people here probably manage Microsoft servers or desktops and think they're all right. Or at least that the bashing goes too far and that stories need a counterpoint. For a while it was fashionable to say "I know I'll get modded down for this, but..." and appeal to the anti-groupthink. I think pro-MS comments still get some of those, all in all what you describe sounds quite as expected.
Sadly, to many people "freedom" means "the freedom to do what I would approve of". I reject this notion. So long as we are talking about consenting adults, I believe people should be free to do whatever they like. It doesn't matter whether I would do the same, whether I approve of the practice, whether I endorse and support it. Anything else is just a thinly-veiled desire to control other people and force them to be like yourself. What a cowardly and pathetic desire.
Fundamentally, you're saying that a person's personal preference to be gay should override a society's collective preference to not approve gays. Unfortunately we've not been able to promote this into a priniciple. If I dump my trash in the forest, it'll be illegal. We've decided that our collective desire to keep the forest clean should override my personal desire to dump trash. This is a non-trivial problem.
Yes. Yes, I am.
Yes, but internationally the definition varies and is .xxx really .xxx.us? Of course we agree on certain things but let's take this BluRay as example. In Germany that's ok for 16+ year olds, it's not pornography which has an 18yo limit. Would you sell this to a 16yo in the US? My impression would be no.
Really?
35-57% support it, they don't list a total figure or the proportion of the three but over 40% is likely. And that is now, if you ask "Was passing the PATRIOT act after 9/11 the right thing to do?" I think you'd find that the general public don't exactly consider it a mistake.
Pfft, we don't need no national power grids! That's socialism! The free market will sort it out!
Actually the electric companies are typically for improved transfer capacity, as long as they're not paying too much for it. That allows them to sell the power some other place where prices are higher then turn around and demand higher prices locally too because reserves are low.
What they don't build is emergency capacity, because to a corporation they typically don't have to care about the consequences except to their bottom line. You saw it a lot in the financial crisis, if it's not profitable to lend money we'll simply stop. That it's choking the rest of the economy doesn't matter. Nor would they ever get to charge the costs either, imagine if in this crisis they said "Finally we ended up using those expensive converters, now to pay them off on this crisis we'll increase prices 10x" and you'd see a lynch mob with torches and pitchforks even in overly polite Japan. It's something people want to have, but they're not willing to pay for it. "The government" has to step in and be the collective responsibility that the country has emergency systems, because the consumers failed to make those demands to the producers.
The PATRIOT act allegedly protects the US against religious terrorists. Hollywood's PATRIOT act allegedly protects the US against economic terrorists aka pirates. I'm not so sure claiming that is a valid comparison is a good strategy....
No, full HD video is not particularly computing intense with dedicated hardware. The Intel Core i5-2500K decodes 5 simultanious 1080p streams according to Anandtech. Hell it even has HDMI 1.4a and 3D support if you're into that, this is "integrated" performance in 2011. I don't know how intensive Photoshop with thousand layers can get, but simple touchups of photos certainly do fine without a discrete GPU.
GPGPU no, but then most users don't do anything computing intense, CPU or GPU. Integrated chipsets handle simple desktop effects quite fine, your FUD is out of date. Problems with higher resolutions? What is this, the 90s?
They may not carry much importance, but yes they still get passed around in meetings.
What, you're suggesting that as long as it doesn't say "Uberl33tSCENERLS" in the filename, that makes it legit to download as it must have been placed on the torrents legitimately?
I'm saying it will almost certainly be obvious from the circumstances, this movie will almost certainly have a public website with the torrent just like Linux distros. Descriptions are likely to link back to it, that's what stuff that is legally on TPB has done. Places like ClearBits (previously LegalTorrents) have been gathering them up and so on. It's not immidiately obvious if an mp3 file is legal or not either, but I still haven't heard anyone seriously use that defense.
Some people are just hilariously naive, like everyone who was quoting the Internet Privacy Act that didn't exist. Hell, even people I talked to that knew it didn't exist seemed to think a cop would read that and go "Oh, I guess I'm not allowed to be here" and disconnect.
Then again, sometimes the law IS that stupid which is why most any big corporation have this huge legal blurb to their outgoing email. Because if you didn't say it's only for the intended recipient, then you might believe it's for the unintended reicipient or uhhh how does that work exactly? But companies have lost cases because the mail didn't say what you could - or rather couldn't - do if you got it in error...
The thing was that when I grew up there was a selection of newspapers, and you picked one (or at most two). Investigative journalism was probably always a loss leader, you filled the rest up with cheap world news, local information that people more than willingly offer and got "free" money on stuff like announcing happenings or schedules, second hand market listings, obituaries and lots of other things that people wanted to put in the paper. You more or less had to have all the bits or people would pick a different newspaper.
Today, I can jump from one online site to the next on a story-by-story basis. Craigslist and eBay and lots of other companies will cherry-pick the lucrative bits and do pure sites based on that. World news? I can get those at the lowest bidder worldwide, being global and all. Before actually there was a value in getting a paper that'd tell you about the earthquake in Japan, today there 2342643 sites willing to tell you about it. So when you get everything else where it's cheapest, investigative journalism has to be its own profit center. The stories they make actually have to sell more than they cost to produce, there's no halo of additional income like there used to be.
That's tough. You see many magazines still do well because they cater to niches. Some financial newspapers still do good, because it's vital the information is fresh and analysis good. The other case is that the other newspapers aren't selling yesterday's news anymore. If an investigative journalist "blows the lid" on a case at 9 AM in one newspaper, by 10 AM all the others will have called someone for comment and made their own arguably legitimate news reporting and by the time it hits the evening news they'll pretty much all have an equally broad covering. So all you get is to work hard then throw it to the sharks who'll all grab their own piece while hopefully still sending a bit of the viewers to your own site. As a vital institution of society it's important, as a business model I'd run for the hills.
And most Linux distros are available on bittorrent, how can you tell wheather this Windows.7.Ultimate.Retail.l33t-haxxors.torrent on The Pirate Bay is legit or not? Oh please...
Well, a lot of famous people WERE weird in some way or another. Average people tend to lead average and balanced lives, which quite frankly limits your potential to be extreme in something and become famous for it. Would Stephen Hawking be the famous scientist if he wasn't a cripple, just as bright but out partying with the girls and worked part time in a store to get money for a car? Probably not. Or look at someone like Perelman, brilliant mathematician, turned down the Fields medal, turned down 1 million dollar in cash and don't even cope well with his fellow mathematicians. And they say many top executives exhibits signs of being sociopaths.
The other thing is that I think there's at least two groups that homeschool, those that homeschool because they feel the current education system is too poor, those people often get a very high quality educations. Then you have all the people that homeschool because they have their own religious/moral teachings they'd like to push instead.
I don't think I'd ever homeschool a child, a private school perhaps but that's quite different and more organized. The school setting itself I think is very healthy for development of social skills and you need good teachers to get high theoretical and practical skills. Though I suppose if you don't have a better alternative....
No, if you have just entered your password (like, because you have just bought a new game and handed the iPhone to the kid) they'll not get any password prompt. It'll be a buy button and it buys, plain and simple. From what I gather that also resets your timeout so kids could play it for a long time racking up charges. It's far from obvious to a child that it's real money and not just fake money - I don't use real dollars when I "buy" something in Monopoly...
"But, AC," you say, "if you add filetype:torrent in the Google search, then you'll also get a bunch of these types of results".
Well no shit - that's partially the point though, isn't it? With Google, I have to explicitly tell the search engine that I'm looking for something a little more specific, generally associated with copies/rips/cams of whatever I'm looking for. With IsoHunt, I don't have to.
If you're specifically searching for something where you know you won't find a legitimate copy, it's not strange that the top hits are pirated copies. It's not so different from going to the Bangkok market and search for "Gucci handbags". Just because I make a map of it pointing you to the store I don't take any responsibility for what the store sells, it's just what my market-crawling robot (to improve the analog) read on the sign.
The trouble with the US system is that it'll get worse before it gets better. It's highly unlikely you'll be able to form a party that steals voters evenly from both Democrats and Republicans. So your voters will either have mostly Democrat symphaties and hurt the Democrats the most or have mostly Republican symphaties and hurt the Republicans the most. In a proportional system you'd just make a coalition, in a first past the post system the 45% party beats the 40 + 15% parties, even though they have a great majority of the voters.
You can try making everyone coordinated and jump at once but it just won't happen - this has been a recurring theme on slashdot for as long as I can remember. Below a certain level of votes - much higher in the US than elsewhere - you really do get zero influence. And every time you try starting a new party the craziest of loons show up as well, it's not hard to make a smear campaign unless you scope it down to *this* much change, not just radical "let's rewrite everything" change.
And even if you get a bunch of people going, say those 15% above, 10% from one party and 5% from the other, it's not smooth sailing. Then a bunch of people go "oh fuck we lost the election because of this stupid third party idea" and abandon it. And both parties like it because they know every few elections people will think the grass is greener on the other side and switch between the two indefinitely, so the system won't change.
Which, is pretty reaching considering in some places it's pretty hard not to know who is dealing, and knowing to stay away from them can be a valuable skill. (...) And, they wonder why people aren't always keen to cooperate with police.
Well being a sting people didn't know they were talking to cops. The second part is the difference between knowing and sending them business, I guess it depends on how they asked. It's one to thing to comment on it in conversation, but if you're asked "Dude, do you know how to get some pot around here?" and you say "Look for that red-haired guy who hangs out down by the C building, he always has good stuff." you've done more than comment on what looks like a crack house.
I would not be surprised at all. Many people will get a high-markup item at a small discount than a low-markup item at full price. Because for the most part they're not really informed customers, I've noticed it on some of the "sales" in my local grocery store. Some offers are 20-40% off, others are down from 17.30 to 17.10 with same kind of red sticker but I see people picking much from both. I doubt many people would remember, they just assume that it's cheaper than normal so a good time to buy. Plus I admit it's an attention-dragger, if I sometimes eat that it's like "hey it's a long time since I've eaten that, let's bag one" even though the offer as such is lousy.
Not so obvious --- now you have a much less efficient use of bandwidth to deal with.
Enough to matter? According to my cell phone bill, I had over 100MB of data traffic last month. That's about 10 hours of 24 kbps CBR encoded voice, which is the highest possible CBR setting speex has. If it's on my DSL/cable/whatever line, who cares? Even if I did that 24x7 for a month it'd be 7-8 GB and I'm pretty sure even a teenage girl with mouth diarrhea has to sleep sometimes. If that's what it takes, I don't see CBR as being a dealbreaker.