And a $1 (or so) charge for reserving a spot and then not parking there, or some douche will walk around the city reserving spots on his smart phone.
I would say the sensible thing is that you be required to pre-pay for the first hour of parking in order to reserve.
Also, your paid up time remaining to park there should start ticking as soon as the reservation is open (not as soon as you park there).
For every complete hour you have the spot reserved, but haven't physically shown up, an additional convenience fee
on top of the hourly parking charge should also be assessed for holding the place with no car in it.
A reserve button to allow the driver 10 minutes to safely navigate to the spot, which must be within a certain distance according to GPS. Otherwise folks will see the available spot and everyone looking for a spot will be heading towards the small number of spots and competing fiercly, possibly resulting in reckless behavior and safety risks.
Better add a red "Reserved" light in front of each spot.
When lit, only the person who reserved the spot is allowed to park there until the allowed time for them to reach the reserved spot expires -- by way of the parking meter refusing to accept payment except by the party holding the reservation, and an automatic parking ticket being issued to the violator.
She could probably also get on with one of the shady web scraping/placement operation/SEO, if she knew of any. I've met people with hardly any skill who make a fair amount of money doing this.
Don't forget the businesses respectively of harvesting e-mail addresses and transmitting advertising.
And guerrilla marketing for-hire firms... (for example: getting paid $0.10 a review by companies to visit various retailers' websites and post favorable authentic-looking reviews and blog articles for their product and negative reviews for major competitors')
As soon as someone's willing to engage in shady businesses/questionable tactics, the number of simple potentially lucrative options explodes.
I'm sorry, but that's entirely bullshit. And it still doesn't justify the obscenely low prices places like GameStop give for used games.
Obviously, you have a total lack of understanding of the retail business and time value of money.
But their offering of used game exchanges has to be built on a solid business case, nonetheless, for their management to keep their jobs.
The reason such a low price is offered should be obvious -- that they have determined that the amount they will pay for used games is sufficient to build a big enough used game inventory that they can sell to obtain an extra profit, such that they will neither leave large amounts of money on the table, by failing to obtain marketable product, nor constrain the profitability of their other business.
If there were inadequate supply of used games available to them at that price, then they would have to pay more... that is, the seller of the used game would be able to negotiate a deal better than $5 a game: If people were not actually bringing used games to them and letting them go for that amount, then either they would be offering more, or not be in the used games business.
Since obviously... people are bringing used games to them at their current prices, or they are able to efficiently obtain them at that price, then the question they would have to deal with is -- is the pricing right for buying used games?
If they offered more money to buy peoples' games, then economically speaking, they would have customers bringing in more used games to sell at that amount -- and their risk would be increased, with the larger used game inventory, there might not be buyers immediately available for all those games at a profitable price, then the purchase could be a loss.
There is not an infinite immediate demand for every used game title.
There is a cost involved in tying up money with the purchase of used games from customers -- in the form of lower returns to shareholders, or in the form of interest payments to their bank on money borrowed. There are also per-item costs in relation to the rent of the floor space.
Property taxes on inventory, and numerous other costs.
Since the sale price of each unused game has to be high enough to make up for the costs of other used games in inventory that won't get sold within 6 months or more, break-even is like a 200% markup.
Again, as for the pricing when selling used games -- it must be sufficiently high that the discount of the used games does not cause their customer base to abandon new game purchases, reducing profitability.
It would not be in the interest of Gamestop to displace their new game business by selling used versions of anything released in the past year at a substantially high discount.
There is a conflict of interest here in that the used game dealer is also a new game dealer.
Also, they are offering a convenience.... the $5 or so price for a used game, is like a convenience. Sure, you could eBay it for more, and there are other venues such as direct sales.
Any pawn shop or other store that deals in used merchandise is likely to make a similar offer.
The fact of the matter is... you giving a used game to a retailer is a market that strongly favors the buyer. If time and convenience aren't important, then you wouldn't be there, you would be doing the leg work to list the used game for sale, to obtain something close to its retail value.
Unless they plan to allow special copies for rental purposes, this spells the end of game rentals. Of course, that just might be part of the intended suite of effects rather than a side effect.
With all the online services; PSN, Xbox Live, etc, the game manufacturer could now provide the rental service online
and pocket all the rental proceeds.
The game makers would also be in a position 'cripple' or 'limit' how much of the game can be played in a rental without paying additional rental fees, online "content purchases", or
the full price to upgrade from "light rental version" to "full version".
The used game that you bought for $30 (instead of $45 new or probably $20 on a Steam sale), the store paid $5. At most. Yes, the stores will occasionally pay as much as $10 for new and hot titles, but those get sold used for as little as $5 off the price of a new copy.
The store is taking on risk by purchasing used games for resale. The item won't move off the shelf and get purchased as fast as a new title.
It might not turn out to be sellable. Employees have to spend time buying these from customers, inspecting them, pricing them, repackaging/preparing them to be resold, and reselling them. Shelf space in a store is expensive, and the store still needs to make overhead and have a healthy profit.
The used games stores are bad for the industry. All the bad things that publishers say about games piracy? The loss of sales and money being diverted away from the people who make the games? The need to jack up prices to make up for sales lost due to alternate means of acquisition? All that shit is actually true about the used games industry.
And I suppose you would say the Libraries and used book stores are bad for industry as well?
The loss of sales and money being diverted away from people who write books.
And the used car dealerships result in money being diverted away from the people who build cars.
All that used stuff must belong in a landfill?
This is not really in the public interest.
If they can implement physical means to prevent reuse of their products, then copyright laws should be taken off the books.
Firmware that expects some kind of handshake within N minutes of initial operation and if it fails to get that handshake it immediately begins an erase operation?
Indeed... not only that, but the custom firmware can contain code to wipe its own EEPROM irrecoverably; the boot loader on the HDD that handles the decryption can be programmed to self-test and initiate a software-based erase, should a boot be attempted without the custom firmware present, should the firmware be tampered with, or should various seek-read-write-read test cycles fail, even if the correct password is entered.
The custom firmware can contain some code to "execute" the contents of some certain magic sectors of the HDD in a special way. So that if someone tries to swap the PCB on the hard drive or flash the disk drive with a standard firmware, the special code won't execute.
Some of the required key material to gain access to the hard drive media can be in that special code and also in the custom firmware, so without the custom firmware loaded, the literal contents of the sector on the physical media would be backed up, instead of the normal customized result of a read of that sector.
And some of those 'special sectors' just happen to include random bytes that the user secret key has to be XOR'ed against to derive the symmetric key required to access the HDD.
This results in the "backup" not capturing critical information required to decrypt the medium.
And therefore being worthless, even with the correct passphrase.
Problem is that forensics officers take backups. They'd back up the drive first and boot from the backup so whether it destroys the data or not is irrelevant. And if you gave the officers the "self destruct" password that horked the backup then that is further evidence that you are up to no good.
A nefarious person could designate a sequence of sectors in various parts of your hard drive as "sectors that will never be read" during the normal course of system operation.
And then patch their hard drive firmware so that if more than 4 of the "off limits" sectors are read, the hard drive will start zero'ing all sectors in the background, and on next power cycle start an ATA Secure erase.
In other words... latent tamper resistant hardware mechanisms implemented such that unauthorized backup attempts result in hardware level self-destruct, so if someone steals the hard drive they can't use it.
Another method of protecting against physical theft of the HDD and passphrase guessing is to
utilize online cloud-based services for key distribution.
Instead of the passphrase being used to decrypt the HDD, it gets entered into software, which
connects using the internet and makes an API request that results in contacting a number of
off-site cloud-based services.
If the passphrase gets entered incorrectly enough times, FAILS to get entered on a certain schedule, or a passphrase with certain characteristics gets entered instead of the correct one, the remote cloud services shut themselves down, and can no longer pass binary data required to derive the HDD decryption keys.
They can also monitor each other and contain an IDS, so if one of them is compromised, it will be ordered to shutdown, and key material required to bootstrap can be incinerated.
e.g. I'm saying the group of all the 'remote cloud security nodes' would form a cooperative group, and for a cloud security node to bootstrap, the other nodes would have to reach an agreement through an election process, and each node would only contain 1/3 or 1/4 of the key material required to reconstruct the HDD decrypt key after presentation of the right passphrase-decoded material from the requestor.
The cloud services can be in disparate geopgrahic locations, even multiple countries, to help
reduce the chance of a hacker breaking into a sufficient plurality of those remote providers.
Ah... Good Ol' UK, where you don't have to decrypt your hard drive on demand --
however, where you are required to have and produce any and all encryption keys on request
from police, or go to jail for the crime of failing to produce encryption keys (no court order required).
Of course, this would make any kind of remote monitoring impossible...
Not impossible. Build a private circuit from the site to be monitored to an operator console at a remote secure location; use a dedicated firewall on the monitored station side of the private circuit that only allows unidirectional encrypted traffic required to feed information into the remote monitoring station.
While it is indeed laughable and sad that these unprepared devices were attached to the Internet, it is also worth highlighting that being detached from the Internet is not itself a pancaea.
In addition to being detached to the internet, the use of USB addon devices should be disabled on all SCADA operator consoles and other SCADA network connected devices. And they must not have connectivity to the same network or storage volume as _any_ other device that has internet access, USB thumb drive access, connectivity to any network that has or has outside connectivity directly or indirectly; or that contains any hard drive or storage media that has EVER been attached to a network-connected device since the last time that media was completely formatted with a SCSI/ATA secure erase.
In other words: no data path from outside network to SCADA network, neither a network datapath, nor a sneakernet data path.
Worse it's easy to claim a product is secure when it is not
A product is not "secure" or "insecure"
A deployment where a product is used is secure or insecure.
A deployment of a product can be highly secure in its expected deployment scenario, but the deployment horribly insecure if you plug it into an outside network which contains unmanaged devices.
There may be flaws in a TCP stack (For example), that could be exploited if an unmanaged device were allowed to produce arbitrary communications, but the deployment can be secure when all devices are managed, and there is no operator console command to generate the invalid packet, without physical access to plug a laptop into the cordoned off network.
I'd say plugging in a CRT is a waste of perfectly good electricity. Why are you hoarding crap?
CRTs have better picture quality than LCD displays, and the difference in power consumption is quite small;
an extra $5 per year in electricity to operate a CRT of equivalent size versus a LCD for 6 hours a day..
LCDs burn extra power for all that CFL backlighting of the display, so the gap is fairly narrow... both are just about the same "waste" of perfectly good electricity.
Newer 19" and 24" LCDs wind up using a lot more power than older smaller CRTs, anyways.
If you want to save power, get a 6" or 8" display.
The biggest advantage of LCDs is that they are thinner, and weight less per inch of display.
Those caught stealing infrastructure cable should be changed with treason and shot in public without trial.
No.. Treason has a specific definition: providing aid or comfort to the country's enemies.
Self-serving crimes that just hurt other people are not treason.
The US is not a monarchy where anyone who defies the king, protests the law, or fails/refuses to follow the law is treasonous.
I would favor allowing those thieves to remain alive, but denying them all further use of any kind of infrastructure/service provided by copper cable, until they repay for their crime 10-fold.
For example, they would be placed in a prison with no electricity, therefore, no TV, phone, internet, and they would have no access to newspapers or any benefits of outside world infrastructure.
Inmates would have to grow their own food. They would have to collect rainwater, and draw supplies from a drinking well by hand.
And they would be put to labor at other times, installing new cables/repairing cables damaged by copper thieves.
And then you have crossed the line from plausible deniability into
clear intent.
The police just have to catch you once dealing with someone whose ID you did not record.
The crooked dealer can no longer feign ignorance -- one meth-head willing to rat the scrap dealer out to police, for the right $$$ is all it would take.
Also, in addition to collecting ID, the reporting requirements could include a description of the scrap waste, and the enforcement agency would then have a "book amount" of the amount of material expected to be recycled from a certain weight of a certain kind of waste.
Really though, as long as scrap dealers are willing to look the other way for where metal is coming from it'll be easy.
I'm all for the government increasing regulatory burdens for scrap dealers and coming down on any scrap dealers caught "looking the other way", by throwing the scrap dealer in jail if necessary
The monopoly that makes Microsoft dangerous is not hardware-related, not even Windows-related -
Microsoft has multiple software monopolies; therefore, they cannot (legally) enter exclusivity agreements requiring hardware manufacturers include only their software, without running afoul of antitrust regulations.
The antitrust regulations probably don't address the issue of "hardware locking" specifically; they were written before the advent of microchips, but it would be difficult to argue that 'locking hardware to specific software' is not a form of product tie-ing, which is illegal if it is used to preserve or extend a monopoly.
I live in Indiana and I have to pay says tax to other online retailers that have a presence in Indiana, but not Amazon.
Because they aren't really "Amazon.com" distribution centers, perhaps?
Because those "distribution centers" are most likely owned by a different company who just happens to
have the name "Amazon" in their name, and just so happens to have
an agreement with Amazon.Com that requires acquisition and shipment of materials on Amazon.com's instruction?
Think of it this way... you can have a website named Amazon.com that has a large number of affiliates.
The internet-based web site creates an illusion that you are dealing with one company, when you are actually dealing
with a multi-level marketing scheme, and Amazon.COM is just the "image" and DBA you, the end user see.
So, when you "order" an item, the order can transparently be sent to an "Affiliate" network member
corporation that doesn't have any presence in the buyer's state, e.g. California if the buyer is in Indiana.
Meanwhile... if someone in California buys something, their order could be sent to an Affiliate in
Indiana whom will be the party they are legally buying the item from.
And then the Amazon.com website's role is just a "Payment processor" and "Order aggregation" company, for the affiliate networks; they bring all the order to one place, and make the process of selecting the optimal affiliate invisible to the end-user.
Slashdot Mirror
And a $1 (or so) charge for reserving a spot and then not parking there, or some douche will walk around the city reserving spots on his smart phone.
I would say the sensible thing is that you be required to pre-pay for the first hour of parking in order to reserve. Also, your paid up time remaining to park there should start ticking as soon as the reservation is open (not as soon as you park there).
For every complete hour you have the spot reserved, but haven't physically shown up, an additional convenience fee on top of the hourly parking charge should also be assessed for holding the place with no car in it.
That those rates can go up to $18/hr
That's really nasty.... so you can park to go to work, pay your parking $144 for 8 hours....
Your $30/hour wage, is effectively reduced to a $12/hour wage just by parking, before you have even added taxes.
You earn less than $25/hr you might as well just quit your job, because you'll be in the hole for parking at those unconscionable parking rates.
A reserve button to allow the driver 10 minutes to safely navigate to the spot, which must be within a certain distance according to GPS. Otherwise folks will see the available spot and everyone looking for a spot will be heading towards the small number of spots and competing fiercly, possibly resulting in reckless behavior and safety risks.
Better add a red "Reserved" light in front of each spot. When lit, only the person who reserved the spot is allowed to park there until the allowed time for them to reach the reserved spot expires -- by way of the parking meter refusing to accept payment except by the party holding the reservation, and an automatic parking ticket being issued to the violator.
Apple products are somewhat ok if you don't test the boundaries or use them too creatively.
That's really sad... Apple's slogan used to be "Think Different."
Their product line used to cater to creative folks, and it brought them to the level of success they have today. It's a darn shame.
Sorry to hear that the Ipad2 is useless to you. Is your unit still in good condition?
Can you send it to me? I would be happy to "dispose" of it for you.
I'm just looking for something that I can teach myself in a few months and start taking small projects and working my way up from there.
In a few months you can learn to play some online MMORPGs.
Look for MMORPGs where rare items, gold, characters, etc, in the game have a high resale value.
Work long hours building characters and obtaining rare items to resell.
She could probably also get on with one of the shady web scraping/placement operation/SEO, if she knew of any. I've met people with hardly any skill who make a fair amount of money doing this.
Don't forget the businesses respectively of harvesting e-mail addresses and transmitting advertising. And guerrilla marketing for-hire firms... (for example: getting paid $0.10 a review by companies to visit various retailers' websites and post favorable authentic-looking reviews and blog articles for their product and negative reviews for major competitors')
As soon as someone's willing to engage in shady businesses/questionable tactics, the number of simple potentially lucrative options explodes.
Correction. Quick, easy, makes a lot of money, legal; pick three.
Naw... it's Fast, Easy, Good... and you can have any two.
Where 'Good' in this case, means the outcome is you make a lot of money without going to jail
I'm sorry, but that's entirely bullshit. And it still doesn't justify the obscenely low prices places like GameStop give for used games.
Obviously, you have a total lack of understanding of the retail business and time value of money.
But their offering of used game exchanges has to be built on a solid business case, nonetheless, for their management to keep their jobs.
The reason such a low price is offered should be obvious -- that they have determined that the amount they will pay for used games is sufficient to build a big enough used game inventory that they can sell to obtain an extra profit, such that they will neither leave large amounts of money on the table, by failing to obtain marketable product, nor constrain the profitability of their other business.
If there were inadequate supply of used games available to them at that price, then they would have to pay more... that is, the seller of the used game would be able to negotiate a deal better than $5 a game: If people were not actually bringing used games to them and letting them go for that amount, then either they would be offering more, or not be in the used games business.
Since obviously... people are bringing used games to them at their current prices, or they are able to efficiently obtain them at that price, then the question they would have to deal with is -- is the pricing right for buying used games?
If they offered more money to buy peoples' games, then economically speaking, they would have customers bringing in more used games to sell at that amount -- and their risk would be increased, with the larger used game inventory, there might not be buyers immediately available for all those games at a profitable price, then the purchase could be a loss.
There is not an infinite immediate demand for every used game title. There is a cost involved in tying up money with the purchase of used games from customers -- in the form of lower returns to shareholders, or in the form of interest payments to their bank on money borrowed. There are also per-item costs in relation to the rent of the floor space. Property taxes on inventory, and numerous other costs.
Since the sale price of each unused game has to be high enough to make up for the costs of other used games in inventory that won't get sold within 6 months or more, break-even is like a 200% markup.
Again, as for the pricing when selling used games -- it must be sufficiently high that the discount of the used games does not cause their customer base to abandon new game purchases, reducing profitability.
It would not be in the interest of Gamestop to displace their new game business by selling used versions of anything released in the past year at a substantially high discount.
There is a conflict of interest here in that the used game dealer is also a new game dealer.
Also, they are offering a convenience.... the $5 or so price for a used game, is like a convenience. Sure, you could eBay it for more, and there are other venues such as direct sales.
Any pawn shop or other store that deals in used merchandise is likely to make a similar offer.
The fact of the matter is... you giving a used game to a retailer is a market that strongly favors the buyer. If time and convenience aren't important, then you wouldn't be there, you would be doing the leg work to list the used game for sale, to obtain something close to its retail value.
Unless they plan to allow special copies for rental purposes, this spells the end of game rentals. Of course, that just might be part of the intended suite of effects rather than a side effect.
With all the online services; PSN, Xbox Live, etc, the game manufacturer could now provide the rental service online and pocket all the rental proceeds.
The game makers would also be in a position 'cripple' or 'limit' how much of the game can be played in a rental without paying additional rental fees, online "content purchases", or the full price to upgrade from "light rental version" to "full version".
The used game that you bought for $30 (instead of $45 new or probably $20 on a Steam sale), the store paid $5. At most. Yes, the stores will occasionally pay as much as $10 for new and hot titles, but those get sold used for as little as $5 off the price of a new copy.
The store is taking on risk by purchasing used games for resale. The item won't move off the shelf and get purchased as fast as a new title. It might not turn out to be sellable. Employees have to spend time buying these from customers, inspecting them, pricing them, repackaging/preparing them to be resold, and reselling them.
Shelf space in a store is expensive, and the store still needs to make overhead and have a healthy profit.
The used games stores are bad for the industry. All the bad things that publishers say about games piracy? The loss of sales and money being diverted away from the people who make the games? The need to jack up prices to make up for sales lost due to alternate means of acquisition? All that shit is actually true about the used games industry.
And I suppose you would say the Libraries and used book stores are bad for industry as well? The loss of sales and money being diverted away from people who write books.
And the used car dealerships result in money being diverted away from the people who build cars.
All that used stuff must belong in a landfill?
This is not really in the public interest. If they can implement physical means to prevent reuse of their products, then copyright laws should be taken off the books.
Firmware that expects some kind of handshake within N minutes of initial operation and if it fails to get that handshake it immediately begins an erase operation?
Indeed... not only that, but the custom firmware can contain code to wipe its own EEPROM irrecoverably; the boot loader on the HDD that handles the decryption can be programmed to self-test and initiate a software-based erase, should a boot be attempted without the custom firmware present, should the firmware be tampered with, or should various seek-read-write-read test cycles fail, even if the correct password is entered.
The custom firmware can contain some code to "execute" the contents of some certain magic sectors of the HDD in a special way. So that if someone tries to swap the PCB on the hard drive or flash the disk drive with a standard firmware, the special code won't execute.
Some of the required key material to gain access to the hard drive media can be in that special code and also in the custom firmware, so without the custom firmware loaded, the literal contents of the sector on the physical media would be backed up, instead of the normal customized result of a read of that sector.
And some of those 'special sectors' just happen to include random bytes that the user secret key has to be XOR'ed against to derive the symmetric key required to access the HDD.
This results in the "backup" not capturing critical information required to decrypt the medium.
And therefore being worthless, even with the correct passphrase.
Problem is that forensics officers take backups. They'd back up the drive first and boot from the backup so whether it destroys the data or not is irrelevant. And if you gave the officers the "self destruct" password that horked the backup then that is further evidence that you are up to no good.
A nefarious person could designate a sequence of sectors in various parts of your hard drive as "sectors that will never be read" during the normal course of system operation.
And then patch their hard drive firmware so that if more than 4 of the "off limits" sectors are read, the hard drive will start zero'ing all sectors in the background, and on next power cycle start an ATA Secure erase.
In other words... latent tamper resistant hardware mechanisms implemented such that unauthorized backup attempts result in hardware level self-destruct, so if someone steals the hard drive they can't use it.
Another method of protecting against physical theft of the HDD and passphrase guessing is to utilize online cloud-based services for key distribution.
Instead of the passphrase being used to decrypt the HDD, it gets entered into software, which connects using the internet and makes an API request that results in contacting a number of off-site cloud-based services.
If the passphrase gets entered incorrectly enough times, FAILS to get entered on a certain schedule, or a passphrase with certain characteristics gets entered instead of the correct one, the remote cloud services shut themselves down, and can no longer pass binary data required to derive the HDD decryption keys.
They can also monitor each other and contain an IDS, so if one of them is compromised, it will be ordered to shutdown, and key material required to bootstrap can be incinerated.
e.g. I'm saying the group of all the 'remote cloud security nodes' would form a cooperative group, and for a cloud security node to bootstrap, the other nodes would have to reach an agreement through an election process, and each node would only contain 1/3 or 1/4 of the key material required to reconstruct the HDD decrypt key after presentation of the right passphrase-decoded material from the requestor.
The cloud services can be in disparate geopgrahic locations, even multiple countries, to help reduce the chance of a hacker breaking into a sufficient plurality of those remote providers.
Yes, it's a good thing you live in England!
Ah... Good Ol' UK, where you don't have to decrypt your hard drive on demand -- however, where you are required to have and produce any and all encryption keys on request from police, or go to jail for the crime of failing to produce encryption keys (no court order required).
Of course, this would make any kind of remote monitoring impossible...
Not impossible. Build a private circuit from the site to be monitored to an operator console at a remote secure location; use a dedicated firewall on the monitored station side of the private circuit that only allows unidirectional encrypted traffic required to feed information into the remote monitoring station.
While it is indeed laughable and sad that these unprepared devices were attached to the Internet, it is also worth highlighting that being detached from the Internet is not itself a pancaea.
In addition to being detached to the internet, the use of USB addon devices should be disabled on all SCADA operator consoles and other SCADA network connected devices. And they must not have connectivity to the same network or storage volume as _any_ other device that has internet access, USB thumb drive access, connectivity to any network that has or has outside connectivity directly or indirectly; or that contains any hard drive or storage media that has EVER been attached to a network-connected device since the last time that media was completely formatted with a SCSI/ATA secure erase.
In other words: no data path from outside network to SCADA network, neither a network datapath, nor a sneakernet data path.
Worse it's easy to claim a product is secure when it is not
A product is not "secure" or "insecure"
A deployment where a product is used is secure or insecure.
A deployment of a product can be highly secure in its expected deployment scenario, but the deployment horribly insecure if you plug it into an outside network which contains unmanaged devices.
There may be flaws in a TCP stack (For example), that could be exploited if an unmanaged device were allowed to produce arbitrary communications, but the deployment can be secure when all devices are managed, and there is no operator console command to generate the invalid packet, without physical access to plug a laptop into the cordoned off network.
I'd say plugging in a CRT is a waste of perfectly good electricity. Why are you hoarding crap?
CRTs have better picture quality than LCD displays, and the difference in power consumption is quite small; an extra $5 per year in electricity to operate a CRT of equivalent size versus a LCD for 6 hours a day..
LCDs burn extra power for all that CFL backlighting of the display, so the gap is fairly narrow... both are just about the same "waste" of perfectly good electricity.
Newer 19" and 24" LCDs wind up using a lot more power than older smaller CRTs, anyways.
If you want to save power, get a 6" or 8" display.
The biggest advantage of LCDs is that they are thinner, and weight less per inch of display.
Those caught stealing infrastructure cable should be changed with treason and shot in public without trial.
No.. Treason has a specific definition: providing aid or comfort to the country's enemies. Self-serving crimes that just hurt other people are not treason. The US is not a monarchy where anyone who defies the king, protests the law, or fails/refuses to follow the law is treasonous.
I would favor allowing those thieves to remain alive, but denying them all further use of any kind of infrastructure/service provided by copper cable, until they repay for their crime 10-fold.
For example, they would be placed in a prison with no electricity, therefore, no TV, phone, internet, and they would have no access to newspapers or any benefits of outside world infrastructure.
Inmates would have to grow their own food. They would have to collect rainwater, and draw supplies from a drinking well by hand.
And they would be put to labor at other times, installing new cables/repairing cables damaged by copper thieves.
And then you have crossed the line from plausible deniability into clear intent.
The police just have to catch you once dealing with someone whose ID you did not record.
The crooked dealer can no longer feign ignorance -- one meth-head willing to rat the scrap dealer out to police, for the right $$$ is all it would take.
Also, in addition to collecting ID, the reporting requirements could include a description of the scrap waste, and the enforcement agency would then have a "book amount" of the amount of material expected to be recycled from a certain weight of a certain kind of waste.
All that adds costs for the bad guys, that eventually exceed the market value of copper in the first place.
Really though, as long as scrap dealers are willing to look the other way for where metal is coming from it'll be easy.
I'm all for the government increasing regulatory burdens for scrap dealers and coming down on any scrap dealers caught "looking the other way", by throwing the scrap dealer in jail if necessary
The monopoly that makes Microsoft dangerous is not hardware-related, not even Windows-related -
Microsoft has multiple software monopolies; therefore, they cannot (legally) enter exclusivity agreements requiring hardware manufacturers include only their software, without running afoul of antitrust regulations.
The antitrust regulations probably don't address the issue of "hardware locking" specifically; they were written before the advent of microchips, but it would be difficult to argue that 'locking hardware to specific software' is not a form of product tie-ing, which is illegal if it is used to preserve or extend a monopoly.
I simply find both sales and marketing immoral (at least in the forms they commonly have in our society).
Then you definitely shouldn't take a jobs in sales or marketing.
The self-conflict would be horribly destructive.
But those functions are still critical for business success.
I live in Indiana and I have to pay says tax to other online retailers that have a presence in Indiana, but not Amazon.
Because they aren't really "Amazon.com" distribution centers, perhaps?
Because those "distribution centers" are most likely owned by a different company who just happens to have the name "Amazon" in their name, and just so happens to have an agreement with Amazon.Com that requires acquisition and shipment of materials on Amazon.com's instruction?
Think of it this way... you can have a website named Amazon.com that has a large number of affiliates. The internet-based web site creates an illusion that you are dealing with one company, when you are actually dealing with a multi-level marketing scheme, and Amazon.COM is just the "image" and DBA you, the end user see.
So, when you "order" an item, the order can transparently be sent to an "Affiliate" network member corporation that doesn't have any presence in the buyer's state, e.g. California if the buyer is in Indiana.
Meanwhile... if someone in California buys something, their order could be sent to an Affiliate in Indiana whom will be the party they are legally buying the item from.
And then the Amazon.com website's role is just a "Payment processor" and "Order aggregation" company, for the affiliate networks; they bring all the order to one place, and make the process of selecting the optimal affiliate invisible to the end-user.