Saving water...right. Clearly you're not speaking for everywhere.
I wish that the grass in our lawn grew less. There's been times when I had to mow every four days. You can almost hear the grass growing. That's because it rains every single day for at least 15 minutes during the summer, and about twice a week during the winter.
No sane person waters their yard. No one wants their grass to grow into three feet long strands that are sharp like knives.
I live in a maritime zone (specifically, Florida). I imagine you'll get the same in most maritime zones. There are a lot of them in the world.
While loosed lawyers are much more powerful than chained ones, the chained ones are safer.
Even if the other side looses their lawyer, like the parent says - the lawyers are the only ones who win if they're loosed.
If you keep control of them, they won't be able to bite you, and you stand a chance of coming out ahead. It may even be possible to win even if the other side has loosed their lawyers.
Another good tip is to remember to spade or neuter your lawyer to help reduce the number of strays.
To quote Star Trek (specifically Q, in the last episode of TGN), the future is "not mapping stars and studying nebula but charting the unknown possibilities of existence."
This isn't science for science's sake. Figuring out how things work is science for science's sake. This is science for scientists that are hunting for something to figure out; it's science for accountancy. I'm not sure that this isn't worse than science for practical applications.
Which do you think kills the imagination faster? Busy-work counting stellar phenomena, or making things that are actually useful but aren't at all based on new, theoretical concepts?
Haraguchi probably looks for patterns in the digits that he can associate with other memorable concepts
Okay...right, yeah. That's good for the first 100 digits, but what about the rest?
Contrary to what you may think, the "memory association trick" only goes so far. Eventually you have to get to the point where you can just force yourself to remember what you want to remember - i.e. develop trained photographic memory.
Try memorizing things more often. Your memory just gets better. No tricks required; you can just remember more and longer when you want to.
Maybe he pushed it and was able to use the trick for the first 1000. But he went WAY past that. That many hours of straight of memorization means learning how to memorize things really well.
A parent that genuinely listens and cares about their children is going to be much better received - and far more trusted - by their kids than one who tries to become the FBI and wiretap everything their kids do.
Exactly! By listening to what your kids say early on in life you can convince them of your near-omniscience. It's not that hard to fool a five year old, after all. Heck, they'd probably believe you if you told them that the internet was a series of tubes.
Once you've put the fear of you in them, it's trivial to keep tabs on them. You just have to listen. They'll tell you everything since they think you already know.
That does crash a harddrive...made in 1993. Modern harddrive controllers will not let you address segments of the drive that don't exist. They just throw an error specifically because there were viruses that did this.
have to integrate high proportions of graphics into their work, and for them a WYSIWYG tool is quite appropriate
I would say the opposite. It is much more important that you don't use a WYSIWYG tool when you've got graphics. You want to be able to say "I don't know what page this is going on, but when it gets there, put it in the upper right corner and cause the text to flow around it seperated by a 10 point border."...or other things like that. WYSIWYG editors are very bad at this. Especially Word. Writing a 30 page word document that includes pictures is insane. Adding new things and reformatting takes forever due to Word's horrible reformatting problems.
Of course, I can see why you might think that. People who work with graphics are often graphic designers...and a lot of those people cringe in fear at the thought of actually doing anything at all outside of a WYSIWYG. So a WYSIWG, while much worse at actually getting things done, is the only thing that they can use.
Everyone needs gas. A lot of it. This is a straw man. The point is that there are a lot of necessities that everyone needs other than gas which aren't watched as closely. If you spend $150 instead of $300 on groceries (which, by the way, include things besides red peppers, and is possible if you stock up on every BOGO sale), you'll be saving a lot more than if you save $15 on gas (which is a realistic amount of monthly "savings" by going to a low priced gas station over a high priced one).
Convenience. Red herring. The article specifically addresses the people who go out of their way to get good gas. It's not focusing on the people who see three different gas stations nearby and go with the cheapest of those three. Those people aren't trying to save a lot of money on gas anyway.
It's for the people who are tracking the prices and going out of their way to buy cheap, but aren't tracking prices anywhere else.
Free Money!
Good point! Not a logical fallacy! I think it's wrong, though. Pretty much all necessary commodities have credit cards/deals that do this. It locks you into their store and keeps you from going to anybody else's. For example, I've never been to a grocery store that doesn't have some sort of card they give out to people who go there. Cashback cards are a gimmick of all necessary commodity producers. This article is comparing one kind of necessary commodity to others, so this factor is equal.
people will pay those prices because someone on their list will be wanting one.
I'm sure that there will be people on my list that want a pony, or an Oompa Loompa, or possibly the moon.
Like those other things, this would be one of those times that those people on my list need to face the reality that they can't have everything they want.
For those of you who think that the money is not much ($800 shouldn't be much to most of us), it might even be one of those things where they get to realize that they can have a lot more of what they want if they get something else.
These are not the same story, but they do fall into an obvious general category: "Problems that Slashdot has solved that other sites haven't."
Perhaps today is "why you should stop going to those other websites and spend all your time on Slashdot" day.
Now if they just get rid of those pesky links to other sites (except in the summaries, of course, as nobody here actually clicks on the links that are in those things), we won't even be tempted to leave!
The GPL quite sensibly forbids the linking of non-Free code with the Linux kernel. Everyone must be free to work on the Linux kernel and everything which links to it, otherwise the authors of the non-Free parts would have an unfair advantage over tha authors of the Free parts.
Thanks to companies like nVidia, it's a darn good thing that this statement isn't true. I could write something capable of working with the Linux kernel, distribute it as closed source, and not make it GPL.
I wouldn't be able to actually distribute it with the Linux kernel, so it wouldn't actually work by itself - it'd be a DIY type project...but I could do it.
This is the biggest reason I use Gentoo. Forget ricing/compiling for speed/compiling for pride. It saves time if you're one of those people who ends up with a lot of these things. Most of the "you have to build this yourself" work is just downloading the package. Gentoo can do the building for me, integrate it in a package management system, and handle any patches/intricacies that I'd rather not bother with.
Even if nobody else has done this, it's generally not bad to write a build myself (by comparison to writing my own RPM).
Of course, for a lot of programs, you really don't need recompilation. Its only to get around things like the GPL, or because the authors haven't yet made a distro for your thing.
I'm thinking someone needs to make a decent Gentoo hybrid that combines binary and non-binary package management into one so that you get the advantage of quick installs when you can while getting automated building when you can't.
Maybe a MAC keyboard doesn't have a "right mouse button" (don't kno never used n one;) ? So what. They miss out, the rest of the world that does have one (i.e. the vast majority of us) gets to use it in the manner it was designed.
I'm absolutely positive that the vast majority of us won't be getting that enhancement. Only keyboards with built-in pointers (which is mostly only aptops) have any kind of pointer-buttons. Why should there be? A keyboard is not a mouse.
If we assume that you're actually talking about the right-mouse button on the mouse this is something that absolutely needs to be handled at the individual application level...and it pretty much is.
All the gnome apps that I use (Abiword, Evolution, Galleon, Gqview, Gimp, Sawfish, Metacity, Nautilus) will give you right mouse buttons almost everywhere. Which ones are you talking about that don't?
I'll agree about Nautilus, though - it's a nearly useless memory hog.
The only other point I'd want to add to this discussion is that Metacity was also a huge step backwards from Sawfish, IMHO. This announcement seems akin to "Hey everybody! We're coming real close to getting all the visual capabilities that Sawfish had!"
1) Still? You weren't actually programming the old bricks with that awful language that lego gave you, were you? You should have been using this.
I'm sure that there'll be something else like it for the new ones. The old ones were based on the well known ATMEL chips, IIRC, and were therefore easy to write a specialized compiler for. I expect much of the same here.
2) I refer you back to #1. Write your own communication protocol and use a serial line. You can.
Of course, the real question here is why you're bothering with legos at all.
Buy a solderless breadboard, your own ATMEL programmer and a chip or five and use 'em directly. You're a short hop away if you're already doing programming in a real language and expanding your communication mechanisms. It's not like you can't use legos for your housing even when you're not using bricks for all the motorized parts.
In actuallity, survival of the fittest implies fittness for a certain environment only. The problem is really the human ego; we have an enourmously hard time accepting the idea that humans aren't innately special.
I tend to think that our survival strategy is highly generalized and superior to all other survival strategies.
We can survive in outer space, on the moon, in heat so hot that it would kill any other lifeform, and in pressures so intense that nothing else can live in them because of our survival strategy (use intelligence to survive harsh conditions).
No other species on Earth has this degree of adaptability to different environments. I believe that it is specifically this adaptability beyond that of anything else that gives man his feeling of superiority - of being a "higher life form". Is that enough to justify such a stance?
I don't know. Even if it isn't, not being superior is no reason to doubt the obvious: we are the most adaptable species on the planet to different environments.
And now it's 'news' that a single cell's genome has as many genes as a human's! When will we learn that the number of genes doesn't mean 'more advanced' or 'better off'?
Umm....doesn't it? That seems to be the reason why it's got so many genes.
It uses them to be able to adapt to it's environment. Which makes it more advanced, and better off than other single-celled organisms with fewer genes.
More genes=more genetic information to draw from=probably better off.
The only reason it wouldn't be true is if the information is useless (redundant not the same thing) or wrong (i.e. causes building of things that are defective). I don't think that's true of humans or of that thing.
All true. Even still, you wouldn't need a lens or any parts dealing with focusing the light - unlike a standard projector.
So while you might not be talking about cellphone size, you'd still be talking about vastly shrinking the size of current projectors - a lot of whose size and weight is currently taken by optics.
Still...you're not going to see me buying one of these for a long time.
Tiny motors have "breaks easily" written all over them (although its too small to see).
Lucky you. In Central Florida (and from what I've heard most of Florida and most of Georgia), cable modem is 5MB/sec down,.5 up for the cheap rate.
Nobody gets even close to that on DSL. In my area, we can get.5MB down,.1 up and the phone company told us that was remarkably good (of course they advertize it as capable of doing more).
Cable really doesn't have much to worry about. It's a lot easier to upgrade and repair cable networks than it is to upgrade and repair fiber, and cable lines can actually handle 100MB from the number of houses they're doing now without much problem.
The issue is that they've got all those pesky analog cable TV channels on there wasting space.
They're slowly phasing out all of the old, nondigital cable boxes and moving everyone over to digital. Once that's done, they'll be far ahead of fiber in terms of getting that last mile in place, and they'll be able to match the speeds fiber is currently offering.
It might cost more, but if I was a betting man, I'd bet more on cable being reliable and maintained over fiber. cable isn't a prototype. We know it works, and we know the network can handle it. Only the switches and the policies need to be changed. Despite the cost of that, I'm pretty sure its still cheaper than all that has to be done to make fiber a reality.
Because our moon is the reference implmentation of a moon. We've held it up as the standard by which we made the definition.
The logic is something like this: 1) It is a given that our moon is a moon. It is the prototype upon which the concept was based. 2) The primary feature of our moon is that it orbits a planet. Lots of other celestial objects also have this property. We therefore call those moons as well. 3) Wait! We were wrong about #2. It doesn't exactly orbit our planet. It orbits the center of gravity between the two, which will eventually not be inside our planet. So our definition of what makes our moon a moon is wrong. 4) Definition of "moon" must be changed.
Can you get a free decryption program for Windows? Are there lots of them? When were they first available?
Can you get one for Linux? Are there lots of them? When were they first available?
This is the first real solid example of DRM, and Linux dominated it because the researchers that were working on reversing the security measures used whatever was most convenient.
Despite the marketshare and mindshare held by Windows, Linux DVD support has been remarkable. Windows development has truly been hindered by the fact that a small group of companies held the rights to all commercial development, and that the only kind of development was commercial development.
Why do you expect the future to be different? If the encryption scheme is unbreakable, then it will be used only by one company - the one that owns the rights to it. You have to be very successful to win with a monopoly.
A more likely occurrance is DRM that sort of works, but in reality is easy to break (and also, therefore, easy to write programs for, and easy to get others to adopt). In such areas, noncommercial development gains an edge just as it did with the DVD standard.
I present some interesting quotes on the subject for the uninitiated (uninitiated to Robert Heinlein's stance on militarism, that is). I like the one about cutting a baby's head off in chapter 5 and the one about "violence never solves anything" in chapter 1.
Slashdot Mirror
Saving water...right. Clearly you're not speaking for everywhere.
I wish that the grass in our lawn grew less. There's been times when I had to mow every four days. You can almost hear the grass growing. That's because it rains every single day for at least 15 minutes during the summer, and about twice a week during the winter.
No sane person waters their yard. No one wants their grass to grow into three feet long strands that are sharp like knives.
I live in a maritime zone (specifically, Florida). I imagine you'll get the same in most maritime zones. There are a lot of them in the world.
While loosed lawyers are much more powerful than chained ones, the chained ones are safer.
Even if the other side looses their lawyer, like the parent says - the lawyers are the only ones who win if they're loosed.
If you keep control of them, they won't be able to bite you, and you stand a chance of coming out ahead. It may even be possible to win even if the other side has loosed their lawyers.
Another good tip is to remember to spade or neuter your lawyer to help reduce the number of strays.
To quote Star Trek (specifically Q, in the last episode of TGN), the future is "not mapping stars and studying nebula but charting the unknown possibilities of existence."
This isn't science for science's sake. Figuring out how things work is science for science's sake. This is science for scientists that are hunting for something to figure out; it's science for accountancy. I'm not sure that this isn't worse than science for practical applications.
Which do you think kills the imagination faster? Busy-work counting stellar phenomena, or making things that are actually useful but aren't at all based on new, theoretical concepts?
Haraguchi probably looks for patterns in the digits that he can associate with other memorable concepts
Okay...right, yeah. That's good for the first 100 digits, but what about the rest?
Contrary to what you may think, the "memory association trick" only goes so far. Eventually you have to get to the point where you can just force yourself to remember what you want to remember - i.e. develop trained photographic memory.
Try memorizing things more often. Your memory just gets better. No tricks required; you can just remember more and longer when you want to.
Maybe he pushed it and was able to use the trick for the first 1000. But he went WAY past that. That many hours of straight of memorization means learning how to memorize things really well.
A parent that genuinely listens and cares about their children is going to be much better received - and far more trusted - by their kids than one who tries to become the FBI and wiretap everything their kids do.
Exactly! By listening to what your kids say early on in life you can convince them of your near-omniscience. It's not that hard to fool a five year old, after all. Heck, they'd probably believe you if you told them that the internet was a series of tubes.
Once you've put the fear of you in them, it's trivial to keep tabs on them. You just have to listen. They'll tell you everything since they think you already know.
That does crash a harddrive...made in 1993. Modern harddrive controllers will not let you address segments of the drive that don't exist. They just throw an error specifically because there were viruses that did this.
A more correct phrase would be that most IQ test shoot for the mean to be 100 and the 1 standard deviation to be placed at 115.
Two standard deviations away is gifted or retarted. 3 means you will probably have trouble functioning in society.
have to integrate high proportions of graphics into their work, and for them a WYSIWYG tool is quite appropriate
...or other things like that. WYSIWYG editors are very bad at this. Especially Word. Writing a 30 page word document that includes pictures is insane. Adding new things and reformatting takes forever due to Word's horrible reformatting problems.
I would say the opposite. It is much more important that you don't use a WYSIWYG tool when you've got graphics. You want to be able to say "I don't know what page this is going on, but when it gets there, put it in the upper right corner and cause the text to flow around it seperated by a 10 point border."
Of course, I can see why you might think that. People who work with graphics are often graphic designers...and a lot of those people cringe in fear at the thought of actually doing anything at all outside of a WYSIWYG. So a WYSIWG, while much worse at actually getting things done, is the only thing that they can use.
A few logical flaws here...
Everyone needs gas. A lot of it.
This is a straw man. The point is that there are a lot of necessities that everyone needs other than gas which aren't watched as closely. If you spend $150 instead of $300 on groceries (which, by the way, include things besides red peppers, and is possible if you stock up on every BOGO sale), you'll be saving a lot more than if you save $15 on gas (which is a realistic amount of monthly "savings" by going to a low priced gas station over a high priced one).
Convenience.
Red herring. The article specifically addresses the people who go out of their way to get good gas. It's not focusing on the people who see three different gas stations nearby and go with the cheapest of those three. Those people aren't trying to save a lot of money on gas anyway.
It's for the people who are tracking the prices and going out of their way to buy cheap, but aren't tracking prices anywhere else.
Free Money!
Good point! Not a logical fallacy! I think it's wrong, though. Pretty much all necessary commodities have credit cards/deals that do this. It locks you into their store and keeps you from going to anybody else's. For example, I've never been to a grocery store that doesn't have some sort of card they give out to people who go there. Cashback cards are a gimmick of all necessary commodity producers.
This article is comparing one kind of necessary commodity to others, so this factor is equal.
Not the first one with a toe, either. :/
What you're talking about is called "dynamic stability."
Most two legged robots are statically stable.
However, most one legged robots are *not* - they're dynamically stable.
So essentially, this is a solution to that problem.
It's not the first one, though. There are tons of pogostick-like one-legged robots.
I'm curious to see what thing Toyota did that makes it worth noting, as the article doesn't mention anything special.
people will pay those prices because someone on their list will be wanting one.
I'm sure that there will be people on my list that want a pony, or an Oompa Loompa, or possibly the moon.
Like those other things, this would be one of those times that those people on my list need to face the reality that they can't have everything they want.
For those of you who think that the money is not much ($800 shouldn't be much to most of us), it might even be one of those things where they get to realize that they can have a lot more of what they want if they get something else.
These are not the same story, but they do fall into an obvious general category:
"Problems that Slashdot has solved that other sites haven't."
Perhaps today is "why you should stop going to those other websites and spend all your time on Slashdot" day.
Now if they just get rid of those pesky links to other sites (except in the summaries, of course, as nobody here actually clicks on the links that are in those things), we won't even be tempted to leave!
You mean like this?
Your personal info is supposed to be safe in the hands of certain people. Perhaps there need to be more that are held accountable?
Still...maybe it's not enough. You didn't mention this act. Did you even know it existed?
If the populace doesn't know big laws like this there's no way that anyone is going to worry about enforcing them.
The GPL quite sensibly forbids the linking of non-Free code with the Linux kernel. Everyone must be free to work on the Linux kernel and everything which links to it, otherwise the authors of the non-Free parts would have an unfair advantage over tha authors of the Free parts.
Thanks to companies like nVidia, it's a darn good thing that this statement isn't true. I could write something capable of working with the Linux kernel, distribute it as closed source, and not make it GPL.
I wouldn't be able to actually distribute it with the Linux kernel, so it wouldn't actually work by itself - it'd be a DIY type project...but I could do it.
This is the biggest reason I use Gentoo. Forget ricing/compiling for speed/compiling for pride. It saves time if you're one of those people who ends up with a lot of these things.
Most of the "you have to build this yourself" work is just downloading the package. Gentoo can do the building for me, integrate it in a package management system, and handle any patches/intricacies that I'd rather not bother with.
Even if nobody else has done this, it's generally not bad to write a build myself (by comparison to writing my own RPM).
Of course, for a lot of programs, you really don't need recompilation. Its only to get around things like the GPL, or because the authors haven't yet made a distro for your thing.
I'm thinking someone needs to make a decent Gentoo hybrid that combines binary and non-binary package management into one so that you get the advantage of quick installs when you can while getting automated building when you can't.
Maybe a MAC keyboard doesn't have a "right mouse button" (don't kno never used n one ;) ? So what. They miss out, the rest of the world that does have one (i.e. the vast majority of us) gets to use it in the manner it was designed.
I'm absolutely positive that the vast majority of us won't be getting that enhancement. Only keyboards with built-in pointers (which is mostly only aptops) have any kind of pointer-buttons. Why should there be? A keyboard is not a mouse.
If we assume that you're actually talking about the right-mouse button on the mouse this is something that absolutely needs to be handled at the individual application level...and it pretty much is.
All the gnome apps that I use (Abiword, Evolution, Galleon, Gqview, Gimp, Sawfish, Metacity, Nautilus) will give you right mouse buttons almost everywhere. Which ones are you talking about that don't?
I'll agree about Nautilus, though - it's a nearly useless memory hog.
The only other point I'd want to add to this discussion is that Metacity was also a huge step backwards from Sawfish, IMHO. This announcement seems akin to "Hey everybody! We're coming real close to getting all the visual capabilities that Sawfish had!"
1) Still? You weren't actually programming the old bricks with that awful language that lego gave you, were you?
You should have been using this.
I'm sure that there'll be something else like it for the new ones. The old ones were based on the well known ATMEL chips, IIRC, and were therefore easy to write a specialized compiler for. I expect much of the same here.
2) I refer you back to #1. Write your own communication protocol and use a serial line. You can.
Of course, the real question here is why you're bothering with legos at all.
Buy a solderless breadboard, your own ATMEL programmer and a chip or five and use 'em directly. You're a short hop away if you're already doing programming in a real language and expanding your communication mechanisms. It's not like you can't use legos for your housing even when you're not using bricks for all the motorized parts.
In actuallity, survival of the fittest implies fittness for a certain environment only.
The problem is really the human ego; we have an enourmously hard time accepting the idea that humans aren't innately special.
I tend to think that our survival strategy is highly generalized and superior to all other survival strategies.
We can survive in outer space, on the moon, in heat so hot that it would kill any other lifeform, and in pressures so intense that nothing else can live in them because of our survival strategy (use intelligence to survive harsh conditions).
No other species on Earth has this degree of adaptability to different environments. I believe that it is specifically this adaptability beyond that of anything else that gives man his feeling of superiority - of being a "higher life form". Is that enough to justify such a stance?
I don't know. Even if it isn't, not being superior is no reason to doubt the obvious: we are the most adaptable species on the planet to different environments.
And now it's 'news' that a single cell's genome has as many genes as a human's! When will we learn that the number of genes doesn't mean 'more advanced' or 'better off'?
Umm....doesn't it? That seems to be the reason why it's got so many genes.
It uses them to be able to adapt to it's environment. Which makes it more advanced, and better off than other single-celled organisms with fewer genes.
More genes=more genetic information to draw from=probably better off.
The only reason it wouldn't be true is if the information is useless (redundant not the same thing) or wrong (i.e. causes building of things that are defective). I don't think that's true of humans or of that thing.
All true. Even still, you wouldn't need a lens or any parts dealing with focusing the light - unlike a standard projector.
So while you might not be talking about cellphone size, you'd still be talking about vastly shrinking the size of current projectors - a lot of whose size and weight is currently taken by optics.
Still...you're not going to see me buying one of these for a long time.
Tiny motors have "breaks easily" written all over them (although its too small to see).
Lucky you. In Central Florida (and from what I've heard most of Florida and most of Georgia), cable modem is 5MB/sec down, .5 up for the cheap rate.
.5MB down, .1 up and the phone company told us that was remarkably good (of course they advertize it as capable of doing more).
Nobody gets even close to that on DSL. In my area, we can get
Cable really doesn't have much to worry about. It's a lot easier to upgrade and repair cable networks than it is to upgrade and repair fiber, and cable lines can actually handle 100MB from the number of houses they're doing now without much problem.
The issue is that they've got all those pesky analog cable TV channels on there wasting space.
They're slowly phasing out all of the old, nondigital cable boxes and moving everyone over to digital. Once that's done, they'll be far ahead of fiber in terms of getting that last mile in place, and they'll be able to match the speeds fiber is currently offering.
It might cost more, but if I was a betting man, I'd bet more on cable being reliable and maintained over fiber. cable isn't a prototype. We know it works, and we know the network can handle it. Only the switches and the policies need to be changed. Despite the cost of that, I'm pretty sure its still cheaper than all that has to be done to make fiber a reality.
Because our moon is the reference implmentation of a moon. We've held it up as the standard by which we made the definition.
The logic is something like this:
1) It is a given that our moon is a moon. It is the prototype upon which the concept was based.
2) The primary feature of our moon is that it orbits a planet. Lots of other celestial objects also have this property. We therefore call those moons as well.
3) Wait! We were wrong about #2. It doesn't exactly orbit our planet. It orbits the center of gravity between the two, which will eventually not be inside our planet. So our definition of what makes our moon a moon is wrong.
4) Definition of "moon" must be changed.
Can you get a free decryption program for Windows? Are there lots of them? When were they first available?
Can you get one for Linux? Are there lots of them? When were they first available?
This is the first real solid example of DRM, and Linux dominated it because the researchers that were working on reversing the security measures used whatever was most convenient.
Despite the marketshare and mindshare held by Windows, Linux DVD support has been remarkable. Windows development has truly been hindered by the fact that a small group of companies held the rights to all commercial development, and that the only kind of development was commercial development.
Why do you expect the future to be different? If the encryption scheme is unbreakable, then it will be used only by one company - the one that owns the rights to it. You have to be very successful to win with a monopoly.
A more likely occurrance is DRM that sort of works, but in reality is easy to break (and also, therefore, easy to write programs for, and easy to get others to adopt). In such areas, noncommercial development gains an edge just as it did with the DVD standard.
Did you even read the title there? Illegal to refuse to decrypt.
Not illegal to have encrypted partitions. A non-issue if you give the police your password when they ask you for it.
On the other side of the ocean, it's a potential starter for when HIPAA-level security is required.
Even if your physical location can't be secured you can still keep the data private.
I present some interesting quotes on the subject for the uninitiated (uninitiated to Robert Heinlein's stance on militarism, that is). I like the one about cutting a baby's head off in chapter 5 and the one about "violence never solves anything" in chapter 1.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers