The simplicity is appealing, but you're just wrong. Some people will buy if they can't pirate. Some people will buy if pirating is difficult. Some people will buy if buying is easy. There are all kinds of people out there.
A few more:
Some people will pirate if they can't buy
Some people will pirate if it's too hard to buy
Some people will pirate if they feel that it's too expensive for what they're getting
And if you're Ubisoft, some people will pirate because they trust a random uploader to piratebay more than they trust you to keep their account details secure.
Whether or not it's a necessity doesn't matter. The issue is that they're colluding with other sellers to remove the natural competition in the market. If there's no competition, then the market will never reach the "correct" price because the equilibrium is being artificially influenced.
When I worked in IT, the office movers were notorious for attempting to hook up computers (we told them not to) the wrong way. They destroyed several video cards by connecting the trapezoid shaped dell matrix connector (it splits off into 2 DVI connectors) upside down. Somehow they forced it on enough that the screws could bite, then cranked it down as hard as they could, completely demolishing the interface between the connector and the card. I don't think I could have done a better job had I taken a sledgehammer to it.
I also do not understand this statement - "artificially raise prices". This assumes there is a correct price for a given product, that sellers know that correct price, and have chosen not to use it.
The "correct" price is what the free market determines. In the event that there is no free market, no correct price can be set.
In this case the sellers colluded to set prices in unison, effectively acting as a single seller. This gives the buyers no say in what the "correct" price is, effectively eliminating the free-market behavior.
Finally, morale. A company that always threatens its developers with offshoring, and has low morale will have far more security issues than one that at least knows how to treat people with some modicum of respect.
Only if the employees return that respect. Not all of them will. One could be a spy, for example - either sent in ahead of time, or a long term worker who was offered an amazingly good deal for a pile of worthless bits that nobody would even know that they were copied. A company may be good to the employee, but not to the tune of paying off his mortgage or sending his kids to college. Most spies work for less, especially if they are convinced by a trained psychologist that they do the right thing and they are saving the world. (Sometimes this is even true.)
That's where the hiring process comes into play. Don't hire people you won't trust with your data. Also hiring based on recommendations can potentially help. Also keeping the work environment such that most co-workers are friends. Many people will be less likely to steal data from big evil corporation that they don't like working for if they know it'll screw over all their friends who still work there and also reflect badly on whoever recommended them.
For the rest of the potential leakers who are all trained spies getting the job because they're out to get you specifically, there's really not much you can do about that kind of adversary besides target them back specifically. To try to address those in a general question begins to get ridiculously specific to the point where you might as well throw up your hands and start storing all your data as a public torrent for the awesome cloud backup capabilities, since against that kind of theorycrafting your data is going to get pwned no matter what you do.
That's because most laptop screens are 15 inch 1366x768, which are terrible for reading due to how far apart the pixels are. It's much different if you've got a 15 inch laptop running 1920x1080 (or higher) resolution.
It's the pixelation that causes text to be annoying to read on a monitor, and has nothing to do with some mythical difference between a luminescent display vs a reflective display.
I don't know about ipads, but reading on a nook is no more eyestraining to me than reading on paper.
A few things I did differently:
- My ereader software (aldiko) is always set to night mode (white text on black background)
- The colors are customized so that the white text is actually a very light gray. The black background is actually a very dark grey. The difference isn't noticeable unless you see them side by side, but not having such a glaring contrast seems to help immensely
- The print size usually gets adjusted to a bit larger than your typical paperback book, I'll also fiddle with the margins and line spacing until it's not obnoxious.
- Running an app such as lux, which allows me to turn the brightness down even further than would generally be possible, is really great for reading at night without it feeling like the screen is trying to burn out my eyeballs.
This is definitely preferable to the several walls of floor to ceiling bookshelves that I have currently: http://i.imgur.com/Y8dmMbN.jpg
And for another $30 I could have had a 64gb card, which I suspect could easily hold the entire contents of your typical B&N store (minus videos and audio/picture books).
You're muddying the waters by involving kids and property with unclear boundaries, both of which make it less reasonable to assign blame to the trespasser and transfer a measure of responsibility to the property owner if, for example, there is something dangerous on the ground and a child hurts themselves on it. It's not really a fair analogy.
It's a completely fair analogy, and I picked it specifically because an unencrypted and wide open wifi signal is an unclear boundary.
Placing any kind of restriction on it (however insecure in reality) is what's needed to establish a clear boundary.
I don't think he's arguing that that makes it ok, he's arguing that the subset of people who are technologically impaired to the point that they can't encrypt their wifi (most routers have a button on the front that does it in one step for crying out loud) aren't tech savvy enough to know/understand/care that their unsecured wifi is in a database.
By your logic, because it is obvious to me as someone knowledgeable about computer networks that WEP is not an effective means of encryption for wireless traffic, anyone using WEP therefore has no reasonable expectation of privacy because they could have searched for two minutes on Google and discovered this but they still haven't protected themselves better.
No.
An unencrypted network takes no action on the part of the person connecting, and does nothing to indicate that it's intended to be private. People could even inadvertently connect to it depending on how their device is configured (particularly if you have the same ssid of a network they've connected to previously, e.g. "linksys").
By encrypting it with WEP (or even mac address filtering, as retarded of a "security" measure as that is), you're indicating that your network isn't intended to be free to access. Even though both of those methods are potentially worse than no security (WEP can be cracked in the time it takes joe idiot to tap out the password on his iDevice, MAC filtering is circumvented just as easily), they still require specific action on the part of the intruder, and are a clear indication by the owner that they did not intent the network to be public.
To make yet another property analogy: If you live on a corner lot and kids keep walking through your front yard in order to cut the corner on their way home from school, good luck yelling at them for trespassing. If you put up a fence (even if it's a 3 foot high white picket fence that'll fall over at the first breath of wind), you're now clearly indicating that you don't want your yard being used at a cut-through, and are a bit more justified in sitting on your front porch with a shotgun and yelling at the kids to get off your lawn in the event the jump the fence.
Yes, I fully understand the power of a fast moving dense object. The problem is accelerating it to get here.
If they were using ion drives, they'd need to use basically all of the xenon (and other similar elements) in their solar system in order to undertake the project. By the time whatever rock they flung gets close enough to detect earth with any degree of accuracy in terms of aiming (and this will be on the order of hundreds of years from now), it may not even have enough time to alter its course for impact due to how little thrust an ion drive can put out (saving chemical thrusters for until the end may or may not be useful just because every bit of mass in this thing would count against its end speed, it would be a big waste to dump significant mass in the end rather than the beginning). And this is assuming that the ion drive or chemical thrusters even still work after hundreds of years of interstellar travel (the most we've done with an ion drive is 5 years continuous operation on the NEXT, and it used a measurable fraction of the xenon available to earth, that stuff is rare).
It's also quite possible that in several hundred years we'll have advanced to the point where we can fling things back at it, and the advantage will be with us because we know exactly where it's going to be if its targeting earth. And because we don't need to go as far to put things in front of it, we can lob bigger projectiles with a better chance of hitting it and altering its course enough to make it matter.
Also, flip the situation around and imagine it was us who received a signal. Would all of humanity unite to go and dump the resources of our solar system into flinging some asteroids towards a star that we think might have life on it? We'd probably think it was cool, news media would cover it 24/7 until they got bored (I give it 2 weeks tops), religious figures would argue about it, conspiracy theorists would go nuts, and then in a few months the only people who would still care would be the nerds and scientists. The most we'd probably do is point all of our sensing equipment in that direction and speculate wildly what they were like.
If they were advanced enough to send a ship here to fight us, they'd be advanced enough to already realize that we were here. Short of FTL (not likely), reaction-less drives (even more unlikely), or something like the park shift from enders game, any ship they send would have to spend something on the order of hundreds of years getting here. Assuming that whatever was sent arrived (and was still in fighting condition), it would be facing whatever technology we manage to develop 100 years from now. It would also have one shot at doing enough damage to kill everyone on earth. Otherwise they would be facing the threat of very pissed off remnants of humanity united in developing the technology to send their own attack back in the other direction.
This is patently UN American. It is the antithesis to the spirit of freedom and exploration.
Can we please take this power away from these few individuals and at least tie it up in bureaucratic red tape so we can build an industry to lobby for its control later on before we miss this golden opportunity...
Yeah! Someone should form a committee to investigate these un-american activities.
It's worth noting that the premise for almost every Robot story Asimov wrote was "something unacceptable despite the robot following the Three Laws".
Which I found quite hilarious to point out to my uncle when he decided to go on about how awesome the Three Laws were and how we should adopt them for use with our AIs (when we all have AIs, which according to him will be in another few years. I told him I'd bet my flying car on him being wrong).
The problem with baseball is that it's designed such that a lot of the rules become so straw splitting as to be unenforceable.
You're not allowed to spit on the ball, but what if it's raining or your fingers are sweaty? It's not like it's harmful to anyone or giving an unfair advantage, since all the pitchers can do it (unless someone has some kind of condition that prevents them from generating saliva or something)
Basically this creates an environment in which players can't really see the reason for the rule and the thing is so vague and arbitrary that they don't see the big deal in breaking it. Break a bunch of small ones and suddenly "cheating" in bigger ways seems par for the course.
If they want to fix it, they need to start allowing more things so that they can really start cracking down on the stuff that's actually giving an unfair advantage.
The Egyptians were obviously an advanced spacefaring culture and flew up to harvest the meteorite metal themselves. Eventually they left the solar system and erased the obvious signs of their advanced technology in order to troll future generations.
The problem is, the only reason you would need to divide an inch by 64 anyway, is because you don't have a smaller unit than an inch to use instead.
Nope. Thousandths of an inch are frequently used in the machining world to measure tolerances. And while you don't usually ever divide anything by 64, it's very common to divide something by 2, then by 2 again, and then cut those things up into fourths, etc. Especially when working from a common stock material (e.g. a 2x4) and trying to maximize the usage for something in which the exact dimensions don't matter a lot as long as they're all equal.
By the way, 0.015625 cm = 0.15625 mm = 156.25 m so it's not THAT unruly.
It's still unruly no matter where the decimal point is. Unless you're honestly claiming that you can mentally divide 15625/2 faster than you can divide 64/2
Can we now do the same exersice and divide a yard or inch into 1/10, 1/100, 1/1000? That will yield in pretty much equally unruly decimals and/or problems with measuing devices, but worse, because you can't easily convert from different scales by just shifting the comma.
And this is what my point was. Both systems have different strengths. As far as everyday sort of uses for the common person, english makes a ton of sense due to relateable units and ease of dividing by even numbers. It rapidly loses its appeal when attempting to scale things or do scientific calculations, which is where metric really shines.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better would be a 100MT underwater detonation....boy would that be spectacular.
Nope: http://what-if.xkcd.com/15/
The simplicity is appealing, but you're just wrong. Some people will buy if they can't pirate. Some people will buy if pirating is difficult. Some people will buy if buying is easy. There are all kinds of people out there.
A few more:
Some people will pirate if they can't buy
Some people will pirate if it's too hard to buy
Some people will pirate if they feel that it's too expensive for what they're getting
And if you're Ubisoft, some people will pirate because they trust a random uploader to piratebay more than they trust you to keep their account details secure.
Whether or not it's a necessity doesn't matter. The issue is that they're colluding with other sellers to remove the natural competition in the market. If there's no competition, then the market will never reach the "correct" price because the equilibrium is being artificially influenced.
That's like saying a country has free elections because it's citizens can either not vote, or vote for the one candidate allowed to run for office.
If the only choice is a binary "I don't get the book" vs "I pay a small premium because everyone is priced the same", it's not really a choice.
whooooooooosh
When I worked in IT, the office movers were notorious for attempting to hook up computers (we told them not to) the wrong way. They destroyed several video cards by connecting the trapezoid shaped dell matrix connector (it splits off into 2 DVI connectors) upside down. Somehow they forced it on enough that the screws could bite, then cranked it down as hard as they could, completely demolishing the interface between the connector and the card. I don't think I could have done a better job had I taken a sledgehammer to it.
I also do not understand this statement - "artificially raise prices". This assumes there is a correct price for a given product, that sellers know that correct price, and have chosen not to use it.
The "correct" price is what the free market determines. In the event that there is no free market, no correct price can be set.
In this case the sellers colluded to set prices in unison, effectively acting as a single seller. This gives the buyers no say in what the "correct" price is, effectively eliminating the free-market behavior.
Finally, morale. A company that always threatens its developers with offshoring, and has low morale will have far more security issues than one that at least knows how to treat people with some modicum of respect.
Only if the employees return that respect. Not all of them will. One could be a spy, for example - either sent in ahead of time, or a long term worker who was offered an amazingly good deal for a pile of worthless bits that nobody would even know that they were copied. A company may be good to the employee, but not to the tune of paying off his mortgage or sending his kids to college. Most spies work for less, especially if they are convinced by a trained psychologist that they do the right thing and they are saving the world. (Sometimes this is even true.)
That's where the hiring process comes into play. Don't hire people you won't trust with your data. Also hiring based on recommendations can potentially help. Also keeping the work environment such that most co-workers are friends. Many people will be less likely to steal data from big evil corporation that they don't like working for if they know it'll screw over all their friends who still work there and also reflect badly on whoever recommended them.
For the rest of the potential leakers who are all trained spies getting the job because they're out to get you specifically, there's really not much you can do about that kind of adversary besides target them back specifically. To try to address those in a general question begins to get ridiculously specific to the point where you might as well throw up your hands and start storing all your data as a public torrent for the awesome cloud backup capabilities, since against that kind of theorycrafting your data is going to get pwned no matter what you do.
Maybe NASA put it there and it was a classic case of the governments left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing?
That's because most laptop screens are 15 inch 1366x768, which are terrible for reading due to how far apart the pixels are. It's much different if you've got a 15 inch laptop running 1920x1080 (or higher) resolution.
It's the pixelation that causes text to be annoying to read on a monitor, and has nothing to do with some mythical difference between a luminescent display vs a reflective display.
I don't know about ipads, but reading on a nook is no more eyestraining to me than reading on paper.
A few things I did differently:
- My ereader software (aldiko) is always set to night mode (white text on black background)
- The colors are customized so that the white text is actually a very light gray. The black background is actually a very dark grey. The difference isn't noticeable unless you see them side by side, but not having such a glaring contrast seems to help immensely
- The print size usually gets adjusted to a bit larger than your typical paperback book, I'll also fiddle with the margins and line spacing until it's not obnoxious.
- Running an app such as lux, which allows me to turn the brightness down even further than would generally be possible, is really great for reading at night without it feeling like the screen is trying to burn out my eyeballs.
This is definitely preferable to the several walls of floor to ceiling bookshelves that I have currently: http://i.imgur.com/Y8dmMbN.jpg
And for another $30 I could have had a 64gb card, which I suspect could easily hold the entire contents of your typical B&N store (minus videos and audio/picture books).
You're muddying the waters by involving kids and property with unclear boundaries, both of which make it less reasonable to assign blame to the trespasser and transfer a measure of responsibility to the property owner if, for example, there is something dangerous on the ground and a child hurts themselves on it. It's not really a fair analogy.
It's a completely fair analogy, and I picked it specifically because an unencrypted and wide open wifi signal is an unclear boundary. Placing any kind of restriction on it (however insecure in reality) is what's needed to establish a clear boundary.
I don't think he's arguing that that makes it ok, he's arguing that the subset of people who are technologically impaired to the point that they can't encrypt their wifi (most routers have a button on the front that does it in one step for crying out loud) aren't tech savvy enough to know/understand/care that their unsecured wifi is in a database.
By your logic, because it is obvious to me as someone knowledgeable about computer networks that WEP is not an effective means of encryption for wireless traffic, anyone using WEP therefore has no reasonable expectation of privacy because they could have searched for two minutes on Google and discovered this but they still haven't protected themselves better.
No.
An unencrypted network takes no action on the part of the person connecting, and does nothing to indicate that it's intended to be private. People could even inadvertently connect to it depending on how their device is configured (particularly if you have the same ssid of a network they've connected to previously, e.g. "linksys").
By encrypting it with WEP (or even mac address filtering, as retarded of a "security" measure as that is), you're indicating that your network isn't intended to be free to access. Even though both of those methods are potentially worse than no security (WEP can be cracked in the time it takes joe idiot to tap out the password on his iDevice, MAC filtering is circumvented just as easily), they still require specific action on the part of the intruder, and are a clear indication by the owner that they did not intent the network to be public.
To make yet another property analogy: If you live on a corner lot and kids keep walking through your front yard in order to cut the corner on their way home from school, good luck yelling at them for trespassing. If you put up a fence (even if it's a 3 foot high white picket fence that'll fall over at the first breath of wind), you're now clearly indicating that you don't want your yard being used at a cut-through, and are a bit more justified in sitting on your front porch with a shotgun and yelling at the kids to get off your lawn in the event the jump the fence.
Yes, I fully understand the power of a fast moving dense object. The problem is accelerating it to get here.
If they were using ion drives, they'd need to use basically all of the xenon (and other similar elements) in their solar system in order to undertake the project. By the time whatever rock they flung gets close enough to detect earth with any degree of accuracy in terms of aiming (and this will be on the order of hundreds of years from now), it may not even have enough time to alter its course for impact due to how little thrust an ion drive can put out (saving chemical thrusters for until the end may or may not be useful just because every bit of mass in this thing would count against its end speed, it would be a big waste to dump significant mass in the end rather than the beginning). And this is assuming that the ion drive or chemical thrusters even still work after hundreds of years of interstellar travel (the most we've done with an ion drive is 5 years continuous operation on the NEXT, and it used a measurable fraction of the xenon available to earth, that stuff is rare).
It's also quite possible that in several hundred years we'll have advanced to the point where we can fling things back at it, and the advantage will be with us because we know exactly where it's going to be if its targeting earth. And because we don't need to go as far to put things in front of it, we can lob bigger projectiles with a better chance of hitting it and altering its course enough to make it matter.
Also, flip the situation around and imagine it was us who received a signal. Would all of humanity unite to go and dump the resources of our solar system into flinging some asteroids towards a star that we think might have life on it? We'd probably think it was cool, news media would cover it 24/7 until they got bored (I give it 2 weeks tops), religious figures would argue about it, conspiracy theorists would go nuts, and then in a few months the only people who would still care would be the nerds and scientists. The most we'd probably do is point all of our sensing equipment in that direction and speculate wildly what they were like.
So it'll take 100 years then, does it matter? It's not like we're going to have packed up and left without a trace before then.
Yes, it will take 18 years in the case of Gliese 526. What's the problem here?
If they were advanced enough to send a ship here to fight us, they'd be advanced enough to already realize that we were here. Short of FTL (not likely), reaction-less drives (even more unlikely), or something like the park shift from enders game, any ship they send would have to spend something on the order of hundreds of years getting here. Assuming that whatever was sent arrived (and was still in fighting condition), it would be facing whatever technology we manage to develop 100 years from now. It would also have one shot at doing enough damage to kill everyone on earth. Otherwise they would be facing the threat of very pissed off remnants of humanity united in developing the technology to send their own attack back in the other direction.
This is patently UN American. It is the antithesis to the spirit of freedom and exploration.
Can we please take this power away from these few individuals and at least tie it up in bureaucratic red tape so we can build an industry to lobby for its control later on before we miss this golden opportunity...
Yeah! Someone should form a committee to investigate these un-american activities.
It's worth noting that the premise for almost every Robot story Asimov wrote was "something unacceptable despite the robot following the Three Laws".
Which I found quite hilarious to point out to my uncle when he decided to go on about how awesome the Three Laws were and how we should adopt them for use with our AIs (when we all have AIs, which according to him will be in another few years. I told him I'd bet my flying car on him being wrong).
The problem with baseball is that it's designed such that a lot of the rules become so straw splitting as to be unenforceable.
You're not allowed to spit on the ball, but what if it's raining or your fingers are sweaty? It's not like it's harmful to anyone or giving an unfair advantage, since all the pitchers can do it (unless someone has some kind of condition that prevents them from generating saliva or something)
Basically this creates an environment in which players can't really see the reason for the rule and the thing is so vague and arbitrary that they don't see the big deal in breaking it. Break a bunch of small ones and suddenly "cheating" in bigger ways seems par for the course.
If they want to fix it, they need to start allowing more things so that they can really start cracking down on the stuff that's actually giving an unfair advantage.
It wasn't aliens.
The Egyptians were obviously an advanced spacefaring culture and flew up to harvest the meteorite metal themselves. Eventually they left the solar system and erased the obvious signs of their advanced technology in order to troll future generations.
The problem is, the only reason you would need to divide an inch by 64 anyway, is because you don't have a smaller unit than an inch to use instead.
Nope. Thousandths of an inch are frequently used in the machining world to measure tolerances. And while you don't usually ever divide anything by 64, it's very common to divide something by 2, then by 2 again, and then cut those things up into fourths, etc. Especially when working from a common stock material (e.g. a 2x4) and trying to maximize the usage for something in which the exact dimensions don't matter a lot as long as they're all equal.
By the way, 0.015625 cm = 0.15625 mm = 156.25 m so it's not THAT unruly.
It's still unruly no matter where the decimal point is. Unless you're honestly claiming that you can mentally divide 15625/2 faster than you can divide 64/2
Can we now do the same exersice and divide a yard or inch into 1/10, 1/100, 1/1000? That will yield in pretty much equally unruly decimals and/or problems with measuing devices, but worse, because you can't easily convert from different scales by just shifting the comma.
And this is what my point was. Both systems have different strengths. As far as everyday sort of uses for the common person, english makes a ton of sense due to relateable units and ease of dividing by even numbers. It rapidly loses its appeal when attempting to scale things or do scientific calculations, which is where metric really shines.
You know that the content industry has got its hooks sunk in too far when even the linux kernel starts shipping with DRM~~~