Sweden, Finland, Norway and Canada whose population density is lower than the US yet have higher broadband penetration seem to suggest that theory may not be entirely accurate.
As basically every government is, or wants to, listen in on any traffic they can I don't only not trust them, I am utterly certain that they will issue any number of falsified certificates enabling them to intercept and MITM any SSL communication they want to. The CA's have yet to indicate that desire. Not that I think most would hesitate to sign a false certificate on request from the government anyway.
So for the purpose of certificates, I trust governments far less than a random company. Of course I also trust those random companies even less than I trust any random self-signed certificate as well.
The trust chain between me and the holder of a self-signed certificate is the only one short enough not to contain external parties potentially interested in eavesdropping.
If you put people in an indestructible box you get people splattered over the insides of that box at impact, if not before. Suspending them in water or near-human density foam might keep them in one part until impact, but I suspect that the impact shockwave would still liquify bones and organs; the available deformation zone simply wouldn't be enough to decelerate a human body at a survivable rate.
You need some form of controlled deceleration or you're simply going to have a very bad day, no matter how indestructible your surrounding compartment is.
It looks close to impossible to regulate away, if you read about DNA transfer it doesn't exactly sound like there are heavily regulated substances involved. The most difficult part seems to be separating your DNA Modified Overlords from ye ole regular overlords.
Can't say I'm sure it's a great idea to have people doing it all around, but considering the level of naturally occuring such modifications it's probably not that much more likely that someone will create something nasty by random chance.
Still, I wonder how long it'll be before someone splices THC production into dandelions or other highly prolific weed.
I ran some benchmarks on Redhat's xen vs. ESX, and for paravirtualized linux-on-linux Redhat/xen will outperform ESX with a fairly significant margin on most IO and kernel-mode things (fork/scripts/etc). As far as I tested it, I basically can't see any load that would be unsuitable for paravirtualized mode.
If you're doing full virtualization you may have to stick with ESX for a bit more, but probably not for long. As noted, various other products, virtualbox, KVM, etc, are rapidly approaching more mature status.
Virtualization is on the cusp of being completely commoditized, just a BIOS and OS feature. It doesn't bode too well for Vmware, but frankly, between their price gouging and their failure to deliver a Linux management client for five years I can't say I'm overly surprised or that I'll miss them.
There is already a competitive market for creative works
Everything is fungible to a certain extent, but most creative works fall on the end of the scale where substitutes do not compete with each other to any significant extent. What would you put on a shopping list? In order of decreasing fungibility, Gas, Juice and A Game? Almost nobody would specify a brand of gas, some may specify a specific type of juice, but almost everyone would say what game. With creative works, once they near serious fungibility you'd tend to see lawsuits over copying.
At that end of product substitution everything is basically only competing over the consumers disposable income; the options reduced to wether the customer will buy the product or do without. No other producers product is a replacement (if they buy the competitors product, will they then 'have' the product we're selling?). Once you reach that level you'll often see pushes for regional locking; a monopoly priced good over the whole world would leave people in countries with less disposable income largely untapped, but if you can lower the price specifically for them, and still keep the higher price in the richer regions by preventing competition from parallel imports you can get a bit more total revenue.
a specific apple in the fruit store would have an infinitely high price
A price would never reach infinitely high, as you have no buyer with infinite resources who values it to infinity. Lets take a (much) simplified example.
Say we have a product that costs $2 as a marginal cost to produce per unit.
For customers A1 to A10 it's worth $1 to $10.
Set the price to $2, then you get 8 customers buying at $2, total revenue of $16, costs of $16, profit $0. Raise the price to $4 instead, now we get A4-A10 buying, 7*4-7*2=$14, ok, better profit. Raise to $6, A6-A10 buy, 5*6-5*2=$20, and we have our winner. Higher or lower price and you get lower profits. The value for A2-A5 is unfulfilled, despite being over marginal cost, being the dead weight loss, as, in a competitive market, competitors would enter and drive prices down towards the marginal cost per unit, thus maximizing total economic value created.
So, you see, you would never get an infinite price, you'd get a price where the value to the purchasers cross your profit maximization point.
Now, you can make a more complex calculation, add distributed costs, etc, but the fundamental economic aspects remain: the price gets set at the point where so many customers drop off that profit decreases. Piracy, if it affects anything at all, is, for the purpose of pricing, equivalent to competition, which means customers drop off quicker. Customers dropping off quicker means you need to lower the price to maximize revenue and profit.
People will pirate when it's overpriced. When it's right-priced, most people will gladly pay for it.
Overpricing is an intrinsic function of monopoly pricing. Revenue is maximized when raising the price would result in so many fewer copies sold that the extra per-copy income no longer outweighs the loss of copies sold.
That means that prices will simply be raised until many consumers simply cannot afford it (arguments like the original articles claims about economies of scale simply indicate lack of economic understanding; less piracy would mean _higher_ price, monopoly pricing limits are completely driven by customer dropoff, economies of scale apply to competitively enforced pricing).
The consumers making up the difference between those who would have bought the product at the lowest-possible competitively priced point and those who would have bought at the monopoly priced point are consumers for whom a free market system would have provided the good, while still allowing it to be produced. The loss of the value they would have derived is known as dead-weight loss, and is one of the most damaging aspects of monopoly laws like copyright. Piracy mitigates that loss of wealth somewhat, and introduces a certain element of competition into the market, keeping prices down, but it's a bad workaround for a problem that could be solved in more productive ways.
So any kind of rightpricing is fundamentally impossible while the monopoly aspects of the IP system are intact. Articles like this one that buy the IP lobbies arguments hook, line and sinker (assuming ignorance) are hardly productive. The author should do a little less fast-forwarding and a little more actual studying of why the debate has moved beyond his views.
I would suspect that it would significantly change the way you view things
Personally I don't trust either side of the climate debate further than their models can make an accurate prediction. Mainly because they're both highly politicised and the actual science is in many cases... debatable.
That hardly changes my view on use of fossil fuels tho; even if someone can ignore the politically and socially devastating consequences of certain aspects of extraction, one has to be fairly dense and utterly irresponsible to ignore the economic implications of having such a fundamental resource in the socioeconomic fabric to be based on very short-term non-renewable and non-recyclable materials.
The very idea that some people seem to need the (real or not) threat of global warming to feel we need to deal with the issue and drastically cut down on the use of oil, coal and gas is a tragic indication of the short-sightedness of many, as well as their blantant disregard of human suffering caused by their actions and choices.
So personally, I'm for stricter standards, but for other reasons. And I dislike the nature of the global warming debate; if future developments invalidate the theories of human induced warming it risks setting back trust in science a whole lot, something we may not be able to afford if in the future there comes some new threat where the credibility of environmental scientists would be essential in bringing about rapid action.
It doesn't mean that either; the value of the dollar is also driven by demand and supply, and the supply is currently simultaneously in freefall due to credit destruction in combination with fractional reserve banking and rapidly being inflated through 'quantitative easing', ie, the Fed running the printing presses (they've expanded the money supply by some 150% since september).
Currently the credit collapse is winning out, meaning more money is getting destroyed than the Fed manages to print and distribute, leading to deflation. Which means that with a rate of 0% you're still better off having your money in your mattress (or treasuries, as is more common), as its purchasing power will increase anyway (and particularly you're better off with the money safe than lending it to some deadbeat for minimal interest and who'll probably default anyway).
Eventually, of course, the mass printing will probably lead to a collapse in the value of the dollar, but not until either the credit destruction is complete or an external asset makes a massive carry trade lucrative.
Considering the fundamental basis of the whole system is based on the flawed assumption that credit can be infinitely expanded the current failure is hardly surprising. The Austrian school pointed out the fallacies that caused both the last depression and the current one almost a hundred years ago.
Computers have very little to do with it. Constructing models to fit political economics rather than to reflect reality is closer to the actual problem.
Yep, that was my first thought as well. Quickly followed by wondering if 'into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations' was some kind of euphemism for, eh, group pr0n of some kind.
Oh, well, either they have much less dirty minds than mine, or someone's desire for well-indexed pr0n browsing has gotten slightly out of hand.
who don't seem to understand why good games are becoming less and less frequent...
For about the same reasons good films, good music and various other things are also becoming less and less frequent within the mainstream discourse; it's not about the actual product anymore, it's about selling the marketing. Exclusive rights work as a force multiplier for marketing (when there's no competition the point of diminishing returns is simply much further out the cost curve). Without piracy you wouldn't get better games, you'd just get more expensive games marketed more heavily.
Interesting, but it looks like it's implemented mostly as a read cache, similar to ReadyBoost. Not quite as flexible as a genuine block level HSM that could be stacked and layered over multiple device types in an extensible hierarchy.
There is just no way to reduce costs with HD beyond that point
Well, you can split them and boot machines over PXE/iSCSI and/or virtualize. I'll admit tho, if I hadn't taken the pain to learn and setup such an environment several years ago, today I would most likely have chosen to implement flash based systems for simplicity.
Tiered Storage will be the future, imho.
I'd love to see a block-based HSM device-mapper layer. Keep copies of frequently accessed blocks in flash, and migrate stuff in and out as needed.
If it's radioactive you can breed it and reuse it as fuel. If it's not radioactive you don't need to store it, just hand it to the army and they'll shoot it at people. More or less. Nuclear waste management is just a problem as long as you want it to be a problem.
Why can't we just agree that taxes in general are a bad thing?
Because they're not. Taxes are value-neutral, merely redistribution.
without the pressure of market forces,
That's a much more important thing. However, that has nothing to do with taxes per se; the collected taxes can be spent on competitively sourced products. And conversely, many private sectors are not the least bit competitive; see pharmaceuticals, for example, whose costs we could theoretically cut by 60-80% by just straight out funding pharmaceutical research through taxes (altho the anti-competitive nature of pharmaceuticals is largely driven by a different even more destructive "tax" form; patents. Still, you get the point, it's not the private-vs-public funding method, it's the competition that drives wealth generation)
So as such, taxes are useful when it's difficult to otherwise accomplish the, for one reason or another, socially desired funding through a pure free market. Various insurance schemes are one example (as should be fairly obvious from the Big Three, private funding of pension and health care need not be less costly for the private sector (and in my opinion, it's probably more costly in many cases, and above all, the risk gets very unevenly distributed)).
Other cases are shared infrastructure; building one road to each house costs less than building four roads to each house and paying depending on which one you use (an example that could be applied and compared to cable and telephone infrastructure). It also avoids the future cost overhead of charging and administration of future payments, as well as bypasses the need for protection against illicit use. A requirement, of course, is that you competitively source the actual building of the roads in question.
Now, if we come to the topic of the article in question. The suggested taxation is obviously utterly horrific for all the reasons mentioned.
That does not mean an actual useful form of creative funding could not be devised.
The first step should be to get rid of the anti-competitive element of current funding, ie, abolish copyright as an exclusive right to copy and distribute.
The second step should be to devise the most equitable way to distribute the cost. As it's a limited group deriving value from the existence of the service, they're obviously the ones who should be paying for it. As such, a VAT on the parties profiting off the sales might be appropriate. IE, anyone would be able to copy and distribute, but from the profit they take they'd be paying a certain amount towards funding the creators.
The third step would be to evaluate the distribution of funds and devise the most goal-oriented distribution. So we need to formulate the goals: the purpose of such social funding is maximizing the production of the funded materials, while still maintaining free market preferences. To maintain free market preferences we'd need to prioritize payouts to the most purchased first. To maximize production we'd need to spread the income along the long tail; I'd suggest a diminishing payout over a certain level for each work, and limiting payouts to a few years at most.
So the probable consequences of such a system? First of all, it'd wipe out the record companies. Their whole 'contract slavery' business would be replaced without automatic 'profit sharing' rights for creators and artists.
Second, as a vastly more significant share of the money spent on music (or other media) would actually reach the creators, many more would be able to work full time on music (or we could lower the costs to the economy and simply have the same level as today).
Third, as payouts would have a cut-off per work, to make very much money you'd have to write very much music, and as the time is limited you have to keep doing it. Or the money will go towards paying someone else who is actually productive instead. Much like any other job.
Fourth, as payouts would have a cut-off per work, the value of promotion would be muc
I don't think functional programming is the place to start
I have to agree. But mostly because procedural languages have much more direct relationships with reality. Reality has state and side-effects are commonplace.
I've seen the functional-as-first approach, and sure, it levels the playingfield a little bit, but mainly due to most people fighting with the constraints of the language. I can see the appeal for certain math-geeks, but the connection between programming and math has been vastly overstated as it is.
That's not to say that functional paradigms shouldn't be used; a first course could include requirements for recursive solutions for some problems to get people used to the mindset. And in real world programming it certainly has it's place; as a supplement for certain problem spaces where it's actually appropriate (I really like multi-paradigm languages:).
We need to go back to the ROOT reason why child pornography is illegal
As I recall, the most compelling reason has actually been that the very existence of the pictures can in themselves be considered a perpetuation of the violation of the person depicted; the existence and spread of the pictures harm the victims chances of psychological recovery. An argument that actually makes sense and is convincing even to many of the strongest censorship opponents.
Of course, I can also recall a lot of 'slippery slope' arguments. And whattayaknow, turns out they were right. We'll probably have laws against pictures of naked animals soon enough. After all, there may be creeps who get their jollies off on that, and as the 'harm' principle has been tossed by the wayside...
As far as such laws protecting real new victims, that's always been a dubious prospect; the stronger the enforcement of various bans, the more money there's in it on the black market. Most likely it leads to more victims, but with money as a more prominent driving factor for the abuse instead.
Kinda makes one wonder exactly what kind of creeps populate organizations like IWF.Then again, I guess the job of reviewing such pictures would tend to attract a certain kind of people.
5) US/European customers get much higher costs of living due to things like MAP 6) US/European customers/workers, laden with the highly anti-competitive legal structure cannot compete with Asian workers buying products at factory price.
Ultimately, after borrowing to fund their living for some decades, the citizens are stuck between a hard place and a rock, and simply cannot afford to pay the inflated prices anymore, the last few resources have been pressed out, and we get widescale deflation and an economic crash.
The reality is that price diffrentiation driven by copyrights, patents, trademarks, MAP, anti-paralell-import and other anti-competetive laws are one of the fundamental aspects undermining sustainable global trade. Western labour isn't 'expensive' in a vacuum; the whole cost structure in western economy is getting geared towards exacting as much resources out of the citizens as possible. Protecting the revenue stream of one player means you're decreasing the competitiveness of everyone else.
So the markup paying your wage is temporary at best; it's more profitable to pay someone living in a country without that markup to do your job, keep the markup in the country where you live and collect the profit on the difference.
Right now we have more than enough addresses to meet the demand
We do? As far as I can tell it's actually getting quite hard to get your ISP to hand you/24 with no better excuse than 'I want them'.
assuming we stop being so liberal with their distribution.
Ah, so if we don't meet demand, then we can meet demand? Hmmm.
It's not an early migration anymore. Personally I've been using 6to4 for ipv6 connectivity for two years by now, and most things work well. Mainly I use it to traverse otherwise natted firewalls, without having to set up more port forwards than I could count to for various services.
To do what you want, to limit use of ipv4 addresses to the cases where they're necessary, to make that possible we actually need to deploy ipv6. The wider the deployment, the more you'll gain the ability to retain v4 addresses.
That depends on what your goal is. The goal of the creators of said device is, like most 'biometric security' companies, most likely, to extract money from taxpayers pockets. For that purpose I'd suggest the approach is a bit too farfetched sci-fi, and not portrayed in enough Hollywood productions to achieve sufficient pocket penetration to extract significant amounts of money.
For actual security value rates like most such measures, somewhere between useless to counterproductive; any terrorists today would probably take a completely new approach, exploiting new holes. Like selling radioactive 'security devices' or exploding fingerprint scanners to the TSA.
However, that constitution was still better than nothing.
As it also lowers the threshold for most council votes I'm not so sure. It could end up actually being worse than nothing.
The parliament should be strengthened, without a doubt, but while I'm generally pro-EU, the suggested constitution is flawed, and the way it's getting rammed down the unions throat anyway is deeply undemocratic.
Barroso's comment about 'the people who matter in the UK' is fairly indicative of the mindset currently in power in the EU. I wonder if anything but an outright refusal by the parliament to pass anything at all will have a chance to reinstate a democratic mindset in the EU core.
Slashdot Mirror
Sweden, Finland, Norway and Canada whose population density is lower than the US yet have higher broadband penetration seem to suggest that theory may not be entirely accurate.
As basically every government is, or wants to, listen in on any traffic they can I don't only not trust them, I am utterly certain that they will issue any number of falsified certificates enabling them to intercept and MITM any SSL communication they want to. The CA's have yet to indicate that desire. Not that I think most would hesitate to sign a false certificate on request from the government anyway.
So for the purpose of certificates, I trust governments far less than a random company. Of course I also trust those random companies even less than I trust any random self-signed certificate as well.
The trust chain between me and the holder of a self-signed certificate is the only one short enough not to contain external parties potentially interested in eavesdropping.
If you put people in an indestructible box you get people splattered over the insides of that box at impact, if not before. Suspending them in water or near-human density foam might keep them in one part until impact, but I suspect that the impact shockwave would still liquify bones and organs; the available deformation zone simply wouldn't be enough to decelerate a human body at a survivable rate.
You need some form of controlled deceleration or you're simply going to have a very bad day, no matter how indestructible your surrounding compartment is.
It looks close to impossible to regulate away, if you read about DNA transfer it doesn't exactly sound like there are heavily regulated substances involved. The most difficult part seems to be separating your DNA Modified Overlords from ye ole regular overlords.
Can't say I'm sure it's a great idea to have people doing it all around, but considering the level of naturally occuring such modifications it's probably not that much more likely that someone will create something nasty by random chance.
Still, I wonder how long it'll be before someone splices THC production into dandelions or other highly prolific weed.
I ran some benchmarks on Redhat's xen vs. ESX, and for paravirtualized linux-on-linux Redhat/xen will outperform ESX with a fairly significant margin on most IO and kernel-mode things (fork/scripts/etc). As far as I tested it, I basically can't see any load that would be unsuitable for paravirtualized mode.
If you're doing full virtualization you may have to stick with ESX for a bit more, but probably not for long. As noted, various other products, virtualbox, KVM, etc, are rapidly approaching more mature status.
Virtualization is on the cusp of being completely commoditized, just a BIOS and OS feature. It doesn't bode too well for Vmware, but frankly, between their price gouging and their failure to deliver a Linux management client for five years I can't say I'm overly surprised or that I'll miss them.
Personally I mainly use Emusic and (rarely) 7digital . Both sell unencumbered mp3's and work in Europe at least.
Perhaps you could use last.fm and listen to the radio of users with a highly eclectic taste.
What kind of pseudo-intellectual babble is that?
It's called 'economics'.
There is already a competitive market for creative works
Everything is fungible to a certain extent, but most creative works fall on the end of the scale where substitutes do not compete with each other to any significant extent. What would you put on a shopping list? In order of decreasing fungibility, Gas, Juice and A Game? Almost nobody would specify a brand of gas, some may specify a specific type of juice, but almost everyone would say what game. With creative works, once they near serious fungibility you'd tend to see lawsuits over copying.
At that end of product substitution everything is basically only competing over the consumers disposable income; the options reduced to wether the customer will buy the product or do without. No other producers product is a replacement (if they buy the competitors product, will they then 'have' the product we're selling?). Once you reach that level you'll often see pushes for regional locking; a monopoly priced good over the whole world would leave people in countries with less disposable income largely untapped, but if you can lower the price specifically for them, and still keep the higher price in the richer regions by preventing competition from parallel imports you can get a bit more total revenue.
a specific apple in the fruit store would have an infinitely high price
A price would never reach infinitely high, as you have no buyer with infinite resources who values it to infinity. Lets take a (much) simplified example.
Say we have a product that costs $2 as a marginal cost to produce per unit.
For customers A1 to A10 it's worth $1 to $10.
Set the price to $2, then you get 8 customers buying at $2, total revenue of $16, costs of $16, profit $0. Raise the price to $4 instead, now we get A4-A10 buying, 7*4-7*2=$14, ok, better profit. Raise to $6, A6-A10 buy, 5*6-5*2=$20, and we have our winner. Higher or lower price and you get lower profits. The value for A2-A5 is unfulfilled, despite being over marginal cost, being the dead weight loss, as, in a competitive market, competitors would enter and drive prices down towards the marginal cost per unit, thus maximizing total economic value created.
So, you see, you would never get an infinite price, you'd get a price where the value to the purchasers cross your profit maximization point.
Now, you can make a more complex calculation, add distributed costs, etc, but the fundamental economic aspects remain: the price gets set at the point where so many customers drop off that profit decreases. Piracy, if it affects anything at all, is, for the purpose of pricing, equivalent to competition, which means customers drop off quicker. Customers dropping off quicker means you need to lower the price to maximize revenue and profit.
People will pirate when it's overpriced. When it's right-priced, most people will gladly pay for it.
Overpricing is an intrinsic function of monopoly pricing. Revenue is maximized when raising the price would result in so many fewer copies sold that the extra per-copy income no longer outweighs the loss of copies sold.
That means that prices will simply be raised until many consumers simply cannot afford it (arguments like the original articles claims about economies of scale simply indicate lack of economic understanding; less piracy would mean _higher_ price, monopoly pricing limits are completely driven by customer dropoff, economies of scale apply to competitively enforced pricing).
The consumers making up the difference between those who would have bought the product at the lowest-possible competitively priced point and those who would have bought at the monopoly priced point are consumers for whom a free market system would have provided the good, while still allowing it to be produced. The loss of the value they would have derived is known as dead-weight loss, and is one of the most damaging aspects of monopoly laws like copyright. Piracy mitigates that loss of wealth somewhat, and introduces a certain element of competition into the market, keeping prices down, but it's a bad workaround for a problem that could be solved in more productive ways.
So any kind of rightpricing is fundamentally impossible while the monopoly aspects of the IP system are intact. Articles like this one that buy the IP lobbies arguments hook, line and sinker (assuming ignorance) are hardly productive. The author should do a little less fast-forwarding and a little more actual studying of why the debate has moved beyond his views.
I would suspect that it would significantly change the way you view things
Personally I don't trust either side of the climate debate further than their models can make an accurate prediction. Mainly because they're both highly politicised and the actual science is in many cases... debatable.
That hardly changes my view on use of fossil fuels tho; even if someone can ignore the politically and socially devastating consequences of certain aspects of extraction, one has to be fairly dense and utterly irresponsible to ignore the economic implications of having such a fundamental resource in the socioeconomic fabric to be based on very short-term non-renewable and non-recyclable materials.
The very idea that some people seem to need the (real or not) threat of global warming to feel we need to deal with the issue and drastically cut down on the use of oil, coal and gas is a tragic indication of the short-sightedness of many, as well as their blantant disregard of human suffering caused by their actions and choices.
So personally, I'm for stricter standards, but for other reasons. And I dislike the nature of the global warming debate; if future developments invalidate the theories of human induced warming it risks setting back trust in science a whole lot, something we may not be able to afford if in the future there comes some new threat where the credibility of environmental scientists would be essential in bringing about rapid action.
It doesn't mean that either; the value of the dollar is also driven by demand and supply, and the supply is currently simultaneously in freefall due to credit destruction in combination with fractional reserve banking and rapidly being inflated through 'quantitative easing', ie, the Fed running the printing presses (they've expanded the money supply by some 150% since september).
Currently the credit collapse is winning out, meaning more money is getting destroyed than the Fed manages to print and distribute, leading to deflation. Which means that with a rate of 0% you're still better off having your money in your mattress (or treasuries, as is more common), as its purchasing power will increase anyway (and particularly you're better off with the money safe than lending it to some deadbeat for minimal interest and who'll probably default anyway).
Eventually, of course, the mass printing will probably lead to a collapse in the value of the dollar, but not until either the credit destruction is complete or an external asset makes a massive carry trade lucrative.
Considering the fundamental basis of the whole system is based on the flawed assumption that credit can be infinitely expanded the current failure is hardly surprising. The Austrian school pointed out the fallacies that caused both the last depression and the current one almost a hundred years ago.
Computers have very little to do with it. Constructing models to fit political economics rather than to reflect reality is closer to the actual problem.
Yep, that was my first thought as well. Quickly followed by wondering if 'into a collaboration environment which supports both the personal information management and the sharing and exchange across social and organizational relations' was some kind of euphemism for, eh, group pr0n of some kind.
Oh, well, either they have much less dirty minds than mine, or someone's desire for well-indexed pr0n browsing has gotten slightly out of hand.
who don't seem to understand why good games are becoming less and less frequent...
For about the same reasons good films, good music and various other things are also becoming less and less frequent within the mainstream discourse; it's not about the actual product anymore, it's about selling the marketing. Exclusive rights work as a force multiplier for marketing (when there's no competition the point of diminishing returns is simply much further out the cost curve). Without piracy you wouldn't get better games, you'd just get more expensive games marketed more heavily.
Interesting, but it looks like it's implemented mostly as a read cache, similar to ReadyBoost. Not quite as flexible as a genuine block level HSM that could be stacked and layered over multiple device types in an extensible hierarchy.
There is just no way to reduce costs with HD beyond that point
Well, you can split them and boot machines over PXE/iSCSI and/or virtualize. I'll admit tho, if I hadn't taken the pain to learn and setup such an environment several years ago, today I would most likely have chosen to implement flash based systems for simplicity.
Tiered Storage will be the future, imho.
I'd love to see a block-based HSM device-mapper layer. Keep copies of frequently accessed blocks in flash, and migrate stuff in and out as needed.
If it's radioactive you can breed it and reuse it as fuel. If it's not radioactive you don't need to store it, just hand it to the army and they'll shoot it at people. More or less. Nuclear waste management is just a problem as long as you want it to be a problem.
Why can't we just agree that taxes in general are a bad thing?
Because they're not. Taxes are value-neutral, merely redistribution.
without the pressure of market forces,
That's a much more important thing. However, that has nothing to do with taxes per se; the collected taxes can be spent on competitively sourced products. And conversely, many private sectors are not the least bit competitive; see pharmaceuticals, for example, whose costs we could theoretically cut by 60-80% by just straight out funding pharmaceutical research through taxes (altho the anti-competitive nature of pharmaceuticals is largely driven by a different even more destructive "tax" form; patents. Still, you get the point, it's not the private-vs-public funding method, it's the competition that drives wealth generation)
So as such, taxes are useful when it's difficult to otherwise accomplish the, for one reason or another, socially desired funding through a pure free market. Various insurance schemes are one example (as should be fairly obvious from the Big Three, private funding of pension and health care need not be less costly for the private sector (and in my opinion, it's probably more costly in many cases, and above all, the risk gets very unevenly distributed)).
Other cases are shared infrastructure; building one road to each house costs less than building four roads to each house and paying depending on which one you use (an example that could be applied and compared to cable and telephone infrastructure). It also avoids the future cost overhead of charging and administration of future payments, as well as bypasses the need for protection against illicit use. A requirement, of course, is that you competitively source the actual building of the roads in question.
Now, if we come to the topic of the article in question. The suggested taxation is obviously utterly horrific for all the reasons mentioned.
That does not mean an actual useful form of creative funding could not be devised.
The first step should be to get rid of the anti-competitive element of current funding, ie, abolish copyright as an exclusive right to copy and distribute.
The second step should be to devise the most equitable way to distribute the cost. As it's a limited group deriving value from the existence of the service, they're obviously the ones who should be paying for it. As such, a VAT on the parties profiting off the sales might be appropriate. IE, anyone would be able to copy and distribute, but from the profit they take they'd be paying a certain amount towards funding the creators.
The third step would be to evaluate the distribution of funds and devise the most goal-oriented distribution. So we need to formulate the goals: the purpose of such social funding is maximizing the production of the funded materials, while still maintaining free market preferences. To maintain free market preferences we'd need to prioritize payouts to the most purchased first. To maximize production we'd need to spread the income along the long tail; I'd suggest a diminishing payout over a certain level for each work, and limiting payouts to a few years at most.
So the probable consequences of such a system? First of all, it'd wipe out the record companies. Their whole 'contract slavery' business would be replaced without automatic 'profit sharing' rights for creators and artists.
Second, as a vastly more significant share of the money spent on music (or other media) would actually reach the creators, many more would be able to work full time on music (or we could lower the costs to the economy and simply have the same level as today).
Third, as payouts would have a cut-off per work, to make very much money you'd have to write very much music, and as the time is limited you have to keep doing it. Or the money will go towards paying someone else who is actually productive instead. Much like any other job.
Fourth, as payouts would have a cut-off per work, the value of promotion would be muc
I don't think functional programming is the place to start
I have to agree. But mostly because procedural languages have much more direct relationships with reality. Reality has state and side-effects are commonplace.
I've seen the functional-as-first approach, and sure, it levels the playingfield a little bit, but mainly due to most people fighting with the constraints of the language. I can see the appeal for certain math-geeks, but the connection between programming and math has been vastly overstated as it is.
That's not to say that functional paradigms shouldn't be used; a first course could include requirements for recursive solutions for some problems to get people used to the mindset. And in real world programming it certainly has it's place; as a supplement for certain problem spaces where it's actually appropriate (I really like multi-paradigm languages :).
We need to go back to the ROOT reason why child pornography is illegal
As I recall, the most compelling reason has actually been that the very existence of the pictures can in themselves be considered a perpetuation of the violation of the person depicted; the existence and spread of the pictures harm the victims chances of psychological recovery. An argument that actually makes sense and is convincing even to many of the strongest censorship opponents.
Of course, I can also recall a lot of 'slippery slope' arguments. And whattayaknow, turns out they were right. We'll probably have laws against pictures of naked animals soon enough. After all, there may be creeps who get their jollies off on that, and as the 'harm' principle has been tossed by the wayside...
As far as such laws protecting real new victims, that's always been a dubious prospect; the stronger the enforcement of various bans, the more money there's in it on the black market. Most likely it leads to more victims, but with money as a more prominent driving factor for the abuse instead.
For something to be porn, it has to inspire me
Kinda makes one wonder exactly what kind of creeps populate organizations like IWF.Then again, I guess the job of reviewing such pictures would tend to attract a certain kind of people.
5) US/European customers get much higher costs of living due to things like MAP
6) US/European customers/workers, laden with the highly anti-competitive legal structure cannot compete with Asian workers buying products at factory price.
Ultimately, after borrowing to fund their living for some decades, the citizens are stuck between a hard place and a rock, and simply cannot afford to pay the inflated prices anymore, the last few resources have been pressed out, and we get widescale deflation and an economic crash.
The reality is that price diffrentiation driven by copyrights, patents, trademarks, MAP, anti-paralell-import and other anti-competetive laws are one of the fundamental aspects undermining sustainable global trade. Western labour isn't 'expensive' in a vacuum; the whole cost structure in western economy is getting geared towards exacting as much resources out of the citizens as possible. Protecting the revenue stream of one player means you're decreasing the competitiveness of everyone else.
So the markup paying your wage is temporary at best; it's more profitable to pay someone living in a country without that markup to do your job, keep the markup in the country where you live and collect the profit on the difference.
Right now we have more than enough addresses to meet the demand
We do? As far as I can tell it's actually getting quite hard to get your ISP to hand you /24 with no better excuse than 'I want them'.
assuming we stop being so liberal with their distribution.
Ah, so if we don't meet demand, then we can meet demand? Hmmm.
It's not an early migration anymore. Personally I've been using 6to4 for ipv6 connectivity for two years by now, and most things work well. Mainly I use it to traverse otherwise natted firewalls, without having to set up more port forwards than I could count to for various services.
To do what you want, to limit use of ipv4 addresses to the cases where they're necessary, to make that possible we actually need to deploy ipv6. The wider the deployment, the more you'll gain the ability to retain v4 addresses.
How good can this really be?
That depends on what your goal is. The goal of the creators of said device is, like most 'biometric security' companies, most likely, to extract money from taxpayers pockets. For that purpose I'd suggest the approach is a bit too farfetched sci-fi, and not portrayed in enough Hollywood productions to achieve sufficient pocket penetration to extract significant amounts of money.
For actual security value rates like most such measures, somewhere between useless to counterproductive; any terrorists today would probably take a completely new approach, exploiting new holes. Like selling radioactive 'security devices' or exploding fingerprint scanners to the TSA.
However, that constitution was still better than nothing.
As it also lowers the threshold for most council votes I'm not so sure. It could end up actually being worse than nothing.
The parliament should be strengthened, without a doubt, but while I'm generally pro-EU, the suggested constitution is flawed, and the way it's getting rammed down the unions throat anyway is deeply undemocratic.
Barroso's comment about 'the people who matter in the UK' is fairly indicative of the mindset currently in power in the EU. I wonder if anything but an outright refusal by the parliament to pass anything at all will have a chance to reinstate a democratic mindset in the EU core.