On the other hand, this is Star Trek, the Next Generation we're talking about, not some 80 cable sitcom. Chances are good that they had proper lighting and used at least somewhat decent film stock.
Blocking by IP doesn't work so well if your customers have dynamic IP addresses. People on PPPoE (still quite common) can get a new IP address anytime they want. It's a bit harder for DHCP users, but still only takes a couple of hours typically.
Pulling code out of closed systems is much easier said than done, and might require crazy things like carefully etching away the package one layer at a time and reading the circuits with an electron microscope. Certainly more difficult than someone pulling up a debugger and reversing the logic statement at the end of the DRM check.
You went 10k without an oil change on a turbocharged car? The dealership was right to ask for the service history, because you pretty much killed your car same as driving it into a tree. Turbos are high performance parts with higher lubrication requirements than the rest of the engine. 10k on some small natural aspirated engine is not the same.
You only need one customer cracking the software, dumping the decrypted form to disk, and uploading to the Pirate Bay. Now you have a massively complicated and expensive DRM system that only punishes people who actually paid for your product.
How about: Acutally bake in some of the code into a dongle? Not just a decryption key, but a specific chunk of the code. That way the system will simply not work without a dongle. The idea here is that crackers probably won't go to the trouble to completely rewrite whatever chunk of code is missing because that's a much larger job than just grabbing a copy of the in-memory executable (or rewriting the dongle check code to simply dump the decrypted data to disk).
From a practical standpoint that will be an expensive dongle, but if your software costs enough that you're considering a dongle in the first place, it might make sense. A bigger question is if such an extreme approach with relatively high upfront costs (designing and manufacturing said dongle, integrating it into the core of your product) will be offset by more people buying the product that were previously just going to pirate it? If you're charging $10k for you application, then a large number of the pirates would never have been able to afford it in the first place anyway (High School students just looking to mess around for instance).
Because they're calling themselves a Ponzi scheme, they can't be a Ponzi scheme? In what world does this logic make sense? If you are taking money from new people and giving it to people who are already in the system, then that's a Ponzi scheme. The whole point is to be an early adopter so you make your money back and more from all of the new suckers. Sure there is a gambling element to it "Did I join early enough?", but if you define gambling that vaguely then virtually all financial instruments are gambles (which is true).
25-30 year lifespan? No thanks. It seems like this might work fine for people who are within a couple of miles of the power plant, but beyond that I doubt it will be economical when you start counting the replacement costs (digging up everybody's yard/roads again) and the fact that the water temperature will depend on how much hot water people are using (get up early in the morning and it won't be as hot for instance). The short lifespan will make it a nonstarter in a city too, even though the higher density housing could theoretically benefit the most. Most older cities have water pipes that are over 100 years old (and made of lead!) because it is too expensive to replace them.
I'm confused. If I want to, I can order other people, even total strangers, to rip up all of their pictures of me with some sort of legal threat if they don't comply? Even public photos where I'm in the background or something? Where does this law come from?
My guess is that it means it was pulled from a working machine and resold. They didn't do any diagnostics on it because it was working when they pulled it.
Choice #3: Just use a regular format and forget about this whole nonsense. The drive doesn't have classified information on it, you don't have to go through some ridiculous disk wipe procedure. If you're feeling particularly helpful you can notify Newegg that their refurb drives were not refurbed properly, but they probably already know that.
Sure, you can buy a GSM iPhone, and then bring it to any national carrier where they will laugh in your face when you ask for an unsubsidized data plan. At best they'll give you a contract where you are still paying the phone subsidy even though you brought your own phone. Or you can go with a regional carrier and just live with the fact that your phone won't work outside of the immediate area and that AT&T is bad about "forgetting" to let their towers honor roaming agreements.
If you want OpenGL support you pretty much need the nVidia binary blob drivers. These drivers seem to be more for people who absolutely cannot have binary blobs for one reason or another, not for people who just want to run games.
International EPA is probably the only real effective solution to combating Greenhouse gasses. Already you see virtually every effort everywhere to combat them either die or get watered down to nothing on the ground that it will "hurt competition". Theoretically a global environment board that could enforce their laws equally would stop that argument in its tracks. Such a godlike agency would be impossible in the real world sadly so we're stuck with killing off the entire planet slowly through outsourced pollution.
If State B is polluting State A, and State A proves it, who is going to make them pay? You have environmental regulation happening at the local level, there is no authority to make State B stop or do anything about it. State B will just claim that it isn't pollution and that their environmental regulation says everything is hunky-dory. State A has no recourse, they can't change the law in State B and what's happening in state B is not illegal! This situation is what caused the EPA to be created in the first place!
I grew up on the outskirts of Nitro, and one of the things you can't forget is the smell. There is a sort of stale-french fries smell that lingers around the town on windless days. I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty sure it's nothing good.
The problem with state level environmental controls is that it ends up with acid rain two states over and inter-state lawsuits that never solve anything.
There are treatments for symptoms, but nothing for the underlying cause. You can keep people alive longer, but they'll always have CF and be on the daily nebulizer and maybe second set of lungs. Even this pill technically just treats the symptoms, but it at least does so in a way that gets to the heart of the problem.
Genetic screening already happens on parents with their first child who have decent pre-natal care. If the genetic tests come back positive, then you can get the baby tested at 12 weeks IIRC, although there is a less intrusive (read: risky) test at 16 weeks that will also tell you. Remember from your middle school genetics that even if both parents are carriers, the child only has a 1/4 chance of developing the disease.
What you do with this information is a different matter. There are no treatments for CF save for this pill in a tiny minority of cases, and your only real decision is either to abort or to carry to term and just treat symptoms for the entirety of their (short) life. If you don't get the genetic test, then symptoms can still show up during pregnancy, but generally not until fairly late into the second trimester where the abortion option becomes even more controversial (and difficult/expensive especially in certain states).
Ironically, this means you'll have to drop your insurance to be able to afford this medication, too bad people with CF have ton of other expenses that they need insurance for.
I think more of this cost reflects attempts to recoup the R&D costs with the tiny userbase. I wonder how many insurance companies will cover it? I'm guessing not very many.
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On the other hand, this is Star Trek, the Next Generation we're talking about, not some 80 cable sitcom. Chances are good that they had proper lighting and used at least somewhat decent film stock.
Blocking by IP doesn't work so well if your customers have dynamic IP addresses. People on PPPoE (still quite common) can get a new IP address anytime they want. It's a bit harder for DHCP users, but still only takes a couple of hours typically.
Pulling code out of closed systems is much easier said than done, and might require crazy things like carefully etching away the package one layer at a time and reading the circuits with an electron microscope. Certainly more difficult than someone pulling up a debugger and reversing the logic statement at the end of the DRM check.
You went 10k without an oil change on a turbocharged car? The dealership was right to ask for the service history, because you pretty much killed your car same as driving it into a tree. Turbos are high performance parts with higher lubrication requirements than the rest of the engine. 10k on some small natural aspirated engine is not the same.
You only need one customer cracking the software, dumping the decrypted form to disk, and uploading to the Pirate Bay. Now you have a massively complicated and expensive DRM system that only punishes people who actually paid for your product.
How about: Acutally bake in some of the code into a dongle? Not just a decryption key, but a specific chunk of the code. That way the system will simply not work without a dongle. The idea here is that crackers probably won't go to the trouble to completely rewrite whatever chunk of code is missing because that's a much larger job than just grabbing a copy of the in-memory executable (or rewriting the dongle check code to simply dump the decrypted data to disk).
From a practical standpoint that will be an expensive dongle, but if your software costs enough that you're considering a dongle in the first place, it might make sense. A bigger question is if such an extreme approach with relatively high upfront costs (designing and manufacturing said dongle, integrating it into the core of your product) will be offset by more people buying the product that were previously just going to pirate it? If you're charging $10k for you application, then a large number of the pirates would never have been able to afford it in the first place anyway (High School students just looking to mess around for instance).
If you've downloaded one of the DRM free games (like VVVVVV), you can run it directly from your Steamapps directory even if Steam does go down.
The best kind of correct.
Because they're calling themselves a Ponzi scheme, they can't be a Ponzi scheme? In what world does this logic make sense? If you are taking money from new people and giving it to people who are already in the system, then that's a Ponzi scheme. The whole point is to be an early adopter so you make your money back and more from all of the new suckers. Sure there is a gambling element to it "Did I join early enough?", but if you define gambling that vaguely then virtually all financial instruments are gambles (which is true).
If your doctor wasn't willing to make an exception for the child that is allergic to the vaccine, then you're better off with a new doctor anyway.
25-30 year lifespan? No thanks. It seems like this might work fine for people who are within a couple of miles of the power plant, but beyond that I doubt it will be economical when you start counting the replacement costs (digging up everybody's yard/roads again) and the fact that the water temperature will depend on how much hot water people are using (get up early in the morning and it won't be as hot for instance). The short lifespan will make it a nonstarter in a city too, even though the higher density housing could theoretically benefit the most. Most older cities have water pipes that are over 100 years old (and made of lead!) because it is too expensive to replace them.
Overfishing is a huge problem, you are right. I don't know what that has to do with Nuclear Power Plants though.
I'm confused. If I want to, I can order other people, even total strangers, to rip up all of their pictures of me with some sort of legal threat if they don't comply? Even public photos where I'm in the background or something? Where does this law come from?
My guess is that it means it was pulled from a working machine and resold. They didn't do any diagnostics on it because it was working when they pulled it.
Choice #3: Just use a regular format and forget about this whole nonsense. The drive doesn't have classified information on it, you don't have to go through some ridiculous disk wipe procedure. If you're feeling particularly helpful you can notify Newegg that their refurb drives were not refurbed properly, but they probably already know that.
Sure, you can buy a GSM iPhone, and then bring it to any national carrier where they will laugh in your face when you ask for an unsubsidized data plan. At best they'll give you a contract where you are still paying the phone subsidy even though you brought your own phone. Or you can go with a regional carrier and just live with the fact that your phone won't work outside of the immediate area and that AT&T is bad about "forgetting" to let their towers honor roaming agreements.
If you want OpenGL support you pretty much need the nVidia binary blob drivers. These drivers seem to be more for people who absolutely cannot have binary blobs for one reason or another, not for people who just want to run games.
International EPA is probably the only real effective solution to combating Greenhouse gasses. Already you see virtually every effort everywhere to combat them either die or get watered down to nothing on the ground that it will "hurt competition". Theoretically a global environment board that could enforce their laws equally would stop that argument in its tracks. Such a godlike agency would be impossible in the real world sadly so we're stuck with killing off the entire planet slowly through outsourced pollution.
If State B is polluting State A, and State A proves it, who is going to make them pay? You have environmental regulation happening at the local level, there is no authority to make State B stop or do anything about it. State B will just claim that it isn't pollution and that their environmental regulation says everything is hunky-dory. State A has no recourse, they can't change the law in State B and what's happening in state B is not illegal! This situation is what caused the EPA to be created in the first place!
I grew up on the outskirts of Nitro, and one of the things you can't forget is the smell. There is a sort of stale-french fries smell that lingers around the town on windless days. I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty sure it's nothing good.
The problem with state level environmental controls is that it ends up with acid rain two states over and inter-state lawsuits that never solve anything.
There are treatments for symptoms, but nothing for the underlying cause. You can keep people alive longer, but they'll always have CF and be on the daily nebulizer and maybe second set of lungs. Even this pill technically just treats the symptoms, but it at least does so in a way that gets to the heart of the problem.
Technically the cure for malnourishment conditions also ends up being a lifelong treatment. You just can't win.
Genetic screening already happens on parents with their first child who have decent pre-natal care. If the genetic tests come back positive, then you can get the baby tested at 12 weeks IIRC, although there is a less intrusive (read: risky) test at 16 weeks that will also tell you. Remember from your middle school genetics that even if both parents are carriers, the child only has a 1/4 chance of developing the disease.
What you do with this information is a different matter. There are no treatments for CF save for this pill in a tiny minority of cases, and your only real decision is either to abort or to carry to term and just treat symptoms for the entirety of their (short) life. If you don't get the genetic test, then symptoms can still show up during pregnancy, but generally not until fairly late into the second trimester where the abortion option becomes even more controversial (and difficult/expensive especially in certain states).
Ironically, this means you'll have to drop your insurance to be able to afford this medication, too bad people with CF have ton of other expenses that they need insurance for.
I think more of this cost reflects attempts to recoup the R&D costs with the tiny userbase. I wonder how many insurance companies will cover it? I'm guessing not very many.