and some scientists think that humans may have contributed to their extinction."
Well for starters, imagine the omlets you could get from that thing! Eggs were a primary food source for almost every hunter-gatherer society back in those times. It certainly wouldn't be the only example of man hunting a species to extinction.
Australia is an isolated continent, and as such it works almost like an island, with a very fragile, mutually-dependent ecosystem. If you want to get more abstract with this, one could even say that man was responsible for their extinction yet never hunted them or their eggs... maybe man for some reason hunted some specific lizard to extinction, which also happened to be their primary food source? Weird subtle interactions like that can occur on islands.
Man is good at causing these sorts of problems because as a species he's very organized. If Grok figures out that those eggs are easy to find and good eating, it doesn't take 25 generations of evolution to breed "nest hunting" behavior into the village. It takes a few months locally, maybe a few years across the entire area. Other species just can't adapt to something that fast. I don't think it's proper to "blame man" for this, it's just the next advancement in evolution. But it is unfortunate. And I think it's something that we just need to understand and accept at some level. Particularly for our behavior in the past when these subtle yet potent interactions weren't understood or respected.
I thought it all came down to their extreme view of idols. Idols were all the rage with pagans, and I think they wanted to make sure that no one prayed to images or statues etc of their god, but to their god directly.
But in a time where paganism isn't too popular you'd think they would consider relaxing a bit on that one.
it makes me want to find the part of my state with the highest Islamic population and then decorate the streets
I was thinking the same thing, but the problem here is twofold. (1) Their religion has a very deep-seeded intolerance for making fun of their god. Or even trying to draw his face for that matter. Couple that with (2) it's as you stated, a theocracy, and that just works as a multiplier because people's outdated intolerant behavior is fully endorsed, supported, and practiced by the state.
I don't really like to call them "nutcases", but religious zealots really do give me the impression of incurably unreasonable people, (an unfortunate chunk of which are extremists) and when they're running the government and the press at the same time, it's almost a complete waste of time to try to reason with them or do anything about it. Not only are they organized, but they're in charge too. Change must come from within. And "change" is universally considered "the enemy" by theocracies, so all I'm saying is don't expect any of this to disappear anytime soon.
All of these outdated laws are ostensibly made to protect them from us, the heathens. It's like "think of the children", but the ENTIRE COUNTRY is "the children". They're all in it together in a grand party of stagnancy and intolerance, and they like it. All you can really do is try to ignore them and hope they eventually either go away or grow up.
Nobody cares whether the flash remembers zeros and ones, naughts and crosses, or fish and chips. All that maters is what the computer sees. I tell it I want a zero, it says there's a zero there now. Why should anything else matter to anyone?
doing a full device write will only increment the "total writes" count for every block by 1. In that respect it won't cause any wear level adjustments to take place at all.
That reminds me of something slightly off-topic here. We discussed recently the problem of block sizes other than 512 bytes causing some systems to baulk. I wonder if any flash drive manufacturer is brave enough to use their flash block size (typically what, 32k? guessing) as their device block size. That would allow the OS to work with the wear leveling by preventing multiple files from saving to the same physical blocks etc. The wear leveling itself could be handled by the OS also I suppose but that's not important. Does anyone know of a flash drive with a non standard size block?
or whatever variation you need for your distro. The above is for mac os x. yes, rdisk is a character device I know I know, but for some reason os x io's a LOT faster o that than the block device. (double or better) No idea why. Block works too tho, whatever works for you. Just plug in the correct disk number for the xxx. Careful which device you're nuking, dd is both swift and unforgiving.
I'd also like to get slightly pedantic and point out that this is NOT a low level format. Low level format refers to laying down the address blocks, and also the data headers and trailers. All dd does is write zeros to the meat of the data block, and update its checksum. There's no such thing as a low level format for non magnetic media because flash drive blocks are electrically addressed, not physically.
FWIW, you can probably tack on "count=20" to make things go much faster. I assume all you need is the partition table completely zapped, and the first 20mb should do it fine. Without this it will wipe the entire device, which for a flash drive may take a little bit. But then again your distro or whatnot may try to find a backup copy of the boot block and partition table etc at the end of the device in which case just wipe the whole thing to avoid it "fixing it" for you.
I think I'd have been wearing a life jacket all the same. That and I'd have some means of propulsion besides paddles. A push from a basic motorboat would suffice. A sail of some sort would have been fun to engineer.
if that were the case, any store selling so much as a candybar would need such a permit.
Laws like that refer to foods prepared when ordered, not pre-packaged. And edible undies are prepackaged as good as any candybar.
The inspectors are interested in the conditions under which you are cooking and handling (and storing) the food. This has absolutely nothing to do with food being sold.
Then start thinking about all the vending machines everywhere...
Consumer tastes have overtaken the perceived needs of business as the leading force shaping technology.
There, fixed that for you. The day of the PHB making decisions based on the novelty of the promo mugs and pens they just received is coming to an end. Thank god.
I took out the trash modem qwest provided and bought my own dsl (dlink) modem at bestbuy. it has a lot more features, tho was a PITA to configure because none of the drones on the phone could help me with the setup and there's a lot to setting up DSL.
This modem tells me a lot of information, including "maximum attainable" speed, the result of the negotiation line test. Current speed: 992/1536. Maximum attainable: 1152/7872. I'm sure if I call them they'll tell me the lines won't support the higher speed. (i.e. their cheap DSLAM cards won't support it) I'd sure like to have 7 down instead of 1.5 on my dsl. So sometimes when they tell you that's the fastest they can offer in your area, the limitation is not your lines or distance, but their gear.
(yes, above I discussed my cable modem. I have both. it's complicated...)
+1 agree. VB is RAD (rapid application development), is very flexible, and is easy to use to make standalone apps. if you like programming in dos, you will love VB. For the use you are suggesting, it sounds ideal. you can basically have it be the gui front end for things you need to be done in dos (via vb, you don't need a folder full of com files for it to use)
I didn't even know cable/dsl were capable of those speeds!
speculating wildly on that, I'd wonder if in those locations they don't use some highly unbalanced methods between upstream and downstream. DSL and ISND are capable of symmetrical speeds, but cable is usually not. (due to many customers sharing one line) If it's a fiber DSL I could believe 100 by 100. And yes, that would be sweet.
Population density probably plays a big role in this as well. It's much easier to drop a single fiber trunk to a dense neighborhood, star out runs from there to 30 large apartments in the area, and put a fiber switch in each of said buildings, and for not-a-lot of overhead you have just put 300 people on fiber.
Where population is much less dense, like residential america, the ISPs have to spend a lot more on more trunks because each one serves a much smaller number of customers.
Is it cable or something else?
Maybe yes and yes. It's possible currently to lay copper with a fiber core, allowing ISPs to replace aging copper infrastructure that was scheduled/due for replacement anyway, before having to transition that run over to fiber. And then when they're ready, the fiber is already in, they just have to change the hardware at both ends, which saves them a LOT of time and money.
The US's upload speed has always stunk. Makes it impractical for most casual admins to run a small private server for friends or even personal use. Stinks when you want to remote to your house to grab a file, where you have 20mbps downstream, and only 768kbps upstream and it just takes forever to grab the file.
Or you can get your wallet totally shafted by your isp if they do offer higher tiers of upstream. Double your speed usually triples to quadruples your monthly cost, and you're usually starting from dirt. (256k to at best 2m)
I pay three times the usual rate at my house because I want their "premium" 2mbps (1.5 actual) instead of the totally useless 384k. (and that's with 10-20m down being standard)
That's an annoying racket they have going with upstream. Problem is, the majority of people that really need high upstream are businesses that need it for employee offsite email and remoting into work, uploading files to customers, etc. So ISPs milk you hard because they expect you to have money to burn.
They should be able to tell where the sound comes from.
That was my initial thought also. But then I realized, they could easily have a speaker IN the violin. It never even came out of its hand. I'd have liked to see them play a few chords on it and then place it in its hand to take over, but I'd bet money that violin was bolted to his hand.
nicely done. I like how it sort of did that "swaying" thing that violinists do as they play, "throwing themselves into the music" so to speak. Gave it a MUCH more realistic feel.
Though with all the lip-syncing going on these days, (even at the Olympics, I have to have a slight suspicion that the performance wasn't "live" from the violin. They could have easily rigged it to not make a sound and simply play the sound out a hidden speaker on the 'bot. But that's just my pessimistic nature.
And it didn't even fall down any stairs or anything either, that was a plus.
Having worked in a school with a mixed environment (XP and Mac) I'd say you should reconsider consolidating to a single platform. My school had a single "business lab" where the business teacher taught. She probably could have used a mac lab, the software she was using was for the most part easily available on any platform. The purpose of the lab was to teach students how to use windows, more than to teach business.
The other PC lab was the Cad Lab. There, autocad 4 was the primary reason for the windows machines.
Then, other than 6 or so custom windows boxes to run specialized administration softwares in the offices, plus a few specialized IT machines such as the firewall, everything ran Mac OS.
Despite the windows machines being vastly outnumbered it was our experience that the upkeep on the two windows labs was equal to that of all the macs on campus. If you are short-staffed, you should consider upkeep like that. If you're presently in a mixed environment, simply adjusting the ratio of your mix may recover the support time you are looking for.
Removing the windows (or the mac) machines is probably a bad idea. They each serve their own purpose. And as much as I despise windows in general, it's a fact of life in the business world, and students need exposure/training on it in school. Heck, I just installed 7 (boot camp) on my mbp here this week. Sometimes you need it. Students need to learn this stuff. To be quite blunt, deploying straight linux all around is probably the worst thing you can do for your students, regardless of the support it lets you provide. If you don't teach them what they need to learn, it doesn't matter how underbudget you are, you've failed at your job. The students are going to need to know how to use macs and windows, and you should keep both of them in place.
That said, getting back to support. ALL of our general labs were macs. They were extremely easy to maintain, and were next to impossible for the students to break. Two weeks ago I had another admin tell me a horror story that some kid had found a program he could run that would open a dialog box message on every windows machine on campus. He had something rather unkind to say about an instructor. That sort of problem is simply unacceptable. (they have yet to figure out how to block it without disabling windows networking, all they can do for now is make major threats to the students since it's easy to track - yes they've talked with a lot of admins about it and no one can find a simple way to block it) Even if you've got the entire lab deep-freeze'd (and you'd be insane not to) you still have to deal with them finding ways to break the machines. So for a good 80%+ of the general machines on your campus you'd save yourself a big headache going with the macs. Linux systems are approximately as difficult to break and give you a tradeoff, cheaper hardware for experience using a machine they are likely to be using in the workplace. Macs are better for the students, linux are better for you, and which are you here for?
Supporting just one platform can vary in difficulty. On windows, unless you have godlike fortune, you're dealing with a wide variety of hardware. It's unfortunately common to see every new lab bought with totally unique hardware, and that leaves you with dozens of hardware layouts to try to image and juggle. The macs can be done per OS. So for now for example, you'd have two images... one for 10.5 and one for 10.6. Maybe a third image for the labs with pro graphics software. You can take a hard drive out of a mac and plug it into another and just GO, and that's insanely useful for support. I can "fix" a macbook in 4 minutes by physically swapping a hard drive, no setup, rekeying, relicensing, drivers etc to muck with. So, three images for the entire campus. This really cuts down on your support time. Throw in firewire target mode and you will never have to take a screwdriver to the machine. Big plus there. So unless you know you can pull off a
What's wrong with that? Shouldn't a person be allowed to sell his device at the price he wants to?
It's like ticket scalping. When you have greater demand than supply and are being a benevolent supplier and not jacking up your prices to agree with demand, scalpers move in and attempt to buy you out. Then they turn around and start selling your goods at or above their true market price, much above what they paid for them. Your customers that you are trying to be benevolent to are now unable to buy from you because you're out of stock, and are forced to pay in blood to the scalpers. In the end the consumers receive no benefit, the suppliers take a loss they were expecting but without the benefit of customer good-will they were intending on buying with it, and the scalpers walk away with money for nothing.
The only two ways to discourage this is to (1) not discount your goods or use a mail-in-rebate strategy so there's no market for the scalpers, or (2) take some sort of technological method of either making the scalping impossible or impractical. (such as by limiting the number of units sold to a given credit card number) #2 has been done for the last several years for sports game tickets, and while it's not entirely effective, it does a pretty good job. It does require the purchaser have a credit card, and for a (usually very small) percentage of customers that is a problem, but when you consider the huge percentage of customers that would otherwise have been shafted, it's a very reasonable tradeoff.
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a Great Leonopteryx
Way I see it, she could (A) sue them for not teaching her properly, or (B) for not passing on the gene for COMMON SENSE
but sooo close. maybe next time. Please try again!
My mom taught me not to walk/play in traffic when I was four. Maybe this gal should sue her parents too?
and some scientists think that humans may have contributed to their extinction."
Well for starters, imagine the omlets you could get from that thing! Eggs were a primary food source for almost every hunter-gatherer society back in those times. It certainly wouldn't be the only example of man hunting a species to extinction.
Australia is an isolated continent, and as such it works almost like an island, with a very fragile, mutually-dependent ecosystem. If you want to get more abstract with this, one could even say that man was responsible for their extinction yet never hunted them or their eggs... maybe man for some reason hunted some specific lizard to extinction, which also happened to be their primary food source? Weird subtle interactions like that can occur on islands.
Man is good at causing these sorts of problems because as a species he's very organized. If Grok figures out that those eggs are easy to find and good eating, it doesn't take 25 generations of evolution to breed "nest hunting" behavior into the village. It takes a few months locally, maybe a few years across the entire area. Other species just can't adapt to something that fast. I don't think it's proper to "blame man" for this, it's just the next advancement in evolution. But it is unfortunate. And I think it's something that we just need to understand and accept at some level. Particularly for our behavior in the past when these subtle yet potent interactions weren't understood or respected.
iirc, drawing Allah is also forbidden?
I thought it all came down to their extreme view of idols. Idols were all the rage with pagans, and I think they wanted to make sure that no one prayed to images or statues etc of their god, but to their god directly.
But in a time where paganism isn't too popular you'd think they would consider relaxing a bit on that one.
So they're guaranteeing none of their users will ever do a certain something ever again? Are these people interested in buying a bridge?
it makes me want to find the part of my state with the highest Islamic population and then decorate the streets
I was thinking the same thing, but the problem here is twofold. (1) Their religion has a very deep-seeded intolerance for making fun of their god. Or even trying to draw his face for that matter. Couple that with (2) it's as you stated, a theocracy, and that just works as a multiplier because people's outdated intolerant behavior is fully endorsed, supported, and practiced by the state.
I don't really like to call them "nutcases", but religious zealots really do give me the impression of incurably unreasonable people, (an unfortunate chunk of which are extremists) and when they're running the government and the press at the same time, it's almost a complete waste of time to try to reason with them or do anything about it. Not only are they organized, but they're in charge too. Change must come from within. And "change" is universally considered "the enemy" by theocracies, so all I'm saying is don't expect any of this to disappear anytime soon.
All of these outdated laws are ostensibly made to protect them from us, the heathens. It's like "think of the children", but the ENTIRE COUNTRY is "the children". They're all in it together in a grand party of stagnancy and intolerance, and they like it. All you can really do is try to ignore them and hope they eventually either go away or grow up.
Nobody cares whether the flash remembers zeros and ones, naughts and crosses, or fish and chips. All that maters is what the computer sees. I tell it I want a zero, it says there's a zero there now. Why should anything else matter to anyone?
doing a full device write will only increment the "total writes" count for every block by 1. In that respect it won't cause any wear level adjustments to take place at all.
That reminds me of something slightly off-topic here. We discussed recently the problem of block sizes other than 512 bytes causing some systems to baulk. I wonder if any flash drive manufacturer is brave enough to use their flash block size (typically what, 32k? guessing) as their device block size. That would allow the OS to work with the wear leveling by preventing multiple files from saving to the same physical blocks etc. The wear leveling itself could be handled by the OS also I suppose but that's not important. Does anyone know of a flash drive with a non standard size block?
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdiskxxx bs=1024000
or whatever variation you need for your distro. The above is for mac os x. yes, rdisk is a character device I know I know, but for some reason os x io's a LOT faster o that than the block device. (double or better) No idea why. Block works too tho, whatever works for you. Just plug in the correct disk number for the xxx. Careful which device you're nuking, dd is both swift and unforgiving.
I'd also like to get slightly pedantic and point out that this is NOT a low level format. Low level format refers to laying down the address blocks, and also the data headers and trailers. All dd does is write zeros to the meat of the data block, and update its checksum. There's no such thing as a low level format for non magnetic media because flash drive blocks are electrically addressed, not physically.
FWIW, you can probably tack on "count=20" to make things go much faster. I assume all you need is the partition table completely zapped, and the first 20mb should do it fine. Without this it will wipe the entire device, which for a flash drive may take a little bit. But then again your distro or whatnot may try to find a backup copy of the boot block and partition table etc at the end of the device in which case just wipe the whole thing to avoid it "fixing it" for you.
Is this a "bait and switch"? Were the users that signed up for earthlink told there was no cap when they applied?
just wait till they figure out what Shatner is past tense for...
and certainly not "stuff that matters"
But definitely well-done.
I think I'd have been wearing a life jacket all the same. That and I'd have some means of propulsion besides paddles. A push from a basic motorboat would suffice. A sail of some sort would have been fun to engineer.
but thems the rules
if that were the case, any store selling so much as a candybar would need such a permit.
Laws like that refer to foods prepared when ordered, not pre-packaged. And edible undies are prepackaged as good as any candybar.
The inspectors are interested in the conditions under which you are cooking and handling (and storing) the food. This has absolutely nothing to do with food being sold.
Then start thinking about all the vending machines everywhere...
Consumer tastes have overtaken the perceived needs of business as the leading force shaping technology.
There, fixed that for you. The day of the PHB making decisions based on the novelty of the promo mugs and pens they just received is coming to an end. Thank god.
I took out the trash modem qwest provided and bought my own dsl (dlink) modem at bestbuy. it has a lot more features, tho was a PITA to configure because none of the drones on the phone could help me with the setup and there's a lot to setting up DSL.
This modem tells me a lot of information, including "maximum attainable" speed, the result of the negotiation line test. Current speed: 992/1536. Maximum attainable: 1152/7872. I'm sure if I call them they'll tell me the lines won't support the higher speed. (i.e. their cheap DSLAM cards won't support it) I'd sure like to have 7 down instead of 1.5 on my dsl. So sometimes when they tell you that's the fastest they can offer in your area, the limitation is not your lines or distance, but their gear.
(yes, above I discussed my cable modem. I have both. it's complicated...)
+1 agree. VB is RAD (rapid application development), is very flexible, and is easy to use to make standalone apps. if you like programming in dos, you will love VB. For the use you are suggesting, it sounds ideal. you can basically have it be the gui front end for things you need to be done in dos (via vb, you don't need a folder full of com files for it to use)
I didn't even know cable/dsl were capable of those speeds!
speculating wildly on that, I'd wonder if in those locations they don't use some highly unbalanced methods between upstream and downstream. DSL and ISND are capable of symmetrical speeds, but cable is usually not. (due to many customers sharing one line) If it's a fiber DSL I could believe 100 by 100. And yes, that would be sweet.
Population density probably plays a big role in this as well. It's much easier to drop a single fiber trunk to a dense neighborhood, star out runs from there to 30 large apartments in the area, and put a fiber switch in each of said buildings, and for not-a-lot of overhead you have just put 300 people on fiber.
Where population is much less dense, like residential america, the ISPs have to spend a lot more on more trunks because each one serves a much smaller number of customers.
Is it cable or something else?
Maybe yes and yes. It's possible currently to lay copper with a fiber core, allowing ISPs to replace aging copper infrastructure that was scheduled/due for replacement anyway, before having to transition that run over to fiber. And then when they're ready, the fiber is already in, they just have to change the hardware at both ends, which saves them a LOT of time and money.
The US's upload speed has always stunk. Makes it impractical for most casual admins to run a small private server for friends or even personal use. Stinks when you want to remote to your house to grab a file, where you have 20mbps downstream, and only 768kbps upstream and it just takes forever to grab the file.
Or you can get your wallet totally shafted by your isp if they do offer higher tiers of upstream. Double your speed usually triples to quadruples your monthly cost, and you're usually starting from dirt. (256k to at best 2m)
I pay three times the usual rate at my house because I want their "premium" 2mbps (1.5 actual) instead of the totally useless 384k. (and that's with 10-20m down being standard)
That's an annoying racket they have going with upstream. Problem is, the majority of people that really need high upstream are businesses that need it for employee offsite email and remoting into work, uploading files to customers, etc. So ISPs milk you hard because they expect you to have money to burn.
They should be able to tell where the sound comes from.
That was my initial thought also. But then I realized, they could easily have a speaker IN the violin. It never even came out of its hand. I'd have liked to see them play a few chords on it and then place it in its hand to take over, but I'd bet money that violin was bolted to his hand.
nicely done. I like how it sort of did that "swaying" thing that violinists do as they play, "throwing themselves into the music" so to speak. Gave it a MUCH more realistic feel.
Though with all the lip-syncing going on these days, (even at the Olympics, I have to have a slight suspicion that the performance wasn't "live" from the violin. They could have easily rigged it to not make a sound and simply play the sound out a hidden speaker on the 'bot. But that's just my pessimistic nature.
And it didn't even fall down any stairs or anything either, that was a plus.
Having worked in a school with a mixed environment (XP and Mac) I'd say you should reconsider consolidating to a single platform. My school had a single "business lab" where the business teacher taught. She probably could have used a mac lab, the software she was using was for the most part easily available on any platform. The purpose of the lab was to teach students how to use windows, more than to teach business.
The other PC lab was the Cad Lab. There, autocad 4 was the primary reason for the windows machines.
Then, other than 6 or so custom windows boxes to run specialized administration softwares in the offices, plus a few specialized IT machines such as the firewall, everything ran Mac OS.
Despite the windows machines being vastly outnumbered it was our experience that the upkeep on the two windows labs was equal to that of all the macs on campus. If you are short-staffed, you should consider upkeep like that. If you're presently in a mixed environment, simply adjusting the ratio of your mix may recover the support time you are looking for.
Removing the windows (or the mac) machines is probably a bad idea. They each serve their own purpose. And as much as I despise windows in general, it's a fact of life in the business world, and students need exposure/training on it in school. Heck, I just installed 7 (boot camp) on my mbp here this week. Sometimes you need it. Students need to learn this stuff. To be quite blunt, deploying straight linux all around is probably the worst thing you can do for your students, regardless of the support it lets you provide. If you don't teach them what they need to learn, it doesn't matter how underbudget you are, you've failed at your job. The students are going to need to know how to use macs and windows, and you should keep both of them in place.
That said, getting back to support. ALL of our general labs were macs. They were extremely easy to maintain, and were next to impossible for the students to break. Two weeks ago I had another admin tell me a horror story that some kid had found a program he could run that would open a dialog box message on every windows machine on campus. He had something rather unkind to say about an instructor. That sort of problem is simply unacceptable. (they have yet to figure out how to block it without disabling windows networking, all they can do for now is make major threats to the students since it's easy to track - yes they've talked with a lot of admins about it and no one can find a simple way to block it) Even if you've got the entire lab deep-freeze'd (and you'd be insane not to) you still have to deal with them finding ways to break the machines. So for a good 80%+ of the general machines on your campus you'd save yourself a big headache going with the macs. Linux systems are approximately as difficult to break and give you a tradeoff, cheaper hardware for experience using a machine they are likely to be using in the workplace. Macs are better for the students, linux are better for you, and which are you here for?
Supporting just one platform can vary in difficulty. On windows, unless you have godlike fortune, you're dealing with a wide variety of hardware. It's unfortunately common to see every new lab bought with totally unique hardware, and that leaves you with dozens of hardware layouts to try to image and juggle. The macs can be done per OS. So for now for example, you'd have two images... one for 10.5 and one for 10.6. Maybe a third image for the labs with pro graphics software. You can take a hard drive out of a mac and plug it into another and just GO, and that's insanely useful for support. I can "fix" a macbook in 4 minutes by physically swapping a hard drive, no setup, rekeying, relicensing, drivers etc to muck with. So, three images for the entire campus. This really cuts down on your support time. Throw in firewire target mode and you will never have to take a screwdriver to the machine. Big plus there. So unless you know you can pull off a
What's wrong with that? Shouldn't a person be allowed to sell his device at the price he wants to?
It's like ticket scalping. When you have greater demand than supply and are being a benevolent supplier and not jacking up your prices to agree with demand, scalpers move in and attempt to buy you out. Then they turn around and start selling your goods at or above their true market price, much above what they paid for them. Your customers that you are trying to be benevolent to are now unable to buy from you because you're out of stock, and are forced to pay in blood to the scalpers. In the end the consumers receive no benefit, the suppliers take a loss they were expecting but without the benefit of customer good-will they were intending on buying with it, and the scalpers walk away with money for nothing.
The only two ways to discourage this is to (1) not discount your goods or use a mail-in-rebate strategy so there's no market for the scalpers, or (2) take some sort of technological method of either making the scalping impossible or impractical. (such as by limiting the number of units sold to a given credit card number) #2 has been done for the last several years for sports game tickets, and while it's not entirely effective, it does a pretty good job. It does require the purchaser have a credit card, and for a (usually very small) percentage of customers that is a problem, but when you consider the huge percentage of customers that would otherwise have been shafted, it's a very reasonable tradeoff.
ya, just look a China for example. (and good thing for them they have a lot more people)