Maybe things (more or less) work that way, but personally I think IP addresses shouldn't be treated as something that can be saved / 'extracted' / bought & sold for profit.
It's not an asset, but an address space, a shared resource, a set of numbers used to manage a world spanning network. Have a share of it assigned to your organization, as necessary to run your piece of that network. When 64K numbers were assigned, other organizations have a need for IP addresses & your organization only needs a couple of hundred IP addresses, the remainder should be re-assigned to those other organizations needing them. The only money involved should be costs that originate directly from bookkeeping of what IP addresses are assigned to whom.
And if IPv4 addresses run out, move to IPv6 to leave IPv4 address space limitations behind in history / LANs / legacy stuff / niche applications.
For some reason, it still blows my mind that it can be cheaper to manufacture a vehicle and then transport it halfway across the world than it could be to manufacture the vehicle locally.
I'd tend to agree with you, but then we would overestimate the real-world cost of transportation. If transport halfway across the globe is feasible for oil, bananas & cheap plastic toys, why would it not be feasible for high-tech products like electronics, cars etc?
Labor cost is what counts. Relative to that, transport is cheap.
Just out of curiosity, what functional (as opposed to ideological) alternatives to the Raspberry Pi are there in this price bracket?
None, I think. Only less functional (say, 8-bit microcontroller kit / Arduino stuff?), more expensive ones (like Beagleboard), or used / bulky / second hand gear.
Personally I like the Raspberry Pi a lot for its combination of cheap, small, brand new, and open-friendly. Biggest minus IMHO is that it's not 100% open due to lacking chipset documentation/drivers. Which limits what OS'es you can run or develop on it. Had such documentation been complete, this would be a perfect dev board for alternative OS experiments.
Yes, mobile devices are on the rise. Often with small (touch)screens where it makes sense to minimize control elements, in order not to clutter that screen.
At the same time, big screens aren't disappearing either. Browsing the web on a 40" TV at home isn't unheard of, maybe those screens are wall-size in a decade or so. And the average laptop / PC on a desk with mouse beside it, is yet another way to go about it.
The intelligent thing would be to realize that those devices & user experiences are different, and applications + their user interfaces should adjust accordingly. Or if that's too difficult, have different applications & different user interfaces for different devices. Like what has always been the case, really.
As for actual implementation, I agree with you. There's more than enough half-baked crap out there that the world could do without.
As a UI project, I disagree. Throwing some concepts out there fits in nicely with the "release early, release often" philosophy that's practiced in the open source world. If users like it: proceed. If users think it's crap: leave things as they are, or try something else (of course this assumes developers are listening to their users, which as we know isn't always the case;-).
A story like this then simply serves as a spotlight on the subject, an entry point to encourage discussion about pro's & cons. What's wrong with that?
Yet another reason for me not to set foot on an aircraft bound for the United States.
Might make no difference... The way I'm reading the article, it says "requires European airlines to pass on passenger information", without going into detail about whether that's US-bound flights only, flights within the EU, flights from EU to outside EU (but not US), or even any flight, from/to anywhere, done by an EU-based airline company. It would be good if someone could clear this up.
Secondly I don't see why passenger data would need to be transferred to US control at all. It's really naive to assume that the US will handle such data as agreed. Good chance it will end up in multiple databases, and possibly used at will (since under US control), in violation of agreement. What safeguards has the EU to the contrary? Any?
Of course the US wants some persons not to board an airplane, why not arrange for the US to provide that watchlist to an EU-controlled organization that checks this watchlist against passenger data? Flag & possibly take action on matches, data for people that don't set off any flags then wouldn't need to be transferred to the US (that is, other than what's done already in US-bound flights).
All this reads to me as: EU doesn't care about its citizens' privacy & lets itself be bullied by the US. Annoying - the EU is not even 1 sovereign nation, it's a whole group of sovereign nations. Combined a bigger population than the US. Our politicians should really show some more backbone.
... and here's how. "Oh, you won't comply? Guess you don't want your airline to have landing rights in the US, then."
That only works for airlines that want/need to land on US airports. A small carrier that only does a few routes (none including a US airport, never going near US airspace) could simply ignore such a threat.
Personally I think countries should just tell the US to stuff it. Lose landing rights in the US? Okay, then planes originating from the US lose landing rights in our country. Regardless of who loses more in such a fight, that would quickly end this nonsense.
Control what flies in US airspace? Sure. Exercise such control a bit outside that space, let's say to give intercepting fighter jets time to take off? Understandable. Control who gets on planes that never come close? Get the @*%^^) off!
Yes, we here many of these stories, and then years later nothing has changed... Other than the fact that the cost/watt of pv has continued to drop a significant percentage year after year after year. If that doesn't suit one's definition of progress, redefine "nothing has changed"...
(..), I would set up solar pv all over my property if it was just a bit more cost effective...
If I'm not mistaken, pv already is cost-effective if not cheaper than conventional energy sources in a variety of places, be it with a significant upfront investment (but with cost-effective = including that investment). Any progress in the cost/watt department will simply increase the # of places where it pays to put up solar panels.
If you do office type work only on a machine, then up to, say ~20% performance differences are pretty much irrelevant CPU-wise, as long as you're in a certain performance class. At least as important is harddisk performance, and having enough RAM to do jobs properly.
With any more-than-casual gaming, chances are GPU performance is much, much more important than CPU. So a small CPU advantage would still lose if the GPU is weak. Wouldn't know about their latest, but historically performance of Intel integrated GPU's has been pathetic compared to Nvidia or ATI (AMD) counterparts.
3) Due to the 'hacking' / under-the-radar nature of the theft (on the network that is, not that the guy was advertising it) the ISP didn't know or realize how much bandwidth was used by paying customers, and how much by non-paying ones.
One might group that under 2) "incompetent", but perhaps it really was difficult from the ISP side to know what exactly was going on & how many people were doing it. Just that someone provides tools that make it easy to abuse a service, doesn't automatically mean those tools are used on a large scale.
I for one am resisting the "services" model all I can. I will not pay to play a game more than once.
Actually "services" isn't a bad match: you play a game 1 week, you pay for 1 week. You play it all year, you pay for a full year. With shiny boxes it's kind of the same: buy box, play for some time, buy another box, play for some time, repeat. With appropriate pricing levels, this could average out to the same overall costs of playing games X, Y and Z over random periods of time.
However I also resist the "services" model, but in principle because what's paid doesn't match the work done by vendor: When vendor works 3 months on a pile of artwork, boxes it up & I buy one of 100k copies, I'm taking a 1/100k share for the work required to produce all that code & artwork. I'm NOT taking that share to provide 3 months income for that vendor.
After-sales work to produce patches is basically fixing a defective product. Large add-ons can be sold as such separately, and the cost of running servers for online play can be dealt with in different ways (buried in the initial cost, paid separately as a service, or perhaps even a community-run p2p style setup).
Post-scarcity production and distribution technology is clashing with industrial-capitalist economics.
While I somewhat agree with that, I see no conflict between modern digital distribution of software products, and shrink-wrapped boxes.
You provide me a copy of software product, I pay you 1x fixed amount for the privilege of having & using that copy. Whether that's shrink-wrapped box or download only is irrelevant for this purpose. X people buy their copy, developer gets X times fixed amount. If developer sells X copies / month, then developer has X times fixed amount / month coming in to support that software and work on new products. If developer sells too few copies, or takes too long to produce something new that also sells, too little money will come in to make a living from it.
Nothing new there, no conflict with modern distribution in the digital age. Whether customers should be forced to pay for their copy, and/or keep paying after getting it, is another matter (or different matters, in fact).
Exactly! That's why I stacked up on a heap of freely usable (and re-usable) bytes. Billions of them! Just to be safe in case lawmakers change their mind...
From an economic perspective there is again little to gain by using previous generation equipment, when that stuff becomes uneconomical in a Western setting it's most likely uneconomical in Africa.
African setting != western setting. And African nation A != African nation B.
From an economical perspective, I'd regard e-waste as a resource of more & less precious raw materials. To obtain some metals (like copper), it's probably a lot cheaper to recycle some tonnes of e-waste, than to buy earth-moving machinery & process many tonnes of dirt + copper ore. If present in that country at all.
So the sensible thing to do would be to invest in large-scale, efficient recycling plants. To keep those 12y old kids from burning a pile of wires in the open. Of course this would also require an effective, smart government that has the general public's interest in mind. There are exceptions, but unfortunately that's a big "if" in many African nations. And unless that changes, those places will keep being used as an e-waste dumping ground. Which makes western export restrictions a good thing in many cases.
What are you talking about? If Dell actually does what you claim, I'd consider that 'evil', but even so that doesn't put a dent in the 2nd hand market. In most western countries the disposable income vs. cost of new gear is what drives a short equipment life cycle, not some evil corp pulling 2nd hand gear from the market.
As a fellow geek / tinkerer I'm limited by time, (physical) storage space, and plain desire to mess with old equipment. But obtaining old gear is like the easiest thing in the world. Yeah you might have to be patient to find exactly what you want, but cost / availability of 2nd hand gear is a non-issue. There's mountains of it, take your pick.
A huge disadvantage is the environment damage when that hardware finally gets thrown away.
If I'm not mistaken, much (if not most) of the environmental damage results from the initial production of electronic equipment. With that fixed cost, it's simply good to keep equipment in service as long as possible - regardless who does that.
Another big cost is that of running the equipment, that is: energy use (mostly, other factors might be repairs / transport / consumables). For a while PC's have gotten increasingly power-hungry (CPU's up to 100W+ TDP, actively cooled videocards etc), so an older PC might be more economical to run. But that trend seems to be reversing, huge 500W+ gaming rigs have become a niche market, people are moving to (lower-power) laptops, small formfactor systems, tablets, netbooks etc. So if you're looking to cut the long-term cost of running the gear, it might make sense to skip that power-hungry stuff even if it gets thrown in your lap. Same thing for LCD screens - give it a few years of use, and an LCD screen might have lower overall cost than a 'free' same-sized CRT. Even when you're buying in Africa.
Lastly, let's not forget that prices for new hardware have been dropping continuous. The technology race-to-the-bottom has produced some very cheap devices that may seem underpowered in many westerner's eyes, but are enough to get online or use in countless other applications.
So there's a sweet spot, just assuming "used = cheap" is skipping your homework. To know how cheap, you have to do the math.
Most piracy is based on poorly implemented encryption due to slow processors. Next Gen hardware will be able to run encryption algorithms that don't have a gazillion assembly optimization in them. The XBox, PS3, current gen TVs & Blu Ray players couldn't. Once that happens, pop. No more piracy.
NOPE.
Suppose I want to watch a movie in the privacy of my own home, and movie distributor 'protects' that movie using strong encryption. In order to display it on my equipment, @ some point it will have to be decrypted. At worst, inside tamper-proofed IC's directly embedded in a TV/monitor. But still, encrypted data will have to go there, and decryption key will have to go there.
So one way or the other end-user will have both data and decryption key inside the walls of his/her house. Read: millions of copies of that data + millions of decryption keys scattered all around the world. And among those end-users, a small percentage (but potentially still large number) of 'hackers', some of who will have extensive technical means & knowledge to intercept that key and/or decrypted data. And if only one of those does it, that's enough. Think 'analog hole', but extended to digital media.
If you think stronger encryption will change that game, you don't understand the mechanism. If you think that will stop piracy some day, you're naive / silly / stupid.
If you lose money on every sale and add volume, you're losing loads of money fast. That's hardly smart.
Sometimes there may be reasons to do this (like getting a foothold in a market), these tablets ain't it I think. Probably these are just write-offs, and any money they get for 'em is better than tossing the remainder of their stocks.
The Meridian communications satellite failed to reach orbit yesterday due to a failure with its Soyuz rocket, in the latest setback for a Russian space program which has now lost over half a dozen satellites in the past year.
That's unusual... from what I know most Russian-built stuff is designed to have bits fall off, and then carry on as if nothing happened.
Hmm a "sphere" - maybe another fuel tank like in that Namibia incident?
But what state or township is going to approve a nuclear power plant -- even a small modular one -- given unfortunate recent events?
Although it does, the 'recent' shouldn't matter. No matter how well you design something, there's always a statistical probability of catastrophic failure. Simplistic: if there's a 1 in X chance that a plant will have a meltdown this year, and you have X number of similar plants across the globe, you could expect (on average) 1 of those to have a meltdown this year. You wanna host that party?
And even 'minor' events could have devastating consequences for people that live in the area. Not saying other options like a coal plant are any better, but the NIMBY syndrome is perfectly understandable (& perhaps logical as well) for lots & lots of reasons.
Or what about if Microsoft just doesn't have anything against open source projects?
More precisely: maybe MS doesn't have anything against open source projects that don't compete with their own products. Another option might be that Apple is a bigger evil to MS than making room for a few open source apps in their app store. Or MS fears losing their share in some markets & makes some concessions in order to stay relevant.
Microsoft has never really locked down their desktop OS either. It has always been open in a way that it lets you run anything you want. Be it open source or proprietary code. Microsoft doesn't care - they're primarily selling their OS, and their OS has always came with the promise of you're being able to run anything you want. That is also why Windows has such a large market place for all kinds of applications and games. Being able to run anything you want, from any vendor you want, has always been one of the largest selling points of Windows.
That's just flamebait... The primary reason for MS being dominant on the desktop is that newly bought computers nearly always come with it pre-installed, people got used to it, and it's good enough. Combined with a hefty dose of marketing, and perhaps a shady deal or two to make life hard for competitors. The landscape is changing, but anyone who believes otherwise is an idiot.
How much more research could you possibly do beyond "Yup, it's a rock."?
Surface structure, chemical composition, searching for embedded items (micrometeorites?), trying to make some sort of concrete out of it to build a moon base from, helping to determine age / history of that moon area, etc, etc, etc.
For some research a surrogate might do, but then you'd still have to compare with the real thing once in a while. Since we have so little actual moon material, of course that is worth its weight in gold (well no, much more actually since only way to obtain more is to go back to the moon - pretty expensive undertaking).
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe things (more or less) work that way, but personally I think IP addresses shouldn't be treated as something that can be saved / 'extracted' / bought & sold for profit.
It's not an asset, but an address space, a shared resource, a set of numbers used to manage a world spanning network. Have a share of it assigned to your organization, as necessary to run your piece of that network. When 64K numbers were assigned, other organizations have a need for IP addresses & your organization only needs a couple of hundred IP addresses, the remainder should be re-assigned to those other organizations needing them. The only money involved should be costs that originate directly from bookkeeping of what IP addresses are assigned to whom.
And if IPv4 addresses run out, move to IPv6 to leave IPv4 address space limitations behind in history / LANs / legacy stuff / niche applications.
For some reason, it still blows my mind that it can be cheaper to manufacture a vehicle and then transport it halfway across the world than it could be to manufacture the vehicle locally.
I'd tend to agree with you, but then we would overestimate the real-world cost of transportation. If transport halfway across the globe is feasible for oil, bananas & cheap plastic toys, why would it not be feasible for high-tech products like electronics, cars etc?
Labor cost is what counts. Relative to that, transport is cheap.
Just out of curiosity, what functional (as opposed to ideological) alternatives to the Raspberry Pi are there in this price bracket?
None, I think. Only less functional (say, 8-bit microcontroller kit / Arduino stuff?), more expensive ones (like Beagleboard), or used / bulky / second hand gear.
Personally I like the Raspberry Pi a lot for its combination of cheap, small, brand new, and open-friendly. Biggest minus IMHO is that it's not 100% open due to lacking chipset documentation/drivers. Which limits what OS'es you can run or develop on it. Had such documentation been complete, this would be a perfect dev board for alternative OS experiments.
Why strive for a "one size fits all" anyway ?
Yes, mobile devices are on the rise. Often with small (touch)screens where it makes sense to minimize control elements, in order not to clutter that screen.
At the same time, big screens aren't disappearing either. Browsing the web on a 40" TV at home isn't unheard of, maybe those screens are wall-size in a decade or so. And the average laptop / PC on a desk with mouse beside it, is yet another way to go about it.
The intelligent thing would be to realize that those devices & user experiences are different, and applications + their user interfaces should adjust accordingly. Or if that's too difficult, have different applications & different user interfaces for different devices. Like what has always been the case, really.
When it's finalized THEN post it.
As for actual implementation, I agree with you. There's more than enough half-baked crap out there that the world could do without.
As a UI project, I disagree. Throwing some concepts out there fits in nicely with the "release early, release often" philosophy that's practiced in the open source world. If users like it: proceed. If users think it's crap: leave things as they are, or try something else (of course this assumes developers are listening to their users, which as we know isn't always the case ;-).
A story like this then simply serves as a spotlight on the subject, an entry point to encourage discussion about pro's & cons. What's wrong with that?
Yet another reason for me not to set foot on an aircraft bound for the United States.
Might make no difference... The way I'm reading the article, it says "requires European airlines to pass on passenger information", without going into detail about whether that's US-bound flights only, flights within the EU, flights from EU to outside EU (but not US), or even any flight, from/to anywhere, done by an EU-based airline company. It would be good if someone could clear this up.
Secondly I don't see why passenger data would need to be transferred to US control at all. It's really naive to assume that the US will handle such data as agreed. Good chance it will end up in multiple databases, and possibly used at will (since under US control), in violation of agreement. What safeguards has the EU to the contrary? Any?
Of course the US wants some persons not to board an airplane, why not arrange for the US to provide that watchlist to an EU-controlled organization that checks this watchlist against passenger data? Flag & possibly take action on matches, data for people that don't set off any flags then wouldn't need to be transferred to the US (that is, other than what's done already in US-bound flights).
All this reads to me as: EU doesn't care about its citizens' privacy & lets itself be bullied by the US. Annoying - the EU is not even 1 sovereign nation, it's a whole group of sovereign nations. Combined a bigger population than the US. Our politicians should really show some more backbone.
... and here's how. "Oh, you won't comply? Guess you don't want your airline to have landing rights in the US, then."
That only works for airlines that want/need to land on US airports. A small carrier that only does a few routes (none including a US airport, never going near US airspace) could simply ignore such a threat.
Personally I think countries should just tell the US to stuff it. Lose landing rights in the US? Okay, then planes originating from the US lose landing rights in our country. Regardless of who loses more in such a fight, that would quickly end this nonsense.
Control what flies in US airspace? Sure. Exercise such control a bit outside that space, let's say to give intercepting fighter jets time to take off? Understandable. Control who gets on planes that never come close? Get the @*%^^) off!
Phone companies: provide paper copies only to those customers that explicitly ask for one (opt-in), and charge for the printing / shipping costs.
Customers: don't ask for one, unless you have a very good reason to keep a paper copy around.
Oh wait - where I live (NL), that's already how it works... (and the vast majority of people do without a paper copy these days).
Yes, we here many of these stories, and then years later nothing has changed... Other than the fact that the cost/watt of pv has continued to drop a significant percentage year after year after year. If that doesn't suit one's definition of progress, redefine "nothing has changed"...
(..), I would set up solar pv all over my property if it was just a bit more cost effective...
If I'm not mistaken, pv already is cost-effective if not cheaper than conventional energy sources in a variety of places, be it with a significant upfront investment (but with cost-effective = including that investment). Any progress in the cost/watt department will simply increase the # of places where it pays to put up solar panels.
If you do office type work only on a machine, then up to, say ~20% performance differences are pretty much irrelevant CPU-wise, as long as you're in a certain performance class. At least as important is harddisk performance, and having enough RAM to do jobs properly.
With any more-than-casual gaming, chances are GPU performance is much, much more important than CPU. So a small CPU advantage would still lose if the GPU is weak. Wouldn't know about their latest, but historically performance of Intel integrated GPU's has been pathetic compared to Nvidia or ATI (AMD) counterparts.
3) Due to the 'hacking' / under-the-radar nature of the theft (on the network that is, not that the guy was advertising it) the ISP didn't know or realize how much bandwidth was used by paying customers, and how much by non-paying ones.
One might group that under 2) "incompetent", but perhaps it really was difficult from the ISP side to know what exactly was going on & how many people were doing it. Just that someone provides tools that make it easy to abuse a service, doesn't automatically mean those tools are used on a large scale.
I for one am resisting the "services" model all I can. I will not pay to play a game more than once.
Actually "services" isn't a bad match: you play a game 1 week, you pay for 1 week. You play it all year, you pay for a full year. With shiny boxes it's kind of the same: buy box, play for some time, buy another box, play for some time, repeat. With appropriate pricing levels, this could average out to the same overall costs of playing games X, Y and Z over random periods of time.
However I also resist the "services" model, but in principle because what's paid doesn't match the work done by vendor: When vendor works 3 months on a pile of artwork, boxes it up & I buy one of 100k copies, I'm taking a 1/100k share for the work required to produce all that code & artwork. I'm NOT taking that share to provide 3 months income for that vendor.
After-sales work to produce patches is basically fixing a defective product. Large add-ons can be sold as such separately, and the cost of running servers for online play can be dealt with in different ways (buried in the initial cost, paid separately as a service, or perhaps even a community-run p2p style setup).
Post-scarcity production and distribution technology is clashing with industrial-capitalist economics.
While I somewhat agree with that, I see no conflict between modern digital distribution of software products, and shrink-wrapped boxes.
You provide me a copy of software product, I pay you 1x fixed amount for the privilege of having & using that copy. Whether that's shrink-wrapped box or download only is irrelevant for this purpose. X people buy their copy, developer gets X times fixed amount. If developer sells X copies / month, then developer has X times fixed amount / month coming in to support that software and work on new products. If developer sells too few copies, or takes too long to produce something new that also sells, too little money will come in to make a living from it.
Nothing new there, no conflict with modern distribution in the digital age. Whether customers should be forced to pay for their copy, and/or keep paying after getting it, is another matter (or different matters, in fact).
Exactly! That's why I stacked up on a heap of freely usable (and re-usable) bytes. Billions of them! Just to be safe in case lawmakers change their mind...
(cue the "I've got more bytes than you" yokes...)
Better: vibrating rounded corners!
No way Apple can claim that as their 'invention'.
From an economic perspective there is again little to gain by using previous generation equipment, when that stuff becomes uneconomical in a Western setting it's most likely uneconomical in Africa.
African setting != western setting. And African nation A != African nation B.
From an economical perspective, I'd regard e-waste as a resource of more & less precious raw materials. To obtain some metals (like copper), it's probably a lot cheaper to recycle some tonnes of e-waste, than to buy earth-moving machinery & process many tonnes of dirt + copper ore. If present in that country at all.
So the sensible thing to do would be to invest in large-scale, efficient recycling plants. To keep those 12y old kids from burning a pile of wires in the open. Of course this would also require an effective, smart government that has the general public's interest in mind. There are exceptions, but unfortunately that's a big "if" in many African nations. And unless that changes, those places will keep being used as an e-waste dumping ground. Which makes western export restrictions a good thing in many cases.
What are you talking about? If Dell actually does what you claim, I'd consider that 'evil', but even so that doesn't put a dent in the 2nd hand market. In most western countries the disposable income vs. cost of new gear is what drives a short equipment life cycle, not some evil corp pulling 2nd hand gear from the market.
As a fellow geek / tinkerer I'm limited by time, (physical) storage space, and plain desire to mess with old equipment. But obtaining old gear is like the easiest thing in the world. Yeah you might have to be patient to find exactly what you want, but cost / availability of 2nd hand gear is a non-issue. There's mountains of it, take your pick.
A huge disadvantage is the environment damage when that hardware finally gets thrown away.
If I'm not mistaken, much (if not most) of the environmental damage results from the initial production of electronic equipment. With that fixed cost, it's simply good to keep equipment in service as long as possible - regardless who does that.
Another big cost is that of running the equipment, that is: energy use (mostly, other factors might be repairs / transport / consumables). For a while PC's have gotten increasingly power-hungry (CPU's up to 100W+ TDP, actively cooled videocards etc), so an older PC might be more economical to run. But that trend seems to be reversing, huge 500W+ gaming rigs have become a niche market, people are moving to (lower-power) laptops, small formfactor systems, tablets, netbooks etc. So if you're looking to cut the long-term cost of running the gear, it might make sense to skip that power-hungry stuff even if it gets thrown in your lap. Same thing for LCD screens - give it a few years of use, and an LCD screen might have lower overall cost than a 'free' same-sized CRT. Even when you're buying in Africa.
Lastly, let's not forget that prices for new hardware have been dropping continuous. The technology race-to-the-bottom has produced some very cheap devices that may seem underpowered in many westerner's eyes, but are enough to get online or use in countless other applications.
So there's a sweet spot, just assuming "used = cheap" is skipping your homework. To know how cheap, you have to do the math.
Most piracy is based on poorly implemented encryption due to slow processors. Next Gen hardware will be able to run encryption algorithms that don't have a gazillion assembly optimization in them. The XBox, PS3, current gen TVs & Blu Ray players couldn't. Once that happens, pop. No more piracy.
NOPE.
Suppose I want to watch a movie in the privacy of my own home, and movie distributor 'protects' that movie using strong encryption. In order to display it on my equipment, @ some point it will have to be decrypted. At worst, inside tamper-proofed IC's directly embedded in a TV/monitor. But still, encrypted data will have to go there, and decryption key will have to go there.
So one way or the other end-user will have both data and decryption key inside the walls of his/her house. Read: millions of copies of that data + millions of decryption keys scattered all around the world. And among those end-users, a small percentage (but potentially still large number) of 'hackers', some of who will have extensive technical means & knowledge to intercept that key and/or decrypted data. And if only one of those does it, that's enough. Think 'analog hole', but extended to digital media.
If you think stronger encryption will change that game, you don't understand the mechanism. If you think that will stop piracy some day, you're naive / silly / stupid.
If you lose money on every sale and add volume, you're losing loads of money fast. That's hardly smart.
Sometimes there may be reasons to do this (like getting a foothold in a market), these tablets ain't it I think. Probably these are just write-offs, and any money they get for 'em is better than tossing the remainder of their stocks.
No strength required to kill you - only weight.
First paragraph from the article:
The Meridian communications satellite failed to reach orbit yesterday due to a failure with its Soyuz rocket, in the latest setback for a Russian space program which has now lost over half a dozen satellites in the past year.
That's unusual... from what I know most Russian-built stuff is designed to have bits fall off, and then carry on as if nothing happened.
Hmm a "sphere" - maybe another fuel tank like in that Namibia incident?
But what state or township is going to approve a nuclear power plant -- even a small modular one -- given unfortunate recent events?
Although it does, the 'recent' shouldn't matter. No matter how well you design something, there's always a statistical probability of catastrophic failure. Simplistic: if there's a 1 in X chance that a plant will have a meltdown this year, and you have X number of similar plants across the globe, you could expect (on average) 1 of those to have a meltdown this year. You wanna host that party?
And even 'minor' events could have devastating consequences for people that live in the area. Not saying other options like a coal plant are any better, but the NIMBY syndrome is perfectly understandable (& perhaps logical as well) for lots & lots of reasons.
Or what about if Microsoft just doesn't have anything against open source projects?
More precisely: maybe MS doesn't have anything against open source projects that don't compete with their own products. Another option might be that Apple is a bigger evil to MS than making room for a few open source apps in their app store. Or MS fears losing their share in some markets & makes some concessions in order to stay relevant.
Microsoft has never really locked down their desktop OS either. It has always been open in a way that it lets you run anything you want. Be it open source or proprietary code. Microsoft doesn't care - they're primarily selling their OS, and their OS has always came with the promise of you're being able to run anything you want. That is also why Windows has such a large market place for all kinds of applications and games. Being able to run anything you want, from any vendor you want, has always been one of the largest selling points of Windows.
That's just flamebait... The primary reason for MS being dominant on the desktop is that newly bought computers nearly always come with it pre-installed, people got used to it, and it's good enough. Combined with a hefty dose of marketing, and perhaps a shady deal or two to make life hard for competitors. The landscape is changing, but anyone who believes otherwise is an idiot.
How much more research could you possibly do beyond "Yup, it's a rock."?
Surface structure, chemical composition, searching for embedded items (micrometeorites?), trying to make some sort of concrete out of it to build a moon base from, helping to determine age / history of that moon area, etc, etc, etc.
For some research a surrogate might do, but then you'd still have to compare with the real thing once in a while. Since we have so little actual moon material, of course that is worth its weight in gold (well no, much more actually since only way to obtain more is to go back to the moon - pretty expensive undertaking).