I think the point is that if a DRM'd game costs $50 in the store many people would actually pay >$50 to pirate the exact same game but without the DRM.
If you spend 30 seconds finding the CD and sticking it in the drive every time you play the game even at a minimum wage of $10/hr it only takes 600 plays to waste another $50 on DRM.
Media does not work that why. Each use has the complete full potential of the product.
Software and other forms of entertainment lose value every day as newer products become available that are more functional or popular. Giving a 2 year old game to your friend is like giving him half of your 2-hour-old fries.
If the consumer allows this model to spread, it will only be a matter of time before it WILL spread to the auto industry and beyond.
The only reason we don't have this situation in the automobile market today is because of "big government" "anti free-market" "socialist" consumer protection laws. So the solution is to pass computer software consumer protection laws.
Randomly elected representative government (uniformly selected from the entire eligible population by widely approved statistical sampling methods), switched out every 4 years, with as many representatives selected as necessary to have confidence at the 97th percentile that their beliefs represent the beliefs of the country as a whole. Make constitutional referendums last >4 years preventing any one elected government from making arbitrary changes.
I think the distinction between protected and legal speech is precisely the distinction between the classes of killable and not-killable people. It's protected speech to advocate for the killing of "terrorists" or foreign combatants in a war. A suggestion to kill an innocent person is generally neither legal nor protected if it could be expected to result in criminal action. Perhaps you can think of some situations where this does not hold, e.g. where it is protected speech to advocate for the killing of a person who could otherwise not legally be killed, or for instance a legal order to kill a person (or class of people) which could not otherwise be stated as protected speech, maybe along the lines of George W. Bush's "Kill them!" speech. Ultimately what matters is whether the government can legally kill you, and how easy it would be for you to become legally killable.
I'm pretty sure telling people to kill other people has never been considered protected speech.
Unless of course it's totally legal to kill them, say because of a "police action" or because they're suspected of being related to a "terrorist". Then it's perfectly legitimate for everyone, especially politicians, to encourage people to kill those people. Because people come in two classes; killable, and not-killable. The trick is to remain in the "not-killable" class as long as possible. Enjoy your police-state life.
should work out pretty well. Just upload your content to as many "cloud" services as possible and each one can pay for itself if your content is worth anything. If one provider goes away, the rest will take up the slack. Use magnet links.
Replying to your original post, the difference is that you are not a creative work; your physical body is a product of nature/genetics/parents/god/whatever,
Random investment of power by lottery; one entry per eligible person printed every four or six years and taken from the last census. Amazingly this process would even preserve the democratic values of the country because randomly chosen representatives would reflect a very good approximation of national political views. Just bump Congress to a thousand members to lower the margin of error. Instead of getting a call from Gallup you'd get a limo to the airport and fly to Washington. Use the downtime between November and January for an intense civics training course. As an addition we could allow yea/nay public elections to retain incumbents for a further single term if they're doing an exceptionally good job and to have some continuity during election season.
Bribery would be the biggest problem (as it currently is) but at least it would be limited to post-election activities and since there would be few if any preexisting relationships between the bribers and incumbents the attempts would be fairly transparent.
1. To be fair, every commercial insurance I've seen does accept the standard codes (ICD-9, ICD-10, CPT-4, etc.) and billing forms and electronic steams (UB's, HCFA's, 837/835's, 5010's, etc.) that Medicare does. The high bar is set by CMS, and it's probably a good thing that they do because it makes disease and treatment reporting statistics slightly more accurate and meaningful. Medical coding is just a very complex topic. Just try categorizing every possible medical diagnosis into 14567 codes (ICD-9, as of October 2011). It may be possible to simplify billing to some extent, for instance by reverting to a single payer, but a lot of the complexity is simply abiding by CMS's rules for documentation (the medical record must support every line item) and combining stays. Some organizations are trying HMO 2.0 where a payer just pays a lump sum based on the diagnosis and some additional factors (no line item billing), but unless that's done very carefully I don't see that ending well at all.
2. Medical malpractice insurance is around 5 or 10 percent of total costs which is certainly high but probably not the biggest contributor to overall cost. Defensive procedures can also be blamed on patients who demand them instead of just trusting their doctors.
3. Fraud is probably not as big a contributor towards total costs as you might think. While there is some overhead chasing bad debt and some abuse of unnecessary procedures, the vast majority of people don't want to be in the hospital unless they're actually sick. The costs are shifted to legitimate payers but the total national cost of healthcare is probably not too adversely inflated. By treating homelessness directly you probably would end up hospitalizing and treating most of those patients for mental health issues anyway.
4. I'd add the cost of supplies to your list. Hospitals and clinics get soaked for everything from electronic devices to sterile pads. There's a high demand with only a few manufacturers and strict regulation but ultimately most patient-room medical devices shouldn't cost much more to manufacture than an iPad. Nationalizing drug development and testing would no doubt help defray another 5% to 15% of the total cost, not to mention helping the third world immensely.
I think that ultimately health care costs have increased so much because we can cure and treat so much. Society is going to have to deal with the fact that longer, healthier lives are a cost-benefit decision and value SUVs and 3D TVs and $3,000,000 Superbowl commercials appropriately.
There is another choice - fuck the government and the horse it rode in on. It's up to the individuals to make individual choices and to help those they want to help without being forced by the guns of gov't officials.
Well good luck because the richest of the rich only want to help each other and they'll be to the ones who own all the schools, roads, utilities, and hospitals when the government sells them off to the highest bidder in response to a 100% libertarian Congress and President. There have been thousands of every-man-for-himself societies in the past and every one of them has been a despotic shithole. Don't forget that the golden age of American Expansionism where some libertarian ideals almost worked was at the expense of native people who had been forming cohesive societies for centuries. There's no more West to travel into and carve out your homestead; you live in a slightly younger version of Europe now.
Government-provided high speed internet to the home, along with a computer to use it, is an unjustified expense.
I suppose that attitude is why the U.S. is falling quite a ways behind most first world countries in the bits-per-second-per-dollar department. I imagine the government also had absolutely no business creating and funding a postal service to deliver packets (of mail) to people's homes.
Maybe you should RTFD (. . . disclaimer) about delta V a little closer. It's that part before the raw data that actually explains what was recorded, and how. Given only Acceleration(t), you can integrate it into Velocity(t) + C where C is unknown because no initial velocity is given. I'm not sure where you saw the 22MPH "acceleration" while the data was being retrieved, but all the data is stored in NVRAM and retrieved later. TFD clearly states that you have to be careful to plug into the module correctly so that new trouble codes don't overwrite old data, and presumably whoever read the module data was careful.
Strike any rigid object against a rock wall and it will develop oscillations at its resonant frequency. If it deforms, you'll get even more interesting waveforms.
If you look at the actual data (the second link) you can see that in the 82 milliseconds leading up to the crash he was decelerating rather hard (about half a G, although it looks like the accelerometer's precision is a bit less than 0.4 Gs and I suppose it could have just been reading 0 acceleration inaccurately).
The most interesting thing is the wild oscillations in the accelerometer data during the crash. There are some pretty amazing vibrations traveling through the frame during a collision. It's important to note that the accelerometers experience much more acceleration than the passenger does due to being mounted on the frame. While the sensors saw +/- 40G it's likely that the dude experienced roughly 9 or 10 G's given the delta V over the last 70 ms.
In some cases they are required to provide Internet access even if it's not necessarily in your home or using your own personal device. There are several countries that only have Internet access to some government services and they do provide public computers for access to those services, and probably subsidize Internet connections in general to make it even easier to access those services.
Much like the government is required to provide public access to courts, polling places, and other city, state, and federal buildings, public access to the Internet may soon become a necessity in the U.S. The existence of things like the new interactive whitehouse.gov features are almost enough to make Internet access a fundamental right so that poor or otherwise disadvantaged people are not excluded from political participation.
Seriously though, if you want to write a correct (or secure, same thing) application, use a type safe language combined with a formal modeling/proof language. There are dozens of choices and you can formally demonstrate any predicate that you care to, up to correctness for your entire application within the constraints of the programming/modeling environment.
If they knew the domain name, yes. Hopefully at least a few sites are not stupid enough to display a user's email address on the password reset screen (or anywhere else publicly available, for that matter).
My password files just look like this:
user: damnstupidelf
pass: glintprickjuliatrunkwouldexcelhymnallearhopbloat
first girlfriend: razeblazetrudytdmoltnobitalysankassetzd
high school: actsdrurybyrneavailprofit'llsjmeaddrawpave
some_other_weakest_link_in_site_security_question: alleysandalohmichead60fendweighhamlinwillstout
I sign up for site accounts using email addresses at random domains that will expire soon. No chance of plaintext password-reset emails being sent out and intercepted unless the site uses a non-SSL third party relay.
The password files are symmetrically encrypted with a passphrase that isn't used anywhere else. Long diceware passphrases are immune to rainbow tables, dictionary and brute force attacks, and rubber hose cryptanalysis (I can't remember them), although some worthless sites limit the length of password form fields (shouldn't the site salt and hash passphrases to a fixed number of bits immediately, thus negating the need to limit the length? Yes.) and I have to revert to uuencoding 16 bytes from/dev/random.
The password files are on an encrypted partition using an ephemeral key on a netbook and there's a generator for power outages longer than a couple hours. Alt-SysRq-B has been modified to wipe RAM before rebooting. I hooked up a USB heart monitor as an actual deadman switch to use when I sleep.
Pretty much. It's a technical problem that is being solved incrementally over a period of years so that there aren't eventually widespread shortages or other major problems (NAT is pretty much the two digit year format). "Normal" people got frenzied over technical issues, but of course they'll also frenzy over some person on TV having a scripted event happen to them.
A far cheaper solution would be to turn half of Kansas into poppy farms and half of Florida into Coca farms. Subsidize them like corn and sell the FDA-grade drugs in supermarkets and vending machines at subsidized prices. I guarantee that the illegal drug trade in the U.S. will be gone with 5 years, and the international rings will switch to completely legal flights out of the U.S. into staging countries. Fire the goddamn ATF and balance the budget with the taxes on drugs.
But no, carpet bombing with B52s is the way to go, of course. Why not just nuke them?
Either silicon valley should secede or we should start up a nice commune down in Antarctica with safe Gen3 nuclear power. Just think of the efficiency at that delta-T!
There's no need to prove that a given belief is completely correct. One just needs a method to compare two beliefs/hypotheses and see which one makes better predictions. Thanks science!
So the obvious thing to do is not to look at some boring distant planet, but look at some star a few thousand light years away. But don't look directly at it, use it as a second gravitational lens to look at *another* star, and indefinitely extend the range of the telescope. Assuming the focal point isn't directly on the opposite side of the gravity well it would be possible to aim the telescope within a small angle and conceivably bend the light path around until it was focusing back on our own planet Earth's past. Our photons stream ever outward but presumably some of them do return by circuitous routes for us to collect and image our own history.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point is that if a DRM'd game costs $50 in the store many people would actually pay >$50 to pirate the exact same game but without the DRM.
If you spend 30 seconds finding the CD and sticking it in the drive every time you play the game even at a minimum wage of $10/hr it only takes 600 plays to waste another $50 on DRM.
Media does not work that why. Each use has the complete full potential of the product.
Software and other forms of entertainment lose value every day as newer products become available that are more functional or popular. Giving a 2 year old game to your friend is like giving him half of your 2-hour-old fries.
If the consumer allows this model to spread, it will only be a matter of time before it WILL spread to the auto industry and beyond.
The only reason we don't have this situation in the automobile market today is because of "big government" "anti free-market" "socialist" consumer protection laws. So the solution is to pass computer software consumer protection laws.
Randomly elected representative government (uniformly selected from the entire eligible population by widely approved statistical sampling methods), switched out every 4 years, with as many representatives selected as necessary to have confidence at the 97th percentile that their beliefs represent the beliefs of the country as a whole. Make constitutional referendums last >4 years preventing any one elected government from making arbitrary changes.
I think the distinction between protected and legal speech is precisely the distinction between the classes of killable and not-killable people. It's protected speech to advocate for the killing of "terrorists" or foreign combatants in a war. A suggestion to kill an innocent person is generally neither legal nor protected if it could be expected to result in criminal action. Perhaps you can think of some situations where this does not hold, e.g. where it is protected speech to advocate for the killing of a person who could otherwise not legally be killed, or for instance a legal order to kill a person (or class of people) which could not otherwise be stated as protected speech, maybe along the lines of George W. Bush's "Kill them!" speech. Ultimately what matters is whether the government can legally kill you, and how easy it would be for you to become legally killable.
I'm pretty sure telling people to kill other people has never been considered protected speech.
Unless of course it's totally legal to kill them, say because of a "police action" or because they're suspected of being related to a "terrorist". Then it's perfectly legitimate for everyone, especially politicians, to encourage people to kill those people. Because people come in two classes; killable, and not-killable. The trick is to remain in the "not-killable" class as long as possible. Enjoy your police-state life.
should work out pretty well. Just upload your content to as many "cloud" services as possible and each one can pay for itself if your content is worth anything. If one provider goes away, the rest will take up the slack. Use magnet links.
Replying to your original post, the difference is that you are not a creative work; your physical body is a product of nature/genetics/parents/god/whatever,
Not if your parents were in a porno.
Random investment of power by lottery; one entry per eligible person printed every four or six years and taken from the last census. Amazingly this process would even preserve the democratic values of the country because randomly chosen representatives would reflect a very good approximation of national political views. Just bump Congress to a thousand members to lower the margin of error. Instead of getting a call from Gallup you'd get a limo to the airport and fly to Washington. Use the downtime between November and January for an intense civics training course. As an addition we could allow yea/nay public elections to retain incumbents for a further single term if they're doing an exceptionally good job and to have some continuity during election season.
Bribery would be the biggest problem (as it currently is) but at least it would be limited to post-election activities and since there would be few if any preexisting relationships between the bribers and incumbents the attempts would be fairly transparent.
Because that would eliminate free will too.
Because letting people "choose" to be tortured horribly for eternity is a swell idea. Kind of like letting your kids "choose" to play on the freeway.
1. To be fair, every commercial insurance I've seen does accept the standard codes (ICD-9, ICD-10, CPT-4, etc.) and billing forms and electronic steams (UB's, HCFA's, 837/835's, 5010's, etc.) that Medicare does. The high bar is set by CMS, and it's probably a good thing that they do because it makes disease and treatment reporting statistics slightly more accurate and meaningful. Medical coding is just a very complex topic. Just try categorizing every possible medical diagnosis into 14567 codes (ICD-9, as of October 2011). It may be possible to simplify billing to some extent, for instance by reverting to a single payer, but a lot of the complexity is simply abiding by CMS's rules for documentation (the medical record must support every line item) and combining stays. Some organizations are trying HMO 2.0 where a payer just pays a lump sum based on the diagnosis and some additional factors (no line item billing), but unless that's done very carefully I don't see that ending well at all.
2. Medical malpractice insurance is around 5 or 10 percent of total costs which is certainly high but probably not the biggest contributor to overall cost. Defensive procedures can also be blamed on patients who demand them instead of just trusting their doctors.
3. Fraud is probably not as big a contributor towards total costs as you might think. While there is some overhead chasing bad debt and some abuse of unnecessary procedures, the vast majority of people don't want to be in the hospital unless they're actually sick. The costs are shifted to legitimate payers but the total national cost of healthcare is probably not too adversely inflated. By treating homelessness directly you probably would end up hospitalizing and treating most of those patients for mental health issues anyway.
4. I'd add the cost of supplies to your list. Hospitals and clinics get soaked for everything from electronic devices to sterile pads. There's a high demand with only a few manufacturers and strict regulation but ultimately most patient-room medical devices shouldn't cost much more to manufacture than an iPad. Nationalizing drug development and testing would no doubt help defray another 5% to 15% of the total cost, not to mention helping the third world immensely.
I think that ultimately health care costs have increased so much because we can cure and treat so much. Society is going to have to deal with the fact that longer, healthier lives are a cost-benefit decision and value SUVs and 3D TVs and $3,000,000 Superbowl commercials appropriately.
There is another choice - fuck the government and the horse it rode in on. It's up to the individuals to make individual choices and to help those they want to help without being forced by the guns of gov't officials.
Well good luck because the richest of the rich only want to help each other and they'll be to the ones who own all the schools, roads, utilities, and hospitals when the government sells them off to the highest bidder in response to a 100% libertarian Congress and President. There have been thousands of every-man-for-himself societies in the past and every one of them has been a despotic shithole. Don't forget that the golden age of American Expansionism where some libertarian ideals almost worked was at the expense of native people who had been forming cohesive societies for centuries. There's no more West to travel into and carve out your homestead; you live in a slightly younger version of Europe now.
Government-provided high speed internet to the home, along with a computer to use it, is an unjustified expense.
I suppose that attitude is why the U.S. is falling quite a ways behind most first world countries in the bits-per-second-per-dollar department. I imagine the government also had absolutely no business creating and funding a postal service to deliver packets (of mail) to people's homes.
Maybe you should RTFD (. . . disclaimer) about delta V a little closer. It's that part before the raw data that actually explains what was recorded, and how. Given only Acceleration(t), you can integrate it into Velocity(t) + C where C is unknown because no initial velocity is given. I'm not sure where you saw the 22MPH "acceleration" while the data was being retrieved, but all the data is stored in NVRAM and retrieved later. TFD clearly states that you have to be careful to plug into the module correctly so that new trouble codes don't overwrite old data, and presumably whoever read the module data was careful.
Strike any rigid object against a rock wall and it will develop oscillations at its resonant frequency. If it deforms, you'll get even more interesting waveforms.
If you look at the actual data (the second link) you can see that in the 82 milliseconds leading up to the crash he was decelerating rather hard (about half a G, although it looks like the accelerometer's precision is a bit less than 0.4 Gs and I suppose it could have just been reading 0 acceleration inaccurately).
The most interesting thing is the wild oscillations in the accelerometer data during the crash. There are some pretty amazing vibrations traveling through the frame during a collision. It's important to note that the accelerometers experience much more acceleration than the passenger does due to being mounted on the frame. While the sensors saw +/- 40G it's likely that the dude experienced roughly 9 or 10 G's given the delta V over the last 70 ms.
In some cases they are required to provide Internet access even if it's not necessarily in your home or using your own personal device. There are several countries that only have Internet access to some government services and they do provide public computers for access to those services, and probably subsidize Internet connections in general to make it even easier to access those services.
Much like the government is required to provide public access to courts, polling places, and other city, state, and federal buildings, public access to the Internet may soon become a necessity in the U.S. The existence of things like the new interactive whitehouse.gov features are almost enough to make Internet access a fundamental right so that poor or otherwise disadvantaged people are not excluded from political participation.
Seriously though, if you want to write a correct (or secure, same thing) application, use a type safe language combined with a formal modeling/proof language. There are dozens of choices and you can formally demonstrate any predicate that you care to, up to correctness for your entire application within the constraints of the programming/modeling environment.
If they knew the domain name, yes. Hopefully at least a few sites are not stupid enough to display a user's email address on the password reset screen (or anywhere else publicly available, for that matter).
My password files just look like this:
/dev/random.
user: damnstupidelf
pass: glintprickjuliatrunkwouldexcelhymnallearhopbloat
first girlfriend: razeblazetrudytdmoltnobitalysankassetzd
high school: actsdrurybyrneavailprofit'llsjmeaddrawpave
some_other_weakest_link_in_site_security_question: alleysandalohmichead60fendweighhamlinwillstout
I sign up for site accounts using email addresses at random domains that will expire soon. No chance of plaintext password-reset emails being sent out and intercepted unless the site uses a non-SSL third party relay.
The password files are symmetrically encrypted with a passphrase that isn't used anywhere else. Long diceware passphrases are immune to rainbow tables, dictionary and brute force attacks, and rubber hose cryptanalysis (I can't remember them), although some worthless sites limit the length of password form fields (shouldn't the site salt and hash passphrases to a fixed number of bits immediately, thus negating the need to limit the length? Yes.) and I have to revert to uuencoding 16 bytes from
The password files are on an encrypted partition using an ephemeral key on a netbook and there's a generator for power outages longer than a couple hours. Alt-SysRq-B has been modified to wipe RAM before rebooting. I hooked up a USB heart monitor as an actual deadman switch to use when I sleep.
NO ONE is getting my WoW forum credentials.
Sounds just like a Y2K-style disaster/frenzy.
Pretty much. It's a technical problem that is being solved incrementally over a period of years so that there aren't eventually widespread shortages or other major problems (NAT is pretty much the two digit year format). "Normal" people got frenzied over technical issues, but of course they'll also frenzy over some person on TV having a scripted event happen to them.
A far cheaper solution would be to turn half of Kansas into poppy farms and half of Florida into Coca farms. Subsidize them like corn and sell the FDA-grade drugs in supermarkets and vending machines at subsidized prices. I guarantee that the illegal drug trade in the U.S. will be gone with 5 years, and the international rings will switch to completely legal flights out of the U.S. into staging countries. Fire the goddamn ATF and balance the budget with the taxes on drugs.
But no, carpet bombing with B52s is the way to go, of course. Why not just nuke them?
Either silicon valley should secede or we should start up a nice commune down in Antarctica with safe Gen3 nuclear power. Just think of the efficiency at that delta-T!
How do you explain this? Did the Koch brothers forget a bribe payment?
There's no need to prove that a given belief is completely correct. One just needs a method to compare two beliefs/hypotheses and see which one makes better predictions. Thanks science!
So the obvious thing to do is not to look at some boring distant planet, but look at some star a few thousand light years away. But don't look directly at it, use it as a second gravitational lens to look at *another* star, and indefinitely extend the range of the telescope. Assuming the focal point isn't directly on the opposite side of the gravity well it would be possible to aim the telescope within a small angle and conceivably bend the light path around until it was focusing back on our own planet Earth's past. Our photons stream ever outward but presumably some of them do return by circuitous routes for us to collect and image our own history.