There's a fairly good piece on it in John McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy" , which gives some information on the topic; I believe that's where I first saw the salad bowl reference.
Most of the ideas behind how to build a bomb are fairly simple. Critical mass and how to calculate it, implosion versus gun type bombs, the effects of reflectors, and so forth. I learned most of the basic math before I dropped my Nuclear Engineering major. Of course, there's no practical way for anything but a large government to make a fusion bomb; ignition temps usually need a fission primer charge. However, it's easy to get something that will cause fission and make a big boom, if you have the fissiles and use some simple approximations ("assume a spherical cow").
Without the detailed computer modeling, you don't anywhere near as big a boom for your kilo of fissile U-235, Pu-240, or U233 (if you're getting exotic). What you get instead is a less efficient reaction, and more of your fissile material goes into the fallout directly rather than fission. Where 40 kilos or so could be optimized to probably around 100 kilotons, a quick-and-sloppy back of the envelope approach would give probably only 1 kiloton. So, yeah, a couple of aluminum salad bowls could be turned into a quick-and-cheap reflector for your bomb, but you would get as big a bang as if you used well machined berylium hemispheres.
The hard part is getting the right material. Stealing fissile material is the easiest for anything besides a government-- isotope separation isn't trivial. And even in the Soviet dis-Union, bomb grade stuff is somewhat guarded. Much better would be some of the FRIGGIN HUGE non-fissile radioisotopes that are essentially just plain missing over there, and could provide a weapon nearly as effective. Stealing one of them, powdering the source (sometimes already done), mixing the powder with a standard fertilizer truck bomb, and blowing it up in a major city would be almost as effective as blowing up a nuke. True, there wouldn't be the lasting sheer "duck and cover" level of hysteria of "someone else has the bomb!", but it would be fairly high. The blast wouldn't level the city, but it could render the bulk of it unusable for a century or so.
While terrorists of Bin Laden's ilk wouldn't hesitate to use a nuke that fell into their hands, they won't concentrate their construction efforts on fission or fusion weapons. Radiological weapons are a much more practical ambition for them to be seeking.
The 32.2 G$ figure is apparently for all media formats, including DVD-audio, Apple iTunes, and music video sales, which were all rising. The 7.5% figure is the fall in sales in the CD category only. The basic math about the royalties fraud versus piracy losses for artists is probably still right.
Haven't they heard of a recession? I just wonder what all "affects" the sales of records[...]
Traditionally, entertainment as a whole is believed to be a counter-cyclical industry, doing BETTER in times of recession; this is attributed to escapism in bad times. From this standpoint, falling music sales seems odd.
It's easy to suggest explanations. If it's perceived that music CDs are overpriced, that may cause them to be treated as a luxury good by the middle class, dropping sales. It may be that music is no longer entertaining, which removes it from it's industry's tradtional immunity. Piracy may be directly cutting sales like the RIAA claim. Or, the belief in the counter-cyclical nature of entertainment may be wrong.
Testing these theories would be more challenging, and papers on them will doubtless keep the economics academic journals in business.
Um... most people don't have several million dollars in their bank accounts, which is what a bad password can cost a company in (a) industrial espionage, (b) lawsuits, or (c) embezzlement, depending what the password is to.
And I've been making noises to my bank about wanting at least a 5 digit pin since I got the damn card.
Especially when there is alcohol involved. I doubt that you would let your teenage daughter go to a frat party wearing a next to nothing.
If she's teenaged, and there's alcohol, I'd object to the drinking underage, not because of what she's wearing. I have the fashion sense of a plaid suit with paisley tie, so fashion advice is Not In My Job Description. If she's at a frat party, I'd question her taste also, but that's why you try to teach some values while they're growing up. (There's nothing quite like hearing a snide "Barbie is a bimbo" from a five-year old girl.)
Because everyone always tells the truth to the police:
"Yes sir, officer, I was thought I was doing 55mph... you musta clocked that other car.."
Depends on the cop. There's a couple of national parks where the rangers give out speeding tickets. Lying to them is a federal felony. I don't care how much the speeding ticket is going to be for, I don't care if it's going to cost me my license: It will cost me more and be longer before I can legally drive if I go to prison for five years over lying to a fed. Smile, admit you were stupid, take the ticket, and chalk up the experience. If you hire a good lawyer and get a freindly judge, you may even avoid the reckless driving conviction.
We had one machine left that missed the regular updates. Due to its horrible programming, the worm interferes with normal TCP/IP operation, which made updating afterwards difficult. Pulling up the task manager and killing the process it ran as (avserve.exe) then allowed me to get the machine to update windows and the anti-virus definitions normally.
The big places usually have one Guru level tech hiding away amidst the competents hiding in the herd of incompetents, and for some problems, you're screwed unless you find him. The small phone companies seldom have even the one... but if he's there, he's easier to find in the smaller herd.
If you are very lucky, you will figure out who he is. If you are very, very lucky, and impress him as a not-stupid yourself, he will let you know how to make sure your requests for service get routed away from the incompetents in the future.
Or how about girls get taught to respect themselves and not GO to frat parties and get trashed while wearing as little as possible
Speaking as a guy, girls should be able to wear as little as they want to the frat party, and still beat the guys off with nothing more than saying "no": how they dress is NO excuse for a guy acting as anything other than a gentleman. (Remember, even if she's wandering around naked, you have to ask politely "Do you mind if I grope your tits?" before trying it.)
On the other hand, if they choose to drink or do drugs, they should do so willing to accept responsibility for anything they do while under the influence, whether it's spraypainting their name on a wall, driving their car into a wall, or screwing some random stranger.
How about guys treat girls with respect and not as pieces of meat?
Assholes get attention; they may be slapped more often, but if they don't have a specific target for their pickup attempts, they have good chance of getting laid, too.
Nice guys don't get slapped, but they not only don't get laid, they also don't get much in the way of moderate freindly attention from either specific or general targets as encouragement either-- they mostly get ignored.
Ergo, agressive behavior by guys is more socially rewarding in the near term, and civilized behavior is extensively under-rewarded.
Behavior that is rewarded is more often repeated; behavior that is unrewarded is less often repeated. Do the math, and you get both the "nice guys finish last" and the "guys treat girls like pieces of meat" conditions. The corollaries of how this can be changed are left as an exercise for the student.
I had personal knowledge of most of these, and they were always consensual (albeit drunken) sex that turned into rape the next morning.
IAmNotALawyer. From what I recall of the general nature of rape laws, the key is the ability for both participants to be able to give informed consent. Thus, statutory rape is illegal based on the idea that below a certain age, the person lacks the legal capacity to make the informed decision. In the case of intoxication (be it ethanol or flunitrazepam), the person is considered legally impaired and unable to give consent. In the state where I went to college, that was codified in the date-rape law.
Of course, there was one stupid part to the law. In theory, if both the guy and girl had drinks before they met, they met up and went off to a bedroom, then when they woke up the next morning ("Aiiigh! Coyote woman/guy!") they could BOTH file rape charges under the law as written. For some reason, it really pissed people off when I pointed this out. (It made a fun test to distinguish feminists versus feminazis; the former looked thoughtful, the latter started screaming at me.)
Speaking from a personal ethical standpoint, I would say that if you knowingly choose to take a drug (like ethanol), you are morally responsible for anything you choose to do while your judgement is impaired by it. So, if the girl goes out and gets drunk, and decides to screw a guy, she should be considered responsible... in that she freely choose to enter the state of impaired judgement. This, however, is not how the law reads. Choosing to have sex is the ONLY thing you can get out from legal responsibility for when you choose to become intoxicated... which is stupid.
So (at least where I went to college), if she knew there was grain in the punch, it was legally rape, even if morally it wasn't. On the other hand, if you don't check that she knows the punch is spiked when you hand her that first glass, it may be rape on ALL accounts.
While it's true no American president was ever elected with a minority of the electoral vote,
[BZZT!]
"I'm sorry, thank you for playing, next contestant please..."
John Quincy Adams, 1824. Andrew Jackson had both a higher popular vote and electoral college vote, but neither had a majority. Under constitutional provisions, the top three candidates were voted on by the house; the fourth threw his support behind Adams, giving him enough for a victory. (Additional reference source)
The 1876 Hayes/Tilden election also might qualify, as an electoral commission of dubious provenance decided the fates of votes from 4 disputed states, with Hayes finally winning by a single electoral vote.
wow, so words are in fact defined by the dictionary, rather than the speech community that uses them?
The problem here is that there are in fact two communities using these terms: there are the professional cybergeek types, who actually know something about the field, and there are the unwashed masses of the general public, who are blissfully ignorant. The Geeks distinguish between hacking and cracking; the great unwashed, however, could care less about the subtle-or-not distinction, and use one term for both.
The term "hacker" started out in the computer community a LONG time back-- I recall reading history pieces that date the term to the 60s. It predates the Google USENET archive, anyway. However, the semantic distinction between hacker and cracker within the Geek community clearly does not predate that great repository of asbestos suppositories.
Anyway, my point is: the hacker community did not make a clear semantic distinction of "cracking" until after the term "hacking" was exposed to the public, and that at the time "hacking" was still a correct term describing the activity, albeit one that included many other different activities as well.
do adervisters really think this will increase their sales.
For the large, reponsible companies-- brands 80% of the population of your home state would recognize-- of course not. But for Fly-By-Night-Porn.com and other tiny web companies which would otherwise get zero business, even a minimal response rate from those getting the ad can be well worthwhile, even if the other 99.999% of the people seeing the ad swear up and down they "will NEVER do business with those #$%^ing @#$%^&*s so long as they exist". And they can always change names if the original company name gets tarnished.
JV: Let's say there are a thousand. But there are 284 million people in this country. You can't have public policy that is aimed at 100,000 people when the other multi-multi-millions are also involved. You can't do it that way.
It's been a while since my civics class, but isn't our entire country founded on the idea that people have certain inalienable rights, even in the face of a majority that wishes to take away those rights?
More to the point: How many people are content creators, who own the rights to these movies the MPAA is trying to "protect"? Probably less than that 100,000 number Valenti quotes.
Protecting the rights of the minority is something people tend to become much more enthusiastic about when they are part of that minority.
It was only the DOD that was considering an internet enabled voting setup, that only for overseas use, and they gave up the idea as stupid. From what I've read, the Diebold type machines are essentially connected by SneakerNet-- carry flash memory cards from polling terminal to central counting machine.
Never underestimate the bandwidth and throughput of a stationwagon full of mag tape.
I suspect the bump was because the earlier post was sent as "Anonymous Coward", giving it an initial score of 0 rather than 1, making it easier for a lazy moderator to see. After that, another lazy moderator didn't care which was timestamped first, and downmodded the other. Not fair, really, but most people with mod points don't bother with the part of the guidelines that says "browse at -1".
Real would be in a great position to
[...]
offer a music management platform to rival all others
In a position to do so, yes; would do so, probably not. The problem is their current free player is very hard to find to download, and last I heard their privacy/spam policy sucked-- a flaw with their advertising supported model, or at least its implementation. It's also highly intrusive, insisting on constantly checking and nagging abot updating to newer-but-not-better versions. The last straw for me was when a security exploit was announced in all versions, and you HAD to update to the newest version.... which was NOT readily findable on their website. As I recall, that week you needed to supply a working email address to get to download the current free player.
My reaction was to explain to my boss that I considered this behavior unacceptable when combined with their poor privacy policy, and got the go-ahead to uninstall Real Player from every PC and Mac I support. No-one has missed it.
As one other poster noted, this may have been done by a projectionist who didn't want the competition.
My then-girlfreind worked as a manager for one and another local theatre with one of the Big Chains. There was a "gentlemen's agreement" between all of the managers for all of the chains allowing the "build screenings" (where they watch the movie after it is first spliced together to make sure it is in the correct order & direction... which was not always the case) were open to any local theatre employee, with one significant other allowed as a guest.... which is how I got to see this first hand.
The managers and some of the more senior trained staff generally took care of the projection duties. At the main theatre for the Other Big Chain, one of the projectionists had a $10K pro-level video camera up in the projection loft for every major release, making a quality copy for his cousin in NYC to redistribute. None of the other theatre managers cared, since it wasn't their theatre, and thus not their problem. The manager for that theatre didn't do anything either, since he was presumably getting a cut of the sale to the DVD maker, and was certainly busy doctoring the books to rob the chain of half the popcorn sales. I cared a little, but not enough to risk pissing off every other manager in town at my GF.
The projectionist had a better sense of timing than the manager-- he quit and left town about three months before the manager was audited and fired for theft. To the best of my knowlege, though, neither were ever caught for their piracy.
The majority of theatre employees, in my experience, are underbright, underpaid, overworked, and consider anything they can get away with five-finger discounting a "perk". (However, restaurant workers are worse on par.) And anyone who deals with computer threat assesment can tell you, the biggest threat to security is from an employee doing an inside job.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a fairly good piece on it in John McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy" , which gives some information on the topic; I believe that's where I first saw the salad bowl reference.
Most of the ideas behind how to build a bomb are fairly simple. Critical mass and how to calculate it, implosion versus gun type bombs, the effects of reflectors, and so forth. I learned most of the basic math before I dropped my Nuclear Engineering major. Of course, there's no practical way for anything but a large government to make a fusion bomb; ignition temps usually need a fission primer charge. However, it's easy to get something that will cause fission and make a big boom, if you have the fissiles and use some simple approximations ("assume a spherical cow").
Without the detailed computer modeling, you don't anywhere near as big a boom for your kilo of fissile U-235, Pu-240, or U233 (if you're getting exotic). What you get instead is a less efficient reaction, and more of your fissile material goes into the fallout directly rather than fission. Where 40 kilos or so could be optimized to probably around 100 kilotons, a quick-and-sloppy back of the envelope approach would give probably only 1 kiloton. So, yeah, a couple of aluminum salad bowls could be turned into a quick-and-cheap reflector for your bomb, but you would get as big a bang as if you used well machined berylium hemispheres.
The hard part is getting the right material. Stealing fissile material is the easiest for anything besides a government-- isotope separation isn't trivial. And even in the Soviet dis-Union, bomb grade stuff is somewhat guarded. Much better would be some of the FRIGGIN HUGE non-fissile radioisotopes that are essentially just plain missing over there, and could provide a weapon nearly as effective. Stealing one of them, powdering the source (sometimes already done), mixing the powder with a standard fertilizer truck bomb, and blowing it up in a major city would be almost as effective as blowing up a nuke. True, there wouldn't be the lasting sheer "duck and cover" level of hysteria of "someone else has the bomb!", but it would be fairly high. The blast wouldn't level the city, but it could render the bulk of it unusable for a century or so.
While terrorists of Bin Laden's ilk wouldn't hesitate to use a nuke that fell into their hands, they won't concentrate their construction efforts on fission or fusion weapons. Radiological weapons are a much more practical ambition for them to be seeking.
wtf? That's 0.6% not 7.5%
The 32.2 G$ figure is apparently for all media formats, including DVD-audio, Apple iTunes, and music video sales, which were all rising. The 7.5% figure is the fall in sales in the CD category only. The basic math about the royalties fraud versus piracy losses for artists is probably still right.
Haven't they heard of a recession? I just wonder what all "affects" the sales of records[...]
Traditionally, entertainment as a whole is believed to be a counter-cyclical industry, doing BETTER in times of recession; this is attributed to escapism in bad times. From this standpoint, falling music sales seems odd.
It's easy to suggest explanations. If it's perceived that music CDs are overpriced, that may cause them to be treated as a luxury good by the middle class, dropping sales. It may be that music is no longer entertaining, which removes it from it's industry's tradtional immunity. Piracy may be directly cutting sales like the RIAA claim. Or, the belief in the counter-cyclical nature of entertainment may be wrong.
Testing these theories would be more challenging, and papers on them will doubtless keep the economics academic journals in business.
Um... most people don't have several million dollars in their bank accounts, which is what a bad password can cost a company in (a) industrial espionage, (b) lawsuits, or (c) embezzlement, depending what the password is to.
And I've been making noises to my bank about wanting at least a 5 digit pin since I got the damn card.
Obscene passwords (or phrases) reduce the chance of anyone casually mentioning what their password is.
Especially when there is alcohol involved. I doubt that you would let your teenage daughter go to a frat party wearing a next to nothing.
If she's teenaged, and there's alcohol, I'd object to the drinking underage, not because of what she's wearing. I have the fashion sense of a plaid suit with paisley tie, so fashion advice is Not In My Job Description. If she's at a frat party, I'd question her taste also, but that's why you try to teach some values while they're growing up. (There's nothing quite like hearing a snide "Barbie is a bimbo" from a five-year old girl.)
Because everyone always tells the truth to the police: ... you musta clocked that other car.."
"Yes sir, officer, I was thought I was doing 55mph
Depends on the cop. There's a couple of national parks where the rangers give out speeding tickets. Lying to them is a federal felony. I don't care how much the speeding ticket is going to be for, I don't care if it's going to cost me my license: It will cost me more and be longer before I can legally drive if I go to prison for five years over lying to a fed. Smile, admit you were stupid, take the ticket, and chalk up the experience. If you hire a good lawyer and get a freindly judge, you may even avoid the reckless driving conviction.
We had one machine left that missed the regular updates. Due to its horrible programming, the worm interferes with normal TCP/IP operation, which made updating afterwards difficult. Pulling up the task manager and killing the process it ran as (avserve.exe) then allowed me to get the machine to update windows and the anti-virus definitions normally.
If you fire anyone, please fire the laptop-owner.
You might consider firing the person whose responsibility it was to make sure Critical Updates got applied to that laptop.
The big places usually have one Guru level tech hiding away amidst the competents hiding in the herd of incompetents, and for some problems, you're screwed unless you find him. The small phone companies seldom have even the one... but if he's there, he's easier to find in the smaller herd.
If you are very lucky, you will figure out who he is. If you are very, very lucky, and impress him as a not-stupid yourself, he will let you know how to make sure your requests for service get routed away from the incompetents in the future.
Or how about girls get taught to respect themselves and not GO to frat parties and get trashed while wearing as little as possible
Speaking as a guy, girls should be able to wear as little as they want to the frat party, and still beat the guys off with nothing more than saying "no": how they dress is NO excuse for a guy acting as anything other than a gentleman. (Remember, even if she's wandering around naked, you have to ask politely "Do you mind if I grope your tits?" before trying it.)
On the other hand, if they choose to drink or do drugs, they should do so willing to accept responsibility for anything they do while under the influence, whether it's spraypainting their name on a wall, driving their car into a wall, or screwing some random stranger.
How about guys treat girls with respect and not as pieces of meat?
Assholes get attention; they may be slapped more often, but if they don't have a specific target for their pickup attempts, they have good chance of getting laid, too.
Nice guys don't get slapped, but they not only don't get laid, they also don't get much in the way of moderate freindly attention from either specific or general targets as encouragement either-- they mostly get ignored.
Ergo, agressive behavior by guys is more socially rewarding in the near term, and civilized behavior is extensively under-rewarded.
Behavior that is rewarded is more often repeated; behavior that is unrewarded is less often repeated. Do the math, and you get both the "nice guys finish last" and the "guys treat girls like pieces of meat" conditions. The corollaries of how this can be changed are left as an exercise for the student.
I had personal knowledge of most of these, and they were always consensual (albeit drunken) sex that turned into rape the next morning.
IAmNotALawyer. From what I recall of the general nature of rape laws, the key is the ability for both participants to be able to give informed consent. Thus, statutory rape is illegal based on the idea that below a certain age, the person lacks the legal capacity to make the informed decision. In the case of intoxication (be it ethanol or flunitrazepam), the person is considered legally impaired and unable to give consent. In the state where I went to college, that was codified in the date-rape law.
Of course, there was one stupid part to the law. In theory, if both the guy and girl had drinks before they met, they met up and went off to a bedroom, then when they woke up the next morning ("Aiiigh! Coyote woman/guy!") they could BOTH file rape charges under the law as written. For some reason, it really pissed people off when I pointed this out. (It made a fun test to distinguish feminists versus feminazis; the former looked thoughtful, the latter started screaming at me.)
Speaking from a personal ethical standpoint, I would say that if you knowingly choose to take a drug (like ethanol), you are morally responsible for anything you choose to do while your judgement is impaired by it. So, if the girl goes out and gets drunk, and decides to screw a guy, she should be considered responsible... in that she freely choose to enter the state of impaired judgement. This, however, is not how the law reads. Choosing to have sex is the ONLY thing you can get out from legal responsibility for when you choose to become intoxicated... which is stupid.
So (at least where I went to college), if she knew there was grain in the punch, it was legally rape, even if morally it wasn't. On the other hand, if you don't check that she knows the punch is spiked when you hand her that first glass, it may be rape on ALL accounts.
While it's true no American president was ever elected with a minority of the electoral vote,
[BZZT!]
"I'm sorry, thank you for playing, next contestant please..."
John Quincy Adams, 1824. Andrew Jackson had both a higher popular vote and electoral college vote, but neither had a majority. Under constitutional provisions, the top three candidates were voted on by the house; the fourth threw his support behind Adams, giving him enough for a victory. (Additional reference source)
The 1876 Hayes/Tilden election also might qualify, as an electoral commission of dubious provenance decided the fates of votes from 4 disputed states, with Hayes finally winning by a single electoral vote.
And, of course, the Florida electoral votes would have been enough to swing the 2000 election, if you want to bring those shenanigans back up....
wow, so words are in fact defined by the dictionary, rather than the speech community that uses them?
The problem here is that there are in fact two communities using these terms: there are the professional cybergeek types, who actually know something about the field, and there are the unwashed masses of the general public, who are blissfully ignorant. The Geeks distinguish between hacking and cracking; the great unwashed, however, could care less about the subtle-or-not distinction, and use one term for both.
The term "hacker" started out in the computer community a LONG time back-- I recall reading history pieces that date the term to the 60s. It predates the Google USENET archive, anyway. However, the semantic distinction between hacker and cracker within the Geek community clearly does not predate that great repository of asbestos suppositories.
The earliest post archived at Google using both the terms "hacker" and "cracker" was on September 15, 1983. This was apparently in response to a news piece on CBS news on roughly Wednesday the 14th, although there is evidence of at least something being earlier. While I do not remember the CBS news piece, it was most likely prompted by a Hollywood turkey released around then.
When the news media presented this little petri-dish culture to the great Unwashed, they made one mistake. They heard, "someone who breaks into systems is a hacker", and reported "a hacker is someone who breaks into systems". It's a category error fallacy, or perhaps a definition fallacy, but who expects logical thought from a reporter?
Anyway, my point is: the hacker community did not make a clear semantic distinction of "cracking" until after the term "hacking" was exposed to the public, and that at the time "hacking" was still a correct term describing the activity, albeit one that included many other different activities as well.
do adervisters really think this will increase their sales.
For the large, reponsible companies-- brands 80% of the population of your home state would recognize-- of course not. But for Fly-By-Night-Porn.com and other tiny web companies which would otherwise get zero business, even a minimal response rate from those getting the ad can be well worthwhile, even if the other 99.999% of the people seeing the ad swear up and down they "will NEVER do business with those #$%^ing @#$%^&*s so long as they exist". And they can always change names if the original company name gets tarnished.
But why would we treat our money as more precious than the foundation of our republican democracy?
What, you mean money isn't the foundation of our Republican democracy?
It's been a while since my civics class, but isn't our entire country founded on the idea that people have certain inalienable rights, even in the face of a majority that wishes to take away those rights?
More to the point: How many people are content creators, who own the rights to these movies the MPAA is trying to "protect"? Probably less than that 100,000 number Valenti quotes.
Protecting the rights of the minority is something people tend to become much more enthusiastic about when they are part of that minority.
"This doesn't solve the problems," said Tab Iredale, a Diebold developer.
No, but "If you will not set a good example, you will serve as a terrible warning."
It was only the DOD that was considering an internet enabled voting setup, that only for overseas use, and they gave up the idea as stupid. From what I've read, the Diebold type machines are essentially connected by SneakerNet-- carry flash memory cards from polling terminal to central counting machine.
Never underestimate the bandwidth and throughput of a stationwagon full of mag tape.
I suspect the bump was because the earlier post was sent as "Anonymous Coward", giving it an initial score of 0 rather than 1, making it easier for a lazy moderator to see. After that, another lazy moderator didn't care which was timestamped first, and downmodded the other. Not fair, really, but most people with mod points don't bother with the part of the guidelines that says "browse at -1".
And, according what looks to be an Arizona TV station, the two stories are linked.
About raiding an Arizona school?
This recreation was painstakingly researched for nearly 5 years before construction.
So were those the five years before construction of the replica, or the five years before the construction of the original?
Is a newspaper the place to run opinion fodder?
Yes... traditionally the inside back two pages of the first section-- the editorial pages, in an area clearly marked for opinion.
Does it belong elsewhere in the paper? Sure... in clearly marked advertisements, too. Oh, you mean in the articles? Absolutely not.
Real would be in a great position to [...] offer a music management platform to rival all others
In a position to do so, yes; would do so, probably not. The problem is their current free player is very hard to find to download, and last I heard their privacy/spam policy sucked-- a flaw with their advertising supported model, or at least its implementation. It's also highly intrusive, insisting on constantly checking and nagging abot updating to newer-but-not-better versions. The last straw for me was when a security exploit was announced in all versions, and you HAD to update to the newest version.... which was NOT readily findable on their website. As I recall, that week you needed to supply a working email address to get to download the current free player.
My reaction was to explain to my boss that I considered this behavior unacceptable when combined with their poor privacy policy, and got the go-ahead to uninstall Real Player from every PC and Mac I support. No-one has missed it.
Really? That prevalent?
As one other poster noted, this may have been done by a projectionist who didn't want the competition.
My then-girlfreind worked as a manager for one and another local theatre with one of the Big Chains. There was a "gentlemen's agreement" between all of the managers for all of the chains allowing the "build screenings" (where they watch the movie after it is first spliced together to make sure it is in the correct order & direction... which was not always the case) were open to any local theatre employee, with one significant other allowed as a guest.... which is how I got to see this first hand.
The managers and some of the more senior trained staff generally took care of the projection duties. At the main theatre for the Other Big Chain, one of the projectionists had a $10K pro-level video camera up in the projection loft for every major release, making a quality copy for his cousin in NYC to redistribute. None of the other theatre managers cared, since it wasn't their theatre, and thus not their problem. The manager for that theatre didn't do anything either, since he was presumably getting a cut of the sale to the DVD maker, and was certainly busy doctoring the books to rob the chain of half the popcorn sales. I cared a little, but not enough to risk pissing off every other manager in town at my GF.
The projectionist had a better sense of timing than the manager-- he quit and left town about three months before the manager was audited and fired for theft. To the best of my knowlege, though, neither were ever caught for their piracy.
The majority of theatre employees, in my experience, are underbright, underpaid, overworked, and consider anything they can get away with five-finger discounting a "perk". (However, restaurant workers are worse on par.) And anyone who deals with computer threat assesment can tell you, the biggest threat to security is from an employee doing an inside job.