As great as open source is that indeed is one of the two elephants in the room (the other being documentation*.) Bugs get completely ignored as new versions get rolled out and then later marked as "Won't Fix". Firefox fixing their memory leak "any day now" is the running joke.
It's an old one, though. I think there was a benchmark a while back that showed that Firefox (14? 15?) was actually the most efficient browser for certain usage scenarios (namely a very large number of tabs open simultaneously). Mind you, it's still by no means lightweight but its memory usage does stabilize after a while and Chrome wouldn't be much better for extremely heavy use.
And yes, I do easily reach 100-200 simultaneously open tabs.
Why not install Guake or Yakuake and tell your DE to autostart it? For me, the console is mapped to F1. I don't see why I should need more than one key press to get to the terminal.
Admittedly, I don't know whether Unity can autostart applications and how it deals with apps that don't use traditional windows like Quake-style terminals.
Actually, the smarter history teachers won't teach "OUR FAULT OUR FAULT" but instead "everyone's just a couple missed meals and an extremist offering food away from starting the Holocaust". The late 1920s illustrated that civilization as we know it is a very fragile thing.
To be honest, having your graphics card lag a year behind is perfectly acceptable unless you absolutely need to play the latest games on top settings (or do heavy CAD, I guess, but I think that market operates differently from the consumer market I know so I can't comment on it).
I'm currently using a Geforce 8800 GTS. Yes, 8800. From 2007. It still does modern games reasonably well and if it wasn't so RAM-starved I'd keep using it for another year. When I'll upgrade my gaming rig at the end of the month I'll put in a card with a six times the RAM, which should last for another four to five years.
Yes, a videophile would argue that playing on anything less than 2560x1440 with 16xAA and all setting maxed out is an insult to human eyes but the opinion of any -phile only vaguely applies to normal users. I'm perfectly fine with "mere" 2xAA at 1080p; the gameplay is more important than the graphics anyway. (Case in point: Due to RAM starvation I play Borderlands 2 with fairly bad texture quality but the fact that I can't read Roland's Facebook post doesn't keep me from enjoying the game.)
Note that as the second FA has pointed out, sideloading is only supported in the following scenarios:
Windows 8 Enterprise computer joined to a domain with the "Allow all trusted apps to install" group policy set if the app is signed by a locally-trusted CA
Windows Server 2012 computer joined to a domain with the "Allow all trusted apps to install" group policy set if the app is signed by a locally-trusted CA
Windows 8 Enterprise computer with an MAK (Volume Licensing Multiple Activation Key)
Windows 8 Pro computer with an MAK
Windows RT computer with an MAK
Any Windows 8 computer with a developer license
MAKs are available under the following circumstances
Medium or enterprise sized customers with Software Assurance for Windows or Windows VDA subscriptions in the following Volume Licensing programs will be granted Enterprise Sideloading rights and provided with the MAK keys as an SA benefit at no additional cost. Product keys for Enterprise Sideloading will be made available through the Volume License Service Center (VLSC).
Time-limited developer licenses are available for free for the purpose of testing your own software and...
Microsoft can detect fraudulent use of a developer license on a registered machine. If Microsoft detects fraudulent use or another violation of the software license terms, we might revoke your developer license. The monitoring process helps ensure the overall health of the app marketplace.
In other words, in order to sideload you're either an enterprise customer, you run your own AD setup at home or you use a time-limited developer license that's not intended to be used for sideloading and that can be revoked if Microsoft finds out you use it for sideloading. Which, according to TFA, Microsoft monitors.
Either you're wrong or TFA is and TFA has links to Microsoft as its sources.
Technically it's not - being better in one thing does not imply inherent superiority. Otherwise, I'd be inherently superior to most Americans in that I'm better at German than they are while they are inherently superior to me in that their American English is better.
For the record, I don't really suvbscribe tothat rationality argument, eithar. At the very least I don't think we are inherently more rational, although we might be effectively more rational. Our advantage is that we're not a superpower. Given that people will usually do things they can get away with (depending on one's moral framework), that top politicians tend to have few scruples and that people like to believe that they aren't doing evil I think it's a reasonably safe assumption that more powerful countries will tend to be more delusional about their status in the world and the possible consequeces of their actions.
If Europe should make it to superpower status (which seems iffy given that we'll have to compete with China, India and possibly the US and Russia) we'll become just as much of an overbearing sociopath as all superpowers in recorded history have been. And boy, will we feel good about ourselves.
Well, it's not like Firefox isn't coding to the WHATWG specification. Or Opera. Or Microsoft. HTML5 as specified by WHATWG so far is the HTML5 everyone's currently dealing with.
Of course there are still plenty of WebKit-specific things that pop up all over the web because the web development community seems to have a massive WebKit fetish. (I admit that WebKit is fast and has nice dev tools but I think it's kind of quirky and temperamental compared to Gecko.) Essentially WebKit is turning into IE6 because we're pushing it in that direction, which I find somewhat disturbing. It's like web designers want to suffer.
The question is whether imposing, violent nutjobs require religion in order to ruin everyone's day. I think that without religion they would just latch onto some other concept and use that as a vehicle to mess things up.
The problem isn't religion, the problem is assholes. Unfortunately we don't really have a solution for that.
I agree with you, but yet I still have to concede that it is a lot easier for evil people to manipulate people into doing evil by using the Quran than it is by using My LIttle Pony episodes.
Just give us a few centuries. If the bronydom continues going as strong as it does now I'd say that around the year 2500 we'll blow each other up over disputes like whether She Who Must Not Be Named was actually called "Derpy Hooves" or the precise number of Pinkie Pie's legs, not to mention the fringe cult that insists that Applejack was not a background pony.
Oh, come on. Comparing PHP to PCP is a bit harsh. I mean, one is dangerous and can lead to violent behavior and suicide and the other doesn't have a function called mysqli_real_escape_string().
Perhaps the browser/engine devs should spend some time on making sure that the existing functionality works well before trying to one-up each other in who supports the latest first-draft CSS feature. Then again that's not how competition works so I guess I'll be looking forward to CSS5 Accessible Teledildonics support while hoping that all engines support position: relative properly...
Perhaps I should move towards a field where there's at least one working implementation of my language of choice.
By providing decent documentation in an easy-to-find place they are making it easier to develop web sites and web apps. More web sites mean more developers, more search revenue etc. I'd say that they are trying to get bigger slices by growing the pie.
That's awesome, because without explicit corporate collusion
How is this 'collusion'? What are you implying they are actually doing?
They are colluding to provide comprehensive information on web technologies in order to make it easier to develop web sites and applications, thus allowing them to indirectly make more money. Those fiends.
Apple doesn't make regular desktop PCs. They make all-in-ones (iMac), nettops (Mac mini) and high-end workstations (Mac pro) but they don't make regular desktop PCs. It's a market they apparently didn't find particularly appealing. That does suck if you'd like an Apple tower that isn't a crazy expensive workstation but they apparently like it that way. (Not a big surprise actually; the PC market is characterized by razor-thin margins and that's something Apple tends to avoid.)
Oh yes. Some truckers also show this attitude towards people on scooters. I once rode my scooter (capable of going 110-120 km/h) on the federal highway (speed limit 100 km/h). In front of me was a trucker going at his legal maximum speed of 70 km/h. The road ahead was clear so I decided to overtake him. My scooter was easily powerful enough to do so safely.
That didn't sit well with him, however. While I was next to him he decided to accelerate. Of course I accelerated further because driving on the wrong side of the road is dangerous and I was already next to his cab. He matched my speed and so we were barelling down the road at about 110 km/h (that's more than 150% of what's legal for him) and were getting close to a soft bend in the road. Of course then another truck came around the bend (which I couldn't see sooner because of a dike next to the road).
Since braking sharply would've been the only way to get behind "my" truck in time and I wasn't certain that the space behind the truck was even free I could only get close to the truck on my right to make room. I found myself driving next to one truck while another truck went past me with a speed difference of 190 km/h. That's when the truck driver to my right realized he'd screwed up and hit the brake.
Unfortunately I didn't bother to read his license plate or memorize which company the truck belonged to before overtaking him or I would've reported the guy to the police. Someone who pulls shit like that doesn't belong on the road.
My boss is a photographer (among other things). He uses a Mac. Turns out that people will use the tool that they work best with, even if that tool is twice as expensive. As long as the additional costs don't outweigh the benefits of (perceived) improved productivity, investing in a more expensive tool is a reasonable choice.
It worked the first time. Then again, the first time was with a Flash-based system that was grown over the course of two years and didn't have to support a three-digit customer base from the get go. He's still convinced that I have it easier than the Flash dev, though, because "all the hard work has already been done" and "I merely need to connect a few systems". Yeah, you can tell that he's not really tech savvy.
Lesson learned: "Small, dynamic team" means "senior developer with a junior developer's wage".
Well, the requirements included a presentation system for bringing in new customers (both frotend and backend), domain and mail account management, time management for our coworkers, invoice generation for four different mutually-incompatible pricing structures (with the possibility of having more than one present on the same invoice), invoice generation for business partners that receive money from us, limited remote configuration of WordPress and being able to handle arbitrary constellations of companies and sub-companies that can be in any kind of business relationship with each other.
And, of course, "it has to work like our existing Flash-based system", which I was expected to be able to reverse-engineer just by looking at the user interface without changing anything. In fact, in the very beginning that was the entirety of the specification as the boss assumed that a programmer can infer from the UI what the program does and hey, my predecassor's predecessor had written a design document after al. Of course due to us having no process for handling documents it turned out that no one could find the design document anymore.
I also had to be compatible with the existing presentation system (which was simultaneously unfinished, in active use, critically important and a legacy system scheduled for replacement), which stored everything in a giant entity-key-value table where the uniqueness of entries was assumed but not guaranteed and things ike transactions were completely absent. I also had to maintain that system simultaneously with my development time. We're currently in the process of finally replacing this crock.
Add to that the fact that prior to taking the job I only had hobbyist exposure to PHP and web design and I think it's no wonder that my first attempt at building the system is also currently in the process of being superseded. 1000 man-hours aren't enough to learn how to build maintainable large codebases, get the hang of software architecture and spec out and build a mission-critical large system while simultaneously babysitting various other badly-written systems without a structured way of keeping track of bugs and unfinished functionality.
We do have an RCS and luckily all of our current devs can be arsed to use it. But yeah, the only reason I'm still there is because I don't want to switch jobs while writing my diploma thesis. Plus I want to move away afterwards and short-term student jobs tend to have lousy pay.
(I should've run when the boss told me that he expects me to write an enterprise business management system on my own in PHP in less than a year of part-time work but hey, this is my first real job and I didn't have the experience to recognize obvious delusion for what it is.)
Reminds me of how my boss won't spring for the small investment neccessary to set up things like a bug tracker or a centralized document store. Because hey, paying 300 bucks for a small office server is much too expensive but having the devs fix the same problems over and over again because they half-finished a bugfix, then were moved to some urgent problem and forgot they ever dealt with the issue at all is totally cost-efficient...
I don't know how things look in the USA but in Germany a new unlocked iPhone 4 still goes for 500 EUR (ca. 650 USD). That's very, very far away from "free" or even "cheap". Of course there's "free" in the sense of "you get it for free with a contract that ends up costing you 700 bucks over two years" but then you still pay 700 bucks and it's not even unlocked. Even the 3G (not 3GS) still goes for about 200 EUR new.
Of course you could be referring to a used iPhone 4. Those go for 300 EUR (ca. 400 USD) and up, which is still solidly in "expensive" territory.
And honestly, I wouldn't qualify myself as poor because I have a disposable income of less than 500 bucks a month and don't think I should spend more than a months' worth of disposable income on a telephone. There are plenty of markets (especially emerging ones) where people can straddle the line between "is starving" and "can casually spend the equivalent of 400 to 600 USD on a gadget that will incur further costs during use".
As for the law being counterproductive, another user pointed out that this can very much be the case as CP rings can't easily be infiltrated the way any other organized crime outfit can. Perhaps a less emotional approach would allow us to be more effective in this case. Sure - a few criminals would go free (although the police would probably keep an eye on them) but that might be a reasonable price for the ability to root out entire CP rings.
As for "no one would possess child porn if they weren't pedophiles" thing: Accidental possession is possible. For instance, certain filesharing networks are great places to get yourself into trouble due to mislabeled files. Just because you thought you were downloading Lesbian Tonguetwister 13 doesn't mean that you didn't end up both possessing and distributing child pornography, even if you never wanted any of it in the first place. Yes, this mostly affects people who trawl the seedier parts of the internet for illegal stuff but there's a bit of a difference between copyright infringement and child porn distribution.
The big problem with current CP laws is that they are trying to fight a real thing but are executed as yet another War on an Abstract Concept. Instead of trying to balance each question against each other* we declare child porn to be so utterly abhorrent that any approach other than swiftly and harshly punishing anyone remotely related to it in any context is evil in itself. The appearance of doing something against CP is more important than actually doing something worthwhile.
* What's the best way to stop CP rings? Do current laws hinder or help this? Does drawn/written CP encourage or prevent real abuse? What's a child in the context of sexuality? Where do we draw the line between mere nudity (think baby photos) and pornography? Is there even such a line or is underage nudity entirely illegal? Do we even get the whole picture right now and do our laws reflect all of it?
Slashdot Mirror
As great as open source is that indeed is one of the two elephants in the room (the other being documentation*.) Bugs get completely ignored as new versions get rolled out and then later marked as "Won't Fix". Firefox fixing their memory leak "any day now" is the running joke.
It's an old one, though. I think there was a benchmark a while back that showed that Firefox (14? 15?) was actually the most efficient browser for certain usage scenarios (namely a very large number of tabs open simultaneously). Mind you, it's still by no means lightweight but its memory usage does stabilize after a while and Chrome wouldn't be much better for extremely heavy use.
And yes, I do easily reach 100-200 simultaneously open tabs.
Why not install Guake or Yakuake and tell your DE to autostart it? For me, the console is mapped to F1. I don't see why I should need more than one key press to get to the terminal.
Admittedly, I don't know whether Unity can autostart applications and how it deals with apps that don't use traditional windows like Quake-style terminals.
Actually, the smarter history teachers won't teach "OUR FAULT OUR FAULT" but instead "everyone's just a couple missed meals and an extremist offering food away from starting the Holocaust". The late 1920s illustrated that civilization as we know it is a very fragile thing.
I hate to break it to you, but... We lied to you for all these years. Chemistry classes are eternal. There's a test on friday.
To be honest, having your graphics card lag a year behind is perfectly acceptable unless you absolutely need to play the latest games on top settings (or do heavy CAD, I guess, but I think that market operates differently from the consumer market I know so I can't comment on it).
I'm currently using a Geforce 8800 GTS. Yes, 8800. From 2007. It still does modern games reasonably well and if it wasn't so RAM-starved I'd keep using it for another year. When I'll upgrade my gaming rig at the end of the month I'll put in a card with a six times the RAM, which should last for another four to five years.
Yes, a videophile would argue that playing on anything less than 2560x1440 with 16xAA and all setting maxed out is an insult to human eyes but the opinion of any -phile only vaguely applies to normal users. I'm perfectly fine with "mere" 2xAA at 1080p; the gameplay is more important than the graphics anyway. (Case in point: Due to RAM starvation I play Borderlands 2 with fairly bad texture quality but the fact that I can't read Roland's Facebook post doesn't keep me from enjoying the game.)
MAKs are available under the following circumstances
Medium or enterprise sized customers with Software Assurance for Windows or Windows VDA subscriptions in the following Volume Licensing programs will be granted Enterprise Sideloading rights and provided with the MAK keys as an SA benefit at no additional cost. Product keys for Enterprise Sideloading will be made available through the Volume License Service Center (VLSC).
Time-limited developer licenses are available for free for the purpose of testing your own software and...
Microsoft can detect fraudulent use of a developer license on a registered machine. If Microsoft detects fraudulent use or another violation of the software license terms, we might revoke your developer license. The monitoring process helps ensure the overall health of the app marketplace.
In other words, in order to sideload you're either an enterprise customer, you run your own AD setup at home or you use a time-limited developer license that's not intended to be used for sideloading and that can be revoked if Microsoft finds out you use it for sideloading. Which, according to TFA, Microsoft monitors.
Either you're wrong or TFA is and TFA has links to Microsoft as its sources.
Technically it's not - being better in one thing does not imply inherent superiority. Otherwise, I'd be inherently superior to most Americans in that I'm better at German than they are while they are inherently superior to me in that their American English is better.
For the record, I don't really suvbscribe tothat rationality argument, eithar. At the very least I don't think we are inherently more rational, although we might be effectively more rational. Our advantage is that we're not a superpower. Given that people will usually do things they can get away with (depending on one's moral framework), that top politicians tend to have few scruples and that people like to believe that they aren't doing evil I think it's a reasonably safe assumption that more powerful countries will tend to be more delusional about their status in the world and the possible consequeces of their actions.
If Europe should make it to superpower status (which seems iffy given that we'll have to compete with China, India and possibly the US and Russia) we'll become just as much of an overbearing sociopath as all superpowers in recorded history have been. And boy, will we feel good about ourselves.
Well, it's not like Firefox isn't coding to the WHATWG specification. Or Opera. Or Microsoft. HTML5 as specified by WHATWG so far is the HTML5 everyone's currently dealing with.
Of course there are still plenty of WebKit-specific things that pop up all over the web because the web development community seems to have a massive WebKit fetish. (I admit that WebKit is fast and has nice dev tools but I think it's kind of quirky and temperamental compared to Gecko.) Essentially WebKit is turning into IE6 because we're pushing it in that direction, which I find somewhat disturbing. It's like web designers want to suffer.
The question is whether imposing, violent nutjobs require religion in order to ruin everyone's day. I think that without religion they would just latch onto some other concept and use that as a vehicle to mess things up.
The problem isn't religion, the problem is assholes. Unfortunately we don't really have a solution for that.
I agree with you, but yet I still have to concede that it is a lot easier for evil people to manipulate people into doing evil by using the Quran than it is by using My LIttle Pony episodes.
Just give us a few centuries. If the bronydom continues going as strong as it does now I'd say that around the year 2500 we'll blow each other up over disputes like whether She Who Must Not Be Named was actually called "Derpy Hooves" or the precise number of Pinkie Pie's legs, not to mention the fringe cult that insists that Applejack was not a background pony.
Oh, come on. Comparing PHP to PCP is a bit harsh. I mean, one is dangerous and can lead to violent behavior and suicide and the other doesn't have a function called mysqli_real_escape_string().
So yeah, no surprise here. Please, someone, make a browser that doesnt suck.
True. As a web developer I like HTML5 and CSS3 but it's interesting how browser engines are often still lacking in fairly basic things. For instance, WebKit apparently can't handle hover states on pseudo-elements properly.
Perhaps the browser/engine devs should spend some time on making sure that the existing functionality works well before trying to one-up each other in who supports the latest first-draft CSS feature. Then again that's not how competition works so I guess I'll be looking forward to CSS5 Accessible Teledildonics support while hoping that all engines support position: relative properly...
Perhaps I should move towards a field where there's at least one working implementation of my language of choice.
By providing decent documentation in an easy-to-find place they are making it easier to develop web sites and web apps. More web sites mean more developers, more search revenue etc. I'd say that they are trying to get bigger slices by growing the pie.
That's awesome, because without explicit corporate collusion
How is this 'collusion'? What are you implying they are actually doing?
They are colluding to provide comprehensive information on web technologies in order to make it easier to develop web sites and applications, thus allowing them to indirectly make more money. Those fiends.
Would we be more of a natural predator if we just waited for cows to get caught in our sticky ropes?
The term you're looking for is not "predation" but "zoophilia".
Thank you, I'll be here all week! Try the veal - but not in public, please!
Apple doesn't make regular desktop PCs. They make all-in-ones (iMac), nettops (Mac mini) and high-end workstations (Mac pro) but they don't make regular desktop PCs. It's a market they apparently didn't find particularly appealing. That does suck if you'd like an Apple tower that isn't a crazy expensive workstation but they apparently like it that way. (Not a big surprise actually; the PC market is characterized by razor-thin margins and that's something Apple tends to avoid.)
Oh yes. Some truckers also show this attitude towards people on scooters. I once rode my scooter (capable of going 110-120 km/h) on the federal highway (speed limit 100 km/h). In front of me was a trucker going at his legal maximum speed of 70 km/h. The road ahead was clear so I decided to overtake him. My scooter was easily powerful enough to do so safely.
That didn't sit well with him, however. While I was next to him he decided to accelerate. Of course I accelerated further because driving on the wrong side of the road is dangerous and I was already next to his cab. He matched my speed and so we were barelling down the road at about 110 km/h (that's more than 150% of what's legal for him) and were getting close to a soft bend in the road. Of course then another truck came around the bend (which I couldn't see sooner because of a dike next to the road).
Since braking sharply would've been the only way to get behind "my" truck in time and I wasn't certain that the space behind the truck was even free I could only get close to the truck on my right to make room. I found myself driving next to one truck while another truck went past me with a speed difference of 190 km/h. That's when the truck driver to my right realized he'd screwed up and hit the brake.
Unfortunately I didn't bother to read his license plate or memorize which company the truck belonged to before overtaking him or I would've reported the guy to the police. Someone who pulls shit like that doesn't belong on the road.
Yeah, that one was built during WW2. Hitler liked his tanks big.
My boss is a photographer (among other things). He uses a Mac. Turns out that people will use the tool that they work best with, even if that tool is twice as expensive. As long as the additional costs don't outweigh the benefits of (perceived) improved productivity, investing in a more expensive tool is a reasonable choice.
It worked the first time. Then again, the first time was with a Flash-based system that was grown over the course of two years and didn't have to support a three-digit customer base from the get go. He's still convinced that I have it easier than the Flash dev, though, because "all the hard work has already been done" and "I merely need to connect a few systems". Yeah, you can tell that he's not really tech savvy.
Lesson learned: "Small, dynamic team" means "senior developer with a junior developer's wage".
Well, the requirements included a presentation system for bringing in new customers (both frotend and backend), domain and mail account management, time management for our coworkers, invoice generation for four different mutually-incompatible pricing structures (with the possibility of having more than one present on the same invoice), invoice generation for business partners that receive money from us, limited remote configuration of WordPress and being able to handle arbitrary constellations of companies and sub-companies that can be in any kind of business relationship with each other.
And, of course, "it has to work like our existing Flash-based system", which I was expected to be able to reverse-engineer just by looking at the user interface without changing anything. In fact, in the very beginning that was the entirety of the specification as the boss assumed that a programmer can infer from the UI what the program does and hey, my predecassor's predecessor had written a design document after al. Of course due to us having no process for handling documents it turned out that no one could find the design document anymore.
I also had to be compatible with the existing presentation system (which was simultaneously unfinished, in active use, critically important and a legacy system scheduled for replacement), which stored everything in a giant entity-key-value table where the uniqueness of entries was assumed but not guaranteed and things ike transactions were completely absent. I also had to maintain that system simultaneously with my development time. We're currently in the process of finally replacing this crock.
Add to that the fact that prior to taking the job I only had hobbyist exposure to PHP and web design and I think it's no wonder that my first attempt at building the system is also currently in the process of being superseded. 1000 man-hours aren't enough to learn how to build maintainable large codebases, get the hang of software architecture and spec out and build a mission-critical large system while simultaneously babysitting various other badly-written systems without a structured way of keeping track of bugs and unfinished functionality.
We do have an RCS and luckily all of our current devs can be arsed to use it. But yeah, the only reason I'm still there is because I don't want to switch jobs while writing my diploma thesis. Plus I want to move away afterwards and short-term student jobs tend to have lousy pay.
(I should've run when the boss told me that he expects me to write an enterprise business management system on my own in PHP in less than a year of part-time work but hey, this is my first real job and I didn't have the experience to recognize obvious delusion for what it is.)
Reminds me of how my boss won't spring for the small investment neccessary to set up things like a bug tracker or a centralized document store. Because hey, paying 300 bucks for a small office server is much too expensive but having the devs fix the same problems over and over again because they half-finished a bugfix, then were moved to some urgent problem and forgot they ever dealt with the issue at all is totally cost-efficient...
I don't know how things look in the USA but in Germany a new unlocked iPhone 4 still goes for 500 EUR (ca. 650 USD). That's very, very far away from "free" or even "cheap". Of course there's "free" in the sense of "you get it for free with a contract that ends up costing you 700 bucks over two years" but then you still pay 700 bucks and it's not even unlocked. Even the 3G (not 3GS) still goes for about 200 EUR new.
Of course you could be referring to a used iPhone 4. Those go for 300 EUR (ca. 400 USD) and up, which is still solidly in "expensive" territory.
And honestly, I wouldn't qualify myself as poor because I have a disposable income of less than 500 bucks a month and don't think I should spend more than a months' worth of disposable income on a telephone. There are plenty of markets (especially emerging ones) where people can straddle the line between "is starving" and "can casually spend the equivalent of 400 to 600 USD on a gadget that will incur further costs during use".
As for the law being counterproductive, another user pointed out that this can very much be the case as CP rings can't easily be infiltrated the way any other organized crime outfit can. Perhaps a less emotional approach would allow us to be more effective in this case. Sure - a few criminals would go free (although the police would probably keep an eye on them) but that might be a reasonable price for the ability to root out entire CP rings.
As for "no one would possess child porn if they weren't pedophiles" thing: Accidental possession is possible. For instance, certain filesharing networks are great places to get yourself into trouble due to mislabeled files. Just because you thought you were downloading Lesbian Tonguetwister 13 doesn't mean that you didn't end up both possessing and distributing child pornography, even if you never wanted any of it in the first place. Yes, this mostly affects people who trawl the seedier parts of the internet for illegal stuff but there's a bit of a difference between copyright infringement and child porn distribution.
The big problem with current CP laws is that they are trying to fight a real thing but are executed as yet another War on an Abstract Concept. Instead of trying to balance each question against each other* we declare child porn to be so utterly abhorrent that any approach other than swiftly and harshly punishing anyone remotely related to it in any context is evil in itself. The appearance of doing something against CP is more important than actually doing something worthwhile.
* What's the best way to stop CP rings? Do current laws hinder or help this? Does drawn/written CP encourage or prevent real abuse? What's a child in the context of sexuality? Where do we draw the line between mere nudity (think baby photos) and pornography? Is there even such a line or is underage nudity entirely illegal? Do we even get the whole picture right now and do our laws reflect all of it?