Instead of just reshuffling your body heat around with high-tech gloves (and, presumably, making your fingers warmer at the expense of your arms), why not just pop in some of those 99 cent hand warmers you can get at places like Costco? We've used these everywhere from the ski slopes to watching the countdown on New Year's. They're cheap, disposable, and widely available.
People who are eager for this sort of thing puzzle me. Maybe I'm a little paranoid, but I'd like to stay as far away from this as possible. I don't say this to be a luddite, but there are definite limits to where I would personally go with technology.
I think you're mistaking the application for this. Dozens of Slashdot posts about the Matrix notwithstanding, this isn't an elective surgery targeted towards geeks who want to get one step closer to their machines. The company line is that it's aimed primarily at quadriplegics who have a choice of either continuing to be unable to interact with their environment or having a shot at gaining some more function.
In spirit, it's similar to prosthetic devices that people have already been developing that operate using nerve impulses, such as prosthetic legs with knees that "bend" via sensors which pick up nerve impulses in the quadriceps. It's just that with people who are more severely disabled, you're going to have to move closer to the brain to pick up live nerve impulses. It'll probably be a long time (if ever) before this moves into being an elective procedure for entertainment purposes; the Matrix-speak from the Wired article seems to be just typical media sensationalization to give the story a little more juice.
Before you start jabbering about "war looming", you might want to look up your history a bit and realize that this sort of trash talk happens every election year in Taiwan. Nothing much has come out of it so far. Talking about political independence in Taiwan is a lot like talking about "increasing national security" and "fighting the terrorists" is in the U.S. right now -- it's a guaranteed attention-getter and makes the electorate feel warm and fuzzy about you.
And I'm not sure if you were being ironic with your "money is bad, think about the children" line, but note that in this case the point is that the lost revenue would actually be a deterrent for war. In other words, economic factors are actually helping to make the war less likely.
I realize you're being funny, but I'm not sure why many of the posts seem to assume that cell phones should be jammed wherever it's inconvenient for them. Personally, I don't see a difference between someone talking to another person who's physically present, versus chatting on the phone -- at least from the perspective of being the person overhearing the conversation.
In a restaurant, for example, it's perfectly fine for two people physically in the restaurant to be talking loudly at each other (in fact, in many restaurants everyone's talking loudly at each other), and yet no one would think of wandering over there and telling them to shut up. Conversely, people would be perfectly in their rights to expect two people talking in a movie theater to be quiet once the show starts, and it should be the same with cell phones.
This means that this type of problem would be more easily solved by just having areas where people are expected to be quiet (like theaters) do passive shielding, which is already legal. It's legal, costs cell phone users nothing, and isn't subject to vigilante jamming. Improperly used, both cell phones and phone jammers can become an annoyance.
If you read the fine print (which actually isn't on the product page as far as I could tell, they say that you have to have an "approved phone". From The Register:
The snag is that Safe Haven technology needs to be integrated at the time of manufacture into new devices or installed as a Java download update to suitable equipment already in the market.
"You need to have an approved camera," Blagden admitted, adding that the incorporation of Sade Haven technology is unlikely to affect handset prices.
In other words, like most DRM-type schemes, it only works if your camera "supports" this feature. And just like DRM, I don't think it's going to be very popular among consumers -- this is a "feature" that benefits the guy trying to stop the camera user, not the guy buying and paying for the phone. I'd especially think that industrial spies would be smart enough to get a phone that didn't support this.
The concept isn't that original anymore, since it's been around for a while. The Berkeley research mentioned in the article, by the way, is most likely the Smart Dust project, which was completed in 2001 and spawned a whole slew of related research.
Having said that, it's not quite as cut-and-dried as you mention. The primary differences from conventional wireless networks like 802.11 are (1) miniaturization, (2) strict power constraints, (3) disposable nature (i.e. ultra-low cost components req'd), and (4) self-organizing. AFAIK it's still an area of active and open research.
They're not talking about PC-to-PC voip calls a la Skype, they're talking about regular phone calls carried over voip such as Vonage. The Detroit News has a good layman's summary of the regulation involved now. The highlight:
Vonage typically pays the Bells or Bell rivals sharply reduced fees to carry data traffic at the other end of a call. Some of its calls are handed to long-distance companies, which pay traditional access fees.
Similarly, AT&T has started carrying some long-distance calls over Internetlike VOIP networks and paying cut-rate fees to connect at the other end. In this case, the customer has no idea VOIP is involved.
Although this approach lets them dodge many of the regulatory fees due to the internet being untaxed at the moment, they still have to hook into POTS for the local loop. If legislation goes through on taxing voip calls, it'll be relatively easy to meter the incoming calls at the POTS interface and tax accordingly.
That still leaves open the possibility of pure voip to voip calls being undetectable (e.g. between different Vonage customers), but in the near term those sorts of calls are likely to still be in the minority.
I think every criminal should be able to do their time and then get on with life, under the fair assumption that the due has been paid. This is pretty much the whole point of a legal system with prisons, right?
Most states limit the amount of time sex offenders are required to be registered. Maine, for example, limits this to 10 years for most offenders (except the sexually violent ones, who register for life); a quick Google turns up other states with similar policies. I don't think it's unreasonable that those who "do the crime" should be subject to increased public scrutiny for at least 10 years, until they've proven that they're not likely to be repeat offenders.
While most of the time I tend to agree with the liberal pro-privacy posts we see on Slashdot, I think this is one case where there's justification for privacy invasion. It's restricted only to those who have committed the crime (a common complaint here is that most recent privacy invasions happen to everyone, including the by-and-large innocent public, and thus violate presumption of innocence), and it's got a built-in expiry for the truly reformed.
The problem with this mindset is that how can companies supposed to sustain research costs (that may cost them millions)? Sure, production cost alone is cheap, but if companies can't offset those research cost (or whatever) to innovate such products, it would eventually lead to scarcity of innovation.
Who said anything about fair pricing not incorporating R&D costs? It's perfectly fine for R&D to be included into sales costs; a good example of this is microprocessors, where the fastest chips are expensive because they're still trying to defray R&D, while slower chips become cheaper because R&D is (ideally) mostly recouped, leaving only production costs that subtract from your revenue.
In an extreme case, the labels might begin to impose costs
beyond the actual search and production costs for which listeners are actually interesting in paying just to feed the bottom line. That is exactly what the recording industry did well before file sharing existed. The result? Alienated and disgruntled customers.
Essentially, they're saying that Price Charged = Production + R&D + Profit Margin. A certain level of profits ("positive NPV projects", in the jargon) are required in order for companies to go ahead with projects. For products in monopolistic environments, "Profit Margin" can be quite high, and piracy can be one incentive for companies to reduce it to more reasonable levels. For industries where profit margin is already quite low, decrease in sales have to be made up by increases in price to increase the profit margin (and hence maintain survival levels of total profits).
As for your second point:
If you were a brilliant scientist and you make an important innovation (such as paraplegic instant cure), heck of course you'd like to make a good fortune out of that after your toiling 20-30 years of research. If you found out that your innovation is pirated, do you feel like... "oh thank God, they copied it over"?
This bit is wandering a bit off-topic, but I thought it worth pointing out that this is already the case in many 3rd-world countries: patents such as the ones for AIDS drugs are often not enforced in regions where people couldn't possibly afford them, for humanitarian reasons.
We've seen this in North America in the music industry. Look at iTunes and their 99c pricing. Before the music industry ran into the file-sharing phenomenon, the concept of a 99c single would have been inconceivable.
It's only for products that are correctly priced that prices will rise, because costs will rise enough that the company can't afford not to raise prices. For products which have previously held monopoly-like protection, piracy essentially serves as market competition. I'd tend to think that video games are a competitive enough market that this doesn't apply here -- chances are it's just going to raise the price of games in Western markets, and the revenue from China will just be treated as found money -- but there certainly are cases where we've seen piracy lower prices.
Zhang Qingsong explains that these "weapons", or points, represent a right that the player can get to a certain level and play with a certain degree of ease or excitement. Even though they may have economic value among players, current law does not specify its legality.
If the Gaming Open Market (reported in an earlier story) takes off, then they'll be able to prove exactly how much economic value lost items have.
I think people are starting to recognize that the time and effort (not to mention subscription dollars) that go into the levelling treadmill for MMORPGs means that your resulting character and items do have economic value, just like if you'd spent the time building model sailboats or writing software code. Whether it should be enough of a basis for suing people I don't know, but companies should put more of an effort into security for MMORPGs than just to say, "Ho hum, guess we got hacked again. Let's just reboot and pretend it didn't happen. Good thing our EULA denies all liability!"
Or maybe they need to realize that it's okay to have a Fedora Linux project and a Fedora (something else) project.
Actually, as I read the article, U Virginia and Cornell are objecting precisely because Red Hat is asserting that it's not ok to have a Fedora Linux and a Fedora [other software] project. From the article:
Red Hat's assertion of trademark includes restrictive guidelines on the use of the Fedora name.
This is understandably a concern for the "other" Fedora if Red Hat is going to make them change their name. If you check RH's Trademark Info page, they do seem to have some cause for concern that RH is going to clamp down on them:
Except as provided herein, you may not use "Fedora" or any confusingly similar mark as a trademark for your product, or use "Fedora" in any other manner that might cause confusion in the marketplace, including in advertising, on auction sites, or on software or hardware. Any party wishing to use the Fedora(TM) mark may do so as long as they meet two conditions:
(1) They must only use the Fedora(TM) mark in association with the original Fedora(TM) code found on the Fedora Project website (see http://fedora.redhat.com/) without modification;
(2) If they charge a fee for the CD-ROM or other media on which they deliver the Fedora(TM) code, they warranty the media on which the Fedora(TM) code is delivered, thus ensuring that the recipient receives a usable copy.
Emphasis added is mine. The wording of the legalese seems to imply that the next step for Red Hat is to clamp down on anyone else trying to publicize other software (or even non-software products) also named Fedora, even if it isn't related to Linux. Whether that's legally defensible is arguable, but the intent to try appears to be there.
There's an article in Dvorak's column in this month's PC Magazine (near the middle) describing how a day trader used a key logger to steal someone's brokerage password via a similar scheme. From the article:
Using an alias, Dinh began prowling around in an online stock-chat forum, until he got the e-mail addresses of some of the traders. Using yet another alias, he then e-mailed these folks the key-logging backdoor, claiming in a long letter that he was beta-testing a new stock-charting software system and wondering whether they could help.
Apparently, one unsuspecting sucker executed the software and wasn't suspicious when it didn't really do anything. Now Dinh had a backdoor and simply key-logged until he found the guy's online brokerage information and password. He could buy and sell from the guy's account.
Apparently he used the other account as a dump for derivatives that he needed to offload quickly. Of course the person in the story should obviously have been more careful about clicking on attachments, but one lesson here is that as people become increasingly wired, the value of logins and passwords is becoming high enough that stealing those is as valuable or more than credit card numbers. This is especially true if you think about how much you can do financially online -- many people use the Internet almost exclusively for bill payments, stock transactions, money transfers, etc.
That's a good point, I seem to remember most of the time they have C-3PO do the translating. The one actual "conversation" I can recall offhand is Luke talking to Artoo in the X-wing before going to Dagobah, and for that one he was reading the translation off his computer screen.
There's probably a few common ones people could recognize, but given that you can't rely on your average person to distinguish tone and pitch reliably (ever been to a karaoke bar?), there's a limit to how much useful communication you could develop out of beeps and whistles.
Apparently the language only has two vowels and four consonants, which (ignoring grammar) would put it at only 2.6 bits per character, compared to the English alphabet at 4.7. It'd be interesting to see how long a typical conversation takes.
I suspect the "language" is probably closer to the tribal drum codes used in Africa than a true spoken language.
For most systems, customers must sign up, which takes about five minutes. They usually must provide their name, phone number and checking account or credit card information, and a fingerprint. [...] Even though customers are usually asked to provide a second form of ID, the thumbprint reader can be a minute faster than writing a check, biometric companies say. And by making it easier to deduct money from a bank account, it can reduce credit card transactions, for which stores usually pay a fee.
So let's see, to make this work I still have to carry and pull out a conventional ID card. Plus, I have to sign up in the first place, waiting in line and filling out annoying forms to do so, and there's no financial incentive to do it.
Or, I could pull out my credit card, which occupies the same space in my wallet as the required ID, and make my payment without signing up for anything or introducing new privacy concerns. On top of that, my credit card gives me 1% cash back.
I think consumers are going to do the math on this one and figure it's not worth the hassle. Sounds like the incentive is mostly for the store to avoid the credit card fees.
Microsoft has turned into everything they used to be against (and sometimes worse).
Has Microsoft ever really been for competition? As far as I can remember, they've always been trying to beat down their competitors by whatever means they could devise. (I remember when our school went with MS-DOS instead of PC-DOS because programs had fewer compatibility issues with the dominant OS rather than a cheaper clone. Similarly, the popularity of DR-DOS petered out after MS-DOS started copying some of their best features.) It's just that they're so much bigger and so much better at it now that they're seen as a hulking Goliath instead of a gutsy underdog. The difference is size.
And yes, dominance is what all companies strive for. Peter Lynch once weighed in on the issue by saying that "In business, competition is never as healthy as total domination." The difference between whether you're admired for your tenacity or reviled for your bullying depends primarily on how successful you are and how close you are to your goal.
It's interesting that they've positioned Linux as the Matrix (the establishment), and Microsoft as Neo/Morpheus (the underdogs/rebels). I'd have thought the reverse would be a more accurate analogy...
Putting the "This provided As Is" section in all caps is SOP for licensing. Check any of your software boxes, or Google "software license". Point-and-click examples include the W3C license, or Apache license.
Except as provided below, Microsoft hereby grants you a royalty-free license under Microsoft's Necessary Claims to make, use, sell, offer to sell, import, and otherwise distribute Licensed Implementations solely for the purpose of reading and writing files that comply with the Microsoft specifications for the Office Schemas. [...] If you distribute, license or sell a Licensed Implementation, this license is conditioned upon you requiring that the following notice be prominently displayed in all copies and derivative works of your source code and in copies of the documentation and licenses associated with your Licensed Implementation:
"This product may incorporate intellectual property owned by Microsoft Corporation. The terms and conditions upon which Microsoft is licensing such intellectual property may be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/odcXMLRef/ html/odcXMLRefLegalNotice.asp?frame=true."
You are not licensed to distribute a Licensed Implementation under license terms and conditions that prohibit the terms and conditions of this license.
The license explicitly allows you to sell/offer/distribute an implementation of their standard. The rest appears to be a bunch of legalese saying that you can't transfer your distribution rights to other people; it's not saying that you can't transfer your distribution. Since anyone else who feels like modifying your GPL'd code is allowed to sell/offer/distribute Microsoft's XML standard too under their license, I fail to see why this is hostile to the GPL license. The GPL itself only requires that a patent license be publicly available, not that the rights themselves have to be transfered to the users. Since the Microsoft license lets anyone use implementations royalty-free, it shouldn't be a problem.
I think it's a knee-jerk reflex against an inferiority complex. I mean, sure, they can beat us at chess, but what about GO?
Kinda like how your average Slashdotter watching the crowd go wild over Barry Bonds breaking the home run record is secretly thinking, "Oh sure, but can he put together a Beowulf cluster of Linux boxes?"
I agree that just because a computer can beat a human at chess, that's not a basis for saying that they're "more intelligent" than us. Intelligence incorporates things like creativity, self-improvement, etc. which are not demonstrated by a chess program.
Having said that, I have to disagree with some of the points in your post.
Computer chess games deal with statistics and historics of previous games to decide how they will move their next turn.
How is this different from human players? Most good chess players I know spend a large portion of their time studying historical games from the grandmasters, just like chess programs do. They even call the procedure of optimizing the program parameters "training".
Usually they [computers] analyze hundreds of thousand of differents moves, even dumb ones ! When a human player take a look at the chess board, he rejects the vast majority of the possible moves and concentrate only on very few of them.
I'll assume you mean that they analyze hundreds of thousands of move sequences, since you can only control at most 16 pieces and the number of moves you could make are much fewer than a hundred thousand. Computer chess programs actually proceed in a very similar fashion to human players - they consider the moves that could be made and discard the least promising ones. For moves whose "scores" are very close, it will look ahead more moves, always pruning the sequences which lead to poorly scored outcomes. They don't continue to analyze sequences which "score" poorly and hence are unlikely to yield a winning result.
The fact is that chess programs have become very good at homing in on promising move sequences and pruning out poor ones. That, combined with the relatively small set of moves on a chessboard, has led chess programs to make great gains over the past few decades. Your argument would be more applicable for Go (had to toss that in there somewhere!), where programmers still don't have a good understanding of how to "score" positions, and hence computers have performed poorly for precisely the reasons you mention: that they are unable to prune out the bad moves and focus on the good ones.
It actually seems like the victims are a pretty scary bunch too. The one murder quoted in the article was the shooting death of a Nigerian consul by a scammer victim:
Last February a retired Czech doctor who had lost more than 400,000 stormed into the Nigerian Embassy in Prague and shot dead the leading consul.
The point you're trying to make is a good one, though. I'd be a little more cautious about how much I mocked dangerous criminals in a public forum, especially when posting them to the internet using my personal domain. With the amount of information that's online these days, it's not that many more steps to reverse-engineer your identity from there.
I was inclined to agree with you initially. With the rash of DMCA suits recently that seem designed to try to exploit DMCA to stifle competition, I chalked this one up as another thread from the same story.
However, I actually did end up RTFA and noticed that you can't actually tell how Fatwallet got the info it posted (since everything's now censored out), nor did they post the text of the C&D. Therefore I can't really tell if the information was from publicly-available sources or if the sale prices were "leaked" by an insider or a web site hack. I'd argue that this makes a pretty big difference in how this C&D should be viewed.
If the prices were publicly available (as I believe most Fatwallet deals are), then the C&D is without merit since the thread would just be a demonstration of one of the great strengths of the internet and capitalism in general: people gathering publicly-available information and figuring out how to profit from it (and sharing it with others, to boot).
However, if it's the latter case, then Best Buy really does have good reason for going after people who leak information that they never planned to release into the public domain. After all, companies have plenty of reason to keep quiet about future plans -- pricing and future product timelines for chip manufacturers, for example, tend to be tightly guarded secrets because of the competitive nature of the industry, and the company has every right to go after people who leak their information.
Unfortunately, unless Fatwallet posts the C&D details (or someone chimes in with a mirror of what was in the deleted posts), it's going to be hard to tell which was the case.
On a final note, regardless of the details, it's probably unlikely that Fatwallet is going to fight it. They haven't said anything yet about this time around, but when Wallmart went after them last year their response was (quoting from the article) "We really have no choice but to delete this post. Wal-Mart has tons of money and there is no way we would even consider fighting them."
They know right now they're not going to be able to convince people that ripping a movie should be a felony alongside, say, robbing a bank. So they're trying to get a toehold by aiming the law at clear cases of copyright violation, namely movies that shouldn't even be available in the public yet. This absolves them of having to worry about issues like "Did this movie come from a P2P network, or was it a legal extraction of a movie you already own?"
Once they've got the public used to "copy a movie = jail", it's a short step to extend this to DVD releases as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of just reshuffling your body heat around with high-tech gloves (and, presumably, making your fingers warmer at the expense of your arms), why not just pop in some of those 99 cent hand warmers you can get at places like Costco? We've used these everywhere from the ski slopes to watching the countdown on New Year's. They're cheap, disposable, and widely available.
In spirit, it's similar to prosthetic devices that people have already been developing that operate using nerve impulses, such as prosthetic legs with knees that "bend" via sensors which pick up nerve impulses in the quadriceps. It's just that with people who are more severely disabled, you're going to have to move closer to the brain to pick up live nerve impulses. It'll probably be a long time (if ever) before this moves into being an elective procedure for entertainment purposes; the Matrix-speak from the Wired article seems to be just typical media sensationalization to give the story a little more juice.
And I'm not sure if you were being ironic with your "money is bad, think about the children" line, but note that in this case the point is that the lost revenue would actually be a deterrent for war. In other words, economic factors are actually helping to make the war less likely.
In a restaurant, for example, it's perfectly fine for two people physically in the restaurant to be talking loudly at each other (in fact, in many restaurants everyone's talking loudly at each other), and yet no one would think of wandering over there and telling them to shut up. Conversely, people would be perfectly in their rights to expect two people talking in a movie theater to be quiet once the show starts, and it should be the same with cell phones.
This means that this type of problem would be more easily solved by just having areas where people are expected to be quiet (like theaters) do passive shielding, which is already legal. It's legal, costs cell phone users nothing, and isn't subject to vigilante jamming. Improperly used, both cell phones and phone jammers can become an annoyance.
Having said that, it's not quite as cut-and-dried as you mention. The primary differences from conventional wireless networks like 802.11 are (1) miniaturization, (2) strict power constraints, (3) disposable nature (i.e. ultra-low cost components req'd), and (4) self-organizing. AFAIK it's still an area of active and open research.
That still leaves open the possibility of pure voip to voip calls being undetectable (e.g. between different Vonage customers), but in the near term those sorts of calls are likely to still be in the minority.
While most of the time I tend to agree with the liberal pro-privacy posts we see on Slashdot, I think this is one case where there's justification for privacy invasion. It's restricted only to those who have committed the crime (a common complaint here is that most recent privacy invasions happen to everyone, including the by-and-large innocent public, and thus violate presumption of innocence), and it's got a built-in expiry for the truly reformed.
Yesterday's Slashdot article about the Red Herring story was a pretty good introduction to economic pricing. A relevant snippet:
Essentially, they're saying that Price Charged = Production + R&D + Profit Margin. A certain level of profits ("positive NPV projects", in the jargon) are required in order for companies to go ahead with projects. For products in monopolistic environments, "Profit Margin" can be quite high, and piracy can be one incentive for companies to reduce it to more reasonable levels. For industries where profit margin is already quite low, decrease in sales have to be made up by increases in price to increase the profit margin (and hence maintain survival levels of total profits).As for your second point:
This bit is wandering a bit off-topic, but I thought it worth pointing out that this is already the case in many 3rd-world countries: patents such as the ones for AIDS drugs are often not enforced in regions where people couldn't possibly afford them, for humanitarian reasons.It's only for products that are correctly priced that prices will rise, because costs will rise enough that the company can't afford not to raise prices. For products which have previously held monopoly-like protection, piracy essentially serves as market competition. I'd tend to think that video games are a competitive enough market that this doesn't apply here -- chances are it's just going to raise the price of games in Western markets, and the revenue from China will just be treated as found money -- but there certainly are cases where we've seen piracy lower prices.
I think people are starting to recognize that the time and effort (not to mention subscription dollars) that go into the levelling treadmill for MMORPGs means that your resulting character and items do have economic value, just like if you'd spent the time building model sailboats or writing software code. Whether it should be enough of a basis for suing people I don't know, but companies should put more of an effort into security for MMORPGs than just to say, "Ho hum, guess we got hacked again. Let's just reboot and pretend it didn't happen. Good thing our EULA denies all liability!"
There's probably a few common ones people could recognize, but given that you can't rely on your average person to distinguish tone and pitch reliably (ever been to a karaoke bar?), there's a limit to how much useful communication you could develop out of beeps and whistles.
I suspect the "language" is probably closer to the tribal drum codes used in Africa than a true spoken language.
Or, I could pull out my credit card, which occupies the same space in my wallet as the required ID, and make my payment without signing up for anything or introducing new privacy concerns. On top of that, my credit card gives me 1% cash back.
I think consumers are going to do the math on this one and figure it's not worth the hassle. Sounds like the incentive is mostly for the store to avoid the credit card fees.
And yes, dominance is what all companies strive for. Peter Lynch once weighed in on the issue by saying that "In business, competition is never as healthy as total domination." The difference between whether you're admired for your tenacity or reviled for your bullying depends primarily on how successful you are and how close you are to your goal.
It's interesting that they've positioned Linux as the Matrix (the establishment), and Microsoft as Neo/Morpheus (the underdogs/rebels). I'd have thought the reverse would be a more accurate analogy ...
Putting the "This provided As Is" section in all caps is SOP for licensing. Check any of your software boxes, or Google "software license". Point-and-click examples include the W3C license, or Apache license.
Kinda like how your average Slashdotter watching the crowd go wild over Barry Bonds breaking the home run record is secretly thinking, "Oh sure, but can he put together a Beowulf cluster of Linux boxes?"
Having said that, I have to disagree with some of the points in your post.
How is this different from human players? Most good chess players I know spend a large portion of their time studying historical games from the grandmasters, just like chess programs do. They even call the procedure of optimizing the program parameters "training". I'll assume you mean that they analyze hundreds of thousands of move sequences, since you can only control at most 16 pieces and the number of moves you could make are much fewer than a hundred thousand. Computer chess programs actually proceed in a very similar fashion to human players - they consider the moves that could be made and discard the least promising ones. For moves whose "scores" are very close, it will look ahead more moves, always pruning the sequences which lead to poorly scored outcomes. They don't continue to analyze sequences which "score" poorly and hence are unlikely to yield a winning result.The fact is that chess programs have become very good at homing in on promising move sequences and pruning out poor ones. That, combined with the relatively small set of moves on a chessboard, has led chess programs to make great gains over the past few decades. Your argument would be more applicable for Go (had to toss that in there somewhere!), where programmers still don't have a good understanding of how to "score" positions, and hence computers have performed poorly for precisely the reasons you mention: that they are unable to prune out the bad moves and focus on the good ones.
However, I actually did end up RTFA and noticed that you can't actually tell how Fatwallet got the info it posted (since everything's now censored out), nor did they post the text of the C&D. Therefore I can't really tell if the information was from publicly-available sources or if the sale prices were "leaked" by an insider or a web site hack. I'd argue that this makes a pretty big difference in how this C&D should be viewed.
If the prices were publicly available (as I believe most Fatwallet deals are), then the C&D is without merit since the thread would just be a demonstration of one of the great strengths of the internet and capitalism in general: people gathering publicly-available information and figuring out how to profit from it (and sharing it with others, to boot).
However, if it's the latter case, then Best Buy really does have good reason for going after people who leak information that they never planned to release into the public domain. After all, companies have plenty of reason to keep quiet about future plans -- pricing and future product timelines for chip manufacturers, for example, tend to be tightly guarded secrets because of the competitive nature of the industry, and the company has every right to go after people who leak their information.
Unfortunately, unless Fatwallet posts the C&D details (or someone chimes in with a mirror of what was in the deleted posts), it's going to be hard to tell which was the case.
On a final note, regardless of the details, it's probably unlikely that Fatwallet is going to fight it. They haven't said anything yet about this time around, but when Wallmart went after them last year their response was (quoting from the article) "We really have no choice but to delete this post. Wal-Mart has tons of money and there is no way we would even consider fighting them."
Once they've got the public used to "copy a movie = jail", it's a short step to extend this to DVD releases as well.