It really gets interesting when you think that there is NO indication for how LONG Adam and Eve spent in the garden. We know Adam was around 1000 years old when he finally died, but we don't know how much of that was spent during his "immortal" years. It may very well be that he and Eve only lived for a few years after they ate the fruit, although we know it was long enough to raise Cain and Abel to adulthood..
State of the art wind, geothermal, hydro an solar thermal are as or more reliable than coal and nuclear, and are rapidly getting even better.
Wind and solar are inherently unreliable for the simple reason that weather is, and also have low energy density (which means they require lots of land). Hydro is reliable but limited by the unfortunate fact that you need a large river to build it, and has absolutely massive enviromental impact, as well as the risk of catastrophic failure (dam breaks). Geothermal might be reliable (depending on how fast heat is conducted through rock) work, but aside from few fortunate(?) volcanic regions in the world requires the kind of deep drilling techniques we don't have nor will have in the foreseeable future.
By contrast, coal and nuclear plants produce energy as long as you supply fuel.
Now, you could possibly convert Sahara into a giant solar power center that could power Europe. However, this has plenty of technical but even most importantly political problems, specifically that it would make Europe dependent on a region that is known for neither its political stability, military might nor love of Europe. In other words, it would re-create the whole situation with US and the Middle-East, with the difference that North Africa is within arm's reach from Europe if and when someone decides to do something stupid on either side. I don't see how that could possibly end well for anyone concerned.
Germany is one of the biggest industrial nations in Europe and is confident they can move from nuclear to renewable without crippling themselves.
Germany is building coal plants to replace the nuclear power. Renewables can take some of the burden, but not fully replace nuclear, much less non-nuclear (polluting) energy production.
Maybe you are right and in ten years they will have reverted to an agrarian society for be totally dependent on French nuclear plants, but if you had bothered to look at their plans you would see they are actually rather credible.
Most likely they'll quietly drop the plans when hysteria passes and people focus on other things, such as their rapidly rising electric bills.
Nuclear is still useful to us, but there is little reason to build more now.
Well no, running out of fossil fuels sooner or later, having climate change grow worse and worse by their use in the meantime, and newer plans being typically safer and more efficient than old ones, there's no reason whatsoever.
We have better alternatives, and while it may be possible to develop better nuclear designs like thorium reactors you have to ask what the point would be when the demand is for renewable.
Unfortunately none of those you listed are alternatives. Hydro can't be scaled up enough, geothermal is still strictly in the realm of science fiction, and wind and solar are only workable if people get used to the idea that whether they get electricity or not is up to luck.
Anyone looking to invest a few tens of billions over a decade or two in new tech isn't going to throw money at something they can't sell to most countries and which will be made redundant in the relatively near future.
You should perhaps wait until this latest financial crisis ends before trying to imply that the actions of businessmen have anything to do with common good.
I really can't blame Sony for doing such a thing, even when it's kind of bad taste
The language used here seems to be similar to how you would describe the actions of, say, a wolf: the entity is entirely directed by its instincts, which are geared towards filling its belly as much as possible, so you can't really blame it for going after easy prey (like kids). This, in turn, rises a question: is it really wise to let such an entity wield power to the tune of billions of dollars?
The only reason you need to cool the water at all is because the fuel is generating more heat than you can extract in your turbines, either because of their design or because of the limited electricity demand.
Or because of basic physics. The theoretical maximum efficiency of any heat engine is ((temperature of the hot end) - (temperature of cold end)) / (temperature of the hot end).
Since ambient temperature on Earth tends to be a bit shy of 300 Kelvins, no heat engine here can extract all of the heat energy flowing through them, and most fall far short of being even 50% efficient.
Distributed, sustainable, carbon-neutral power generation is the way to go - but that would entail actual modern technology, like biotech and robotics, so we can't have that.
Care to be a bit more specific? What specific system are you proposing? How does it involve biotech? How does it involve robotics?
Because, when you leave out all the details of implementation, my cynical ears hear "I propose we produce energy by wistful thinking".
We'll stick to steam power, because people like nuclear irrationally, and are immune to data or argument. The spewing white stuff makes them feel butch, I guess? I suspect nuke shills have potency and inadequacy issues.
While speculating on other people's sexual and mental issues certainly makes for a convincing engineering argument, I think you could also work in a comparison to the Nazis somewhere. Can't go wrong with the classics.
"Nazis had a nuclear research program, thus it's evil" or something like that.
First of all, I'm not against nuclear power plants. I'm in favour. However, it matters not one whit whether "Nuke haters" do or do not hate nuclear power.
As long as they get to vote, and building nuclear plants is subject to permission from politicians, and politicians are more interested in getting re-elected than worrying about long-term consequences, it matters.
The only thing that matters is whether they are *right* in opposing a specific proposed plant or not.
"Right" by what criteria? It is entirely rational to oppose nuclear power if one places the potential risks as higher priority as pollution-free and fossile fuel independent electricity generated by it. As is, people seem to think that it's either nuclear power or magical maintenance-free reliable windmills, rather than either coal power or de-industrialization.
It's rational to chose opposing nuclear energy over modern comforts like electric lights, but it's not rational to oppose nuclear power and fossil fuels yet insist on having reliable electricity available. So no, I'd say that most people who oppose nuclear energy are not "right", in the sense that they're fooling themselves about what they're actually choosing and what it implies.
As noted in other posts, water-based cooling is unnecessary if one builds cooling towers. So why propose a design that impacts this water supply *unnecessarily* ?
Cooling towers work by evaporating water. While they don't warm rivers, they do consume the supply.
Attitudes like that go a long way towards eroding trust in anyone proposing a nuclear reactor. That's not a technical problem, it's an attitude problem.
Attitudes like what? You aren't seriously suggesting that engineers purposefully pick the most enviromentally destructive option while twirling their mustaches and cackling villainously, are you?
Entitlement mentality killed the Greek economy, not the ebb and flow around currency mechanisms.
"Entitlement", as in "investors are entitled to have their gambling losses covered by taxpayer money"? Because that entitlement absolutely dwarfs any and all entitlements the common people in Greece received. And it's the same problem everywhere, including the US.
And what if that 1% were tied to the highest tax bracket at a 1:5 ratio such that if you want to raise the highest tax bracket from 35% to 45%, you'd need to raise the lowest from 1% to 3%?
As long as you're willing to tie social security and minimum wage to the highest income at the same ratio, I'm all for it.
Wouldn't they be a lot better off with wood or coal, something that would actually burn for a WHILE? Paper is only useful as kindling.
Paper sheets burn for just a short duration, just as wood sheets would. However, you can heat a stove just fine with paper, it's just a matter of feeding it a lot of those sheets. However, the chances are that you'll have to agitate the fuel manually during the burning to burn it all.
And that is too much, simply because if each such idiot injures 9 others then the entire society is affected.
That's a pretty efficient idiot. Also, "affected" is not the same as "destroyed".
When Titanic went down a lot of people were willing to save others, endangering themselves in the process. But when Costa Concordia went down a lot of people were willing to kill others in their rush to lifeboats - though the land was within spitting distance.
You do realize that the main difference between these was how the captain, not the rabble, behaved, right?
That's how they begin their career. A 25 y/o murderer has to start somewhere...
Excuses. Someone who's starting a criminal career is not a murderer unless he was a sociopath to begin with. Most people on the criminal career will never become murderers. But even if neither of those were true, you speaking of "unemployable" people and linking to an article about teenagers would still be dishonest.
You cannot claim that militarization of the society has no side effects.
Did it ever occur to you that the "militarization of society" is not a universal problem, but mostly an American problem? It's your culture that's broken, not humanity in general.
If you regularly walk the streets for pleasure or for business, and therefore place themselves into the path of those roving gangs, do you just pray to your god(s) before leaving home, or you make sure that your concealed-carry firearm is loaded?
Neither. I just leave my house, go around conducting my business or taking my pleasure, and return home unmolested. Again you are projecting American problems to humanity as large.
Never underestimate the influence of small but loud groups; human history is written in blood of their victims.
And all of these groups started by trying to make their victims seem less than humans, as rabid animals undeserving of sympathy or even life. Just like you're doing here.
the billions of idle hands are trouble only because people can't set their own purpose - but if they could [...]
That little word "if" is the trouble here. USSR was trying to change the man for almost entire century and failed.
USSR had plenty of problems but unemployment wasn't one of them.
Also, the Net is full of stuff idle hands built, from Slashdot itself (or at least I am not getting paid to write this comment) to everything on DeviantArt and too many fan- and original fiction communities to count to the entire Free Software movement to OpenGL tutorials to pretty much anything you could imagine. So, it seems that most people can handle being idle just fine, and rather than self-destruct will simply start learning and creating things.
Most of the USA's social problems stem from the fact that large segments of population don't work, don't need to work, and are as matter of fact unemployable. Then they go out and entertain themselves as they may.
If an unemployed person in the United States does something constructive, say, writes a blog, how many people are going to write indignant messages exclaiming how "those lazy unemployed" have too much money since they can afford a computer and Internet connection?
Also, when you talk about "unemployed" and "unemployable", and then link to an article about school kid gangs, well... yeah.
Actually when I'm topping off my gas tank which is usually 50km away in another city I'm feeling raped as I pay 1.11/l while if I was to fill up in my city I'd be paying $1.28/l
I guess having a serious lack of perspective could lead one to stick the nozzle into the wrong hole...
The single greatest cause of death in human history is religion!
Statements like this are utterly meaningless, since they require comparisons of actual world history to a hypothethical alternative history of an Earth-like planet populated by a species with some resemblance to humans but utter imperviousness to religious memes, which almost certainly would imply a lot more changes (even if we disregard the different developmental history required to come up with such a species) - for example, what of religion-like but secular ideologues like Nazism, Communism, Nationalism, etc? How would early societies maintain cohesion and transfer lore without the help of religion? How would the lack of a priest class affect early development of astronomy and mathematics? What would happen in the aftermath of, say, the fall of Rome, when monasteries wouldn't be around to preserve information? Would resource wars be more or less nasty if they were fought with pragmatic cynicism without religious justifications?
Atheism seems more and more like a religion to me nowadays, completely with its own fundamentalists, philosophers, apologics and evangelists. Also, it gives some of its adherents a smug feeling of superiority for believing unprovable (to any degree, in your case) statements and a need to proudly declare their overconfidence for all the world to see. Not to mention a need to end all their sentences in an exclamation point.
Cue a dozen posts explaining how atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby, and completely ignoring that people not collecting stamps don't engage in this kind of behaviour, nor care if someone calls their lack of stamps collecting a hobby.
It's fundamentally impossible for any process to defeat a bad employee with the authority to subvert it. This is why hiring is the single most important meta-function that occurs in any organization, and if you don't put a LOT of energy into it you are screwed.
It is also fundamentally impossible to know who will or will not be a good fit for a particular position before they're entrenched, thus all the energy that goes into the process is basically wasted. It does result in plenty of people having very impressively inflated resumes, though.
They ain't gonna change because none of the pirates posting on Slashdot have ever elaborated a credible alternative for them.
Show movies on big screen for a price, or simply sell unrestricted movie files online.
Kodak was killed by superior technology - digital was clearly a better way of taking photos and Kodak just failed to make the leap.
Yes. There's a lesson there.
But what, exactly, is the superior alternative for Hollywood? Give everything away for free? The financial physics of that don't work. Maybe they should pay for movies entirely out of popcorn sales.
Pretty much anything would be superior to their current tactic of making everyone hate their guts while simultaneously trying their level best to become the number one threat to Western culture.
Please. This kind of 24/7 "piracy is freedom fighting" crap tires me.
Maybe you should stop reading it, then?
He then ignores the fact that the easy and cheap rental services he asks for already exist (eg, iTunes, Netflix, Apple TV), and oddly enough, if both are as easy as he claims the free alternative will still always win.
As long as the Pirate Bay is the only place people can get movie files they can watch on any program and platform they want, are guaranteed to stay on their possession for as long as they - as opposed to a licensing server elsewhere - want, and can be worked on by tools to create new works - such as music videos - the Pirate Bay will always win. Freedom matters. Not to an authoritarian suggesting throwing mentally deficient people into jail over copyright infringement to stop them from "clogging up the Internet", of course, but it does matter to normal people.
The guy practically admits he breaks the law constantly and doesn't care, which isn't surprising because he has demonstrated the kind of reasoning skills I'd expect of a small child.
How about the police check his computer then throw him in jail for a bit? That won't stop piracy but it might stop stupid articles about it from clogging up the internet.
So you think he's clinically retarded yet you suggest throwing him into jail for copyright infringement, not because you think that stops this horrendous criminal behaviour but because you don't like something he wrote?
it's important to recognize that there is a great diversity in the opinions of professional economists
Thus proving that it's not science, but simply people pushing their personal opinions draped in the prestige of science.
many of the younger generation will not buy into the simple ideas of "deregulate, lower taxes, and eliminate minimum wage".
If they don't buy into it, then they will be ignored, because the libertarian hands-off mantra better serves the interests of the vultures who want to loot the society while there's still some meat on the bones.
The world is slipping into a very dark place right now, and every concession that providers like Google make, will be looked upon with shame by future generations.
But by that time, Google execs have already gotten their bonuses, so what do they care?
Piracy is the act of using something without giving money for it.
You are using oxygen generated by plants owned by me right now for free, you damn buccaneer! Not that I should speak, my plants soak in sunlight for free.
Piracy is robbery at high seas. Copyright infringement is exactly what it says. What you describe goes beyond both, straight into some kind of absurd strawman capitalist dystopia from Hell.
Seriously, think of what you write, or start thinking of who you should be paying in order to use grammar, 12 english words, and the concepts behind them.
Have people sign up to download the crippled training copy.
Why cripple it? That just makes it look worse than it is. Offer a fully-functional copy for non-profit use (perhaps with the requirement that you mention the tool in credits?) and make money on for-profit licenses. Let the userbase grow unchecked so any new commercial project will have have people familiar and comfortable with your tool.
On the same notion, why require registration? It does nothing but needlessly tax your system to send spam to throwaway e-mail addresses. And why prohibit reposting the files? Let the Pirate Bay handle the distribution costs. If you want userbase statistics, you can simply check the seeder/leech numbers on any torrents there to get a rough estimate.
For most software, you are not going to make money from home users. You only make money from corporate users, so let home users use the software freely so they'll want it when they go work somewhere. A pirated copy is not a lost sale, it's a fraction of a sale in the making.
That's all well and good until someone needs to get contact info, mail, and apps in and out of a company-purchased phone. An iTunes account is necessary to operate an iOS device.
So the obvious solution is to not use iOS devices in companies. Use Android instead.
I'm not quite sure what's happening with this country (and I suppose the rest of the world as well), but I know it's not good.
Corruption, plain and simple. Those with money and power are using it to bribe, bully and flatter the lawmakers into passing bad laws. The lawmakers, on the other hand, are all too happy to screw over the peons for their fellow aristocrats, especially since making choices that make people worse off lets them pretend they're being though and heroic for making "hard decisions".
That last problem is not limited to copyright law, BTW. Politicians are making decisions based on a screwed-up criteria where causing misery is considered a plus since it lets them pretend they're a modern-day Churchill (or the national equivalent). That's one of the reasons why the ongoing financial crisis is so damn hard to solve, despite ultimately only existing in the pages of accounting books: every action taken needs to make people poorer, otherwise it's not seen as "responsible". Thus various governments cut spending and rise taxes in the middle of a depression, which of course just steepens the downward spiral, leading to even higher taxes and spending cuts.
"The beatings will continue until morale improves", indeed.
Good or bad the games industry is fed up with used games, and piracy.
They are fed up with the Doctrine of First Sale, yet whine when everyone else gets even more fed up with the rest of the copyright law.
I guess we're headed for another great video game crash; the combination of incompetence, rising development costs and feelings of entitlement reaching the level of absurd hubris in the industry are a deadly combination. Now if only they'll take the movie and music industries with them, we can start cleaning the corruption they have inflicted on us, such as ACTA.
Slashdot Mirror
"After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Adam lived 930 years, and then he died."
Wind and solar are inherently unreliable for the simple reason that weather is, and also have low energy density (which means they require lots of land). Hydro is reliable but limited by the unfortunate fact that you need a large river to build it, and has absolutely massive enviromental impact, as well as the risk of catastrophic failure (dam breaks). Geothermal might be reliable (depending on how fast heat is conducted through rock) work, but aside from few fortunate(?) volcanic regions in the world requires the kind of deep drilling techniques we don't have nor will have in the foreseeable future.
By contrast, coal and nuclear plants produce energy as long as you supply fuel.
Now, you could possibly convert Sahara into a giant solar power center that could power Europe. However, this has plenty of technical but even most importantly political problems, specifically that it would make Europe dependent on a region that is known for neither its political stability, military might nor love of Europe. In other words, it would re-create the whole situation with US and the Middle-East, with the difference that North Africa is within arm's reach from Europe if and when someone decides to do something stupid on either side. I don't see how that could possibly end well for anyone concerned.
Germany is building coal plants to replace the nuclear power. Renewables can take some of the burden, but not fully replace nuclear, much less non-nuclear (polluting) energy production.
Most likely they'll quietly drop the plans when hysteria passes and people focus on other things, such as their rapidly rising electric bills.
Well no, running out of fossil fuels sooner or later, having climate change grow worse and worse by their use in the meantime, and newer plans being typically safer and more efficient than old ones, there's no reason whatsoever.
Unfortunately none of those you listed are alternatives. Hydro can't be scaled up enough, geothermal is still strictly in the realm of science fiction, and wind and solar are only workable if people get used to the idea that whether they get electricity or not is up to luck.
You should perhaps wait until this latest financial crisis ends before trying to imply that the actions of businessmen have anything to do with common good.
The language used here seems to be similar to how you would describe the actions of, say, a wolf: the entity is entirely directed by its instincts, which are geared towards filling its belly as much as possible, so you can't really blame it for going after easy prey (like kids). This, in turn, rises a question: is it really wise to let such an entity wield power to the tune of billions of dollars?
Or because of basic physics. The theoretical maximum efficiency of any heat engine is ((temperature of the hot end) - (temperature of cold end)) / (temperature of the hot end).
Since ambient temperature on Earth tends to be a bit shy of 300 Kelvins, no heat engine here can extract all of the heat energy flowing through them, and most fall far short of being even 50% efficient.
Care to be a bit more specific? What specific system are you proposing? How does it involve biotech? How does it involve robotics?
Because, when you leave out all the details of implementation, my cynical ears hear "I propose we produce energy by wistful thinking".
While speculating on other people's sexual and mental issues certainly makes for a convincing engineering argument, I think you could also work in a comparison to the Nazis somewhere. Can't go wrong with the classics.
"Nazis had a nuclear research program, thus it's evil" or something like that.
As long as they get to vote, and building nuclear plants is subject to permission from politicians, and politicians are more interested in getting re-elected than worrying about long-term consequences, it matters.
"Right" by what criteria? It is entirely rational to oppose nuclear power if one places the potential risks as higher priority as pollution-free and fossile fuel independent electricity generated by it. As is, people seem to think that it's either nuclear power or magical maintenance-free reliable windmills, rather than either coal power or de-industrialization.
It's rational to chose opposing nuclear energy over modern comforts like electric lights, but it's not rational to oppose nuclear power and fossil fuels yet insist on having reliable electricity available. So no, I'd say that most people who oppose nuclear energy are not "right", in the sense that they're fooling themselves about what they're actually choosing and what it implies.
Cooling towers work by evaporating water. While they don't warm rivers, they do consume the supply.
Attitudes like what? You aren't seriously suggesting that engineers purposefully pick the most enviromentally destructive option while twirling their mustaches and cackling villainously, are you?
"Entitlement", as in "investors are entitled to have their gambling losses covered by taxpayer money"? Because that entitlement absolutely dwarfs any and all entitlements the common people in Greece received. And it's the same problem everywhere, including the US.
As long as you're willing to tie social security and minimum wage to the highest income at the same ratio, I'm all for it.
That's a pretty efficient idiot. Also, "affected" is not the same as "destroyed".
You do realize that the main difference between these was how the captain, not the rabble, behaved, right?
Excuses. Someone who's starting a criminal career is not a murderer unless he was a sociopath to begin with. Most people on the criminal career will never become murderers. But even if neither of those were true, you speaking of "unemployable" people and linking to an article about teenagers would still be dishonest.
Did it ever occur to you that the "militarization of society" is not a universal problem, but mostly an American problem? It's your culture that's broken, not humanity in general.
Neither. I just leave my house, go around conducting my business or taking my pleasure, and return home unmolested. Again you are projecting American problems to humanity as large.
And all of these groups started by trying to make their victims seem less than humans, as rabid animals undeserving of sympathy or even life. Just like you're doing here.
USSR had plenty of problems but unemployment wasn't one of them.
Also, the Net is full of stuff idle hands built, from Slashdot itself (or at least I am not getting paid to write this comment) to everything on DeviantArt and too many fan- and original fiction communities to count to the entire Free Software movement to OpenGL tutorials to pretty much anything you could imagine. So, it seems that most people can handle being idle just fine, and rather than self-destruct will simply start learning and creating things.
If an unemployed person in the United States does something constructive, say, writes a blog, how many people are going to write indignant messages exclaiming how "those lazy unemployed" have too much money since they can afford a computer and Internet connection?
Also, when you talk about "unemployed" and "unemployable", and then link to an article about school kid gangs, well... yeah.
I guess having a serious lack of perspective could lead one to stick the nozzle into the wrong hole...
They are, however, violatable by anyone with a bigger stick than you. Which means that yes, you can be executed for leaving a religion.
Statements like this are utterly meaningless, since they require comparisons of actual world history to a hypothethical alternative history of an Earth-like planet populated by a species with some resemblance to humans but utter imperviousness to religious memes, which almost certainly would imply a lot more changes (even if we disregard the different developmental history required to come up with such a species) - for example, what of religion-like but secular ideologues like Nazism, Communism, Nationalism, etc? How would early societies maintain cohesion and transfer lore without the help of religion? How would the lack of a priest class affect early development of astronomy and mathematics? What would happen in the aftermath of, say, the fall of Rome, when monasteries wouldn't be around to preserve information? Would resource wars be more or less nasty if they were fought with pragmatic cynicism without religious justifications?
Atheism seems more and more like a religion to me nowadays, completely with its own fundamentalists, philosophers, apologics and evangelists. Also, it gives some of its adherents a smug feeling of superiority for believing unprovable (to any degree, in your case) statements and a need to proudly declare their overconfidence for all the world to see. Not to mention a need to end all their sentences in an exclamation point.
Cue a dozen posts explaining how atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby, and completely ignoring that people not collecting stamps don't engage in this kind of behaviour, nor care if someone calls their lack of stamps collecting a hobby.
It is also fundamentally impossible to know who will or will not be a good fit for a particular position before they're entrenched, thus all the energy that goes into the process is basically wasted. It does result in plenty of people having very impressively inflated resumes, though.
It's amazing how effective a 10-meter tsunami is at dispersing crowds, no?
Show movies on big screen for a price, or simply sell unrestricted movie files online.
Yes. There's a lesson there.
Pretty much anything would be superior to their current tactic of making everyone hate their guts while simultaneously trying their level best to become the number one threat to Western culture.
Maybe you should stop reading it, then?
As long as the Pirate Bay is the only place people can get movie files they can watch on any program and platform they want, are guaranteed to stay on their possession for as long as they - as opposed to a licensing server elsewhere - want, and can be worked on by tools to create new works - such as music videos - the Pirate Bay will always win. Freedom matters. Not to an authoritarian suggesting throwing mentally deficient people into jail over copyright infringement to stop them from "clogging up the Internet", of course, but it does matter to normal people.
So you think he's clinically retarded yet you suggest throwing him into jail for copyright infringement, not because you think that stops this horrendous criminal behaviour but because you don't like something he wrote?
Thus proving that it's not science, but simply people pushing their personal opinions draped in the prestige of science.
If they don't buy into it, then they will be ignored, because the libertarian hands-off mantra better serves the interests of the vultures who want to loot the society while there's still some meat on the bones.
But by that time, Google execs have already gotten their bonuses, so what do they care?
You are using oxygen generated by plants owned by me right now for free, you damn buccaneer! Not that I should speak, my plants soak in sunlight for free.
Piracy is robbery at high seas. Copyright infringement is exactly what it says. What you describe goes beyond both, straight into some kind of absurd strawman capitalist dystopia from Hell.
Seriously, think of what you write, or start thinking of who you should be paying in order to use grammar, 12 english words, and the concepts behind them.
Why cripple it? That just makes it look worse than it is. Offer a fully-functional copy for non-profit use (perhaps with the requirement that you mention the tool in credits?) and make money on for-profit licenses. Let the userbase grow unchecked so any new commercial project will have have people familiar and comfortable with your tool.
On the same notion, why require registration? It does nothing but needlessly tax your system to send spam to throwaway e-mail addresses. And why prohibit reposting the files? Let the Pirate Bay handle the distribution costs. If you want userbase statistics, you can simply check the seeder/leech numbers on any torrents there to get a rough estimate.
For most software, you are not going to make money from home users. You only make money from corporate users, so let home users use the software freely so they'll want it when they go work somewhere. A pirated copy is not a lost sale, it's a fraction of a sale in the making.
So the obvious solution is to not use iOS devices in companies. Use Android instead.
Corruption, plain and simple. Those with money and power are using it to bribe, bully and flatter the lawmakers into passing bad laws. The lawmakers, on the other hand, are all too happy to screw over the peons for their fellow aristocrats, especially since making choices that make people worse off lets them pretend they're being though and heroic for making "hard decisions".
That last problem is not limited to copyright law, BTW. Politicians are making decisions based on a screwed-up criteria where causing misery is considered a plus since it lets them pretend they're a modern-day Churchill (or the national equivalent). That's one of the reasons why the ongoing financial crisis is so damn hard to solve, despite ultimately only existing in the pages of accounting books: every action taken needs to make people poorer, otherwise it's not seen as "responsible". Thus various governments cut spending and rise taxes in the middle of a depression, which of course just steepens the downward spiral, leading to even higher taxes and spending cuts.
"The beatings will continue until morale improves", indeed.
They are fed up with the Doctrine of First Sale, yet whine when everyone else gets even more fed up with the rest of the copyright law.
I guess we're headed for another great video game crash; the combination of incompetence, rising development costs and feelings of entitlement reaching the level of absurd hubris in the industry are a deadly combination. Now if only they'll take the movie and music industries with them, we can start cleaning the corruption they have inflicted on us, such as ACTA.
Hey, you can't always be on the winning side of at-will firing.