Technically you can't unless you're planning to resell the PC you install it on. It probably doesn't bother many individuals, but it bothers businesses.
Personally, I suspect the number of people who actually buy the complete, full, non-upgrade, non-OEM version of Windows is negligible. You usually get it with the PC you buy; corporates may well buy a site license to allow them to push out the same image on everything (another thing that's banned with the OEM copy that came with your PC) and upgrade existing systems.
I know there's the "export" problem, but the export problem is a lot worse for actual drug dealers versus drug dealers with diplomatic immunity.
Contrary to popular opinion, NK is not run by a bunch of complete idiots.
Crazies, maybe. Ruthless dictator who's prepared to watch his people starve to death following some sort of an idealistic economic model that was disproved decades ago? Sure.
But with the US's faintly absurd war on drugs, even the most crackpot banana republic isn't about to openly re-jig their economy so it operates on exports of cocaine under government approval.
A $10k price for "video editing software" is like a 10k price for "word processing software." It just isn't going to work out.
Don't be so certain. Usually the reason why these things cost that sort of money is they include a number of features that nobody who works outside the relevant industry would ever need in a million years. Quite often they're features that you or I simply don't know exist.
For that reason, the potential market is drastically limited.
"I would like the law" to operate in this way is not the same thing as "The law operates in this way".
Must confess I haven't read the actual judgement, but if the article in The Register is anything to go by, the legal argument that led to the Pirate Bay being blocked (even though my ISP doesn't appear to have blocked it yet....) was that its purpose was more-or-less exclusively to encourage copyright infringement on a large scale.
To go back to your road analogy, the government would probably pay more attention to roads if they were emblazoned with signs like "Shortcut to Evade Police", "Body Hiding Place 200 yards" and "Poorly secured bank that gets a delivery of cash on the dot of 11:00 every day, next left. Park 50 yards down the road; they're bastards for towing away around here and if you're not careful they'll tow you away so quickly you'll get out and find your getaway car's disappeared".
Depending on the industry you're in - yes, people really will make a cut of 1% to realise savings. It sounds crazy at first, but the thing is once a business reaches a certain point - which I daresay most burger chains did years ago - there simply aren't any 10-20% type savings anywhere to be found because you've already cut costs to the bone. So instead you make 10x 1% savings.
Thing is, sous vide cooking is an extremely good way to give yourself botulism poisoning unless you're very careful. I can't imagine it's a very good idea when you can't even reliably get clean water.
Take this with as much salt as you think it needs.... but the easiest way I can think of to do this is actually quite possible with no hacking.
Step 1: Take over the site through legal means. Step 2: Troll through the server logs, getting the IP addresses of everyone that's downloaded a.torrent file in the last month. There's a good chance the configuration for how much to keep in the way of logs won't have been nailed down to "almost nothing" because until recently, most of the sites that hosted nothing but.torrent files thought they were on fairly solid legal ground so didn't need to worry about that sort of thing. Step 3: Filter the list you got in step 2 for all IP addresses assigned to UK ISPs. Step 4: Contact those ISPs with a court order requesting: - Identity of who had IP address XX.XX.XX.XX at the appropriate date/time. - What else those people had been downloading. You don't need DPI-type information; if a customer has also been downloading lots of other.torrent files over an insecure link (dead easy to find out because many ISPs operate transparent proxy servers for HTTP traffic) and subsequently used a lot of bandwidth, that may well be enough to get a court order to seize the customer's own computer equipment.
You want a higher burden of evidence before getting a court order? Fine, limit it to IP addresses that have been visiting the site regularly and downloaded a lot. Yes, dynamic IP addresses do change but they don't typically change on an hourly basis. A single IP address that downloads a lot over the course of a couple of hours could easily be enough.
There. You've now got enough information to monitor the UK without having to plant a single trojan or do a single thing illegally.
What worries me is that it will be just user unfriendly enough that low-tech-savvy users won't know what to do. As opposed to immediately prompting you for your password. My assumption is that this is couched in security, but is actually a deliberate inconvenience to make sure that application developers see a sales loss if they don't fall in line. Yes, it will increase security. I'm just connecting the dots between "Apple making 30% off every app transaction" and "Apple being a business first and a secure OS second" and assuming the business interests are going to take us to some interesting places.
Considering the state such users tend to get Windows into, them not being able to figure out how to override it is probably no bad thing.
In all seriousness, airports are some of the least traveler-friendly places in America.
Much the same wherever you go. The great majority of airports are quite blatantly not there to help people relax in comfort before jetting off - they're a shopping arcade that you leave by plane.
I don't even understand why a company would bother. Electricity is what, about 8 cents a kw? So powering a 1000w microwave for an entire hour is only 8 cents. Laptop for an hour would probably be less than 1 cent, so why would you put in an expensive outlet when you could just let people charge their devices for a penny?
You're looking in the wrong place.
The real killer for electricity usage isn't a microwave, it's cooking (if you use an electric stove), heating and lighting. Unlike with a microwave, these are the sort of things that really will be running for several hours per day every day, and they often add up to several kilowatts.
Assuming electric cars ever take off, they're another killer - they need to draw a couple of KW for several hours to charge their batteries. Sure, your petrol bill will plummet but my God your electricity bill will go through the roof.
In the UK we most definitely have subsidised mobile phones - just visit o2.co.uk, vodafone.co.uk or carphonewarehouse.com - with a whole range of contracts ranging from "phone free, pay lots per month" to "phone expensive, pay little per month".
We don’t know yet; we’re still negotiating about logistics. The people we’re talking to have local distribution points all over the world, so you can have your Raspberry Pi shipped from somewhere closer than the UK.
This is a fancy way of saying "We've got an account manager with a well-known international courier such as UPS, and we're negotiating terms with them.".
That's precisely what it is, and even if the judge doesn't recognise it for being that someone's sure to point it out to him.
It's generally considered to be a really bad idea to piss off a judge when you're standing before him as a defendant in his courtroom. You can tell him what you think he can do all you like, but if he has other ideas, guess what's happening?
There are of course non-weird problems where you get the answer from IBM support in 2-3 days, and from Linux forums in 2-3 minutes.
I really wouldn't paint Linux support in such rosy terms. Many forums are heading in the direction of the blind leading the blind; application-specific mailing lists and IRC channels, while improving, still have a slight tendency to say "RTFM n00b!". (Or, as happened to me, "Can't be done. It's a stupid demand anyway. Fuck off" - twenty minutes later I figured out how to do it on my own, so it evidently could be done...)
Fine, Base might suck donkeys (I've never even bothered to try using it). Why don't you try a more functional DB. Even sqlite is better and that doesn't even pretend to be a competitor.
LibreOffice might do well to dump Base completely, Access-style DBs might have been useful 20 years ago, but today putting a (crap) DB in your office suite is a pointless exercise.
Access may have a terrible engine under the hood but that's not the point. The point is the GUI makes it possible for someone who knows precisely zero about databases to put together a basic system very quickly and easily - meaning that if a department has a relatively simple set of needs, Dave (who happens to know quite a bit about computers) can do it rather than having to go to all the hassle of setting up a formal project, finding money in the budget and getting approval from higher up.
Is it desirable to let this happen in any decent-sized business? Well, probably not. We all know what happens with the database Dave puts together. But that's a battle you lost about sixteen years ago when Microsoft started to include Access with their Office suite.
You still need some central, backed-up way to store your contacts list. Your head of sales won't thank you when his entire contact list disappears because his laptop's been stolen.
Not necessarily. Every penny spent trying to buy laws that keep their business model going - even when all the evidence suggests that they're throwing good money after bad - is a penny not being spent on keeping up with the times.
While this is going on, some bands are looking at other ways to fund their continued operation. Marillion took pre-orders through their website for an album when their contract with a record label expired; Radiohead released an album online through their own website.
Well and good for bands with an existing fanbase, what about others? I don't think we have to look very far to find out where they'll go. Amazon's music store and iTunes between them have more-or-less all the infrastructure in place to build a band up from nothing to a successful business.
They've got sales and distribution, they've got powerful marketing tools ("People who liked this also bought...."; "Featured on iTunes today is....") and they've got the expertise to automate much of this so the costs involved in figuring out what music is likely to sell and bringing it to market will plummet; not to mention the sort of results you can get without hiring a top-end studio are getting better with every year that goes by.
Five or ten years ago, Apple probably wouldn't have dreamed of doing this - they needed the record companies too much to risk pissing them off. I'm not sure that's still the case today.
Specifically, I think you're overestimating their ability to change. It is famously difficult to turn around a huge company, particularly when their entire business model is vanishing before their eyes. Only a few have succeeded - Apple and IBM are some of the best-known tech examples.
More often, the company comes close to collapse. See also Polaroid and Kodak.
Why? Simple. The bigger the company, the harder it is to make big changes to how it operates. You've typically got a fair bit of debt you need to service, you may well be looking at net profit margins in the single digits, you've got layers of middle-management who see their own little fiefdoms as being at risk and will happily say "Sure thing, boss" to your face while totally ignoring your instructions behind your back - and because you've got other things to worry about, it can be months or even years before it becomes obvious that your instructions are being ignored. Notwithstanding all this, huge changes that risk gutting the income from one business unit before you've got another one up and running nicely are almost certainly off the menu.
Wouldn't surprise me - I can't remember where I saw it now but I'm certain I've seen evidence that Microsoft seem convinced that "Multi-platform" means "Works on XP and Vista".
It's much easier to successfully treat cancer in its early stages. Which is great if you're "lucky" enough to be struck down with a type that tends to be easily detectable at early stages. Testicular and breast cancer fall into this category - it's pretty damn obvious if you've got a lump on one of your testicles.
Cancers that start deep inside the body - things like lung, liver, pancreas cancer - often don't show much in the way of symptoms until you're at a pretty advanced stage. By which time you'd be well advised to get your affairs in order.
Source: No particular expertise, but my wife works in radiotherapy and treats people with cancer all day long.
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Technically you can't unless you're planning to resell the PC you install it on. It probably doesn't bother many individuals, but it bothers businesses.
Personally, I suspect the number of people who actually buy the complete, full, non-upgrade, non-OEM version of Windows is negligible. You usually get it with the PC you buy; corporates may well buy a site license to allow them to push out the same image on everything (another thing that's banned with the OEM copy that came with your PC) and upgrade existing systems.
I know there's the "export" problem, but the export problem is a lot worse for actual drug dealers versus drug dealers with diplomatic immunity.
Contrary to popular opinion, NK is not run by a bunch of complete idiots.
Crazies, maybe. Ruthless dictator who's prepared to watch his people starve to death following some sort of an idealistic economic model that was disproved decades ago? Sure.
But with the US's faintly absurd war on drugs, even the most crackpot banana republic isn't about to openly re-jig their economy so it operates on exports of cocaine under government approval.
Are you serious or a troll?
A $10k price for "video editing software" is like a 10k price for "word processing software." It just isn't going to work out.
Don't be so certain. Usually the reason why these things cost that sort of money is they include a number of features that nobody who works outside the relevant industry would ever need in a million years. Quite often they're features that you or I simply don't know exist.
For that reason, the potential market is drastically limited.
"I would like the law" to operate in this way is not the same thing as "The law operates in this way".
Must confess I haven't read the actual judgement, but if the article in The Register is anything to go by, the legal argument that led to the Pirate Bay being blocked (even though my ISP doesn't appear to have blocked it yet....) was that its purpose was more-or-less exclusively to encourage copyright infringement on a large scale.
To go back to your road analogy, the government would probably pay more attention to roads if they were emblazoned with signs like "Shortcut to Evade Police", "Body Hiding Place 200 yards" and "Poorly secured bank that gets a delivery of cash on the dot of 11:00 every day, next left. Park 50 yards down the road; they're bastards for towing away around here and if you're not careful they'll tow you away so quickly you'll get out and find your getaway car's disappeared".
Depending on the industry you're in - yes, people really will make a cut of 1% to realise savings. It sounds crazy at first, but the thing is once a business reaches a certain point - which I daresay most burger chains did years ago - there simply aren't any 10-20% type savings anywhere to be found because you've already cut costs to the bone. So instead you make 10x 1% savings.
Thing is, sous vide cooking is an extremely good way to give yourself botulism poisoning unless you're very careful. I can't imagine it's a very good idea when you can't even reliably get clean water.
One penny per burger in a hundred million burgers is a million bucks.
Take this with as much salt as you think it needs.... but the easiest way I can think of to do this is actually quite possible with no hacking.
Step 1: Take over the site through legal means. .torrent file in the last month. There's a good chance the configuration for how much to keep in the way of logs won't have been nailed down to "almost nothing" because until recently, most of the sites that hosted nothing but .torrent files thought they were on fairly solid legal ground so didn't need to worry about that sort of thing. .torrent files over an insecure link (dead easy to find out because many ISPs operate transparent proxy servers for HTTP traffic) and subsequently used a lot of bandwidth, that may well be enough to get a court order to seize the customer's own computer equipment.
Step 2: Troll through the server logs, getting the IP addresses of everyone that's downloaded a
Step 3: Filter the list you got in step 2 for all IP addresses assigned to UK ISPs.
Step 4: Contact those ISPs with a court order requesting:
- Identity of who had IP address XX.XX.XX.XX at the appropriate date/time.
- What else those people had been downloading. You don't need DPI-type information; if a customer has also been downloading lots of other
You want a higher burden of evidence before getting a court order? Fine, limit it to IP addresses that have been visiting the site regularly and downloaded a lot. Yes, dynamic IP addresses do change but they don't typically change on an hourly basis. A single IP address that downloads a lot over the course of a couple of hours could easily be enough.
There. You've now got enough information to monitor the UK without having to plant a single trojan or do a single thing illegally.
What worries me is that it will be just user unfriendly enough that low-tech-savvy users won't know what to do. As opposed to immediately prompting you for your password. My assumption is that this is couched in security, but is actually a deliberate inconvenience to make sure that application developers see a sales loss if they don't fall in line. Yes, it will increase security. I'm just connecting the dots between "Apple making 30% off every app transaction" and "Apple being a business first and a secure OS second" and assuming the business interests are going to take us to some interesting places.
Considering the state such users tend to get Windows into, them not being able to figure out how to override it is probably no bad thing.
In all seriousness, airports are some of the least traveler-friendly places in America.
Much the same wherever you go. The great majority of airports are quite blatantly not there to help people relax in comfort before jetting off - they're a shopping arcade that you leave by plane.
I don't even understand why a company would bother. Electricity is what, about 8 cents a kw? So powering a 1000w microwave for an entire hour is only 8 cents. Laptop for an hour would probably be less than 1 cent, so why would you put in an expensive outlet when you could just let people charge their devices for a penny?
You're looking in the wrong place.
The real killer for electricity usage isn't a microwave, it's cooking (if you use an electric stove), heating and lighting. Unlike with a microwave, these are the sort of things that really will be running for several hours per day every day, and they often add up to several kilowatts.
Assuming electric cars ever take off, they're another killer - they need to draw a couple of KW for several hours to charge their batteries. Sure, your petrol bill will plummet but my God your electricity bill will go through the roof.
Unless it's moved on drastically from the days of OpenOffice.org, don't bother. Last time I checked, it was a third-rate clone of Access '97.
The masses have spoken. They don't care.
In the UK we most definitely have subsidised mobile phones - just visit o2.co.uk, vodafone.co.uk or carphonewarehouse.com - with a whole range of contracts ranging from "phone free, pay lots per month" to "phone expensive, pay little per month".
We don’t know yet; we’re still negotiating about logistics. The people we’re talking to have local distribution points all over the world, so you can have your Raspberry Pi shipped from somewhere closer than the UK.
This is a fancy way of saying "We've got an account manager with a well-known international courier such as UPS, and we're negotiating terms with them.".
That's precisely what it is, and even if the judge doesn't recognise it for being that someone's sure to point it out to him.
It's generally considered to be a really bad idea to piss off a judge when you're standing before him as a defendant in his courtroom. You can tell him what you think he can do all you like, but if he has other ideas, guess what's happening?
There are of course non-weird problems where you get the answer from IBM support in 2-3 days, and from Linux forums in 2-3 minutes.
I really wouldn't paint Linux support in such rosy terms. Many forums are heading in the direction of the blind leading the blind; application-specific mailing lists and IRC channels, while improving, still have a slight tendency to say "RTFM n00b!". (Or, as happened to me, "Can't be done. It's a stupid demand anyway. Fuck off" - twenty minutes later I figured out how to do it on my own, so it evidently could be done...)
Fine, Base might suck donkeys (I've never even bothered to try using it). Why don't you try a more functional DB. Even sqlite is better and that doesn't even pretend to be a competitor.
LibreOffice might do well to dump Base completely, Access-style DBs might have been useful 20 years ago, but today putting a (crap) DB in your office suite is a pointless exercise.
Access may have a terrible engine under the hood but that's not the point. The point is the GUI makes it possible for someone who knows precisely zero about databases to put together a basic system very quickly and easily - meaning that if a department has a relatively simple set of needs, Dave (who happens to know quite a bit about computers) can do it rather than having to go to all the hassle of setting up a formal project, finding money in the budget and getting approval from higher up.
Is it desirable to let this happen in any decent-sized business? Well, probably not. We all know what happens with the database Dave puts together. But that's a battle you lost about sixteen years ago when Microsoft started to include Access with their Office suite.
You still need some central, backed-up way to store your contacts list. Your head of sales won't thank you when his entire contact list disappears because his laptop's been stolen.
I don't think it is - Google Docs generally does a better job of interpreting .doc files than the latest versions of Libre|OpenOffice
Not necessarily. Every penny spent trying to buy laws that keep their business model going - even when all the evidence suggests that they're throwing good money after bad - is a penny not being spent on keeping up with the times.
While this is going on, some bands are looking at other ways to fund their continued operation. Marillion took pre-orders through their website for an album when their contract with a record label expired; Radiohead released an album online through their own website.
Well and good for bands with an existing fanbase, what about others? I don't think we have to look very far to find out where they'll go. Amazon's music store and iTunes between them have more-or-less all the infrastructure in place to build a band up from nothing to a successful business.
They've got sales and distribution, they've got powerful marketing tools ("People who liked this also bought...."; "Featured on iTunes today is....") and they've got the expertise to automate much of this so the costs involved in figuring out what music is likely to sell and bringing it to market will plummet; not to mention the sort of results you can get without hiring a top-end studio are getting better with every year that goes by.
Five or ten years ago, Apple probably wouldn't have dreamed of doing this - they needed the record companies too much to risk pissing them off. I'm not sure that's still the case today.
I think you're overestimating huge corporations.
Specifically, I think you're overestimating their ability to change. It is famously difficult to turn around a huge company, particularly when their entire business model is vanishing before their eyes. Only a few have succeeded - Apple and IBM are some of the best-known tech examples.
More often, the company comes close to collapse. See also Polaroid and Kodak.
Why? Simple. The bigger the company, the harder it is to make big changes to how it operates. You've typically got a fair bit of debt you need to service, you may well be looking at net profit margins in the single digits, you've got layers of middle-management who see their own little fiefdoms as being at risk and will happily say "Sure thing, boss" to your face while totally ignoring your instructions behind your back - and because you've got other things to worry about, it can be months or even years before it becomes obvious that your instructions are being ignored. Notwithstanding all this, huge changes that risk gutting the income from one business unit before you've got another one up and running nicely are almost certainly off the menu.
Wouldn't surprise me - I can't remember where I saw it now but I'm certain I've seen evidence that Microsoft seem convinced that "Multi-platform" means "Works on XP and Vista".
It's not as simple as that.
It's much easier to successfully treat cancer in its early stages. Which is great if you're "lucky" enough to be struck down with a type that tends to be easily detectable at early stages. Testicular and breast cancer fall into this category - it's pretty damn obvious if you've got a lump on one of your testicles.
Cancers that start deep inside the body - things like lung, liver, pancreas cancer - often don't show much in the way of symptoms until you're at a pretty advanced stage. By which time you'd be well advised to get your affairs in order.
Source: No particular expertise, but my wife works in radiotherapy and treats people with cancer all day long.