Simply because we're switching the entire fleet of computers to Mac systems. A lot more reliable, a lot less expensive, a lot easier to manage.
No flame to Dell or Microsoft intended but their tandem has been biting the company in the behind for quite a while whether it be annoyingly small issues (roaming profiles not syncing correctly) or larger issues like virus outbreaks (even with full commercial anti-virus software), data loss when using SMB and the worse-than-awful support from Dell.
What good are 12 hard drives without anything else? Absolutely nothing. An enclosure alone to correctly power and cool these drives costs at least $800 and that's only with (e)SATA connections. No SAS, no FibreChannel, no Failovers, no cache or backup batteries, no controllers, no hardware that can connect your clients over eg. NFS or SMB to it.
Currently I can do professional storage in ~$1000/TB if you get 10TB, including backups, cooling and power that would probably run you $1600/TB over the lifetime of the hard drives (5 years).
I use a trackball myself. While coding I practically only use it while scrolling. It's easy on the hands, it doesn't move around (and during long programming and terminal sessions you might actually forget where you left the mouse) and you can program your mouse that for example if you click both left and right at the same time that you want your balls to do the scrolling - in any direction.
I currently have a Logitech TrackMan Wheel (cordless version exists) and a TrackMan Marble.
If you want a classic mouse I would suggest the Apple Mighty Mouse: it has a trackball in the middle that you can use for scrolling - in any direction.
There are also keyboards that have trackballs built in but I don't like them. The ball is in the wrong position, is too small and/or is mechanical.
Technically, these days you need to pay a fee for just about anything you implement. Like this patent:
A facility for automatically processing software patches is described. The facility receives in a computing system a distinguished patch package for modifying the behavior of a programmatic entity. The facility automatically extracts from the distinguished patch package (1) patch application information that identifies a distinguished programmatic entity against which the patches to be applied, and (2) patch behavior information that specifies a manner in which to modify the behavior of the distinguished programmatic entity. The facility automatically adds to a patch table a distinguished entry containing the extracted patch application information and patch behavior information.
It's not eavesdropping on full conversations - apparently they listened into some people's voicemail accounts by dialing the voicemail and then using default pin codes (eg. 0000 or 1234) to listen to the conversations.
There is not much you can do about it short of either changing your password or disabling voicemail or the carriers could inconvenience their customers by not allowing voicemail from other phone numbers (if that is at all possible)
First of all, I have been noticing it in the real world. More and more people walking around with Apple systems, netbooks and other portable devices running some flavor of Linux. I work at a large school and practically 80% of the new students buys an Apple over a (sometimes cheaper) Windows system. Researchers, doctors and labs are more and more going for the alternative - either a Linux machine or an Apple workstation some even fully outfitting their labs with Mac's. Someone from the Windows side of the IT department joked recently: if it's going to continue like this, soon we'll all have to migrate to Mac since that's what the students are going to expect.
But for some statistics (these are excluding mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile):
2005 Windows 95.96% Mac 3.64% Linux 0.31%
2006 Windows 94.82% Mac 4.68% Linux 0.38%
2007: Windows 92.86% Mac 6.40% Linux 0.46%
2008 Windows 90.67% Mac 8.03% Linux 0.76%
2009 (so far) Windows 88.04% Mac 9.83% Linux 0.87%
That's practically an 8% over just 4 years and it's not something like an application that people can simply install - usually it's on the computer when one buys it and it's going to be a great feat if it has all the updates. Internet Explorer is currently at 66% down from 98% a few years ago and there was a story a few days ago about how they are reviewing last months statistics since there are anomalies in the browser share.
- Bing is just a rename of MSN Search or Live Search or whatever it was called before. Microsoft products have gone through name changes just for the sake of it under BG too. - Natal can be seen as an extension or spinoff of the Surface project. It's similar technology. Microsoft has their fingers in all types of technology and will develop some type of interface for developers to it. If you've ever been subscribed to MSDN (back when they used to send you a package of all possible CD's) you should know that it's not unusual for Microsoft to start something way out there that eventually never gets finished. - Microsoft is forced to open their standards both from the market as well as court orders. They have to satisfy the demands of courts all over the world. If they could, they wouldn't open up the way they are. There are still clauses in a lot of their promises related to patents (they keep the possibility open to sue over use of their related patents and commercial use of their technologies and most of their promises are not compatible with GPL) and a lot of caveats in the technologies that they open (eg. they opened C# but didn't open the majority of libraries that make their.NET Framework, they opened DOCX but didn't open the implementations you need to implement DOCX) - Microsoft has been stagnant for so long that they're actually on the verge of dying (they've been stagnant ever since XP came on the market). Their operating system is losing market fast, Internet Explorer is losing market even faster, their steps into the Internet have been nothing but disaster and even Office is losing out against their own older products. They're probably going to stay around but not as a large monopolist - they will remain as a software development company and that was inevitable whether it was Ballmer or Gates at the wheel. They're so big, diverse and filled with management level-types that nobody can really take control of the company in the way eg. Apple's CEO is in control.
As one of the core devs and large user, I can tell you it scales well, develops easy and has a lot prefab. The system does everything you're asking for. Let me know if you need help or paid support.
An SSN or TIN number identifies an entity. In case of SSN that entity is a person. The SSN just gives you a serial number and that serial number is only owned by you and cannot (legally) be used by anyone else. Your birth certificate also identifies you as a person.
A phone however identifies a location, usually the end of the line in the vicinity where the phone is (whether tethered to a hardline or not). It's your phone number because you pay for it but your mom could pick it up, or a burglar that's in your house at that particular moment. Same goes for an IP-address, e-mail address and any other type of address (a phone number is technically a phone address). An address identifies where you most likely live, it doesn't mean you have to be there at any particular moment and legally/technically somebody else could be at the same address - it thus does not identify you.
Say the police are scoping out your house because of drug dealing going on from your house. The police might arrest you because most likely you know what's going on there. However if you can prove that a) you didn't know (it only happens when you're at work and you don't see any sign of it) or b) you are incapable of doing something about it (they keep your kids hostage) then they most likely will not prosecute you for the crime. Same goes for computers and phones and all types of stuff.
Actually, Phorm in it's current form (pun not intended) will not return. What will return is a milder version of it. Then they can say: look it's not as bad as Phorm, but it needs to be done for the children. The same happened when they planned to change our promised unlimited broadband to a monthly 10GB limit. They received a lot of backlash from their customers then said: ok we won't do it and behind the scenes they changed the contract to say they reserve the right to bother you if you're using too much of your bandwidth (a vague limit that seems to be ~50GB) and they started throttling certain protocols. See also the example of AT&T's deep packet inspection for the NSA - they said they won't do it anymore without a warrant - they'll just have to ask a warrant from a non-existent court controlled by the NSA and the packet inspection goes on at even larger levels than before.
I think the investigators make use of the GPS system in your cell phone. Your cell phone can be tracked or triangulated at will by your provider without you even knowing it unless you either a) programmed the phone yourself or b) disabled the GPS unit. This is useful for emergency situations where your GPS coordinates are transfered to the 911 operator who then knows where you are even if you don't.
The smart thing would be to leave your phone home only if you're going to commit a crime and make sure nobody can see you going out/in (backdoor, through your neighbors yard). Then your phone can give you the alibi if they are tracking it. But then again, most criminals aren't bright at all.
What do you mean ripping off? iTunes charges you $0.99 for a song you then own (without DRM). Pandora charges you $0.99 for a stream you are not allowed to record and can't take with you on your MP3 player. They are two different business models. One is a store, the other one is a radio station.
h.264 doesn't have expensive licensing fees. It's a STANDARD meaning it can be implemented by anyone for free. The issue is that h.264 has expensive patent licensing fees because somebody (not necessarily the creators of the standard) have patents on (parts) of the standard. The same is probably true for Ogg/Theora/FLAC but nobody has challenged it yet so we won't know until some patent troll decides to use it against a big enough player.
In Windows 2003 at least Software RAID is not trustworthy. Especially under high loads, Windows will stop synchronizing the disks and then you have a secondary drive that all of a sudden boots into a 6 month old version of your system (if it boots at all).
If you have no other choice, I would go for the 'firmware RAID' - I have never had any issues except that it's not that fast and you might have issues with Linux bypassing the RAID controller altogether (but then again, software RAID on Linux is at least stable). You can get burnt with any RAID controller, that's why we have backups but any decent setup will usually work.
Technically there is already a small benefit for renting a car if you're only doing one trip a year, it's just so small people don't want to put up with it. But if this should increase, the market will take care of it eventually. Rentals in any airport city is already fairly cheap (30-50/day) so you would only have to save $500/year on your car for it to become interesting (2 1 week trips to grandma).
And even if you want, you can keep both types around. It's not like US families only can afford 1 car - most have 2 or 3 already.
Electricity has to go down in price though. We would need to be less reliant on a grid since this is going to add to the already frequent brownouts anywhere in the US and have more widespread, less restricted use of mini-reactors (like Fujitsu's container-sized model) for larger companies (or charging stations) and other sources for 'home and garden'.
No it doesn't. I used to work for the people that do start.* (the start domain names of the late 90's - as you can imagine huge loads) and they ran on clusters of MSSQL. As soon as all CPU's (8- and 16-cores) hit 100% MSSQL pauses for a few milliseconds. I saw the same issue later for a large (well-known) oil company. Microsoft liked to make publicity that such customers ran MSSQL and Windows 2000 and 2003 but I believe none of them actually got any of the performance they had before on IBM mainframes or other Unix platforms
Maybe there is a difference between a manual 'fresh' install and the automatic update to IE8. It might have been temporary too - since the few Windows machines we have automatically update I don't really know. I had installed IE8 before manually without any issues, those that were automatic updated came with bing.
That's not the issue. The issue is that the 'required software update' Internet Explorer 8 changes all your preferences to bing.com instead of migrating/leaving it from IE7 or before. I have noticed it too on a machine I sometimes use. As soon as the latest updates are installed, the search preference and home page preference changes to bing.com (from whatever you had before) for all users.
They already do in many states so they could easily use this to track taxes. On cars built after 1992 they check your odometer against rollbacks. If the odometer has been rolled back, it is reported on your title. They just want to be able to track you in more detail, see when and where you are speeding (automatic speeding tickets), see where you were the night of the murder, which protests you attended, what church you belong to etc. etc.
We have been losing since the beginning of the widespread use of the Internet. The state (which is ran by such enterprises) wants to keep tight control over this (originally free and open) medium because they want to turn it into a sales channel for their products.
And then the populace votes for these enterprises while feeling good that they had a choice and made the right one.
There are certain reasons people want to switch to a new format (eg. VHS -> DVD or DVD -> Blu-Ray)
1) Convenience - VHS had to be rewound, you had to wait for it to fast forward in order to skip parts. DVD can be repositioned on the fly. Blu-Ray is similar to DVD in that regard, so no win. 2) Quality - VHS degraded over time and DVD had a much better resolution. Blu-Ray is supposedly better only if the original source was better than DVD. A lot of small studios don't have 1080p camera's, a lot of consumers don't have 1080p TV's. 720p or 1080i is the current budget format and unless you're going larger than 42" it's not really noticeable. 3) Price - Maybe that should be on top but DVD in the beginning was just as expensive as Blu-Ray. The only reason it took off fairly fast was because of 1 and 2. DVD only killed VHS when the prices had come down so low that there was no real difference between a VHS or a DVD player and a VHS tape or a DVD disc. By then DVD was cracked by a certain kid named Jon. 4) Features - DVD had features that VHS couldn't give (commentary, different audio tracks, extra's) and Blu-Ray has the same exact features. However the added features of Blu-Ray (internet connectivity etc.) will hardly be used because of the inconvenience of having to put in the disk. DVD's have the capability of similar features like games etc. on some discs but again hardly anyone uses them.
The problem that Blu-Ray has which will leave it dead is that the price can never be on par with DVD if the studios are trying to keep control over the Blu-Ray format. How much does it cost to keep re-encrypting, offering firmware, fine-tuning the DRM? You can put it on a DVD and press it for cheap with or without the encryption. Blu-Ray already costs more to press it but now you're going to have to keep remastering it as well and then you'll have to contact all the vendors and let them update firmware in their current stock, at the customers' side, deal with complaints and keep exchanging units where either flashing went wrong or the customer is too incompetent to do it themselves. This will keep the cost of both players and media high and then the customer will complain to their friends that Blu-Ray players are always having issues.
If you've lived here long enough, you know that shutting down the highway is only done for those that can't drive on snow (tourists). You take the inside route with any decent 4WD car and a good set of tires and you'll get to your job. I used to drive from Rochester, NY to Erie, PA (through Buffalo - I-90 is right besides the lakes all the way) in the middle of winter through the heaviest storms. Unless the University of Rochester shuts down there is nothing to worry about (they haven't in decades).
Slashdot Mirror
Simply because we're switching the entire fleet of computers to Mac systems. A lot more reliable, a lot less expensive, a lot easier to manage.
No flame to Dell or Microsoft intended but their tandem has been biting the company in the behind for quite a while whether it be annoyingly small issues (roaming profiles not syncing correctly) or larger issues like virus outbreaks (even with full commercial anti-virus software), data loss when using SMB and the worse-than-awful support from Dell.
What good are 12 hard drives without anything else? Absolutely nothing. An enclosure alone to correctly power and cool these drives costs at least $800 and that's only with (e)SATA connections. No SAS, no FibreChannel, no Failovers, no cache or backup batteries, no controllers, no hardware that can connect your clients over eg. NFS or SMB to it.
Currently I can do professional storage in ~$1000/TB if you get 10TB, including backups, cooling and power that would probably run you $1600/TB over the lifetime of the hard drives (5 years).
I know for sure that I used Germanium diodes before and I'm pretty sure Germanium-based LED's have been developed before. Dunno what the news is.
I use a trackball myself. While coding I practically only use it while scrolling. It's easy on the hands, it doesn't move around (and during long programming and terminal sessions you might actually forget where you left the mouse) and you can program your mouse that for example if you click both left and right at the same time that you want your balls to do the scrolling - in any direction.
I currently have a Logitech TrackMan Wheel (cordless version exists) and a TrackMan Marble.
If you want a classic mouse I would suggest the Apple Mighty Mouse: it has a trackball in the middle that you can use for scrolling - in any direction.
There are also keyboards that have trackballs built in but I don't like them. The ball is in the wrong position, is too small and/or is mechanical.
Technically, these days you need to pay a fee for just about anything you implement. Like this patent:
A facility for automatically processing software patches is described. The facility receives in a computing system a distinguished patch package for modifying the behavior of a programmatic entity. The facility automatically extracts from the distinguished patch package (1) patch application information that identifies a distinguished programmatic entity against which the patches to be applied, and (2) patch behavior information that specifies a manner in which to modify the behavior of the distinguished programmatic entity. The facility automatically adds to a patch table a distinguished entry containing the extracted patch application information and patch behavior information.
It's not eavesdropping on full conversations - apparently they listened into some people's voicemail accounts by dialing the voicemail and then using default pin codes (eg. 0000 or 1234) to listen to the conversations.
There is not much you can do about it short of either changing your password or disabling voicemail or the carriers could inconvenience their customers by not allowing voicemail from other phone numbers (if that is at all possible)
First of all, I have been noticing it in the real world. More and more people walking around with Apple systems, netbooks and other portable devices running some flavor of Linux. I work at a large school and practically 80% of the new students buys an Apple over a (sometimes cheaper) Windows system. Researchers, doctors and labs are more and more going for the alternative - either a Linux machine or an Apple workstation some even fully outfitting their labs with Mac's. Someone from the Windows side of the IT department joked recently: if it's going to continue like this, soon we'll all have to migrate to Mac since that's what the students are going to expect.
But for some statistics (these are excluding mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile):
2005
Windows 95.96%
Mac 3.64%
Linux 0.31%
2006
Windows 94.82%
Mac 4.68%
Linux 0.38%
2007:
Windows 92.86%
Mac 6.40%
Linux 0.46%
2008
Windows 90.67%
Mac 8.03%
Linux 0.76%
2009 (so far)
Windows 88.04%
Mac 9.83%
Linux 0.87%
That's practically an 8% over just 4 years and it's not something like an application that people can simply install - usually it's on the computer when one buys it and it's going to be a great feat if it has all the updates. Internet Explorer is currently at 66% down from 98% a few years ago and there was a story a few days ago about how they are reviewing last months statistics since there are anomalies in the browser share.
- Bing is just a rename of MSN Search or Live Search or whatever it was called before. Microsoft products have gone through name changes just for the sake of it under BG too. .NET Framework, they opened DOCX but didn't open the implementations you need to implement DOCX)
- Natal can be seen as an extension or spinoff of the Surface project. It's similar technology. Microsoft has their fingers in all types of technology and will develop some type of interface for developers to it. If you've ever been subscribed to MSDN (back when they used to send you a package of all possible CD's) you should know that it's not unusual for Microsoft to start something way out there that eventually never gets finished.
- Microsoft is forced to open their standards both from the market as well as court orders. They have to satisfy the demands of courts all over the world. If they could, they wouldn't open up the way they are. There are still clauses in a lot of their promises related to patents (they keep the possibility open to sue over use of their related patents and commercial use of their technologies and most of their promises are not compatible with GPL) and a lot of caveats in the technologies that they open (eg. they opened C# but didn't open the majority of libraries that make their
- Microsoft has been stagnant for so long that they're actually on the verge of dying (they've been stagnant ever since XP came on the market). Their operating system is losing market fast, Internet Explorer is losing market even faster, their steps into the Internet have been nothing but disaster and even Office is losing out against their own older products. They're probably going to stay around but not as a large monopolist - they will remain as a software development company and that was inevitable whether it was Ballmer or Gates at the wheel. They're so big, diverse and filled with management level-types that nobody can really take control of the company in the way eg. Apple's CEO is in control.
As one of the core devs and large user, I can tell you it scales well, develops easy and has a lot prefab. The system does everything you're asking for. Let me know if you need help or paid support.
Plummet? So now people will start promising Slashdotters they will have sex with them and never deliver? THE AGONY!
An SSN or TIN number identifies an entity. In case of SSN that entity is a person. The SSN just gives you a serial number and that serial number is only owned by you and cannot (legally) be used by anyone else. Your birth certificate also identifies you as a person.
A phone however identifies a location, usually the end of the line in the vicinity where the phone is (whether tethered to a hardline or not). It's your phone number because you pay for it but your mom could pick it up, or a burglar that's in your house at that particular moment. Same goes for an IP-address, e-mail address and any other type of address (a phone number is technically a phone address). An address identifies where you most likely live, it doesn't mean you have to be there at any particular moment and legally/technically somebody else could be at the same address - it thus does not identify you.
Say the police are scoping out your house because of drug dealing going on from your house. The police might arrest you because most likely you know what's going on there. However if you can prove that a) you didn't know (it only happens when you're at work and you don't see any sign of it) or b) you are incapable of doing something about it (they keep your kids hostage) then they most likely will not prosecute you for the crime. Same goes for computers and phones and all types of stuff.
Actually, Phorm in it's current form (pun not intended) will not return. What will return is a milder version of it. Then they can say: look it's not as bad as Phorm, but it needs to be done for the children. The same happened when they planned to change our promised unlimited broadband to a monthly 10GB limit. They received a lot of backlash from their customers then said: ok we won't do it and behind the scenes they changed the contract to say they reserve the right to bother you if you're using too much of your bandwidth (a vague limit that seems to be ~50GB) and they started throttling certain protocols. See also the example of AT&T's deep packet inspection for the NSA - they said they won't do it anymore without a warrant - they'll just have to ask a warrant from a non-existent court controlled by the NSA and the packet inspection goes on at even larger levels than before.
I think the investigators make use of the GPS system in your cell phone. Your cell phone can be tracked or triangulated at will by your provider without you even knowing it unless you either a) programmed the phone yourself or b) disabled the GPS unit. This is useful for emergency situations where your GPS coordinates are transfered to the 911 operator who then knows where you are even if you don't.
The smart thing would be to leave your phone home only if you're going to commit a crime and make sure nobody can see you going out/in (backdoor, through your neighbors yard). Then your phone can give you the alibi if they are tracking it. But then again, most criminals aren't bright at all.
What do you mean ripping off? iTunes charges you $0.99 for a song you then own (without DRM). Pandora charges you $0.99 for a stream you are not allowed to record and can't take with you on your MP3 player. They are two different business models. One is a store, the other one is a radio station.
... they're all driving on the wrong side of the road. And then they wonder why they're having accidents.
h.264 doesn't have expensive licensing fees. It's a STANDARD meaning it can be implemented by anyone for free. The issue is that h.264 has expensive patent licensing fees because somebody (not necessarily the creators of the standard) have patents on (parts) of the standard. The same is probably true for Ogg/Theora/FLAC but nobody has challenged it yet so we won't know until some patent troll decides to use it against a big enough player.
In Windows 2003 at least Software RAID is not trustworthy. Especially under high loads, Windows will stop synchronizing the disks and then you have a secondary drive that all of a sudden boots into a 6 month old version of your system (if it boots at all).
If you have no other choice, I would go for the 'firmware RAID' - I have never had any issues except that it's not that fast and you might have issues with Linux bypassing the RAID controller altogether (but then again, software RAID on Linux is at least stable). You can get burnt with any RAID controller, that's why we have backups but any decent setup will usually work.
Technically there is already a small benefit for renting a car if you're only doing one trip a year, it's just so small people don't want to put up with it. But if this should increase, the market will take care of it eventually. Rentals in any airport city is already fairly cheap (30-50/day) so you would only have to save $500/year on your car for it to become interesting (2 1 week trips to grandma).
And even if you want, you can keep both types around. It's not like US families only can afford 1 car - most have 2 or 3 already.
Electricity has to go down in price though. We would need to be less reliant on a grid since this is going to add to the already frequent brownouts anywhere in the US and have more widespread, less restricted use of mini-reactors (like Fujitsu's container-sized model) for larger companies (or charging stations) and other sources for 'home and garden'.
No it doesn't. I used to work for the people that do start.* (the start domain names of the late 90's - as you can imagine huge loads) and they ran on clusters of MSSQL. As soon as all CPU's (8- and 16-cores) hit 100% MSSQL pauses for a few milliseconds. I saw the same issue later for a large (well-known) oil company. Microsoft liked to make publicity that such customers ran MSSQL and Windows 2000 and 2003 but I believe none of them actually got any of the performance they had before on IBM mainframes or other Unix platforms
Maybe there is a difference between a manual 'fresh' install and the automatic update to IE8. It might have been temporary too - since the few Windows machines we have automatically update I don't really know. I had installed IE8 before manually without any issues, those that were automatic updated came with bing.
That's not the issue. The issue is that the 'required software update' Internet Explorer 8 changes all your preferences to bing.com instead of migrating/leaving it from IE7 or before. I have noticed it too on a machine I sometimes use. As soon as the latest updates are installed, the search preference and home page preference changes to bing.com (from whatever you had before) for all users.
They already do in many states so they could easily use this to track taxes. On cars built after 1992 they check your odometer against rollbacks. If the odometer has been rolled back, it is reported on your title. They just want to be able to track you in more detail, see when and where you are speeding (automatic speeding tickets), see where you were the night of the murder, which protests you attended, what church you belong to etc. etc.
We have been losing since the beginning of the widespread use of the Internet. The state (which is ran by such enterprises) wants to keep tight control over this (originally free and open) medium because they want to turn it into a sales channel for their products.
And then the populace votes for these enterprises while feeling good that they had a choice and made the right one.
There are certain reasons people want to switch to a new format (eg. VHS -> DVD or DVD -> Blu-Ray)
1) Convenience - VHS had to be rewound, you had to wait for it to fast forward in order to skip parts. DVD can be repositioned on the fly. Blu-Ray is similar to DVD in that regard, so no win.
2) Quality - VHS degraded over time and DVD had a much better resolution. Blu-Ray is supposedly better only if the original source was better than DVD. A lot of small studios don't have 1080p camera's, a lot of consumers don't have 1080p TV's. 720p or 1080i is the current budget format and unless you're going larger than 42" it's not really noticeable.
3) Price - Maybe that should be on top but DVD in the beginning was just as expensive as Blu-Ray. The only reason it took off fairly fast was because of 1 and 2. DVD only killed VHS when the prices had come down so low that there was no real difference between a VHS or a DVD player and a VHS tape or a DVD disc. By then DVD was cracked by a certain kid named Jon.
4) Features - DVD had features that VHS couldn't give (commentary, different audio tracks, extra's) and Blu-Ray has the same exact features. However the added features of Blu-Ray (internet connectivity etc.) will hardly be used because of the inconvenience of having to put in the disk. DVD's have the capability of similar features like games etc. on some discs but again hardly anyone uses them.
The problem that Blu-Ray has which will leave it dead is that the price can never be on par with DVD if the studios are trying to keep control over the Blu-Ray format. How much does it cost to keep re-encrypting, offering firmware, fine-tuning the DRM? You can put it on a DVD and press it for cheap with or without the encryption. Blu-Ray already costs more to press it but now you're going to have to keep remastering it as well and then you'll have to contact all the vendors and let them update firmware in their current stock, at the customers' side, deal with complaints and keep exchanging units where either flashing went wrong or the customer is too incompetent to do it themselves. This will keep the cost of both players and media high and then the customer will complain to their friends that Blu-Ray players are always having issues.
If you've lived here long enough, you know that shutting down the highway is only done for those that can't drive on snow (tourists). You take the inside route with any decent 4WD car and a good set of tires and you'll get to your job. I used to drive from Rochester, NY to Erie, PA (through Buffalo - I-90 is right besides the lakes all the way) in the middle of winter through the heaviest storms. Unless the University of Rochester shuts down there is nothing to worry about (they haven't in decades).