Private space companies, who incidentally are booming and profitable with regards to satellite operations (because, unlike everything else done in space, they bring back real, measurable benefits to mankind), have great multi-million dollar incentives to keep costs down. You save the shareholders a million bucks with a bright idea? Congratulations, collect a $10,000 bonus. However, at NASA, the bureacracy exists to perpetuate itself and that does NOT happen by saving money, it happens by spending it. $10 million extra in operational costs is 10 million opportunities to buy the votes or publicity that they need to get their next $400 million mission-to-nowhere approved. That is why cost savings which would make this article seem like a footnote (gee, lets start with "Stop sending up shuttle missions since we know they are hideously expensive and of no scientific value whatsoever" and move on from there) will never, ever be approved.
Yes, and if you proxy all your connections through Simple Pigeon Protocol, then downloading new plugins takes forever. Silly Eclipse developers making totalizing assumptions about things like "hard disk seek times are probably not measured in seconds due to overly convoluted network setups" and "the Internet is accessed through a series of tubes, not via specially trained animals".
Blizzard would HAPPILY give out a copy of World of Warcraft free to anyone who asks, if it were a good economic decision for them. Its not (or rather, was not at launch and will not be at the launch of each expansion pack for a few years yet). In the US, good high speed bandwidth is rare, and WoW is huge. The most efficient form of distributing untold terabytes of textures across the Internets is to not use the Internet at all, but rather to burn it on CDs, put the CDs in warehouses, and move from warehouses to retail outlets where your customers shop. (Also note that customers and users of MMORPGs are not necessarily the same people. Remember, although its changing slowly, a huge percentage of the video game market is gifts from Mom to child, and Mom may not get the same experience out of giving an emailed "CD" key rather than something wrappable.)
The problem? Retail outlets don't stock CDs just to make you happy -- you have to have a proposition for them to make money from the deal. The solution is to charge for a box what every other A list title costs, and give them an exclusivity deal -- that is why no A list MMORPGs offer online distribution for several months after release despite it being a technological no-brainer (after all, they do onlnie distribution for the beta, which in late stage is 100% the same product as the retail release). If you don't give them exclusivity, or if you drop the price on your CD to where it is nominal, they drop your MMORPG and use the shelf space for Sims: Fighting Aliens in the 'Hood or whatever that cash cow is on these days. (Which would you rather have, as a retailer? 50% of a $49.95 sale of GTA42: Vatican City or a $1 per CD bounty for giving out the AOL-esque "Free WoW trial!" CDs?)
... but I already own a Wii and a new PC. And $500 would buy me 8-10 new games for my Wii or PC. 8-10 games is a whole lot of fun to miss out on to bet on an unknown quality like the PS3, which hasn't really come out with a game that grabbed me yet.
I also find that with a new job and promotion that I'm not just gaming less than I used to, I'm gaming a HECK OF A LOT less than I used to, and its very hard to justify $500 for what might be a 6 hour a month hobby for me now. On the other hand, with disposable income and not a heck of a lot of time to spend it, if I see pretty much anything in the Wii section that looks like it would make for good entertainment with my friends the next time they come over for a dinner party I can buy it without a second thought.
My family has the same unlimited DSL connection that was sold to Jolly Roger next door who has BitTorrent pegging the block's bandwith allocation for 168 hours a week. This is partially responsible for the constant service outages and poor performance they experience (or, in family parlance, "It's Comcastic!"). Slashdot seems to get rather excised about Jolly Roger not getting the "unlimited" dirt-cheap bandwidth he thought he was going to get when he signed up for Comcast. Can you guys explain why my family needs to put up with terrible speeds on their moderate Internet usage to subsidize Roger's piracy, when they both bought the same package at the same price?
(Sure, sure -- blame Comcast. Believe me, we already do. The fact is, though, that if you're offered unmetered amounts of a finite resource and you then employ technology specifically designed to maximize your use of that resource that something will have to give. It might be Comcast's pricing model, but that would probably be pretty sucky: how many folks here would enjoy having bandwidth on the cellphone pricing plan, with a certain amount included, overages charges galore routinely affecting anyone with above-average needs, and a flat-rate plan costing about the price of your PC every month?)
... but I hear workers in IT also need to be able to deal with that funny TV with the clicky-clicky thing in front of it, and that sort of skill is not exactly disproportionately present in grade school teachers. (Says the ex-grade school teacher, current software engineer.)
Average family size is just over 3, so thats 42 million households. 9% drop of viewership is like losing 3.78 million households. I can't imagine that ALL of the Wiis picked off a household, but I could imagine that the intersection of "plays Wii" and "watches television" is pretty darn high. Thus, there are probably a few million households with older folks, young single salarymen, etc who do not watch television at all, reducing the total number of TV viewing households, and then 3 millon Wiis could cause a bit of a bite.
Now, most likely, there is a witches brew of factors here, of which the Wii is only one part. Frankly, I think the Wii is probably not causing a 9% decline or even a 5% decline based on my totally anecdotal knowledge of my Japanese friends and coworkers. That said, add in 3% from a Wii with 3% from random variation and 3% from a poor season for TV and things go from "disappointing" to "crisis" in a hurry.
He's straight, and his job is pretending to be gay. And not just "Well, when I'm in the privacy of my own bedroom..." gay, more "I own no clothes except form-fitting black leather and dry hump everything that moves and much that does not" gay. You'd feel repressed, too!
Essentially everybody, Japanese and otherwise, thinks Japan is a "small island nation". This is a myth made true only through repetition. The only thing that makes these myths SEEM true is if you compare Japan to only the United States, which is a tremendous outlier in many many ways, including surface area.
Here, I'll prove it to you: I have listed, in numerically ascending order, the land surface areas of the United Kindom, France, Germany, and Japan below. Can you pick out which one is Japan?
241,590 357,021 374,744 545,630
(Answer, in hex, is 5B7D8. That will probably suffice to not spoil folks still staring at the numbers.)
Seperately, Japan's population density is really not that high. No, really. The greater metropolitan Tokyo area's population density is *absurdly* high, but the rest of the nation wouldn't look out of place if you grafted it onto England or next to Missouri.
Hideho, American expat in rural Japan here. Its been ages in Internet time since I've paid for a US connection, so lets compare notes:
I get high speed internet through YahooBB (ADSL), which is now run by Softbank. I pay 4200 yen a month (~$34 at present) for 50 MB/s download speed, which is oversold (bounces between 2 MB/s and 12 MB/s when connecting to sites where I could reasonably expect to get the full benefit, such as iTunes Japan or the WoW bittorrent installer). This includes the basic charge for VoIP phone service but no call time (which is cheap -- 3 cents a minute to the US) and equipment rental (the modem -- should have bought it, would have paid for itself around month 18). I also pay approximately 1800 yen for basic telephone service, a necessary prerequisite for ADSL unless you want your VoIP phone to not be reachable by non-VoIP customers ("uh oh"). There is also the issue of buying a lease for a landline, which is a one time charge of $100 but which theoretically has the same resale value so we'll ignore that for the present.
So, all told, about $50 for high speed service which consistently delivers 2 to 12 MB/s.
Pretend that, to eat Cheerios or Frosted Flakes, you have to eat them in a special bowl. The bowl is really expensive, absorbing much of a month's discretionary budget. You will still continue buying Cheerios or Frosted Flakes, without which your bowl is useless. However, should Cheerios outsell Frosted Flakes 4 to 1, it will become increasingly difficult for you to find a store which stocks Frosted Flakes, and while the Cheerios kid will get Honey Nut Cheerios and Blueberry Sparkle Cheerios and a hundred variations on the theme you will be stuck with plain vanilla Frosted Flakes because the cereal companies will abandon Frosted Flakes as unprofitable.
In this weird alternate world, it makes sense for you to become emotionally attached to being a Frosted Flakes fan, and try to convince people to eat Frosted Flakes instead of that healthy not-really-a-cereal-more-like-a-grain-in-a-bowl Cheerios: if Cheerios "wins", they lose their investment in the Frosted Flakes bowl (additionally, they might actually like blueberry sparkles, but only if they are on Frosted Flakes rather than Cheerios, even if they had a spare Cheerios bowl lying around). Personally I don't think its a winner-take-all market but, eh, nobody ever accused Frosted Flakes eaters of being sophisticated economics thinkers:)
The people who talk in theatre are watching their favorite movie for eternity, except the seat behind them holds a fully-clothed women popping balloons. And the seats to either side of them hold the men who are buying the videos of the fully-clothed women popping balloons.
Hmm, I wonder if Satan would pay me a usage fee if I trademarked that. Eh, probably not, he has enough lawyers to fight his way out of it.
Somebody needs to flip the price on its back and hit it for massive damage. I think whacking 200 HP off of it might make it worthwhile to buy... sometime... pending a game I actually want to play on it. As it is, I can get a new Wii game and have great fun for a month without blowing half of my discretionary income for the month on it.
"Everyone who could possibly be interested in a handheld gaming system knows what a DS is."
Nintendo begs to differ. Just because you may have given up on getting grandma to play one doesn't mean they have. And, scarily, after seeing my mother get hooked on Wii bowling I think they might have a decent chance at pulling it off.
Some of us, quite sensibly, would wonder why the heck its the government's business that Avril Lavigne is getting less airplay than her corporate backers paid for. (Oh, these grants were supposed to be given to struggling small artists, as opposed to the folks who pay the lobbyists. Right. Sorry about that. OK, why the heck should the government support Working Mothers of Slamdancing Elephants? Its not like we are suffering a market failure of undersupply of music. There is plenty of it out there, for every taste, and we should let prospective producers concentrate on producing rather than concentrating on working the bureacracy to wheedle out extra airtime.)
You deserve a +1 insightful just for not saying "That means that they sold 10 UMD movies". The inability of smart, at-least-theoretically-mathematically-literate people to comprehend the reasoning for why it is 11 movies, not 10, fills me with despair. Actual quote from a discussion I had a few years ago with an engineering boss:
"Boss, we increased the throughput by 200% relative to [the baseline]" "Good. See if you can jigger something and get it up to triple."
I of course took the next hour off and then said:
"Hey boss, it took some doing, but we now have triple the performance of [the baseline]."
and we know what "model" is being used to mean, what difference does it make to use one versus the other? Its similar to using $variable notation in a Slashdot post: is that "good English" as your high school English teacher taught it? Who cares. It was comprehensible to your audience, leave it at that.
However, I will disavow all knowledge of the above paragraph if I am ever shown a memo with the word "lol" PRINTED on it. Unless the memo reads "All hands: use of the word 'lol' in any business capacity is now a firing offense".
... to RMS' frequent claims of being a tireless, persecuted martyr for freedom that they apply to, say, an American politican's frequent claims that any policy which they think is a good idea is justified by freedom. "Freedom" is not a magic word which forgives all sins and justifies all measures. Not for the politicians, not for the activists.
And, yes, RMS is radical and radically wrong on some points. His definition of "freedom" involves having the government coerce people who disagree with him. Read the GNU Manifesto -- not just the fluffy "Oh, I'm going to give you tons of free goodies" bits but the hard core "I really desire a radical transformation of how EVERYONE, not just you and me, see software" bits. Actual quotes, emphasis is mine:
"If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they DESERVE TO BE PUNISHED if they restrict the use of these programs"
"Proprietary and secret software is the moral equivalent of runners in a fist fight. Sad to say, the only referee we've got does not seem to object to fights; he just regulates them ("For every ten yards you run, you can fire one shot"). He really ought to break them up, and penalize runners for even trying to fight." (This is a call for the government to *ban proprietary software*.)
There's another bit where he proposes funding software development by creating a transnational agency to tax all computer hardware, and then fund deserving projects. "The total tax rate could be decided by a vote of the payers of the tax, weighted according to the amount they will be taxed on." Quite aside from the fact that your Dell is now 30% or 300% more expensive than it was yesterday, do you really want ALL money flowing into software to be allocated on the basis of the priorities of the US business community, who will ALWAYS win the "election" for determining development priorities because they spend vastly more money on hardware than anyone else? For that matter, does the idea of any government agency determining how much money needs to be allocated to WoW relative to Office appeal to you?
That doesn't sound like a CAPCHA has been broken, except perhaps by the sophisticated AI device known as a human being. 8 and a half CAPCHAs a minute? No problem for one person with a tolerance for boredom and CTS. Heck, you can even put the job up on Amazon Turk and charge a penny an account for the signups, or use cheap labor in any of a number of countries to do it.
Allow me to throw my IAAAIM (I Am Actually an Internet Merchant) two cents into the ring here: if somebody buys my product for $24.95 and then either asks me for a refund or I decide to refund it to them for whatever reason, including I suspect that the order was placed in error, that costs me either "nothing" (Paypal/Google Checkout both eat the CC fees) or "very little" (I end up paying the fee I paid for the transaction, in the neighborhood of a buck). The refund shows up right to their credit card statement. If, on the other hand, the customer actually does a chargeback -- i.e. they call their bank or card issuer and say "Excuse me, I found a transaction on my credit card bill that I didn't authorize", THEN I get to eat the $25 fee.
Refunding 700 transactions for approximately $300 (and the loss of your ill-gotten gains) is a great way to avoid getting hit with 200-400 chargebacks 30 days later, costing you well over $5,000.
Slashdot Mirror
Private space companies, who incidentally are booming and profitable with regards to satellite operations (because, unlike everything else done in space, they bring back real, measurable benefits to mankind), have great multi-million dollar incentives to keep costs down. You save the shareholders a million bucks with a bright idea? Congratulations, collect a $10,000 bonus. However, at NASA, the bureacracy exists to perpetuate itself and that does NOT happen by saving money, it happens by spending it. $10 million extra in operational costs is 10 million opportunities to buy the votes or publicity that they need to get their next $400 million mission-to-nowhere approved. That is why cost savings which would make this article seem like a footnote (gee, lets start with "Stop sending up shuttle missions since we know they are hideously expensive and of no scientific value whatsoever" and move on from there) will never, ever be approved.
Yes, and if you proxy all your connections through Simple Pigeon Protocol, then downloading new plugins takes forever. Silly Eclipse developers making totalizing assumptions about things like "hard disk seek times are probably not measured in seconds due to overly convoluted network setups" and "the Internet is accessed through a series of tubes, not via specially trained animals".
Blizzard would HAPPILY give out a copy of World of Warcraft free to anyone who asks, if it were a good economic decision for them. Its not (or rather, was not at launch and will not be at the launch of each expansion pack for a few years yet). In the US, good high speed bandwidth is rare, and WoW is huge. The most efficient form of distributing untold terabytes of textures across the Internets is to not use the Internet at all, but rather to burn it on CDs, put the CDs in warehouses, and move from warehouses to retail outlets where your customers shop. (Also note that customers and users of MMORPGs are not necessarily the same people. Remember, although its changing slowly, a huge percentage of the video game market is gifts from Mom to child, and Mom may not get the same experience out of giving an emailed "CD" key rather than something wrappable.)
The problem? Retail outlets don't stock CDs just to make you happy -- you have to have a proposition for them to make money from the deal. The solution is to charge for a box what every other A list title costs, and give them an exclusivity deal -- that is why no A list MMORPGs offer online distribution for several months after release despite it being a technological no-brainer (after all, they do onlnie distribution for the beta, which in late stage is 100% the same product as the retail release). If you don't give them exclusivity, or if you drop the price on your CD to where it is nominal, they drop your MMORPG and use the shelf space for Sims: Fighting Aliens in the 'Hood or whatever that cash cow is on these days. (Which would you rather have, as a retailer? 50% of a $49.95 sale of GTA42: Vatican City or a $1 per CD bounty for giving out the AOL-esque "Free WoW trial!" CDs?)
... but I already own a Wii and a new PC. And $500 would buy me 8-10 new games for my Wii or PC. 8-10 games is a whole lot of fun to miss out on to bet on an unknown quality like the PS3, which hasn't really come out with a game that grabbed me yet.
I also find that with a new job and promotion that I'm not just gaming less than I used to, I'm gaming a HECK OF A LOT less than I used to, and its very hard to justify $500 for what might be a 6 hour a month hobby for me now. On the other hand, with disposable income and not a heck of a lot of time to spend it, if I see pretty much anything in the Wii section that looks like it would make for good entertainment with my friends the next time they come over for a dinner party I can buy it without a second thought.
My family has the same unlimited DSL connection that was sold to Jolly Roger next door who has BitTorrent pegging the block's bandwith allocation for 168 hours a week. This is partially responsible for the constant service outages and poor performance they experience (or, in family parlance, "It's Comcastic!"). Slashdot seems to get rather excised about Jolly Roger not getting the "unlimited" dirt-cheap bandwidth he thought he was going to get when he signed up for Comcast. Can you guys explain why my family needs to put up with terrible speeds on their moderate Internet usage to subsidize Roger's piracy, when they both bought the same package at the same price?
(Sure, sure -- blame Comcast. Believe me, we already do. The fact is, though, that if you're offered unmetered amounts of a finite resource and you then employ technology specifically designed to maximize your use of that resource that something will have to give. It might be Comcast's pricing model, but that would probably be pretty sucky: how many folks here would enjoy having bandwidth on the cellphone pricing plan, with a certain amount included, overages charges galore routinely affecting anyone with above-average needs, and a flat-rate plan costing about the price of your PC every month?)
See above. Sad, too, as it would really help a project I am working on.
... but I hear workers in IT also need to be able to deal with that funny TV with the clicky-clicky thing in front of it, and that sort of skill is not exactly disproportionately present in grade school teachers. (Says the ex-grade school teacher, current software engineer.)
640 feet above sea level should be enough for anybody!
... how many blog posts can you dig up about them?
t nG=Google+Search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=golf+widow&b
Average family size is just over 3, so thats 42 million households. 9% drop of viewership is like losing 3.78 million households. I can't imagine that ALL of the Wiis picked off a household, but I could imagine that the intersection of "plays Wii" and "watches television" is pretty darn high. Thus, there are probably a few million households with older folks, young single salarymen, etc who do not watch television at all, reducing the total number of TV viewing households, and then 3 millon Wiis could cause a bit of a bite.
Now, most likely, there is a witches brew of factors here, of which the Wii is only one part. Frankly, I think the Wii is probably not causing a 9% decline or even a 5% decline based on my totally anecdotal knowledge of my Japanese friends and coworkers. That said, add in 3% from a Wii with 3% from random variation and 3% from a poor season for TV and things go from "disappointing" to "crisis" in a hurry.
He's straight, and his job is pretending to be gay. And not just "Well, when I'm in the privacy of my own bedroom..." gay, more "I own no clothes except form-fitting black leather and dry hump everything that moves and much that does not" gay. You'd feel repressed, too!
Essentially everybody, Japanese and otherwise, thinks Japan is a "small island nation". This is a myth made true only through repetition. The only thing that makes these myths SEEM true is if you compare Japan to only the United States, which is a tremendous outlier in many many ways, including surface area.
Here, I'll prove it to you: I have listed, in numerically ascending order, the land surface areas of the United Kindom, France, Germany, and Japan below. Can you pick out which one is Japan?
241,590
357,021
374,744
545,630
(Answer, in hex, is 5B7D8. That will probably suffice to not spoil folks still staring at the numbers.)
Seperately, Japan's population density is really not that high. No, really. The greater metropolitan Tokyo area's population density is *absurdly* high, but the rest of the nation wouldn't look out of place if you grafted it onto England or next to Missouri.
Hideho, American expat in rural Japan here. Its been ages in Internet time since I've paid for a US connection, so lets compare notes:
I get high speed internet through YahooBB (ADSL), which is now run by Softbank. I pay 4200 yen a month (~$34 at present) for 50 MB/s download speed, which is oversold (bounces between 2 MB/s and 12 MB/s when connecting to sites where I could reasonably expect to get the full benefit, such as iTunes Japan or the WoW bittorrent installer). This includes the basic charge for VoIP phone service but no call time (which is cheap -- 3 cents a minute to the US) and equipment rental (the modem -- should have bought it, would have paid for itself around month 18). I also pay approximately 1800 yen for basic telephone service, a necessary prerequisite for ADSL unless you want your VoIP phone to not be reachable by non-VoIP customers ("uh oh"). There is also the issue of buying a lease for a landline, which is a one time charge of $100 but which theoretically has the same resale value so we'll ignore that for the present.
So, all told, about $50 for high speed service which consistently delivers 2 to 12 MB/s.
What does $50 get in the US these days?
Those were Jack Bauer's hairs. And he wants them back. Looks like we'll be getting that war with Iran, after all.
Pretend that, to eat Cheerios or Frosted Flakes, you have to eat them in a special bowl. The bowl is really expensive, absorbing much of a month's discretionary budget. You will still continue buying Cheerios or Frosted Flakes, without which your bowl is useless. However, should Cheerios outsell Frosted Flakes 4 to 1, it will become increasingly difficult for you to find a store which stocks Frosted Flakes, and while the Cheerios kid will get Honey Nut Cheerios and Blueberry Sparkle Cheerios and a hundred variations on the theme you will be stuck with plain vanilla Frosted Flakes because the cereal companies will abandon Frosted Flakes as unprofitable.
:)
In this weird alternate world, it makes sense for you to become emotionally attached to being a Frosted Flakes fan, and try to convince people to eat Frosted Flakes instead of that healthy not-really-a-cereal-more-like-a-grain-in-a-bowl Cheerios: if Cheerios "wins", they lose their investment in the Frosted Flakes bowl (additionally, they might actually like blueberry sparkles, but only if they are on Frosted Flakes rather than Cheerios, even if they had a spare Cheerios bowl lying around). Personally I don't think its a winner-take-all market but, eh, nobody ever accused Frosted Flakes eaters of being sophisticated economics thinkers
The people who talk in theatre are watching their favorite movie for eternity, except the seat behind them holds a fully-clothed women popping balloons. And the seats to either side of them hold the men who are buying the videos of the fully-clothed women popping balloons.
Hmm, I wonder if Satan would pay me a usage fee if I trademarked that. Eh, probably not, he has enough lawyers to fight his way out of it.
Somebody needs to flip the price on its back and hit it for massive damage. I think whacking 200 HP off of it might make it worthwhile to buy... sometime... pending a game I actually want to play on it. As it is, I can get a new Wii game and have great fun for a month without blowing half of my discretionary income for the month on it.
"Everyone who could possibly be interested in a handheld gaming system knows what a DS is."
Nintendo begs to differ. Just because you may have given up on getting grandma to play one doesn't mean they have. And, scarily, after seeing my mother get hooked on Wii bowling I think they might have a decent chance at pulling it off.
Some of us, quite sensibly, would wonder why the heck its the government's business that Avril Lavigne is getting less airplay than her corporate backers paid for. (Oh, these grants were supposed to be given to struggling small artists, as opposed to the folks who pay the lobbyists. Right. Sorry about that. OK, why the heck should the government support Working Mothers of Slamdancing Elephants? Its not like we are suffering a market failure of undersupply of music. There is plenty of it out there, for every taste, and we should let prospective producers concentrate on producing rather than concentrating on working the bureacracy to wheedle out extra airtime.)
You deserve a +1 insightful just for not saying "That means that they sold 10 UMD movies". The inability of smart, at-least-theoretically-mathematically-literate people to comprehend the reasoning for why it is 11 movies, not 10, fills me with despair. Actual quote from a discussion I had a few years ago with an engineering boss:
"Boss, we increased the throughput by 200% relative to [the baseline]"
"Good. See if you can jigger something and get it up to triple."
I of course took the next hour off and then said:
"Hey boss, it took some doing, but we now have triple the performance of [the baseline]."
and we know what "model" is being used to mean, what difference does it make to use one versus the other? Its similar to using $variable notation in a Slashdot post: is that "good English" as your high school English teacher taught it? Who cares. It was comprehensible to your audience, leave it at that.
However, I will disavow all knowledge of the above paragraph if I am ever shown a memo with the word "lol" PRINTED on it. Unless the memo reads "All hands: use of the word 'lol' in any business capacity is now a firing offense".
... to RMS' frequent claims of being a tireless, persecuted martyr for freedom that they apply to, say, an American politican's frequent claims that any policy which they think is a good idea is justified by freedom. "Freedom" is not a magic word which forgives all sins and justifies all measures. Not for the politicians, not for the activists.
And, yes, RMS is radical and radically wrong on some points. His definition of "freedom" involves having the government coerce people who disagree with him. Read the GNU Manifesto -- not just the fluffy "Oh, I'm going to give you tons of free goodies" bits but the hard core "I really desire a radical transformation of how EVERYONE, not just you and me, see software" bits. Actual quotes, emphasis is mine:
"If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative programs, by the same token they DESERVE TO BE PUNISHED if they restrict the use of these programs"
"Proprietary and secret software is the moral equivalent of runners in a fist fight. Sad to say, the only referee we've got does not seem to object to fights; he just regulates them ("For every ten yards you run, you can fire one shot"). He really ought to break them up, and penalize runners for even trying to fight." (This is a call for the government to *ban proprietary software*.)
There's another bit where he proposes funding software development by creating a transnational agency to tax all computer hardware, and then fund deserving projects. "The total tax rate could be decided by a vote of the payers of the tax, weighted according to the amount they will be taxed on." Quite aside from the fact that your Dell is now 30% or 300% more expensive than it was yesterday, do you really want ALL money flowing into software to be allocated on the basis of the priorities of the US business community, who will ALWAYS win the "election" for determining development priorities because they spend vastly more money on hardware than anyone else? For that matter, does the idea of any government agency determining how much money needs to be allocated to WoW relative to Office appeal to you?
That doesn't sound like a CAPCHA has been broken, except perhaps by the sophisticated AI device known as a human being. 8 and a half CAPCHAs a minute? No problem for one person with a tolerance for boredom and CTS. Heck, you can even put the job up on Amazon Turk and charge a penny an account for the signups, or use cheap labor in any of a number of countries to do it.
* Plays fun games.
Allow me to throw my IAAAIM (I Am Actually an Internet Merchant) two cents into the ring here: if somebody buys my product for $24.95 and then either asks me for a refund or I decide to refund it to them for whatever reason, including I suspect that the order was placed in error, that costs me either "nothing" (Paypal/Google Checkout both eat the CC fees) or "very little" (I end up paying the fee I paid for the transaction, in the neighborhood of a buck). The refund shows up right to their credit card statement. If, on the other hand, the customer actually does a chargeback -- i.e. they call their bank or card issuer and say "Excuse me, I found a transaction on my credit card bill that I didn't authorize", THEN I get to eat the $25 fee.
Refunding 700 transactions for approximately $300 (and the loss of your ill-gotten gains) is a great way to avoid getting hit with 200-400 chargebacks 30 days later, costing you well over $5,000.