For this reason, cable modem service, while being cheaper than broadband, is also inferior. For myself, I'm sticking with my existing dialup account until I can get true broadband, something better than cable modem (such as DSL).
What a ridiculous conclusion. As I'm typing this a download is happening from Microsoft at a solid 245KB/second in the background (Cogeco here in Southern Ontario has a superb infrastructure), and this is pretty much the speed that I get 24/7 on my cable modem. I realize that not all cable users have as good of an area as me, however from what I've read most do.
Secondly, your technical analysis sounds like a sales pitch for DSL, and it has little grounding in reality. Let me let you in on a little secret: DSL providers do the exact same thing : They oversubscribe a given amount of bandwidth to make it cost effective (of course this happens at the CO rather than at the neighbourhood level, but the net effect is exactly the same): Got 500 1.5Mbps DSL users? Calculate the likely proportion that'll be online at any time (20%), multiple that by an acceptably low "satisfied" ratio (80%), and set the switch up with a 120Mbps connect to the net, because anything more would be financial suicide.
It should also be noted that this technical "cable versus DSL" argument has been played out a million times (always disproving the ridiculous "never shared" spiel about DSL), and people are usually reminded that a) cable is capable of an unbelievable frequency bandwidth, and technically the cable company could multiplex dozens of cable modem frequency per subnet if they felt like it, and b) even barring that, they can make a subnet as small as financially viable : Maybe they'll drop fiber to the corner and you'll be your own little subnet.
While this concept seems to be beyond the gimmee-gimmee crowd, the high speed cable networks, just like the phone system, the cell phone system, and just about every shared system, is oversubscribed : They do some complex calculations about the amount of bandwidth that an average family will do, and the pricing is based upon that. If someone is setting himself up as a terminal, obviously his usage pattern is going to be very irregular for an ordinary family, and it's virtually certain that he's using far more capacity than the connection was intended for. As such, they have every right to shut him off, and kudos to them for doing it : It really pisses me off when righteous, gimmee-gimmees claim their god given right to have an endless stream of anything when the economics simply do not support their claims (the cable companies CAN'T let you run 100% 24/7 without significantly raising the price, or withdrawing the service. If someone believes otherwise, often coupling their absurd argument with a claim that "bandwidth is free, man!", then I encourage them to set up high speed networks where they offer DS1 speeds for $40 a month).
What's with the "retard" comment? You immediately dismissed your reply as the slotherings of a pre-teen juvenile kid.
In any case, you ARE responsible for your phone. If, at that same party, a guest made a call to a 900 number and left it off the hook for the night you _WILL_ be charged for the bill, and there will be no way out of it.
Exactly, it is force, just as Americans don't have the choice not to have the law applied on their property, nor can they run sweat shops, nor can they decide that they no longer want to pay taxes, or that their children shouldn't go to school. There are basic fundamentals, such as health care, that are just a given with any reasonably advanced nation, and most such nations decided that health care could only be excluded as a basic, natural service if greed were a deciding factor.
Yeah, it's called democracy, and it's alive and well, and overwhelmingly Canadians support "socialist" health care (which, in reality, means "We all agree to buy into the big health insurance policy"). The people who make the choices are the electorate which goes to the polls and makes its feelings known.
Of course, as I mentioned in another post, the only Americans who "choose" not to have health insurance are the very poor who can't afford it. What a great choice.
Who in the US chooses not to have health insurance? I'm asking a very serious question here. The reality is that the ONLY people who "choose" not to have health insurance are the people who CAN'T have health insurance because they can't afford it. Similar observations can be made about property insurance, car insurance, etc. The "choice" in this case isn't a choice at all : It's a condition thrust on you by economic reality.
I don't want public roads, and I want them all to be toll roads (even my little side street). Can I have it? No? Oh right, it's against the common good. I want my kids to go to private school and I want public school abolished. Can I have it? No, of course I can't: It's against the common good. I don't want to pay TAXES, because what do I care if there's a military, or a fire fighting crew, or police : I live in a bunker and am a trained marksman, so why should I support the silly helpless victims out there? I could go on with examples of "socialism" in the mighty capitalist US of A, but I wouldn't want to upset any of the Slashdot freedom fighters who are so willing to brand Canada and Europe as "socialist" without looking in their own backgrounds, or understanding what they're really talking about.
Unfortunately, Canadia is not a capitalist system.
I see this "Canada is a socialism" BS on here a lot on Slashdot, and I find it fascinating. Could you tell me where I might find a "non-socialist" country? I presume you won't say the United States, as public highways, old age security, public schools, police departments, fire departments, public health, any government agency, etc, is ALL SOCIALISM (I'm in a rush and am too lazy right now, but please show me the budget amounts for the US and Canadian federal governments: I'll guess that they are largely the same per capita).
Any time people gather together for a "common good" is socialism. Life insurance is a version of socialism. Health insurance is COMPLETELY socialism (or do all Americans forsake health insurance because it's "commie socialism"? Do they say "No, when I get cancer, I'm looking forward to ponying up $527,293.23, because that's the capitalist American way!). Any time you don't directly pay for the goods and services that you receive, 100% so, it is a socialism system that is supporting it.
That's ridiculous. When a police car hits someone during a high speed chase, the police always get the blame (legally and socially. The person being chased won't be charged for manslaughter if a police car plows into a innocent victim). Hell, when the suspect fleeing hits someone during a high speed chase, 9 times out of 10 the police still get blamed (at least by ultra-liberal media like the Toronto Star. I'm not agreeing or disgreeing, but am just making an observation, though legally the suspect will be held accountable). We've had situations in Ontario where the police chase someone and then call it off because of the danger, and the suspects many minutes later ran a red light getting themselves killed (by a dump truck in a recent incident), and some media STILL tried to blame the police.
You have no idea what their methods of dealing with potential terrorism will be. In this case they merely cleared the way for the option by obtaining permission : They aren't saying "We're going to turn the jammers to 11 all week long and we'll be safe". Because Canada is a free country (yeah yeah...like all Western countries freedom is balanced with civic safety) they had to obtain permission publicly, which is why you hear about this, but they're hardly yelling out their plans.
And then what do you do with your couple of grand of bogus $5? Firstly you're under a massive risk of being caught : Every single time you pass one there's a risk, and of couse you can't walk into a bank and launder your stack of inkjet $5s (the probability of being caught is...oh...100%). Indeed, there's absolutely nowhere apart from maybe a variety store or Tim Horton's where you could spend them. Furthermore money is printed on a very unique paper in a very unique process, and being creatures of habit we THINK that we wouldn't notice, but in reality we do : Instantly any citizen would know that it just felt wrong in their hands (this is the amazing thing about becoming acquainted with your environment. I hopped on a GO train this morning and one of the fans was off, and while I couldn't place what was off I knew that something was awry : We notice small differences like that more than we think).
In reality the rate of counterfeiting is remarkably low (indeed : Virtually every "We don't take $100s" sign in Ontario is the result of a single little Windsor counterfeiting operation getting a lot more press than actual results), however because debit card machines are so prevalent throughout Canada (bit of history: Because we have only a few big banks across the entire country, they were way ahead of the US in forming a country-wide electronic transfer system), paper money is becoming more of a hassle than its worth: Not only do those $50s put you at a maginally higher risk of having counterfeits (albeit marginal), it also means that you have to have the float to store change for that, which means that you'll be a much likelier victim of a robbery.
The condensed version of that goes as such : Debit machines are so common and so heavily used that retailers are in the process of actively discouraging the use of actual paper money, and I wouldn't be suprized to see some store actually refuse to take any money within the next couple of years (P.S. Before someone claims that that's illegal and they have to take "legal tender", blah blah: Actually they don't, and any merchant is well within their rights to refuse paper money).
Search for Java on the java.sun.com page? Are you trying to be funny? Of course there'll be hundreds of matches, the overwhelming majority of which will not be the plug-in for the 32-bit Windows variants. The point of my original message is that many people, such as myself, are often under tight timelines when they have to find something like that, and Sun should take advantage of every eyeball to the greatest extent possible.
P.S. The point about the graphics "format" had to do with the fact that I usually expedite overly-polluted pages like that (er...what you like to call a "professional" page) with a CTRL-F and then trying to find on the page what I'm looking for. Obviously that doesn't search the text bitmaps on a GIF image.
Well, firstly that hasn't always been there. Secondly, they made it a GIF (with a not-very-helpful ALT tag of "Get Java Now"), which means that a find on the page fails. Thirdly, that page is usually grossly polluted with thousands of words crammed onto one page. I guess I just think that when Joe Average with java.sun.com goes to java.sun.com, and they're running a Windows OS with IE, you'd think that Sun would super capitalize on that and make it enormously clear how they can find and install the superior Sun plug-in.
Speaking of that: Sun has a horribly designed website. I hate to even mention it because I'm sure some wise ass will respond telling me how easy it is, but of the several times I've installed machines or virtual machines, one thing that I am always astounded about is how bloody hard it is to find the plug-in on the Sun site : You would think that this would be a huge market for them to exploit, and maybe the IE browser identification when I visited should have led them to put it front and center, but instead it seems to be hidden away in the middle of who knows where.
I disagree entirely. Ralph Nader's book brought about a revolution in the public's eyes, and any legislation was politicians trying to choose the colour to paint the shed : They followed the trend rather than led it. ABS, electronic stability control, side impact beams, traction control systems, side airbags, have nothing to do with legislation, and everything to do with consumer's saying "yeah, safety matters". Volvo exists primarily based upon their safety standard. The law almost always lags rather than leads.
The "little incentive to offer new features" is ridiculous. There are dozens of extremely large auto companies, all dying to eat into each other's business.
Bridges collapse, buildings fall down, boats sink. For all of the talk of the auto industry, it's interesting to see 100s of thousands of autos recalled yearly because of basic design defects that compromise safety (and lead to thousands of accidents when brakes fail, trucks rollover, etc.). Mind you I personally find it hard to believe that the radiation machines would allow for erroneous input, but at the same time anyone can hop into a car and plow it into a group of people : Why aren't the car makers expected to deal with erroneous input in automobiles?
Actually, almost every softare company that I'm aware of has an inexpensive media replacement program, though of course they want some verification that you're the actual owner. I'm sure there are insidious companies that won't, but overall I'd say the majority of software companies would be more than happy to replace media.
Indeed, it should be the market that decides, and not the courts : The market is the reason that North American automakers were forced to dramatically improve their quality (because the Japanese automakers were far ahead of them, and the market started voting for quality with their pocketbooks), and the markets are the reason why people pay a huge premium for IBM laptops. These capitalistic forces are amazingly powerful in getting what people really want, and the only time they fail to work is when someone with a pet issue tries to circumvent market-forces to get their own personal beliefs imposed on everyone through the legal system. It isn't surprizing to see the "sue em!" claims from many of those who already have forsook Microsoft software: These are the type of authoritarian people who believe that because it's not right for them, therefore it shouldn't be right for anyone else.
The irony is that most people, the average Joe and Jane out there, have shown that quality of software is very low on their list of purchasing criteria (which is how software like "ICQ" has never been non-beta...why bother ever calling it production code when millions of people will download it anyways). Given the choice, the market has stated time and time again that features will always trump quality, and that time to market often beats quality.
Sidenote: My own philosophy is that I spend about 90% of QA time code auditing and refactoring, and about 10% of the time doing runtime testing. I find that this is exactly the opposite of many organizations which push runtime testing as the method of evaluating code. To me runtime testing is no different than doing a compiler syntax check: It's an incredibly weak, time intensive, limited case way to assure the quality of your code, and should at most be used to evaluate tha the compiler and dependant third party code is of a good quality.
Wow, looks like I really hit a sore spot. I find it most interesting that first you cover for yourself by claiming that it's for, err, backups (coughBULLSHITcough). Now generally if someone made an argument like that, they've taken the high road and have no need to defend their actions, but then right after that you blather out about how I think I'm a "pinnacle of virtue". Uh huh. Pick an argument Einstein.
I think you missed the point : If it's convenient enough, a good portion of average, ordinary people will commit "petty crimes", especially when they can convince themselves that it's harmless (such as what you see on Slashdot regularly : The whole "Software is free anyways, and I've deprived them of nothing" prehistoric thought process) : It's the prisoner's dilemma playing out on a grand scale. THESE are the people that copy protection is meant to thwart, not Jimmy the 13 year old that's willing to spend 40 hours to get a copy of a $59 game. Microsoft's activation key could easily be circumvented with a bit of social engineering (ignoring the volume copies out there), but Microsoft knows that most Mom and Pops aren't going to overtly commit a crime like that, and they're more likely to pony up for a copy.
How am I a hypocrite? Because I call the "I want to copy for `backups'" BS anti-copy protection line what it is: A cover? I have _never_ _ever_ _ever_ had a CD fail in any way, and I would say that at most times my care of them has been less than exemplary (I tend to have piles of CDs sitting atop each other, caseless). In other words I've never had the need to have a, err, backup. I find this excuse for anti-copy protection advocacy weak.
People who break copy protection are "good guys"? Sorry, but as the kind of guy who goes down to EB every month or so to help support my fellow programmer for their efforts and ingenuity, I'm not going to be in line to give them a pat on the back, just as I'm not out there looking to give accolades to people cheating on welfare or collecting fraudulent compensation claims : Theft is theft.
Having said that, the comparison between security and copy protection is brutally flawed at the outset. Security is to avoid ANY intrusions, copy protection is to avoid MOST intrusions. This is a vast chasm of difference that many people with very juvenile thought processes fail to get on Slashdot. To put it into expanded form: Copy protection is meant to make it inconvenient for the casual "pirate", to the point that they're more likely to just buy a copy rather than screw with 20 different burning softwares, or downloading cracks from the warez sites (indeed, I would say that virus' and trojan horses have done software vendors more of a favour than they could ever imagine: I know a lot of former pirates who won't touch anything that isn't on a retail shelf anymore). Copy protection NEVER has to be absolute to be effective.
On a similar theme, the game Operation Flashpoint has a system they called "FADE", wherein a detected bootleg copy would lead to the player's weapons being much less effective. This is a brilliant strategy given how suggestive human beings are: Even for the times when a dupe is a 1:1 100% perfect copy, a less than skillful player will be sure that the real reason that they aren't hitting the enemy is because of FADE kicking in in the background.
How is a maglev more "complex"? Perhaps because of the newness it may appear that way, but the fundamentals are so basic that it seems to me that it's the height of simplicity: The opposite of a normal train which is thousands of constantly wearing down parts, etc.
Once a maglev is in operations I would expect that it is significantly cheaper to maintain maintenance wise.
Slashdot Mirror
For this reason, cable modem service, while being cheaper than broadband, is also inferior. For
myself, I'm sticking with my existing dialup
account until I can get true broadband, something
better than cable modem (such as DSL).
What a ridiculous conclusion. As I'm typing this a download is happening from Microsoft at a solid 245KB/second in the background (Cogeco here in Southern Ontario has a superb infrastructure), and this is pretty much the speed that I get 24/7 on my cable modem. I realize that not all cable users have as good of an area as me, however from what I've read most do.
Secondly, your technical analysis sounds like a sales pitch for DSL, and it has little grounding in reality. Let me let you in on a little secret: DSL providers do the exact same thing : They oversubscribe a given amount of bandwidth to make it cost effective (of course this happens at the CO rather than at the neighbourhood level, but the net effect is exactly the same): Got 500 1.5Mbps DSL users? Calculate the likely proportion that'll be online at any time (20%), multiple that by an acceptably low "satisfied" ratio (80%), and set the switch up with a 120Mbps connect to the net, because anything more would be financial suicide.
It should also be noted that this technical "cable versus DSL" argument has been played out a million times (always disproving the ridiculous "never shared" spiel about DSL), and people are usually reminded that a) cable is capable of an unbelievable frequency bandwidth, and technically the cable company could multiplex dozens of cable modem frequency per subnet if they felt like it, and b) even barring that, they can make a subnet as small as financially viable : Maybe they'll drop fiber to the corner and you'll be your own little subnet.
While this concept seems to be beyond the gimmee-gimmee crowd, the high speed cable networks, just like the phone system, the cell phone system, and just about every shared system, is oversubscribed : They do some complex calculations about the amount of bandwidth that an average family will do, and the pricing is based upon that. If someone is setting himself up as a terminal, obviously his usage pattern is going to be very irregular for an ordinary family, and it's virtually certain that he's using far more capacity than the connection was intended for. As such, they have every right to shut him off, and kudos to them for doing it : It really pisses me off when righteous, gimmee-gimmees claim their god given right to have an endless stream of anything when the economics simply do not support their claims (the cable companies CAN'T let you run 100% 24/7 without significantly raising the price, or withdrawing the service. If someone believes otherwise, often coupling their absurd argument with a claim that "bandwidth is free, man!", then I encourage them to set up high speed networks where they offer DS1 speeds for $40 a month).
What's with the "retard" comment? You immediately dismissed your reply as the slotherings of a pre-teen juvenile kid.
In any case, you ARE responsible for your phone. If, at that same party, a guest made a call to a 900 number and left it off the hook for the night you _WILL_ be charged for the bill, and there will be no way out of it.
Exactly, it is force, just as Americans don't have the choice not to have the law applied on their property, nor can they run sweat shops, nor can they decide that they no longer want to pay taxes, or that their children shouldn't go to school. There are basic fundamentals, such as health care, that are just a given with any reasonably advanced nation, and most such nations decided that health care could only be excluded as a basic, natural service if greed were a deciding factor.
Yeah, it's called democracy, and it's alive and well, and overwhelmingly Canadians support "socialist" health care (which, in reality, means "We all agree to buy into the big health insurance policy"). The people who make the choices are the electorate which goes to the polls and makes its feelings known.
Of course, as I mentioned in another post, the only Americans who "choose" not to have health insurance are the very poor who can't afford it. What a great choice.
Who in the US chooses not to have health insurance? I'm asking a very serious question here. The reality is that the ONLY people who "choose" not to have health insurance are the people who CAN'T have health insurance because they can't afford it. Similar observations can be made about property insurance, car insurance, etc. The "choice" in this case isn't a choice at all : It's a condition thrust on you by economic reality.
I don't want public roads, and I want them all to be toll roads (even my little side street). Can I have it? No? Oh right, it's against the common good. I want my kids to go to private school and I want public school abolished. Can I have it? No, of course I can't: It's against the common good. I don't want to pay TAXES, because what do I care if there's a military, or a fire fighting crew, or police : I live in a bunker and am a trained marksman, so why should I support the silly helpless victims out there? I could go on with examples of "socialism" in the mighty capitalist US of A, but I wouldn't want to upset any of the Slashdot freedom fighters who are so willing to brand Canada and Europe as "socialist" without looking in their own backgrounds, or understanding what they're really talking about.
Unfortunately, Canadia is not a capitalist system.
I see this "Canada is a socialism" BS on here a lot on Slashdot, and I find it fascinating. Could you tell me where I might find a "non-socialist" country? I presume you won't say the United States, as public highways, old age security, public schools, police departments, fire departments, public health, any government agency, etc, is ALL SOCIALISM (I'm in a rush and am too lazy right now, but please show me the budget amounts for the US and Canadian federal governments: I'll guess that they are largely the same per capita).
Any time people gather together for a "common good" is socialism. Life insurance is a version of socialism. Health insurance is COMPLETELY socialism (or do all Americans forsake health insurance because it's "commie socialism"? Do they say "No, when I get cancer, I'm looking forward to ponying up $527,293.23, because that's the capitalist American way!). Any time you don't directly pay for the goods and services that you receive, 100% so, it is a socialism system that is supporting it.
That's ridiculous. When a police car hits someone during a high speed chase, the police always get the blame (legally and socially. The person being chased won't be charged for manslaughter if a police car plows into a innocent victim). Hell, when the suspect fleeing hits someone during a high speed chase, 9 times out of 10 the police still get blamed (at least by ultra-liberal media like the Toronto Star. I'm not agreeing or disgreeing, but am just making an observation, though legally the suspect will be held accountable). We've had situations in Ontario where the police chase someone and then call it off because of the danger, and the suspects many minutes later ran a red light getting themselves killed (by a dump truck in a recent incident), and some media STILL tried to blame the police.
You have no idea what their methods of dealing with potential terrorism will be. In this case they merely cleared the way for the option by obtaining permission : They aren't saying "We're going to turn the jammers to 11 all week long and we'll be safe". Because Canada is a free country (yeah yeah...like all Western countries freedom is balanced with civic safety) they had to obtain permission publicly, which is why you hear about this, but they're hardly yelling out their plans.
And then what do you do with your couple of grand of bogus $5? Firstly you're under a massive risk of being caught : Every single time you pass one there's a risk, and of couse you can't walk into a bank and launder your stack of inkjet $5s (the probability of being caught is...oh...100%). Indeed, there's absolutely nowhere apart from maybe a variety store or Tim Horton's where you could spend them. Furthermore money is printed on a very unique paper in a very unique process, and being creatures of habit we THINK that we wouldn't notice, but in reality we do : Instantly any citizen would know that it just felt wrong in their hands (this is the amazing thing about becoming acquainted with your environment. I hopped on a GO train this morning and one of the fans was off, and while I couldn't place what was off I knew that something was awry : We notice small differences like that more than we think).
In reality the rate of counterfeiting is remarkably low (indeed : Virtually every "We don't take $100s" sign in Ontario is the result of a single little Windsor counterfeiting operation getting a lot more press than actual results), however because debit card machines are so prevalent throughout Canada (bit of history: Because we have only a few big banks across the entire country, they were way ahead of the US in forming a country-wide electronic transfer system), paper money is becoming more of a hassle than its worth: Not only do those $50s put you at a maginally higher risk of having counterfeits (albeit marginal), it also means that you have to have the float to store change for that, which means that you'll be a much likelier victim of a robbery.
The condensed version of that goes as such : Debit machines are so common and so heavily used that retailers are in the process of actively discouraging the use of actual paper money, and I wouldn't be suprized to see some store actually refuse to take any money within the next couple of years (P.S. Before someone claims that that's illegal and they have to take "legal tender", blah blah: Actually they don't, and any merchant is well within their rights to refuse paper money).
Search for Java on the java.sun.com page? Are you trying to be funny? Of course there'll be hundreds of matches, the overwhelming majority of which will not be the plug-in for the 32-bit Windows variants. The point of my original message is that many people, such as myself, are often under tight timelines when they have to find something like that, and Sun should take advantage of every eyeball to the greatest extent possible.
P.S. The point about the graphics "format" had to do with the fact that I usually expedite overly-polluted pages like that (er...what you like to call a "professional" page) with a CTRL-F and then trying to find on the page what I'm looking for. Obviously that doesn't search the text bitmaps on a GIF image.
Well, firstly that hasn't always been there. Secondly, they made it a GIF (with a not-very-helpful ALT tag of "Get Java Now"), which means that a find on the page fails. Thirdly, that page is usually grossly polluted with thousands of words crammed onto one page. I guess I just think that when Joe Average with java.sun.com goes to java.sun.com, and they're running a Windows OS with IE, you'd think that Sun would super capitalize on that and make it enormously clear how they can find and install the superior Sun plug-in.
Draw on the gold section of your optical cable with green marker and that'll make 'er really sound good!
Speaking of that: Sun has a horribly designed website. I hate to even mention it because I'm sure some wise ass will respond telling me how easy it is, but of the several times I've installed machines or virtual machines, one thing that I am always astounded about is how bloody hard it is to find the plug-in on the Sun site : You would think that this would be a huge market for them to exploit, and maybe the IE browser identification when I visited should have led them to put it front and center, but instead it seems to be hidden away in the middle of who knows where.
I disagree entirely. Ralph Nader's book brought about a revolution in the public's eyes, and any legislation was politicians trying to choose the colour to paint the shed : They followed the trend rather than led it. ABS, electronic stability control, side impact beams, traction control systems, side airbags, have nothing to do with legislation, and everything to do with consumer's saying "yeah, safety matters". Volvo exists primarily based upon their safety standard. The law almost always lags rather than leads.
The "little incentive to offer new features" is ridiculous. There are dozens of extremely large auto companies, all dying to eat into each other's business.
Bridges collapse, buildings fall down, boats sink. For all of the talk of the auto industry, it's interesting to see 100s of thousands of autos recalled yearly because of basic design defects that compromise safety (and lead to thousands of accidents when brakes fail, trucks rollover, etc.). Mind you I personally find it hard to believe that the radiation machines would allow for erroneous input, but at the same time anyone can hop into a car and plow it into a group of people : Why aren't the car makers expected to deal with erroneous input in automobiles?
Actually, almost every softare company that I'm aware of has an inexpensive media replacement program, though of course they want some verification that you're the actual owner. I'm sure there are insidious companies that won't, but overall I'd say the majority of software companies would be more than happy to replace media.
Indeed, it should be the market that decides, and not the courts : The market is the reason that North American automakers were forced to dramatically improve their quality (because the Japanese automakers were far ahead of them, and the market started voting for quality with their pocketbooks), and the markets are the reason why people pay a huge premium for IBM laptops. These capitalistic forces are amazingly powerful in getting what people really want, and the only time they fail to work is when someone with a pet issue tries to circumvent market-forces to get their own personal beliefs imposed on everyone through the legal system. It isn't surprizing to see the "sue em!" claims from many of those who already have forsook Microsoft software: These are the type of authoritarian people who believe that because it's not right for them, therefore it shouldn't be right for anyone else.
The irony is that most people, the average Joe and Jane out there, have shown that quality of software is very low on their list of purchasing criteria (which is how software like "ICQ" has never been non-beta...why bother ever calling it production code when millions of people will download it anyways). Given the choice, the market has stated time and time again that features will always trump quality, and that time to market often beats quality.
Sidenote: My own philosophy is that I spend about 90% of QA time code auditing and refactoring, and about 10% of the time doing runtime testing. I find that this is exactly the opposite of many organizations which push runtime testing as the method of evaluating code. To me runtime testing is no different than doing a compiler syntax check: It's an incredibly weak, time intensive, limited case way to assure the quality of your code, and should at most be used to evaluate tha the compiler and dependant third party code is of a good quality.
Wow, looks like I really hit a sore spot. I find it most interesting that first you cover for yourself by claiming that it's for, err, backups (coughBULLSHITcough). Now generally if someone made an argument like that, they've taken the high road and have no need to defend their actions, but then right after that you blather out about how I think I'm a "pinnacle of virtue". Uh huh. Pick an argument Einstein.
I think you missed the point : If it's convenient enough, a good portion of average, ordinary people will commit "petty crimes", especially when they can convince themselves that it's harmless (such as what you see on Slashdot regularly : The whole "Software is free anyways, and I've deprived them of nothing" prehistoric thought process) : It's the prisoner's dilemma playing out on a grand scale. THESE are the people that copy protection is meant to thwart, not Jimmy the 13 year old that's willing to spend 40 hours to get a copy of a $59 game. Microsoft's activation key could easily be circumvented with a bit of social engineering (ignoring the volume copies out there), but Microsoft knows that most Mom and Pops aren't going to overtly commit a crime like that, and they're more likely to pony up for a copy.
How am I a hypocrite? Because I call the "I want to copy for `backups'" BS anti-copy protection line what it is: A cover? I have _never_ _ever_ _ever_ had a CD fail in any way, and I would say that at most times my care of them has been less than exemplary (I tend to have piles of CDs sitting atop each other, caseless). In other words I've never had the need to have a, err, backup. I find this excuse for anti-copy protection advocacy weak.
People who break copy protection are "good guys"? Sorry, but as the kind of guy who goes down to EB every month or so to help support my fellow programmer for their efforts and ingenuity, I'm not going to be in line to give them a pat on the back, just as I'm not out there looking to give accolades to people cheating on welfare or collecting fraudulent compensation claims : Theft is theft.
Having said that, the comparison between security and copy protection is brutally flawed at the outset. Security is to avoid ANY intrusions, copy protection is to avoid MOST intrusions. This is a vast chasm of difference that many people with very juvenile thought processes fail to get on Slashdot. To put it into expanded form: Copy protection is meant to make it inconvenient for the casual "pirate", to the point that they're more likely to just buy a copy rather than screw with 20 different burning softwares, or downloading cracks from the warez sites (indeed, I would say that virus' and trojan horses have done software vendors more of a favour than they could ever imagine: I know a lot of former pirates who won't touch anything that isn't on a retail shelf anymore). Copy protection NEVER has to be absolute to be effective.
On a similar theme, the game Operation Flashpoint has a system they called "FADE", wherein a detected bootleg copy would lead to the player's weapons being much less effective. This is a brilliant strategy given how suggestive human beings are: Even for the times when a dupe is a 1:1 100% perfect copy, a less than skillful player will be sure that the real reason that they aren't hitting the enemy is because of FADE kicking in in the background.
How is a maglev more "complex"? Perhaps because of the newness it may appear that way, but the fundamentals are so basic that it seems to me that it's the height of simplicity: The opposite of a normal train which is thousands of constantly wearing down parts, etc.
Once a maglev is in operations I would expect that it is significantly cheaper to maintain maintenance wise.