Not by the time financial transaction software developers like Fidelity Information Services get a hold of it. How is running a daemon compiled together with it's monitor in a GUI-based.COM object even remotely "working pretty damn well"? Don't get me wrong, I've heard all the fairy tale applications for.NET, and sure it could have some uses.. But any.NET app I've ever seen has been a nightmare. Had to build server images with very specific versions of every single OS patch and interpretor, otherwise the thing went tits up... This is not what.NET was "supposed" to be about, but in the end it was utter crap.
Any technology can be misused to generate despair.
Nobody used aggressive optimizations? You're off your rocker. I think that's one of the first tweaks people go to when they're trying to tune Java performance. Yes, it wasn't used by the majority of people, but it would have been excusable to think that these options had seen enough testing from those enabling the option to catch any obvious bugs.
Obviously "nobody" is a sweeping generalization, but if someone is tuning Java performance, and it breaks when a particular switch is turned on, the switch is just going to be left off from then on. Maybe they'll turn revert a few other previously changed options, but unless it stops being broken as a result...
It was downright hilarious when I saw someone take apart their GBA SP and they discovered that Nintendo had literally ripped off the Afterburner design for their own GBA lighting system.
Let's be fair here, though, how many ways are there to properly design a front-light for a reflective color LCD display?
Exactly. Super heroes stories are the modern mythology; they never die they just keep being told and retold just like people have been doing for thousands of years before. And, despite all the haters hating the lack of "originality", I personally think that's pretty cool.
No hate here, but I've never seen a more succinct reason to outlaw perpetual copyright protections granted to our "modern mythology". What I hate is that only DC and Marvel and Hollywood moguls will profit indefinitely from what is OUR culture. Imagine how much more interesting culture would be if the everyday person was allowed to tell and retell these stories, too.
How about this: I am such an old fart that my.vi file is older than you and most of your friends you basement dwelling, tissue-mountain constructing, Twitter-tweeting, Facebook drone.
Tissue mountain? Pfft, it's a fort. Fort Excelsior. Where I plan my D&D campaigns.
Its called an over-served market, that is Windows gaming.
Does it not make logical sense that an over-served market with millions of mediocre games would pay less dollars? As opposed to under-served markets whose only choices are either, just a few natively developed games, or games known to work with the assistance of wine.
Is that not the basic gist of supply and demand? There is an over supply of Windows "PC" games, the over-served market can only afford to buy some of the entertainment available to them. There must be something like a hundred new games on Steam, available for Windows only, every month. On the other hand, you have an under-served market of highly technical users who likely make a professional living from their primary OS of choice (Mac or Linux). The demand in that particular corner of the under-served market is greater than the supply of quality entertainment.
Doesn't really explain why Average Mac isn't closer to the top. Considering the price premium on Apple hardware, I'm not convinced they couldn't dig deeper in their pockets.
As far as Linux being on top, it's amazing how much money you save living in your mom's basement. (lol, I kid I kid.... it's because they are in a better position to appreciate the complexity of quality software, while other user segments treat software as a commodity)
Even better, VVVVVV was rewritten in C++ instead of Flash/Actionscript, so it now performs amazingly well on slower hardware than before AND now has a level editor. I hope the lesson was well learned.:)
Writing the game engine twice... talk about "Doing Things the Hard Way".
"Very complicated", referring of course to the process of determining whether your political leanings are threatening or not to the government in power.
No, remember this is a Senate committee. "Very complicated" is anything more advanced than a fork.
Actually, that is pretty good, considering most House committees haven't gotten past spoons.
Ah, that's what all that talk about "silver spoons" is all about.
Just remember, this is your government. You get what you vote for.
Nah, you get what the ignorant stammering majority choosing between a turd and a douche, if they could even be arsed to waddle down to the polling place and take 5 minutes within a 12 hour window on a Tuesday out of fear the other guy might win.
The dick part comes in when you love something and some other imbecile shows up and starts shitting all over it with false and misleading information - trolling - purposeful or otherwise, then arguments and insults ensue...
Or, you know, shitting all over it with the truth.
THE FIGHT IS ON
Seriously, though, there really ought to be two words to extract out of fanboy: one related to being a fan of a product and the other related to being a boy (child) about defending it. Criticism, legitimate or not, shouldn't lead to rabid mouth foaming. I'm pretty surprised that it exists in nature since it seems that it wouldn't serve any useful purpose.
[...] I think if a game offers something something in exchange for real money (aside from possibly the game itself), it should not affect gameplay itself. Maybe someone really wants a slightly different looking avatar, and if they want to pay a few dollars for it, so be it, it doesn't hinder anyone else's enjoyment of the game. [...]
You should check Turbine's Dungeons & Dragons Online. They made it pretty right.
Maybe off topic, but while they handled micropayments right, the favoring MP versus spell slots is pretty unforgivable for a D&D implementation IMHO.
So, how did the roads get built? How is the mail delivered? How is power transmitted? How about Plain Old Telephone Service? There used to be some bonafide investment in infrastructure in the US, so where did all that go?
Granted, I understand that water and sewer isn't too common in rural areas, but it's not like it's a backpacking adventure through the rainforest we're talking about.
That's the only interesting part though, the rest can be summed up as "Complete asshole behaves like complete asshole". There was nothing technical clever or new about what he did, although he went further than most such incidents I've heard of, but few slashdotters will be at all surprised that that kind of thing is possible. The only surprise is that it doesn't happen more often, more subtly... or does it?
Reading the TFA from ars, the reason why he was caught was because he wasn't clever at all:
1) The only reason why he was caught is because his malicious actions were intertwined with his normal web traffic (his name in plain text and Comcast packets). He could have used a clean purpose-built computer for his torture, like a laptop, that wasn't configured for his own network at all, and hid it in a safe deposit box or something and they never would have figured out where it's coming from without a long and arduous task with a spectrum analyzer.
2) Ardolf did so much stuff on the target network that it raised suspicion. It's the same thing that happens to regular criminals: they get greedy and keep coming back for more. If he just went right for the terrorist threats and never ever connected again, his neighbors would never have had any reason to suspect external hacking. Even then, his prank emails to coworkers and social network profiles were so out there that they were obvious. There must have been many more subtle ways to do damage that aren't immediately obvious.
3) The neighbor works for a law firm and they were willing to spend the resources to check out his home network and find the unknown device as well as install a sniffer. I don't see a middle-manager working for a sub Fortune-500 company getting that same kind of help, they'd probably sooner call him a schizoid and fire him instead of dealing with that.
If he was a little smarter, I think he very well could have gotten away with it framing the innocent.
Apparently, someone forgot to tell chip makers about this "Brick Wall". Seriously, sounds like the author is making stuff up with absolutely no idea what he is talking about.
Contrary to your complete stupidity, the "chip makers", subscribe to his news letter. There are several significant issues with modern CPUs. One of the most prevalent issues is heat dissipation. Thus, accurately described as a "brick wall", as it is effectively preventing the creation of faster, general purpose CPUs.
Why does slashdot seem to attract so many completely fucking stupid morons who like to pretend they know something when in fact is obvious they known absolutely nothing anything anything. Holy shit you are really fucking stupid.
It's only to delay the inevitable: the move to liquid cooling. Chip manufacturers have made great strides in technologies to keep waste heat down and still get good performance, but one of these days R&D is going to turn out their pockets and admit they have no tricks left to get better performance on air alone.
It's a pretty scary thought, though, because liquid cooling brings all sorts of new issues that have never been before: coolant levels, biocides, toxicity, leaking, conductivity, contamination, maintenance, reliability... but I'm sure we'll get through it. After all, my car is liquid cooled and it's about 10 years old with no signs of stopping.
I would think RIAA would demand 3D scanner be illegal to own or operate as it is a device designed to circumvent "copy protection" known as "obsolescence."
Past DMCA rulemakings by the Register of Copyrights show a pattern of deeming obsolescence a valid exception to anticircumvention laws.
Is this the legal basis for NES/SNES emulators, for example?
I would agree, which would also explain why the mad dash to get all old, worthwhile games, onto paid Virtual Console type offerings from the company. It's hard to argue the obsolescence is a valid excuse when it's still being sold, digitally, from an infinite supply.
It's even more interesting considering how "nothing to see here" became popularized.
Police doing crowd control (and, to an extent, spin control) at a crime scene would say "Nothing to see here", despite the fact that it 1) is a crime scene, and 2) by merit of a crime scene, something interesting most certainly happened there.
Wow, so Forbes magazine wants to dismantle a government organization and replace it with private industry? What a surprise.
Yes, TSA rules are sort of insane and should be fixed. I'm absolutely mystified by why they think industry would do better. "Some might object that private firms will have incentives to cut corners on safety. It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out." Right, Forbes, like they weeded it out before, you know, 9/11 happened? Give me a break.
Or like how you keep seeing stories like passengers accidentally carrying knives onto planes, mock security tests smuggling bombs onto planes that get missed over 90% of the time, theft of items screened, harassment of all kinds?
Fact: the TSA is no more effective than any private security screening company prior to their mandate. Instead, the blank check and supra-legal status gives them the right to demand all sorts of crazy surrenders and procedures while completely ignoring factors that private industry would find important.
The public just needs to wrap their head around the fact that a sufficiently dedicated attacker will find a way, because security practices are always a compromise between functionality and protection, and group holding the bag, government or private industry, doesn't change that.
Great, now I'm going to miss half my television shows because some hippie wants me to shave a few watts off my electric bill. Isn't it enough that I have to flush my toilet twice as much now (and clean the shit stains left behind) because some hippie said that a 2-gallon toilet was just as good as a 4?
I'll tell you what, I'll get an Energy Star DVR just as soon as Al Gore moves out of his McMansion and stops driving a luxury SUV.
DVRs are a solution to a problem of inefficient distribution. Television networks put popular shows against each other, put reruns at weird hours, fill programming with commercials, air things out of order, all sorts of inconveniences. The technology exists today (ala Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, etc.) to let people go out and actively watch what they want when they want to.
The "problem" of DVRs, as usual, is a solution to a different problem. If the different problem were to go away, the solution would be unneeded.
Opera has been a damn good browser, and the focus of the company Opera has always been producing a damn good browser. If the focus becomes quarterly profit, I don't see much of a future for the Opera browser.
Unless they can make such a damn good browser people would be willing to pay for it.
Considering they moved away from a paid model, yeah...
Oh, yeah, I forgot: Christian-Bashing is the last acceptable and politically-correct form of prejudice and ignorant hatred.
Carry on.
The comments below pretty much prove it. Which is a shame because they lump in the American Taliban version of Christianity that wants to codify the Bible into law (much like how the Afghan Taliban previously implemented Sharia law) with those who just want to have their faith and are happy to merely live and let live.
I'm not ok with ignorance, but when people see the difference but choose to ignore it because it's fun to use phrases like "zombie Jesus" and "man in the sky" about things that people hold sacred, it stops being ignorance and starts being maliciousness.
Then again, I would never make a joke about someone's mother, either, so I suppose some people just get off on pissing on what someone else might find sacred. There's a name for that. "Troll."
I disagree. In fact, it's incredibly taxing on our economy to keep up the prohibition. Unless the government has a hand in selling marijuana (I doubt that marijuana would be their illegal narcotic of choice) then all they're doing is shoveling millions of dollars into the prisons to pay for the prisoners in jail for selling/possessing it.
However, if they legalize and tax it, marijuana would bring in millions of dollars.
It IS incredibly taxing, but this really is taking from all sides of the table. The militarized police behind the War on Drugs get loads of funding to continue their holy war for the sake of officer safety, the courts are crammed with drug cases demanding more court funding and so on. Money goes into anti-drug propaganda and education, society gets a convenient scourge to curse at (instead of cursing their government)... the list goes on.
Who foots the bill? The Taxpayer. Why should they trim those costs? They attached themselves to the public funds teat and ain't gonna let go willingly.
There's another interesting side effect that isn't taxpayer funded. Lawyers make loads of cash defending the wealthy and well connected while the poor get lousy representation and become felons who are stripped of their rights. With the strike of a gavel they directly lose the voice to participate in their government, arm themselves against corruption and implicitly lose the ability to ever hold a job or get education that will elevate them from poverty. I'm sure the "accident" in "happy accident" is a misnomer in this case.
Yes, that's certainly a productive use of someone's day. Taking all your CDs that have been ripped... and doing it again!
Well, what other potential exists? If you are out of compliance*, that may just be the cost of getting into compliance.
My OCD naming conventions for ripped files and using iTunes to manage my library seems to have worked out pretty well for me. Downloaded files didn't adhere to my naming convention but were usable because of iTunes' ID3 tagging. As such, a simple regular expression can find all the filenames that don't match their origin from me, and from there I can filter based on whether it's protected AAC (evidence I bought from iTunes), and, boom, I have a list of my potentially infringing files for me to sort through.
If I were less disciplined about it, yeah, I might have to do an audit in the same way that my customers might do an audit, and that can mean investing the time and going through everything one at a time.
* for various degrees of "compliance". I'm satisfied that if I can merely show possession of physical media or a receipt from a legitimate download source then I'm compliant. I've seen some posters (notably yesterday's about iCloud honeypot) where some users seem to think their maximum copyright violation liability is 99 cents per song, so their degree of compliance is probably much less. They'd better not be wrong, though.:)
In all your posts on this topic, you seem to be consistently drawing the conclusion that Apple wouldn't share the data. What do you base this conclusion on?
Keep in mind that Google's music locker service was unable to get enough permissions from the RIAA members about streaming master tracks of music therefore necessitating the upload of your entire music collection along with having the user certify they will not use the service to upload pirated material.
What sorts of assurances and dealings were negotiated with Apple to make their (admittedly superior) implementation legitimate? Do you know? Can you say for certain there is no arrangement?
Slashdot Mirror
Works pretty damn well for that.
Not by the time financial transaction software developers like Fidelity Information Services get a hold of it. How is running a daemon compiled together with it's monitor in a GUI-based .COM object even remotely "working pretty damn well"? Don't get me wrong, I've heard all the fairy tale applications for .NET, and sure it could have some uses.. But any .NET app I've ever seen has been a nightmare. Had to build server images with very specific versions of every single OS patch and interpretor, otherwise the thing went tits up... This is not what .NET was "supposed" to be about, but in the end it was utter crap.
Any technology can be misused to generate despair.
Nobody used aggressive optimizations? You're off your rocker. I think that's one of the first tweaks people go to when they're trying to tune Java performance. Yes, it wasn't used by the majority of people, but it would have been excusable to think that these options had seen enough testing from those enabling the option to catch any obvious bugs.
Obviously "nobody" is a sweeping generalization, but if someone is tuning Java performance, and it breaks when a particular switch is turned on, the switch is just going to be left off from then on. Maybe they'll turn revert a few other previously changed options, but unless it stops being broken as a result...
It was downright hilarious when I saw someone take apart their GBA SP and they discovered that Nintendo had literally ripped off the Afterburner design for their own GBA lighting system.
Let's be fair here, though, how many ways are there to properly design a front-light for a reflective color LCD display?
Exactly. Super heroes stories are the modern mythology; they never die they just keep being told and retold just like people have been doing for thousands of years before. And, despite all the haters hating the lack of "originality", I personally think that's pretty cool.
No hate here, but I've never seen a more succinct reason to outlaw perpetual copyright protections granted to our "modern mythology". What I hate is that only DC and Marvel and Hollywood moguls will profit indefinitely from what is OUR culture. Imagine how much more interesting culture would be if the everyday person was allowed to tell and retell these stories, too.
They're so old, their Slashdot IDs are negative.
Negative??? Is that the best you can do?
How about this: I am such an old fart that my .vi file is older than you and most of your friends you basement dwelling, tissue-mountain constructing, Twitter-tweeting, Facebook drone.
Tissue mountain? Pfft, it's a fort. Fort Excelsior. Where I plan my D&D campaigns.
Its called an over-served market, that is Windows gaming.
Does it not make logical sense that an over-served market with millions of mediocre games would pay less dollars? As opposed to under-served markets whose only choices are either, just a few natively developed games, or games known to work with the assistance of wine.
Is that not the basic gist of supply and demand? There is an over supply of Windows "PC" games, the over-served market can only afford to buy some of the entertainment available to them. There must be something like a hundred new games on Steam, available for Windows only, every month. On the other hand, you have an under-served market of highly technical users who likely make a professional living from their primary OS of choice (Mac or Linux). The demand in that particular corner of the under-served market is greater than the supply of quality entertainment.
Doesn't really explain why Average Mac isn't closer to the top. Considering the price premium on Apple hardware, I'm not convinced they couldn't dig deeper in their pockets.
As far as Linux being on top, it's amazing how much money you save living in your mom's basement. (lol, I kid I kid.... it's because they are in a better position to appreciate the complexity of quality software, while other user segments treat software as a commodity)
Even better, VVVVVV was rewritten in C++ instead of Flash/Actionscript, so it now performs amazingly well on slower hardware than before AND now has a level editor. I hope the lesson was well learned. :)
Writing the game engine twice... talk about "Doing Things the Hard Way".
"Very complicated", referring of course to the process of determining whether your political leanings are threatening or not to the government in power.
No, remember this is a Senate committee. "Very complicated" is anything more advanced than a fork.
Actually, that is pretty good, considering most House committees haven't gotten past spoons.
Ah, that's what all that talk about "silver spoons" is all about.
WAS HERE!
How about "sucks"?
Just remember, this is your government. You get what you vote for.
Nah, you get what the ignorant stammering majority choosing between a turd and a douche, if they could even be arsed to waddle down to the polling place and take 5 minutes within a 12 hour window on a Tuesday out of fear the other guy might win.
The dick part comes in when you love something and some other imbecile shows up and starts shitting all over it with false and misleading information - trolling - purposeful or otherwise, then arguments and insults ensue...
Or, you know, shitting all over it with the truth.
THE FIGHT IS ON
Seriously, though, there really ought to be two words to extract out of fanboy: one related to being a fan of a product and the other related to being a boy (child) about defending it. Criticism, legitimate or not, shouldn't lead to rabid mouth foaming. I'm pretty surprised that it exists in nature since it seems that it wouldn't serve any useful purpose.
[...] I think if a game offers something something in exchange for real money (aside from possibly the game itself), it should not affect gameplay itself. Maybe someone really wants a slightly different looking avatar, and if they want to pay a few dollars for it, so be it, it doesn't hinder anyone else's enjoyment of the game. [...]
You should check Turbine's Dungeons & Dragons Online. They made it pretty right.
Maybe off topic, but while they handled micropayments right, the favoring MP versus spell slots is pretty unforgivable for a D&D implementation IMHO.
So, how did the roads get built? How is the mail delivered? How is power transmitted? How about Plain Old Telephone Service? There used to be some bonafide investment in infrastructure in the US, so where did all that go?
Granted, I understand that water and sewer isn't too common in rural areas, but it's not like it's a backpacking adventure through the rainforest we're talking about.
That's the only interesting part though, the rest can be summed up as "Complete asshole behaves like complete asshole". There was nothing technical clever or new about what he did, although he went further than most such incidents I've heard of, but few slashdotters will be at all surprised that that kind of thing is possible. The only surprise is that it doesn't happen more often, more subtly ... or does it?
Reading the TFA from ars, the reason why he was caught was because he wasn't clever at all:
1) The only reason why he was caught is because his malicious actions were intertwined with his normal web traffic (his name in plain text and Comcast packets). He could have used a clean purpose-built computer for his torture, like a laptop, that wasn't configured for his own network at all, and hid it in a safe deposit box or something and they never would have figured out where it's coming from without a long and arduous task with a spectrum analyzer.
2) Ardolf did so much stuff on the target network that it raised suspicion. It's the same thing that happens to regular criminals: they get greedy and keep coming back for more. If he just went right for the terrorist threats and never ever connected again, his neighbors would never have had any reason to suspect external hacking. Even then, his prank emails to coworkers and social network profiles were so out there that they were obvious. There must have been many more subtle ways to do damage that aren't immediately obvious.
3) The neighbor works for a law firm and they were willing to spend the resources to check out his home network and find the unknown device as well as install a sniffer. I don't see a middle-manager working for a sub Fortune-500 company getting that same kind of help, they'd probably sooner call him a schizoid and fire him instead of dealing with that.
If he was a little smarter, I think he very well could have gotten away with it framing the innocent.
Apparently, someone forgot to tell chip makers about this "Brick Wall". Seriously, sounds like the author is making stuff up with absolutely no idea what he is talking about.
Contrary to your complete stupidity, the "chip makers", subscribe to his news letter. There are several significant issues with modern CPUs. One of the most prevalent issues is heat dissipation. Thus, accurately described as a "brick wall", as it is effectively preventing the creation of faster, general purpose CPUs.
Why does slashdot seem to attract so many completely fucking stupid morons who like to pretend they know something when in fact is obvious they known absolutely nothing anything anything. Holy shit you are really fucking stupid.
It's only to delay the inevitable: the move to liquid cooling. Chip manufacturers have made great strides in technologies to keep waste heat down and still get good performance, but one of these days R&D is going to turn out their pockets and admit they have no tricks left to get better performance on air alone.
It's a pretty scary thought, though, because liquid cooling brings all sorts of new issues that have never been before: coolant levels, biocides, toxicity, leaking, conductivity, contamination, maintenance, reliability... but I'm sure we'll get through it. After all, my car is liquid cooled and it's about 10 years old with no signs of stopping.
I would think RIAA would demand 3D scanner be illegal to own or operate as it is a device designed to circumvent "copy protection" known as "obsolescence."
Past DMCA rulemakings by the Register of Copyrights show a pattern of deeming obsolescence a valid exception to anticircumvention laws.
Is this the legal basis for NES/SNES emulators, for example?
I would agree, which would also explain why the mad dash to get all old, worthwhile games, onto paid Virtual Console type offerings from the company. It's hard to argue the obsolescence is a valid excuse when it's still being sold, digitally, from an infinite supply.
It's even more interesting considering how "nothing to see here" became popularized.
Police doing crowd control (and, to an extent, spin control) at a crime scene would say "Nothing to see here", despite the fact that it 1) is a crime scene, and 2) by merit of a crime scene, something interesting most certainly happened there.
Wow, so Forbes magazine wants to dismantle a government organization and replace it with private industry? What a surprise.
Yes, TSA rules are sort of insane and should be fixed. I'm absolutely mystified by why they think industry would do better. "Some might object that private firms will have incentives to cut corners on safety. It is a legitimate concern, but competitive mechanisms tend to weed this out." Right, Forbes, like they weeded it out before, you know, 9/11 happened? Give me a break.
Or like how you keep seeing stories like passengers accidentally carrying knives onto planes, mock security tests smuggling bombs onto planes that get missed over 90% of the time, theft of items screened, harassment of all kinds?
Fact: the TSA is no more effective than any private security screening company prior to their mandate. Instead, the blank check and supra-legal status gives them the right to demand all sorts of crazy surrenders and procedures while completely ignoring factors that private industry would find important.
The public just needs to wrap their head around the fact that a sufficiently dedicated attacker will find a way, because security practices are always a compromise between functionality and protection, and group holding the bag, government or private industry, doesn't change that.
Great, now I'm going to miss half my television shows because some hippie wants me to shave a few watts off my electric bill. Isn't it enough that I have to flush my toilet twice as much now (and clean the shit stains left behind) because some hippie said that a 2-gallon toilet was just as good as a 4?
I'll tell you what, I'll get an Energy Star DVR just as soon as Al Gore moves out of his McMansion and stops driving a luxury SUV.
DVRs are a solution to a problem of inefficient distribution. Television networks put popular shows against each other, put reruns at weird hours, fill programming with commercials, air things out of order, all sorts of inconveniences. The technology exists today (ala Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, etc.) to let people go out and actively watch what they want when they want to.
The "problem" of DVRs, as usual, is a solution to a different problem. If the different problem were to go away, the solution would be unneeded.
Opera has been a damn good browser, and the focus of the company Opera has always been producing a damn good browser. If the focus becomes quarterly profit, I don't see much of a future for the Opera browser.
Unless they can make such a damn good browser people would be willing to pay for it.
Considering they moved away from a paid model, yeah...
uhhh, what?
Oh, yeah, I forgot: Christian-Bashing is the last acceptable and politically-correct form of prejudice and ignorant hatred.
Carry on.
The comments below pretty much prove it. Which is a shame because they lump in the American Taliban version of Christianity that wants to codify the Bible into law (much like how the Afghan Taliban previously implemented Sharia law) with those who just want to have their faith and are happy to merely live and let live.
I'm not ok with ignorance, but when people see the difference but choose to ignore it because it's fun to use phrases like "zombie Jesus" and "man in the sky" about things that people hold sacred, it stops being ignorance and starts being maliciousness.
Then again, I would never make a joke about someone's mother, either, so I suppose some people just get off on pissing on what someone else might find sacred. There's a name for that. "Troll."
I disagree. In fact, it's incredibly taxing on our economy to keep up the prohibition. Unless the government has a hand in selling marijuana (I doubt that marijuana would be their illegal narcotic of choice) then all they're doing is shoveling millions of dollars into the prisons to pay for the prisoners in jail for selling/possessing it.
However, if they legalize and tax it, marijuana would bring in millions of dollars.
It IS incredibly taxing, but this really is taking from all sides of the table. The militarized police behind the War on Drugs get loads of funding to continue their holy war for the sake of officer safety, the courts are crammed with drug cases demanding more court funding and so on. Money goes into anti-drug propaganda and education, society gets a convenient scourge to curse at (instead of cursing their government)... the list goes on.
Who foots the bill? The Taxpayer. Why should they trim those costs? They attached themselves to the public funds teat and ain't gonna let go willingly.
There's another interesting side effect that isn't taxpayer funded. Lawyers make loads of cash defending the wealthy and well connected while the poor get lousy representation and become felons who are stripped of their rights. With the strike of a gavel they directly lose the voice to participate in their government, arm themselves against corruption and implicitly lose the ability to ever hold a job or get education that will elevate them from poverty. I'm sure the "accident" in "happy accident" is a misnomer in this case.
It's all math, so clearly you have to etch out all the bits from your wallet file onto a stone tablet, no electricity required. :)
Yes, that's certainly a productive use of someone's day. Taking all your CDs that have been ripped... and doing it again!
Well, what other potential exists? If you are out of compliance*, that may just be the cost of getting into compliance.
My OCD naming conventions for ripped files and using iTunes to manage my library seems to have worked out pretty well for me. Downloaded files didn't adhere to my naming convention but were usable because of iTunes' ID3 tagging. As such, a simple regular expression can find all the filenames that don't match their origin from me, and from there I can filter based on whether it's protected AAC (evidence I bought from iTunes), and, boom, I have a list of my potentially infringing files for me to sort through.
If I were less disciplined about it, yeah, I might have to do an audit in the same way that my customers might do an audit, and that can mean investing the time and going through everything one at a time.
* for various degrees of "compliance". I'm satisfied that if I can merely show possession of physical media or a receipt from a legitimate download source then I'm compliant. I've seen some posters (notably yesterday's about iCloud honeypot) where some users seem to think their maximum copyright violation liability is 99 cents per song, so their degree of compliance is probably much less. They'd better not be wrong, though. :)
In all your posts on this topic, you seem to be consistently drawing the conclusion that Apple wouldn't share the data. What do you base this conclusion on?
Keep in mind that Google's music locker service was unable to get enough permissions from the RIAA members about streaming master tracks of music therefore necessitating the upload of your entire music collection along with having the user certify they will not use the service to upload pirated material.
What sorts of assurances and dealings were negotiated with Apple to make their (admittedly superior) implementation legitimate? Do you know? Can you say for certain there is no arrangement?