“Control the coinage and the courts -- let the rabble have the rest.” Thus the
Padishah Emperor advises you. And he tells you: "If you want profits, you must
rule." There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: "Who are the rabble and
who are the ruled?"

-Muad'Dib's Secret Message to the Landsraad from "Arrakis Awakening" by the
Princess Irulan

But once you have gone to the trouble of deciding to support a new language/market, such as China, the production cost of making translations available on all your offerings is virtually nil. In the code settings it's most likely a set of a parameter settings within a unified codebase. The language pack option suggests that apart from a little install space, its not a difficult change.

The core logic here is economics and profit maximization. Software has a high up front build cost, then a virtually zero marginal cost to produce future units. Copyright is a government enforced monopoly. Piracy is the non-monopoly free-market price of software based on its marginal cost of production (ie free, or simply the the cost of CD media plus retail markup).

Profit = (Price - MarginalCostPerUnit) * Quantity - InitialCosts

Assuming no piracy, For each individual there is a maximum price they would be willing to pay for the product before they would choose not to buy it, or to switch to something else. A business running a standardized Windows setup would, if forced, likely pay a very high price for more copies of Windows as long as its less than the cost of switching their entire setup. A chinaman with access to torrents is likely only to be willing to pay a small fee to "go legit".

The laws of Supply and Demand in market economics means the quantity is heavily dependent upon price for a given market. A lower market price means more people will find the market price less than the price they would be willing to pay, overall it can increase profit, but it comes at the cost of making less money on all the previous units sold (this is known as poisoning previous sales).

In a perfectly price discriminating market, everybody would be haggled up to the maximum price they would individually be willing to pay. This is not possible. But the average American has a far high disposable income than the average Chinese. Thus you maximize profit by selling to the rich Americans at the price they are willing to pay, and to the chinese at the price they are willing to pay, and make it very hard for the chinese to see their copies to the Americans.

This could be solved by a "paypal" like anonymous bitcoin transfer/laundering service.

You make your payment to the transfer service, and they make payment to the hooker using a random selection of coins from their collective "pool". There could be a few obfuscating transfers in the middle of the process, and possibly an apparently "respectable name" as the payment beneficiary. The transfer service would charge a commission of course.

All the wife/government would be able to trace is that payment was made to a known anonymous bitcoin transfer service... which still leaves the question of what are you hiding?

Of course you could always create a special one time throwaway bitcoin wallet for suspicious purchases. Do It Yourself Virtualized Pimping.

This works until the problems being solved for course credit become so complex/hard/boring/time-consuming that the number of participants drops to 0 and you have to decrease the course cost to negative figures just to get a handful of people to offer to enroll and complete the course... the eLance and vWorker universities are rather popular in developing nations... the StackOverflow university runs a similar model but they manage to run it on a revenue neutral basis to both sides

The one line summary of this article is: Command-Shift-T (or Ctrl-Shift-T) = Reopen Closed Tab (in some browsers)

The public transport network is optimized for cost... whats the cheapest network we can run whilst still being useable and affordable to poor people without cars

The private bus networks have a different optimization goal... employee productivity... employees have 24 hours a day and their time is valuable... sleep, travel, work, fun, family... save them time and effort in the morning... and most importantly give them wifi on the bus (which you don't get on plublic transport)... suddenly you have an extra hour of employee productivity for the price of a bus ticket

First Flight

The NSA in its role as spy agency is to be professionally paranoid

They have been tasked with protecting "national interest" against all the possible "unknown" threats in the big wide scary world... lack of effort or money is not their primary limiting factor

When faced with "unknowns" their primary method of response is "more data"... oh and we can't let anybody know what we know as that would simply produce more "unknown" threats... ie if people know we are spying on them and how... they might take countermeasures to stop us being able to spy on them... this is their job in being professionally paranoid

So the whole PRISIM thing seems to be a well funded version of the internet archive... with backdoor access to "private" information... that they can either do retrospective queries on... plus data mining and other analytics on... the last thing a spy wants to tell is boss is: sorry I missed that bit of information

The core problem is that while the American "empire" seems stable and secure... there is no such thing as 100% safety and security... and as history has shown the butterfly effect can be very powerful... their idea is that with 100% of all available information, they should be able to identify at least 99% of all surprises... but you can never have 100% information and you can never eliminate 100% of surprises

In part this is due to the inherent promise and expectation of first world civilization... that we live in a totally safe, fair and secure environment where everything follows the rules and there are no unexpected risks or surprises... this comes back to the argument of freedom vs security... and it seems the majority prefer the illusion of security to the true reality of freedom

It doesn't stop the device being striped down and sold for parts... but it does stop the device being using a working iPhone. This won't curb all thefts, but if you have effectively reduced the stealing payoff from a $600 iPhone to a $100 bag of parts, this makes the risk/reward payoff of breaking the law less inciting... possibly turning instant gratification of instant cash into more hassle than its actually worth.

Also a working iPhone is relatively easy to sell on ebay for easy cash. But a disabled device means having to go to extra effort to either strip the device down yourself and do multiple small sales for individual pieces, which assumes you actually know what you are doing. Or selling it to a commercial chop shop, where the very fact that it is disabled would be a potentual flag that it was stolen, so the chop shop would have to be willing to turn a blind eye which might further lower the market value.

Had to do a double take on that one, my first reading was

"Device Snuffs Out Signs of Life After Disasters"

False Lead

Insightful

Could this not in of itself be used as a possible terrorist attack vector.

Load a vibrating toothbrush (or dildo), with a timer switch, into the checked in luggage of at airports across the US. While the devices themselves are perfectly harmless, you could effectively shut down the entire US air transportation network for hours, and cause massive secondary economic damage (due to missed flights and delayed schedules).

You don't even need to buy plane tickets, just sneak a time delayed dildo into unsuspecting passenger luggage, or even just a series of airmail packages sent across the nation. The attack could be repeated almost indefinitely, at random intervals, and would be difficult to detect via the TSA X-Ray scanners.

This would not even be technically illegal (the plane, the airport and the passengers where never in any real danger)... though the killjoy TSA may eventually respond by explicitly adding dildos (and toothbrushes) to the no-fly list of forbidden objects

Most of the time people work because they need money to pay for the requirements of basic survival, things like food, rent and hopefully afford a few extra western luxuries.

Rich guy comes along, he is no longer motivated by the requirements of ensuring basic survival, and could become a professional layabout if he so wished (the idle rich don't get as much publicity). But instead he says, I have a bat shit crazy idea, lets build a moon rocket. Not only that, I'll flow enough money towards the project that food and rent won't be a limiting factor to anybody who wants the fun job of making this happen.

As the poor little peon on the ground, what you mean I get to design a moon rocket and get paid money at the same time?

As for what does the rich guy do personally, well whatever jobs he feels like are most fun, and because he is the one paying the bills, nobody is going to tell him "you are not qualified". Oh, I get to design a spaceship, that sounds like fun... almost as fun as getting to fly one of these things.

With illegal drugs, they have already been government certified (class A, B or C) and they are only available on the black market, where there is no incentive to hide what they really are (assuming they are not cut).

With drugs that have not been formally classified, this is legally a gray area, they are technically sold "not for human consumption" and thus marketed "legally" as "bath salts", "plant feeder", "room odorizer" etc... a form of legal plausible deniability for the manufacturer and the shop.

Due to the current legal framework, adding a true ingredients list would only provide additional legal liability to the manufacturer, both alerting the authorities to a new chemical they should look to ban, plus highlighting that the product is indeed "illegal" once the government gets around to updating its list of banned chemicals.

Thus we see the ingredients marked as "ketones", which sounds chemical and technical, but its vague to the point of only describing that molecule has a C=O functional group somewhere inside.

Also in the commercialised "legal high" world, there are no drug patents, only trade secrets. Commercial value comes from scarcity, and if the product itself is not scarce (assuming you know its name), the value comes from the brand name and not disclosing the secret.

The downside is that nobody really knows what they are taking, the scarcity of the tried and tested drugs (which are now all illegal) means only the new and untested drugs are legally available, until human clinical trials show its effective enough to become popular enough for journalists to talk about it, at which point the government bans the effective drug, until the human teenage guinea pigs find something else for the government to ban. It becomes even harder for the new generation to research and stay safe when attempting to get high responsibly.

This is all a dark artefact of the drug licensing laws that try to prohibit rather than regulate recreational drugs. However this would require a law saying you are allowed to openly state that an untested chemical is intended for human consumption and that information regarding its composition and known safety (even if its not been through formal clinical trials) is included and openly stated.