And a related article from Planet Money:

"Why Buying A Car Never Changes"
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/19/172402376/why-buying-a-car-never-changes

An excerpt:

"Buying a car sucks," Scott Painter says. "It's something that most consumers fear."

Back in the '90s, Painter started a company to try to change this. "The name of the company was Cars Direct," he says. "The mission was to sell cars directly."

Painter wanted his company to build virtual dealerships that would let people go online and buy cars. But after talking with a few car execs, he realized nobody would even consider his idea.

Painter was stopped by a web of state laws that make it very, very difficult to change the way cars are sold.
...
Car dealers argue that the laws are necessary to protect dealers' investment, and to protect the jobs of people who work at car dealerships.

"If you just take our organization alone, we employ over 2,000 people," says Tammy Darvish, who runs a group of auto dealerships and sits on the board of the National Automobile Dealers Association. "That's 2,000 families throughout greater Washington that are dependent on us continuing our business operations."

There are plenty other businesses employ lots of people but don't have so much protection from state laws.

That may partly be due to the fact that car dealers have a lot political power. Dealers contribute a big share of state sales tax revenues — as much as 20 percent in some states — and they tend to be big local employers. That makes state and local legislators listen.

Scott Painter now runs a company called true car...that tries to ease the process of buying a car. He's now trying to work with dealers not around them.

"There is no argument by which franchise law goes away," he says. "That is purely a fantasy conversation.

Companies like Tesla, Auto Nation, Costco and even many dealers are pushing to innovate from within the system as it is. All the people I talked to for this story — Tammy Darvish, lawyers for the auto industry, and Scott Painter himself — aid a friendlier, more rational car buying experience would come eventually. But it won't come without your local car dealer.

A few months back, NPR's Planet Money did an episode on the car dealership business and how entrenched they are with the government. It goes back for decades. It's worth a listen.

"Episode 435: Why Buying A Car Is So Awful"
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/02/12/171814201/episode-435-why-buying-a-car-is-so-awful

According to this page ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate ), the gun-related deaths in the US are:

Total firearm-related death rate: 10.2
Homicides: 3.2
Suicides: 6.3
Unintentional: 0.2
Undetermined: 0.1

The graph in the comic shows the US "gun related murders" on a logrithmic scale a little under 4. Based on that, it's clear that his graph is including gun homicides and not gun suicides.

Good luck getting a positive comment about DRM or a negative comment about piracy on Slashdot.

Most everyone here is quick to point out the problems of DRM. Honest users don't like DRM because it's going to affect their ability to use the stuff they bought. Pirates don't like DRM, either. (Oftentimes the DRM gets broke which doesn't bother the pirates, but sometimes it slows them down to blocks them entirely.)

Based on this, there's a tendency for people to be dishonest about DRM - the same way you'd be dishonestly harsh about some kid who stole your girlfriend.

I'm generally accepting about DRMs existence - in part because it seems like the younger generation thinks they should have a right to pirate everything. The worse piracy gets, the more I support the creation and use of DRM - both to support the creators and to support the continued survival of the industry that creates our entertainment and our software.

I generally favor the removal of DRM after a set period of time. This gives creators access to the initial sales spike. After a year or so, removing the DRM can be done for the benefit of the customer.

Some of the myths promoted by the anti-DRM, pro-piracy crowd (which overlap but aren't necessarily synonymous):

- DRM always gets broken. Not true. It's true that the more popular a piece of software is, the more likely it is to get cracked. The PS3 DRM system held up quite well for years (and GeoHot's crack only worked for previous versions of the OS; he now says the PS3 is too hard to crack). Microsoft's DRM allowed them to ban a million XBox users - they can still use their XBoxes, but have to buy a new one if they want to play online. Both of those count as positive (and different strategies) for combating piracy through DRM. I also had some software I wrote under DRM. It was eventually cracked (after 10 months) and showed up on pirate sites. Still, that gave me 10 months of pirate-free sales, which is where most of the sales were anyway.

- Piracy increases sales. In case you're wondering: no, I didn't see any increase in sales after 10 months due to "pirates paying for the software they pirated". I actually saw a slight drop in sales, though I'm doubtful about blaming that on piracy. My experience makes me doubt that pirates pay for media after they've pirated it.

- DRM is only about control. The subtext of this is "if it was about getting consumers to buy their stuff instead of pirate it, it might be legitimate, but it's all about control and they have no right to control me. Therefore, by pirating I'm subverting their vile attempts to control me!" What nonsense. I will admit that this kind of thinking fulfills a psychological need among pirates to legitimize their piracy. I've worked with publishers and game developers and I know they hate seeing their products pirated, and the kind of fear that creates when you've invested tons of time and money and you need to get paid or else you'll go bankrupt. (I've heard even some of the smallest game-developer companies ask the question, "How do you prevent piracy?" Do you really believe some small-time company is out to control people?) Creating stuff is a gamble - a big gamble. All business ventures are gambles. It's like walking into a casino and dropping a big part of your life savings. It sucks when you think that pirates are (effectively) putting their hand on the roulette wheel and making it difficult for you to win on the gamble you're taking.

- People should create stuff because that's what they love to do, not worry about piracy. What nonsense. Creators invest tons of time and money into their product. We're not going to live under a bridge just so you can have free stuff. I'd recommend you try that argument with doctors, teachers, and everyone else in the modern economy. We've got bills to pay, and I'm not going to make myself into a sacrificial lamb so you can have great stuff. Maybe if you'd come over to my house and mow my lawn for free or pay my mortgage or buy my groceries for me, but since pirates want other people to act magnanimously towards them, but offer nothing in return, it really just looks like a psychological scam to get free stuff.

- People will still create stuff even if they don't get paid. Yup. Technically, this is true, but only due to semantics. You could say the same thing about any other job. Let's stop paying doctors and teachers. It's true that some people will stick around and continue to work in those professions, even though they're forced to live a life of monk-like poverty, but there will be a lot less of them. The same is true for people who create digital media - yeah, there will be some production going on, but there will be a lot less of it and it'll look like the low-quality shareware stuff. Sounds like a big loss to society, even if it's technically true that some people will stick around and keep doing it.

Still, like I said: I think DRM should be removed from media after a certain period of time, and I generally favor less obtrusive DRMs (like encrypted DVDs) instead of "you have to be connected to the internet to use this software; oh, and you'll be screwed if our DRM-authentication servers go down temporarily or permanently".

it takes a powerfully broken worldview to even begin to think that people only do create stuff so that they'll get paid.

With that kind of thinking, I'm surprised you aren't advocating the abolition of payment for all jobs. Doctors, teachers, taxi drivers - they should all work for free according to this argument, right?

The established studios are scared to death of this, so are fighting tooth and nail to prevent it and preserve their old, outdated business model. Just like happened with the VCR and movie rental stores. They fought those tooth and nail too, claiming they'd be the doom of the movie industry [slashdot.org]. Instead they turned into the lifeblood of the industry (tape/disc sales and rentals have long since surpassed movie theaters for revenue).

I don't think movie studios fought movie rental stores or video discs. They fought re-recordable media like the VCR because it was *re-recordable*. It turns out that there wasn't the large scale copying that they feared would undermine the industry. There's a variety of reasons that things worked out that way (maybe it has to do with the fact that you had to get a copy of the movie in the first place in order to make a copy, and the fact that VCR copies always look worse than the original - neither of these problems plague BitTorrent). Additionally, VCR/VideoDiscs allow for the existence of rental stores. BitTorrent doesn't provide them anything at all. They're already streaming movies via NetFlix and Amazon video-on-demand.

So, no, I don't think BitTorrent is comparable.

Cory Doctorow says a lot of stupid things. I especially like when he argued that "Nobody woke up one day and decided they'd like to have less rights with the digital content they buy" (in other words: copyright is dumb because it doesn't serve the customer's interest). Meanwhile, he believes that free piracy should be legal, he also believes that nobody should be allowed to sell his copyrighted material (beyond the first sale). Excuse me for pointing out the obvious contradiction, but (1) despite what he's always heard, the customer is not always right and (2) if copyright restricts selling copyrighted material (example: I can't sell the same copy of digital media over and over on ebay or amazon or on the street corner) that constitutes a restriction that I (as the consumer) don't want. More bluntly: I didn't wake up one day and say, "I'd like Cory Doctorow to restrict my ability to keep reselling copyrighted material over and over." He's a man of many contradictions and poor rationalizations.

BTW, a few years ago, the technology to copy Nintendo DS disks came out and started to become common in places like Spain. Nintendo saw their sales drop in half in about a year. So, yeah, there's definitely cases of piracy hurting an industry. Even worse for Cory's point, I've seen him argue elsewhere that piracy helps middle-level musicians (by getting their music out there), but harms the big-players (like Metallica) because they're already known and don't benefit much from the extra publicity. I disagree with his point (and think it probably applies better to a society where there is some piracy, but where society hasn't entirely switched over to being fully pirate-based), It's obvious that his claim that big-names get hurt by piracy directly contradicts his argument here that "nobody ever lost a dime from piracy". Like I said: He's a man of many contradictions and poor rationalizations.

Sorry to be the bearer of truth, but Gabe is a good marketer: he's talking out of both sides of his mouth - telling you what you want to hear, but meanwhile, Steam is DRM.

'Blaming BitTorrent for piracy is like blaming a freeway for drunk drivers, ' Jill Calcaterra, Cinedigm's chief marketing officer said.

I'd say BitTorrent is more like selling ruffies to the general public, and then complaining when the public blames the company for women getting ruffied and raped. It's obvious that they're aiding and abetting the rapists - all to make a few bucks. It's also obvious what people are going to use ruffies and BitTorrent for, if given the chance. BitTorrent is empowering pirates to screw over creators.

I have never heard of a credible biological reason to this, is there a "scientist" gene that is present in only men? I would find that hard to belive.

Obviously, there's no "scientist gene". But, it's not a simple dichotomy between "gene for x" versus "it's all socialization". We still haven't found the genes responsible for tallness (and I say "genes" because there's probably a variety of them). Additionally, I'd expect tallness to be based on hormones, as well (this is why males tend to be taller, on average, than women). It would be fallacious to say that men are taller because of some "tallness gene" that is only present in men. Yet, we can all agree that tallness is heritable and it would be laughable to say it's all socialization (even if height is based somewhat on how much nutrition you receive as a child). I could say the same thing about strength (men tend to be naturally stronger than women - and this is based on hormonal levels, not some "strength gene" that is present only in males). The way you ask the question is biased towards getting the answer you want.

I dunno, you seem perfectly comfortable with a bunch of undeserving white professionals who got there simply because they were born in first/second base thanks to past discrimination and they would not have made it at all, had they started from the dug out, like a kid from the ghetto.

You act like jobs are just given out to white people with no real consideration of whether they're capable or educated ("undeserving white professionals"). I don't know if you know this, but employers generally try to pick the best/most capable candidate. If we're going to base this purely on some "past discrimination" and want society to rectify past wrong by handing out jobs to the down and out, then I look forward to an incompetent workforce.

You are assuming that all the female candidates are of lower quality and that is why they don't get hired in the first place. That assumption is wrong. Sometimes they don't get hired because the person hiring them is biased against their gender (they won't fit in, might generate sexual harassment lawsuits etc.).

That's why it's useful to compare the gender ratios against the applicants for a job. It's not a perfect measure, by any means, though.

For example, only about 20% of the students studying computer science are women, which means you can't really expect more than 20% of the programmers to be women in the workforce; though historical rates also come into play here. I had read recently that about 27% of developer jobs are staffed by women, which almost seems to indicate a pro-woman bias.

There was a big storm a number of years back when some student in the admissions office noticed that minority students had lower test scores than white students. They ended up leaking a bunch of information showing that minority students had SAT scores that were, on average, several hundred points below the SAT scores of white students (of course, there's other factors to take into account in that case, for example, if no white students had test scores less than X, but minority students had test scores several hundred points below X. Averages can be deceiving since they can be skewed by a bunch of high performing white students.)

So, yeah, it is very possible for affirmative action to favor lower quality minorities over higher performing white candidates.

"2) Private stuff. ans to 2 is why? private is private and provided you use proper security on access controls all is hunky dory"

What do you mean by "proper security on access controls"? Do you mean encrypting individual files or folders depending on their contents (e.g. if you store your tax returns on your computer)? Out of convenience and avoiding the hassle of figuring out exactly which files I need to encrypt, I can just encrypt the whole thing and be done with it.

> "Do you use encryption for your hard drive(s)? What's your setup like and how manageable is it?"

I have two backup drives, placed in different locations so that, even if my house burns down, I still have the data. I encrypt my data. My data is not tied to a specific hard drive. It's just a bunch of files in a TrueCrypt container (either encrypting the whole drive or an encrypted file container). I can go in and access/move/delete/rename any files when I need to - from any computer the backup drive is attached to, as long as I have TrueCrypt running and have punched in the password.

"Backup images of the encrypted operating system can only be restored to the original hard drive (ie.: the drive that has failed)." What? That seems complicated if you lose your hard drive. Treat your encrypted backup as a bunch of files.

I'm guessing we'll see the rise of the "pay x cents to continue reading this article" model.