That's true. I assumed that the used market price, while apparently fixed, would be less than the new market price, because (as you note) having them the same seems... silly. But I suppose we can't rule it out until we see it...

the downside, of course, is that one stamp is two thirds of the cost of one month of this charge. You gotta really feel strongly about the principle involved (or just want to get away from ATT :) to go through the effort

ah, but if you make step 3 $20 and step 4 $45, now it makes more sense for gamer B while still making a reasonable amount of sense for gamer A and the shop. And out of that initial $60, the publisher is probably netting around 10 after the store's cut and the expenses related to making and shipping the physical disk, so they're likely getting about the same out of the used sale as a new sale. (Unless I'm missing something, which is not unlikely :)

The impression I had was that the equipment was owned by a DR company and if some other company's stuff became unavailable they could cut a deal and have them back up quickly; it sounded useful for companies who can't afford their own backup data center. But it was a while back and I may have misunderstood. Your setup sounds a lot better. Thanks for the clarification :)

unless they seriously rework the power and AC I'm not sure they'll have enough total weight to be a problem anyway. And if they do seriously rework the AC they can probably reinforce the floors while they have the ducting out.

I've heard the terms used in ways that implied that a primary datacenter always had your data, but a DR datacenter just had hardware and the ability to load the data when needed, for downtime of days while loading data rather than weeks while setting up new hardware, while still being cheaper than a redundant primary.

for a one time pad, encryption doesn't affect the strength (it's perfect; it can't get better). For other methods, yeah, reducing redundancy in the plaintext reduces redundancy in the ciphertext, which is a good thing. As someone else mentioned, it may wind up with the first several bytes of plaintext being predictable, but these days any respectable algorithm has to be able to resist a known plaintext attack (the OTP resists it by never reusing the key; deriving the first 6 bytes by xoring with 'From: ' won't help you on any future message).

Sort of. The only form of brute force that works on a one time pad is the rubber hose kind; if the pad is actually random there is no indication whatsoever in the ciphertext whether it's a phone book or Hamlet; any message with the right number of bits is equally possible. So you have to get information not contained in the ciphertext.

and so do I. Bastard :)

probably decided the extra cost of making the cards outweighed the losses due to magstripe fraud.

*shrug* Without tests, how can you assess the randomness of any bit source? If this passes the same tests as sources we currently accept, then it's at least as good given what we currently know. When we learn more stuff, it may change.

if it can replace my cable box, maybe, but I'm already working on that and I think I can do it better (for my needs) than this does. It can't replace the 360 (not compatible), can't replace the ps3 (unless they stop making me buy xbox live to do netflix), can't replace the turntable, so now we have to find room for it somewhere that won't annoy my wife... yeah, not seeing it.

perhaps they figure streaming makes spinning plastic obsolete. Personally, spinning plastic will be a feature of my entertainment life at least until Netflix has all the language/subtitle options for the foreign films, and probably longer (since I already have a fair amount of such plastic).

My _personal_ problem with it is that it's not backwards compatible, which means I can't get rid of the xbox 360, which means Yet Another Item In The Entertainment Console, which will make my wife Not Happy. If enough good titles come out for it that aren't 360/ps3 available, she might decide it's worth it, but I don't expect that to be for at least a couple of years, and more likely she'll just play them at someone else's house.

complicit they may be, but shielded from any effect they most certainly are; that's the entire point of the DMCA safe harbor provision.