Yeah. I'm aware of that. I think my point is more that in the case of infinite supply there's no reason demand should increase the price, profits would naturally increase from the higher demand anyway (and by increasing the price for no reason they should in theory decrease the demand). It just does because we're accustomed to thinking of it working that way with things that have limited supply and companies are more than willing to take advantage of that in order to make a profit.

This is basically one of those circumstances where capitalism doesn't work properly ,and encourages unethical behavior, because people aren't rational agents, if they were they'd simple wait for the price to go back down before they bought it.

I don't think plane ticket ordering is the best analogy, its a reasonable assumption that a surge in demand would cause a limit of supply in such cases (there's a finite number of seats), so the price increase is still sort of tied to a finite supply.

I'm entirely capable of hating the player and the game. Especially since we're in a system where the players seem to write most of the rules for their own benefit to start with.

There is no Supply vs Demand here, the supply of digital items is effectively infinite, so the idea of automated price increases based on such doesn't make sense.

And some people might have rushed out to buy it because of the publicity her death generated ie this is the first time they've heard of her, or they heard some of her music they wanted to on one of the news clips.

Gatekeeper's like Sony are in a very strong position when it comes to this. You *can't* boycott Sony without also effectively boycotting people you want to support.

Actually it kind of does but in this case the loyalty is to the Artist (and these companies know that, this is why Copyright legislation is always for the artist even though their actual benefits are tiny).

There's a problem with capitalist theory though , people aren't rational agents with perfect knowledge (the vast majority of people will never even hear about this). If they were things like market dominance and regulatory capture couldn't happen. This is how capitalism , as it is practiced, can actually reward unethical behavior.

Actually the key problem there would be the automatic price setting based on number of purchases for a non-scarce good.

Not really, was tired when I wrote that,so I could easily be wrong about why.

But starting at both ends won't optimize that algorithm in the general case, it is the most efficient algorithm known for the task it solves (there are optimizations for Djikstra's Algorithm but they are for reduced classes like spase graphs, or are heuristic and thus aren't guaranteed to find an optimal solution).
 

I think the problem there is the "on Friday" bit. "Good enough" can be any threshold you set, including rigorous security and maintainability thresholds where necessary, the arbitrary deadline isn't a part of the Agile process any more than its part of the Waterfall Model.

Also I'd have to say your answer is a bit flawed, a project that is 6000 lines of code shouldn't have a documentation trail the size of the Encyclopedia Brittanica. That's the attitude that drives people away from documentation heavy models, and its one of the great flaws with University teaching of Software Engineering, they require you to do rigorous documentation of a toy task, so the only thing it teaches people is that rigorous documentation is a pointless nuisance and waste of time.

Essentially appropriate documentation and testing for the task is the correct answer, you don't want to little or to much. If you're developing a life support system for hospitals everything should be documented and tested to the utmost extent.

That's because that optimization won't work if there's two (or more) equally good paths and you're forward and backwards route select different ones (in such a case you could actually be almost doubling the work). .

You've got the analogue conversion problem their for everything but interactive media. People can just record the clear text version on their display device.

You've got the key and lock problem for interactive media (that doesn't do a significant chunk of its processing server side and only send the results), ie you're trying to stop someone from accessing the content (making a copy) who you want to be able access the content (viewing it).

Encryption is great for stopping copying by intermediaries but as for stopping copying by the receiving party, the strength of the encryption is irrelevant (they have the key), you have to instead rely on the strength of your obfuscation of the key (and perhaps the encryption methodology).

Or he's figuring that if enough people regard a law as illegitimate and refuse to obey it (or aren't aware of it and its not intuitively obvious) , it becomes unenforceable whether or not they all deliberately try to get caught (like what happened with the Prohibition, where instead of stopping alcohol sales it created an impressive criminal market because people weren't impressed by the law).

Pretty much every English-as-a-first-language person on the planet is guilty of infringing on Happy Birthday, see how well the enforcement campaign on that one would go over.

Erm, the internet is a soapbox in this age. A far more effective one than standing on a street corner in terms of the number of people you can reach. Contrary to what some people believe there's no inherent virtue in doing something in the most inefficient way possible.

Probably because a real job in CS isn't what you (or a lot of CS graduates) think it is. CS is not a different way of saying Software Engineering. CS is about how computing works and more efficient ways to do it (like improving the algorithmic efficiency of sorting), not about how to efficiently and effectively produce 1 000 000 lines of code dedicated to special case X (e.g. flying a plane). Some fields are like that, there's a difference between being a physicist (perhaps a mathematician might be more accurate even in some contexts) and an engineer too.

I can't be the only one who parsed that first sentence as the US causing the financial meltdown of Greece,Ireland, Italy and Spain. Especially since that wouldn't be completely untrue.