...I do not need zuckerberg to tell me who I 'should' like, emulate, or otherwise view as a 'mentor.'
Exactly right.
Besides, I'm fairly certain this will become some kind of game where we find those who have paid Facebook the most or have otherwise won the popularity vote become the "should know" group. Greed will likely find a way to fuck this gimmick up too.
"The franchise was set to end with this year's "Resident Evil: The Final Chapter," which grossed $312 million worldwide..."
If sitting in a movie theater watching Paint Dry for two hours drew that kind of revenue, we would see Paint Dry: The Other Wall filming next month. From a financial standpoint, they're never going to fix what's not broken, and clearly this recycling bullshit is what consumers want.
It's rather sad and weird that new content seems to not be drawing the revenue creators were hoping for.
Now. Show me that you were able to do more than break into the equivalent of Starbucks public network.
The point of the report was to show the state of security regarding locations where the President of the United States often conducts official business.
By comparison, who gives a flying fuck about Starbucks hotspots and spying on arguments over avocado toast recipes between two hipster douchebags.
...There's no reason why an intelligent computer would be any better at writing software than an intelligent human. More importantly, a intelligent computer might decide it doesn't want to write software.
How much more intelligent have humans become in the last century or two?
I'm talking about actual capability and intelligence, not ingenuity. Sure we've created some amazing technology born of newer concepts, but our capability has not really increased since the days of Einstein. This tends to prove we have a finite limit, which AI will likely not find.
The simple fact that machines can operate at speeds much faster than a human will ever be able to operate proves how superior they could become simply from a performance capacity (there's a valid reason we use them today.) And your latter statement tends to hint to that fact quite clearly, as computers may deduce that code is irrelevant and unnecessary far before capitalistic greed could ever do.
Yes, we're very much at the start of the new tech hype cycle
Keep in mind that most tech hype is actually correct, even if premature. People laughed in the 1980s when hypers predicted that home computers would be popular, and in the workplace there would be a computer on every desk. But that is what happened. Likewise, people rolled their eyes in the 1990s at the notion that online shopping would be popular, and many people predicted that smartphones and social media were passing fads.
Well, no. I didn't reject the notion of PCs, or ecommerce. I do reject the notion of "AI" becoming a thing in my lifetime. First of all, what's being hyped as AI is not AI, as AI has been defined. At most, we're talking about "machine learning", not the same thing at all.
Perhaps you need to understand and grasp the fact that AI doesn't need to be perfect or even close to become a significant disruption to our environment. Hell, we only really need automation to be adopted on a large scale to initiate the destruction of human employment. AI will be nothing more than the final iteration once it comes to fruition.
I have an idea. Every patent that has been granted in the last 20 years that is not actively being used should be forced to go up for auction. I'm guessing a trillion or two would come flying out of tax havens...
Probably not. Most patents don't last anywhere near the full 20 years, because the USPTO (as well as foreign patent offices) charge "maintenance fees" or "annuity fees" that increase throughout the lifetime of the patent. Fail to pay those, and the patent goes abandoned. In the US, those fees go up to $7400. In Europe, it's $787.50 Euros... annually. Pay all the fees through the full 20 year term, and you're spending an additional $20-30k on the patent - so, for Apple, with their 56 patents, that's potentially $100-150k for just this set.
$100 - 150K? Are you fucking kidding me? For a company sitting on $200+ billion in cash reserves, even $150 million in patent fees is pocket change. Literally.
The financial argument is obviously an invalid one. If the current financial penalties were an effective deterrent, the business of patent hoarding wouldn't be a viable one.
Every patent that has been granted in the last 20 years that is not actively being used should be forced to go up for auction.
Ok let's go with that for a moment. Define "actively being used" and tell me who is going to monitor all these patents for activity. I think you are going to find that to be a LOT harder than you think.
I think a better idea is to have an exponential patent renewal fee. Anyone who gets a patent has to pay an annual fee. The fee is say $100 the first year (indexed for inflation) and it doubles every year after that. The patent remains valid as long as the fees get paid. This way patents that are actually valuable get used and less valuable patents enter the public domain sooner. It wouldn't be hard to maintain the patent for 5-10 years but after that it becomes very expensive. There is no point in paying the patent fees to hold a patent that brings in insufficient value. This would mean that by year 25 a patent would have to be worth in excess of $1 billion to be worth paying the fees to maintain. You can adjust the length of the average patent by adjusting the starting price.
If you want to make it interesting you could make it so that the patent holder gets first rights to pay the patent but if they decline to pay it, it goes up for auction with a starting price at the fee the patent holder would have had to pay. If someone buys the patent then they get to continue the payment schedule.
This is a good idea going forward for new patents, but you're kind of ruining the fun of flushing out tax havens and watching Greed scramble in bidding wars.
And if this were law, you'd see devices using them available for sale online (or in a showcase store) for a few million dollars a piece. "See? We're still using the patent!"
Nice idea in theory, but you won't fix the patent system that easily.
A lot of patents exist for the sole purpose of control and fucking over innovation as a result. There are likely quite a few that aren't even worth the R&D to develop one or two devices for the sole purpose of demonstrating usability, especially for those who only secured it in the first place in order to obtain revenue from licensing or litigation.
And when loopholes like this open up and start getting abused, you shut them the fuck down to stop Greed from gaming the system once again.
"Apple has been granted a total of 56 patents today."
Just another day on the Monopoly board of Innovation.
I have an idea. Every patent that has been granted in the last 20 years that is not actively being used should be forced to go up for auction. I'm guessing a trillion or two would come flying out of tax havens as companies scramble to bid and secure patent stockpiles, which those funds would be available as capital funding for new startups based entirely out of the US, along with that money being taxed properly.
But here's the catch. We repeat the process every year for every unused patent until the concept of hoarding patents for litigations sake is not a sound investment strategy.
US startup investing and onshore hiring. Considerable tax revenue gained. Short-circuit pointless patent hoarding and allow innovation to thrive once again.
"The Tech Sector Is Leaving the Rest of the US Economy In Its Dust"
Uh, more like The Tech Monopolies and Mega-corps are leaving Everyone In Its Dust.
These tech giants are crushing even other tech companies.
And of course let's not forget about the political strings they've pulled to stay on top. I wonder how well the "Tech Sector Five" would have performed had they been forced to play more by the damn rules and actually do things like pay taxes, and not hide 99% of their revenue in some fucking tax haven somewhere.
>"Cities will ban human drivers once the data confirms how dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will spread to suburbs, and then beyond"
And those of us who ENJOY driving, especially motorcycles (which can likely never be self-driving) are royally screwed. But hey, I suppose a super-safe and boring life is so much more meaningful than a a free and enjoyable one with some risk....
If humans could learn to put down their booze, their pills, and their fucking cell phones, people might actually be able to enjoy a meaningful life without being maimed or killed by an idiot behind the wheel.
Slap-on-the-wrist punishments sure as shit aren't helping either.
Oh, make sure to ban bicycles and pedestrians too. Then start banning skateboards, roller skates/blades, horseback riding, skydiving, mounting climbing, target shooting, football, skiing, dogs, game consoles, whatever. Life is just not safe, you know.
You're likely going to be free to engage in whatever unsafe activity you want to. Just be prepared to pay much more for your insurance premiums. All of them. I mean, think of all the starving lawyers...
exactly what it sounds like... taking a low dose of drugs. usually many times a day.
Gee, not unlike caffeine addicts taking shots all day from a dealer named Keurig...ain't it funny how we demonize certain stimulants and champion others...
I wonder why no-one thinks about this, the car is always connected to the network. So someone can probably take over your car and drive you to the police station. That is a better outcome, anyway, than driving you to the outskirts, robbing and shooting you...
I recently moved to a different county, where it seems that everyone drives the exact speed limit. In every lane.
Normally I'm not prone to becoming frustrated and angry behind the wheel, but as I sit there unable to pass anyone in the left lane, I started to wonder....is this bullshit what is to be expected when autonomous cars start to take over? Computers programmed to never exceed the speed limit, and drive in a sane controlled manner all the time?
Not saying that doesn't make sense, especially as not-so-sane human drivers kill and maim tens of thousands annually. Just pointing out the fact that it won't go over well in the transitional years as human drivers share the road with autonomous vehicles. Chances are they'll be more violence with impatient humans dealing with that shit than their ever will be coming from car hackers looking to kidnap and shoot you on the outskirts of the city.
No, they're patching a very old product that they told people - for years straight - to stop using, and they explained why. You do get this, right?
It's hard to stop using a system when it requires repurchasing the $100,000 hospital X-ray machine that it runs.
Did you think every hospital should just throw out all it's working equipment and purchase new ones? For hospitals in Africa and India as well?
Short answer? Yes, they should. It's part of the cost of doing business.
But in the event they cannot afford to maintain their systems properly and choose to run unsupported software, perhaps they should take the fucking thing offline and learn how to mitigate risk.
You're also ignoring the huge elephant in the room - that Microsoft probably knew about that vulnerability or even better, created it in conjunction with the NSA et al. By the way - WINDOWS 10 ALSO REQUIRED A "FIX". This is not a "zero day vulnerability", it's a back-door plain and simple.
The other elephant is that a lot of very expensive hardware still runs on WinXP (and other less-recent but still old versions), can't be upgraded to the new version, and is too expensive to replace...So effectively Microsoft is saying that you have to throw out and repurchase all of your medical equipment, all of your research equipment, and all of your manufacturing equipment - even if it's still working - because they want you to purchase a new version of their OS.
Microsoft never forced vendors to use Windows when designing and creating expensive equipment, especially medical equipment. As far as being "too expensive" to replace, compare and contrast that maintenance against the cost of leaking HIPAA-controlled data, or worse yet, losing a shitload of it to ransomware. At some point, the solution is rather obvious.
Given just how long Microsoft DID support Windows XP (over a decade), along with the fact that the expiration date of that OS was not exactly some corporate secret, I grow tired of the bullshit excuses regarding businesses that have failed to replace shit that has been expired for years now. Companies should have properly budgeted for that replacement LONG ago. Stop bitching, and get off your fucking wallet. The cost of running Windows IS a part of the cost of doing business.
Blaming Microsoft about an environment you failed to maintain properly is kind of like blaming the car manufacturer when your car breaks down after running it for years without changing the oil. Maintenance matters.
The general gist is that users should be able to choose whether this shit is enabled or not. They did pay for the chip after all.
Oh really?
Just because you paid for a car from Ford or Toyota doesn't mean you get to decide what shit is enabled in the ECU or CAN.
And that's just scratching the surface with a car analogy. The general gist is there's a shitload of electronic devices you pay for and don't get to choose how it behaves.
Except your analogy sucks because nobody has created alternative music content. Or the content that has been created, people do not want.
For whatever reason, people want that Top 40 crap. They want the MTV crap. I am not part of that demographic, but the demographic is huge. There is a cost to access that content.
The cost to access said crap is mandated by those who feel others are muscling in on their action. Sites like bandcamp support artists coming out who now represent themselves, and are exactly how we have in fact created alternative ways of obtaining music content. Giving it away for free in order to draw fans and make money through live gigs is another method in use these days. Or pressing it on vinyl for fans that have no idea how to even use and yet still buy a $30 piece of limited-edition plastic as a method of donating funds to support their favorite artist.
Here in America, you either pay the cost, or you do without it. Or you break the law and steal it. Downloading music, streaming it without paying the artist, whatever are theft. I say this as someone who was swapping warez at 2400 baud and still has access to all of the free content that I want.
The whole, "If they weren't going to buy it in the first place, it's not a lost sale." argument does not work here. People obviously want the content. They are going to YouTube.com and consuming the content. Google is making money from the content via ads. But for some reason, people like you seem to think that Google not paying for content that they are making money on, is okay.
If the artist is OK with using YouTube to promote their own content, then yes, I am saying it's OK. There have been quite a few artists who have in fact been discovered or promoted themselves quite successfully using that medium and channel, often getting a cut of the ad revenue themselves as a benefit for all involved. And you are overlooking the fact that they've saved a lot of money promoting themselves for free using social media channels. As far as Google earning money, well they do have costs related to the infrastructure that supports this promotional method, which is a cost that an artist isn't paying for. (Imagine the bandwidth and hosting costs for streaming HD video a couple hundred million times in a week, as a new artist goes viral.)
Let me put this in terms you might understand. Let's pretend that you work a 40 hour week. At the end of the week, you get a paycheck for 10% of what you were expecting. You whine to your boss about it. His response is that, "The work that you do could have been done by anyone. If you don't like my wages, go kick rocks." That is basically what is going on here. Your Boss is profiting from your labor in the same way that Google is profiting from the content created by the artists. Just like it wouldn't be okay for your boss to decide after the fact that he does not want to pay you what he owes you, it is not okay for Google to decide that they do not want to pay RIAA, ASCAP, whoever represents the artist in question, the fee for the content.
Speaking of paychecks, a top-40 artist who's being represented by the industry is probably lucky to get 10% for their work, because the other 90% goes to an antiquated, outdated business model that has grown so greedy it needs to die. THAT is what is basically going on here, and has for a very long time. Plenty of other avenues exist for a new artist to showcase their talents, and can now do so to a global audience rather instantly, and without needing to pay an representation engine their cut they "earned". Now if an artist truly feels like they need to be supported and protected by the greed-riddled model of yore, then fine. Enjoy that flavor of a 10% paycheck.
On a related note, I find it rather comical I can find all the Metallica
Not loading down the spaceship with useless baggage is always a good idea. Hopefully Orion will continue to be unmanned.
Nah - you don't understand many (most) space junkies. With humans in space, I support defense department type funding. Your dream of no humans. I support a budget of exactly $0.00.
Sorry but for most of us, your useless baggage is our raison d'être for a space program.
Speaking of useless, care to explain to the rest of us your fucking logic? How exactly does humans in space justify spending for the defense department again?
...While the RIAA may suck, this is still America and producers get to set their prices. If the RIAA says the latest Top 40 track is worth X, it is worth X.
How ironic that the greedy mentality of it's-worth-what-we-say-it-is, is part of the entire reason people choose not to support it. No wonder they call themselves the MAFIAA.
People need and want music. People also need and want transportation. Maybe the car analogy is more like the RIAA is a gasoline company who got too fucking greedy, and someone established another method of transportation (EV), to avoid needing to paying a lot of middlemen obscene markups for gas.
Soon, gasoline will be an unnecessary component for transportation to survive and thrive. Not unlike a lot of pointless Greed in the music industry...
Slashdot Mirror
A halfway solution is not a solution.
The only solution identified to solve for was removing the effort normally required to authenticate to your smartphone.
Biometrics was created to meet the needs of the lazy generation.
...I do not need zuckerberg to tell me who I 'should' like, emulate, or otherwise view as a 'mentor.'
Exactly right.
Besides, I'm fairly certain this will become some kind of game where we find those who have paid Facebook the most or have otherwise won the popularity vote become the "should know" group. Greed will likely find a way to fuck this gimmick up too.
The last spiderman reboot died immediately.
Hope springs eternal
Doubt it. The last film still grossed over $700 million worldwide, despite mixed reviews and shitty ratings.
They'll find a way to regurgitate another one. They've got half a century of comic book stories to throw up on the big screen.
"The franchise was set to end with this year's "Resident Evil: The Final Chapter," which grossed $312 million worldwide..."
If sitting in a movie theater watching Paint Dry for two hours drew that kind of revenue, we would see Paint Dry: The Other Wall filming next month. From a financial standpoint, they're never going to fix what's not broken, and clearly this recycling bullshit is what consumers want.
It's rather sad and weird that new content seems to not be drawing the revenue creators were hoping for.
Now. Show me that you were able to do more than break into the equivalent of Starbucks public network.
The point of the report was to show the state of security regarding locations where the President of the United States often conducts official business.
By comparison, who gives a flying fuck about Starbucks hotspots and spying on arguments over avocado toast recipes between two hipster douchebags.
...There's no reason why an intelligent computer would be any better at writing software than an intelligent human. More importantly, a intelligent computer might decide it doesn't want to write software.
How much more intelligent have humans become in the last century or two?
I'm talking about actual capability and intelligence, not ingenuity. Sure we've created some amazing technology born of newer concepts, but our capability has not really increased since the days of Einstein. This tends to prove we have a finite limit, which AI will likely not find.
The simple fact that machines can operate at speeds much faster than a human will ever be able to operate proves how superior they could become simply from a performance capacity (there's a valid reason we use them today.) And your latter statement tends to hint to that fact quite clearly, as computers may deduce that code is irrelevant and unnecessary far before capitalistic greed could ever do.
Yes, we're very much at the start of the new tech hype cycle
Keep in mind that most tech hype is actually correct, even if premature. People laughed in the 1980s when hypers predicted that home computers would be popular, and in the workplace there would be a computer on every desk. But that is what happened. Likewise, people rolled their eyes in the 1990s at the notion that online shopping would be popular, and many people predicted that smartphones and social media were passing fads.
Well, no. I didn't reject the notion of PCs, or ecommerce. I do reject the notion of "AI" becoming a thing in my lifetime. First of all, what's being hyped as AI is not AI, as AI has been defined. At most, we're talking about "machine learning", not the same thing at all.
Perhaps you need to understand and grasp the fact that AI doesn't need to be perfect or even close to become a significant disruption to our environment. Hell, we only really need automation to be adopted on a large scale to initiate the destruction of human employment. AI will be nothing more than the final iteration once it comes to fruition.
I have an idea. Every patent that has been granted in the last 20 years that is not actively being used should be forced to go up for auction. I'm guessing a trillion or two would come flying out of tax havens...
Probably not. Most patents don't last anywhere near the full 20 years, because the USPTO (as well as foreign patent offices) charge "maintenance fees" or "annuity fees" that increase throughout the lifetime of the patent. Fail to pay those, and the patent goes abandoned. In the US, those fees go up to $7400. In Europe, it's $787.50 Euros... annually. Pay all the fees through the full 20 year term, and you're spending an additional $20-30k on the patent - so, for Apple, with their 56 patents, that's potentially $100-150k for just this set.
$100 - 150K? Are you fucking kidding me? For a company sitting on $200+ billion in cash reserves, even $150 million in patent fees is pocket change. Literally.
The financial argument is obviously an invalid one. If the current financial penalties were an effective deterrent, the business of patent hoarding wouldn't be a viable one.
Every patent that has been granted in the last 20 years that is not actively being used should be forced to go up for auction.
Ok let's go with that for a moment. Define "actively being used" and tell me who is going to monitor all these patents for activity. I think you are going to find that to be a LOT harder than you think.
I think a better idea is to have an exponential patent renewal fee. Anyone who gets a patent has to pay an annual fee. The fee is say $100 the first year (indexed for inflation) and it doubles every year after that. The patent remains valid as long as the fees get paid. This way patents that are actually valuable get used and less valuable patents enter the public domain sooner. It wouldn't be hard to maintain the patent for 5-10 years but after that it becomes very expensive. There is no point in paying the patent fees to hold a patent that brings in insufficient value. This would mean that by year 25 a patent would have to be worth in excess of $1 billion to be worth paying the fees to maintain. You can adjust the length of the average patent by adjusting the starting price.
If you want to make it interesting you could make it so that the patent holder gets first rights to pay the patent but if they decline to pay it, it goes up for auction with a starting price at the fee the patent holder would have had to pay. If someone buys the patent then they get to continue the payment schedule.
This is a good idea going forward for new patents, but you're kind of ruining the fun of flushing out tax havens and watching Greed scramble in bidding wars.
And if this were law, you'd see devices using them available for sale online (or in a showcase store) for a few million dollars a piece. "See? We're still using the patent!"
Nice idea in theory, but you won't fix the patent system that easily.
A lot of patents exist for the sole purpose of control and fucking over innovation as a result. There are likely quite a few that aren't even worth the R&D to develop one or two devices for the sole purpose of demonstrating usability, especially for those who only secured it in the first place in order to obtain revenue from licensing or litigation.
And when loopholes like this open up and start getting abused, you shut them the fuck down to stop Greed from gaming the system once again.
"Apple has been granted a total of 56 patents today."
Just another day on the Monopoly board of Innovation.
I have an idea. Every patent that has been granted in the last 20 years that is not actively being used should be forced to go up for auction. I'm guessing a trillion or two would come flying out of tax havens as companies scramble to bid and secure patent stockpiles, which those funds would be available as capital funding for new startups based entirely out of the US, along with that money being taxed properly.
But here's the catch. We repeat the process every year for every unused patent until the concept of hoarding patents for litigations sake is not a sound investment strategy.
US startup investing and onshore hiring. Considerable tax revenue gained. Short-circuit pointless patent hoarding and allow innovation to thrive once again.
"The Tech Sector Is Leaving the Rest of the US Economy In Its Dust"
Uh, more like The Tech Monopolies and Mega-corps are leaving Everyone In Its Dust.
These tech giants are crushing even other tech companies.
And of course let's not forget about the political strings they've pulled to stay on top. I wonder how well the "Tech Sector Five" would have performed had they been forced to play more by the damn rules and actually do things like pay taxes, and not hide 99% of their revenue in some fucking tax haven somewhere.
>"Cities will ban human drivers once the data confirms how dangerous they can be behind a wheel. This will spread to suburbs, and then beyond"
And those of us who ENJOY driving, especially motorcycles (which can likely never be self-driving) are royally screwed. But hey, I suppose a super-safe and boring life is so much more meaningful than a a free and enjoyable one with some risk....
If humans could learn to put down their booze, their pills, and their fucking cell phones, people might actually be able to enjoy a meaningful life without being maimed or killed by an idiot behind the wheel.
Slap-on-the-wrist punishments sure as shit aren't helping either.
Oh, make sure to ban bicycles and pedestrians too. Then start banning skateboards, roller skates/blades, horseback riding, skydiving, mounting climbing, target shooting, football, skiing, dogs, game consoles, whatever. Life is just not safe, you know.
You're likely going to be free to engage in whatever unsafe activity you want to. Just be prepared to pay much more for your insurance premiums. All of them. I mean, think of all the starving lawyers...
Hey, it sure as hell worked for Pink Floyd.
I think it is taking small doses of LSD which allegedly acts as a mild stimulant and creativity booster.
Oh, we've got that where I work too. We call it a Keurig.
Only downside is it's an addictive little bastard. You should see how the caffeine junkies act when we're out of product...
exactly what it sounds like... taking a low dose of drugs. usually many times a day.
Gee, not unlike caffeine addicts taking shots all day from a dealer named Keurig...ain't it funny how we demonize certain stimulants and champion others...
how to lock up 50% of PC resources whenever the user starts certain software
Isn't that just windows updates?
Even worse.
Microsoft could consider this activity patent infringement. Guess it's good the government isn't easily sued...
I wonder why no-one thinks about this, the car is always connected to the network. So someone can probably take over your car and drive you to the police station. That is a better outcome, anyway, than driving you to the outskirts, robbing and shooting you...
I recently moved to a different county, where it seems that everyone drives the exact speed limit. In every lane.
Normally I'm not prone to becoming frustrated and angry behind the wheel, but as I sit there unable to pass anyone in the left lane, I started to wonder....is this bullshit what is to be expected when autonomous cars start to take over? Computers programmed to never exceed the speed limit, and drive in a sane controlled manner all the time?
Not saying that doesn't make sense, especially as not-so-sane human drivers kill and maim tens of thousands annually. Just pointing out the fact that it won't go over well in the transitional years as human drivers share the road with autonomous vehicles. Chances are they'll be more violence with impatient humans dealing with that shit than their ever will be coming from car hackers looking to kidnap and shoot you on the outskirts of the city.
They're patching XP for chrissakes.
No, they're patching a very old product that they told people - for years straight - to stop using, and they explained why. You do get this, right?
It's hard to stop using a system when it requires repurchasing the $100,000 hospital X-ray machine that it runs.
Did you think every hospital should just throw out all it's working equipment and purchase new ones? For hospitals in Africa and India as well?
Short answer? Yes, they should. It's part of the cost of doing business.
But in the event they cannot afford to maintain their systems properly and choose to run unsupported software, perhaps they should take the fucking thing offline and learn how to mitigate risk.
secure Win10
+1 Funny
You're also ignoring the huge elephant in the room - that Microsoft probably knew about that vulnerability or even better, created it in conjunction with the NSA et al. By the way - WINDOWS 10 ALSO REQUIRED A "FIX". This is not a "zero day vulnerability", it's a back-door plain and simple.
The other elephant is that a lot of very expensive hardware still runs on WinXP (and other less-recent but still old versions), can't be upgraded to the new version, and is too expensive to replace...So effectively Microsoft is saying that you have to throw out and repurchase all of your medical equipment, all of your research equipment, and all of your manufacturing equipment - even if it's still working - because they want you to purchase a new version of their OS.
Microsoft never forced vendors to use Windows when designing and creating expensive equipment, especially medical equipment. As far as being "too expensive" to replace, compare and contrast that maintenance against the cost of leaking HIPAA-controlled data, or worse yet, losing a shitload of it to ransomware. At some point, the solution is rather obvious.
Given just how long Microsoft DID support Windows XP (over a decade), along with the fact that the expiration date of that OS was not exactly some corporate secret, I grow tired of the bullshit excuses regarding businesses that have failed to replace shit that has been expired for years now. Companies should have properly budgeted for that replacement LONG ago. Stop bitching, and get off your fucking wallet. The cost of running Windows IS a part of the cost of doing business.
Blaming Microsoft about an environment you failed to maintain properly is kind of like blaming the car manufacturer when your car breaks down after running it for years without changing the oil. Maintenance matters.
The general gist is that users should be able to choose whether this shit is enabled or not. They did pay for the chip after all.
Oh really?
Just because you paid for a car from Ford or Toyota doesn't mean you get to decide what shit is enabled in the ECU or CAN.
And that's just scratching the surface with a car analogy. The general gist is there's a shitload of electronic devices you pay for and don't get to choose how it behaves.
Hopefully if it becomes the norm that people don't make any money from these things, it won't be worth the effort to do....
I highly doubt it. Sadly, people do this kind of malicious shit just for the fun of it.
Before the concept of anonymous e-cash and ransomware came along, they often did.
Except your analogy sucks because nobody has created alternative music content. Or the content that has been created, people do not want.
For whatever reason, people want that Top 40 crap. They want the MTV crap. I am not part of that demographic, but the demographic is huge. There is a cost to access that content.
The cost to access said crap is mandated by those who feel others are muscling in on their action. Sites like bandcamp support artists coming out who now represent themselves, and are exactly how we have in fact created alternative ways of obtaining music content. Giving it away for free in order to draw fans and make money through live gigs is another method in use these days. Or pressing it on vinyl for fans that have no idea how to even use and yet still buy a $30 piece of limited-edition plastic as a method of donating funds to support their favorite artist.
Here in America, you either pay the cost, or you do without it. Or you break the law and steal it. Downloading music, streaming it without paying the artist, whatever are theft. I say this as someone who was swapping warez at 2400 baud and still has access to all of the free content that I want.
The whole, "If they weren't going to buy it in the first place, it's not a lost sale." argument does not work here. People obviously want the content. They are going to YouTube.com and consuming the content. Google is making money from the content via ads. But for some reason, people like you seem to think that Google not paying for content that they are making money on, is okay.
If the artist is OK with using YouTube to promote their own content, then yes, I am saying it's OK. There have been quite a few artists who have in fact been discovered or promoted themselves quite successfully using that medium and channel, often getting a cut of the ad revenue themselves as a benefit for all involved. And you are overlooking the fact that they've saved a lot of money promoting themselves for free using social media channels. As far as Google earning money, well they do have costs related to the infrastructure that supports this promotional method, which is a cost that an artist isn't paying for. (Imagine the bandwidth and hosting costs for streaming HD video a couple hundred million times in a week, as a new artist goes viral.)
Let me put this in terms you might understand. Let's pretend that you work a 40 hour week. At the end of the week, you get a paycheck for 10% of what you were expecting. You whine to your boss about it. His response is that, "The work that you do could have been done by anyone. If you don't like my wages, go kick rocks." That is basically what is going on here. Your Boss is profiting from your labor in the same way that Google is profiting from the content created by the artists. Just like it wouldn't be okay for your boss to decide after the fact that he does not want to pay you what he owes you, it is not okay for Google to decide that they do not want to pay RIAA, ASCAP, whoever represents the artist in question, the fee for the content.
Speaking of paychecks, a top-40 artist who's being represented by the industry is probably lucky to get 10% for their work, because the other 90% goes to an antiquated, outdated business model that has grown so greedy it needs to die. THAT is what is basically going on here, and has for a very long time. Plenty of other avenues exist for a new artist to showcase their talents, and can now do so to a global audience rather instantly, and without needing to pay an representation engine their cut they "earned". Now if an artist truly feels like they need to be supported and protected by the greed-riddled model of yore, then fine. Enjoy that flavor of a 10% paycheck.
On a related note, I find it rather comical I can find all the Metallica
Not loading down the spaceship with useless baggage is always a good idea. Hopefully Orion will continue to be unmanned.
Nah - you don't understand many (most) space junkies. With humans in space, I support defense department type funding. Your dream of no humans. I support a budget of exactly $0.00.
Sorry but for most of us, your useless baggage is our raison d'être for a space program.
Speaking of useless, care to explain to the rest of us your fucking logic? How exactly does humans in space justify spending for the defense department again?
...While the RIAA may suck, this is still America and producers get to set their prices. If the RIAA says the latest Top 40 track is worth X, it is worth X.
How ironic that the greedy mentality of it's-worth-what-we-say-it-is, is part of the entire reason people choose not to support it. No wonder they call themselves the MAFIAA.
People need and want music. People also need and want transportation. Maybe the car analogy is more like the RIAA is a gasoline company who got too fucking greedy, and someone established another method of transportation (EV), to avoid needing to paying a lot of middlemen obscene markups for gas.
Soon, gasoline will be an unnecessary component for transportation to survive and thrive. Not unlike a lot of pointless Greed in the music industry...