Oh no! There is no default value. It's in the tiny print in the paperwork you must sign when you buy the car. The ONLY value is accept. You can not-accept or you can buy the car. Those are your choices.
This is untrue, simply have your lawyer (or if you want, on your own) change the text to read what you want. It's a contract. Now, the dealership may not sell you the car under those conditions, and in fact, given the size of the corporation vs. you, one could argue it's a contract of adhesion and therefore unconscionable.
But its a contract and it's not just Ford that can change the contract text.
My main PC is a 2.5-year-old Fujitsu Siemens workstation with an 8-core Xeon and 4 hdds in it. It will prolly run fine for another 3 years.
As for building your own: at work, I recently proposed we build our own server, for a certain project - at a cost of about € 4000 - rather than buying a COTS Dell box for about € 10,000. The proposal was met with enthusiasm by colleagues, only died because of archaic in-house regulations. The PC is not dead, in spite of what is being heard each year again. It is changing. That's all.
Did your quote include integration testing and support? WHat about service contracts?
Yeah, the ASUS Black Knight AC router is half this price and also able to run open source firmware. Sure the CPU and other specs seem very nice, but that's a lot of dough for a consumer router where one half as expensive will work basically just as well.
Warning: Anecdote ahead: I have one of those, and it died on me after I tried to reset it back to factory specs. It simply would not wake or route after that reset. I haven't had time to call support, and in the interim am using my 5-year old Apple AEBS. I haven't noticed a major change in speeds or bandwidth, though I do admit I only have one AC capable client so far.
YMMV, but I'm pretty disappointed with the experience on my RT-AC66U.
I want knobs. Knobs and physical buttons. Let them surround a fancy whizz-bang touchscreen if you want, but I damn well want to be able to turn up the heat or volume without looking.
That's what on-wheel controls are for. I've driven a car with touchscreen inputs for quite some time (2005 Prius), and I've never ever had issues (and neither have my parents) in using the car interface even while driving.
The key to usability is, as you say, an appropriate set of on-wheel controls, and knobs/buttons for the key non-wheel controls (i.e., audio interface has both touchscreen and knob/button interface) where appropriate (i.e., high traffic controls) and the touch interface for the non-key, complex controls (i.e., monitoring fuel efficiency status, synch, navigation setup, etc).
Is Tesla any different than Toyota's implementation of touchscreen?
Really you can say the same thing about any fiat currency.
Like playing a game of poker and saying "Ok, red chips are worth $1, white chips $5, and blue chips $10". Even the US dollar is this way -- its value is very much arbitrary.
Now just because it is only worth whatever you think its worth does not necessarily make it worth nothing.
No, you can't. Fiat currencies are backed by the will of countries or large organizations, often with armies/guns to support their decisions. That some fiat currencies are effectively worthless says more about the country/organization than it does about fiat currencies in general.
Sure a crypto currency could be used as the main currency of some large organization, but until then they all have very little intrinsic worth and no guarantee of guns and/or a large populace to back up their worth.
So sad that a criminal is listed as an influential person. Especially one so cowardly and spineless as to flee instead of actually staying and working towards what he believed in. I hope he lives to a ripe old age and has to spend his life constantly hiding in the shadows in fear. In countries with worse personal liberties and freedoms than the one he fled from.
I'm sorry you feel this way. Very few people here feel that way, in fact, the only people here that feel that way you do usually work for the NSA.
The NSA and their numerous sockpuppets enabled through Palantir technology [1] - that could be millions of "people" who "support" the NSA. They exist everywhere, even heavily moderated forums like/. and dailykos.
Let's see if the sockpuppets mod this comment down - it's happened before when I brought it up.
This guy is probably creaming his jeans just thinking of all the new war spending that can be accomplished by tarring and feathering his new favorite scapegoat Snowden (remember, even if he's retired, he's connected to all the defense contractors and defense "community" where his gravy train is tied to.
Demanding authority and accountability means we need some standard, reliable source of truth to measure them against. Where do we get it from?
No, that's not what's needed. There's a lot of bullshit out there that nobody thinks is "news". What's at issue here is that these propoganda organizations that try to dip into that pool and not filter it for sanity (e.g.: Fox "news" - entertainment posing as reportage).
I see this hoax news as a good movement. People need to understand that these organizations where they get their "facts" need to be correlated and cross-checked. Especially from the internet, but it's easier there because some folks generally push back against bullshit that poses as facts (Politifact, Snopes). Some people don't worry about dressing warmly until they get a cold.
It's like when Colbert decided to claim Wikipedia was the "truth" then had his ColbertNation change the wiki to refrerence bald-faced lies as truth (these changes were later reverted, but the message was to question authority).
While I agree with your assessment, I think the pressure that Apple is putting on Microsoft in the enterprise space won't be seen for a few years. And Apple isn't the only factor, just one of the many. Then all of a sudden, Microsoft will have massive resistance at the enterprise level in keeping their margins on standard 2-version licensing contracts where they used to be able to ask the customer for anything they wanted (i.e., they used to have the customer over a barrel).
For now, like Blackberry, their profits will continue to rise, but once their enterprise dominance is broken it will be like the floodgates opening, and either Microsoft will see a steady lowering of licensing revenues, or they will see a sharp drop-off of renewals (i.e., sudden drop of revenues). In either case, it will force Microsoft to revisit their company culture and attitude towards customers.
But...corporate America is still solidly entrenched, and they are just now moving on from Windows XP to Windows 7. In 10 years or so, when Windows 7 is as old as XP is now, That's when they will start to think about where to go next, and whatever it is, that option isn't around yet. So we'll see!
This is not my experience. I consult and visit quite a few customers, and I'm seeing more and more Macs around. Not just tech companies, insurance firms, colleges, etc.
Macs are a non-trivial part of corporate purchases and increasing. Of course, this is because Microsoft pretty much lost out to open-source software and the web, and if you want a machine that can run Office (which sadly, isn't going anywhere as Excel is a truly entrenched product), Macs are decent hardware and a status symbol.
... should have taken the offered cash and start a new venture, producing more in long term value.
Most buyout offers have these annoying things called conditions - one of them could have been that a) founders must stay to certain period/goal or achieve a result post-acquisition (usually monetary, might be tied to purchasing company's metrics) or the payout offered (often in purchasing company's stock) would be reduced (sometimes it's worded positively like $X without conditions, but $5*X if conditions are met, with partial work being rewarded appropriately) or b) preventing founders from starting a competing venture using same idea/basis as purchased company.
Companies purchasing others aren't idiots - FB wouldn't buy Snapchat just to have the founders ditch - their effort/involvement is likely a large part of the purchasing price.
Federal Communication Commision regulates cell phones. Federal law preempts state law. Any California law could be nulified by the FCC.
Federal Law only pre-empts state law when there is a contradiction. Is there a federal law that specifically says cell phones must not have a remote killswitch?
The endgame of this legislation for totalitarian-loving legislators is that ultimately that's what will happen - they propose onerous conditions on the manufacturers and carriers who can't say no to the 12th largest market [1] in the world (probably even more important for cell phones), who then complain and ask the Feds to step in and propose their own laws that supersede the CA law, which then requires their client states and treaty members to follow along (for those nice economic treaties mandating matching legislation to promote copyright and favorable business environment for US corporations).
At each point in this chain of corruption, the law can be "enhanced" to provide more power to the TSA, CIA, FSB, Mossad, etc so wealth interests can keep increasing their profit margins.
Your still on tivo how very 90's of you. Automatic commercial skipping has been around forever now.
I'm actually not any longer - Dish due to needing TV5 (French channel) and not trusting Comcast which is the only other place I could get that. Though I miss the UX on the Tivo. Dish DVR sucks to use.
Bingo. Maybe the taxpayers have a very incompetent portfolio manager. The federal government.
Which is filled with cronies to assist their "helpless" megacorps like GM. Yes, the federal government is not nearly as competent as it should be - mostly because it's representing it's funders.
We the taxpayer have allowed corporations to control our government. We live in a socialist corporatocracy - where the corporations get bailouts and emergency loans while the citizens get taxed, spied on and are not represented.
Those who blame government are correct, but the answer - to cede more power to the corporations that are undermining it - is like going from the frying pan into the fire.
I can see myself following a policy of "never type directly into a web browser, only copy and paste" in the near future. (And here's yet another reason to avoid "cloud" services and prefer local storage for anything personal.)
Then add the Chrome browser location bar as well - since it's clear that Google is doing auto-completion against their search indexes. In fact, many "web 2.0" text entry boxes do auto-completion.
Or you could simply accept that Google and Facebook are working hard to make the web a panopticon, and act accordingly.
Exactly, The evol libertarians are destroying america with all their small government and individual freedoms
Remember, small government = big business. i.e., someones going to be making the big decisions. In one case you get a vote, in the other, you get shafted (unless you happen to be one of the few who are profiting from everyone else's misery).
Retention: "I see you are not the account holder. We will need permission from the account holder." Me: "She's at work. I'm her husband." Retention: "Well, we'll need her permission."
This is a major issue with not only Comcast but many other services. If your relationship is on solid ground, I recommend having one person do all the account management/ownership - the support from major companies/utilities on whom can actually update the account is pretty shitty. It can apply to healthcare accounts, financial accounts, etc. The hoops it takes to add a 2nd "authorized user" can be more trouble than actually signing up for service.
We share a 1Password profile for our shared services, which works for some cases, but in other cases, it's all me.
So, as far as I can tell, Safari doesn't actually block 3rd party cookies despite saying it does, and stores your credentials in plain text.
Sounds like Apple have some issues on their hands.
Hell, in my experience with Safari on Windows, deleting a cookie causes WebKit2WebProcess to crash.
Looks like the only major browser that really your needs seriously is Firefox. Given thats the sole purpose of the organization that produces it, that is a lot more re-assuring to me. Go FF.
If someone else is reading files on your computer, you're already screwed!
This has issues for backups as well - you may have been very good at prevent physical/console access to your computer, but if someone gets an old backup that happens to be unencrypted, your secure browsing history is now exposed.
Your entire premise is an argument against defense-in-depth multilayered security policy. I'd go with the expert-guided policy against your pithy analysis.
You cannot have complete security and freedom. You may want your cake and to eat it to, but it is impossible. Since providing complete security is impossible all by itself, I choose freedom. I believe the only reasonable compromise is that the government can monitor Americans only with a court order. There is no need to spy on grandma, and it is a waste of resources with no tangible benefit anyways.
It's ridiculous that you're presenting this as a dichotomy. It's false. Why were there so few attacks on the US prior to 9/11 and so few afterwards despite the rash of changes to how we collected information on all Americans?
From what I can tell, security is orthogonal to privacy. Security is doing proper detective work, targeted information collection, and
No one is saying that we should throw away the logs and make everything anonymous (well, not very many people). What is at issue is that these logs are being mined on a continual basis which leads to the amazingly depressing leaks exposed by Snowden and the unbelievable ex-girlfriend snooping that even low-level analysts have power to do.
That. Should. Not. Be happening on a daily basis against large groups of innocent Americans. That's at issue here. Contrary to the concocted reality posed in The Dark Knight, the authorities do NOT need a real-time panopticon in order to find and defeat the Jokers of the world. That's fantasy. Otherwise, we'd be praising all this data gathering as our quality of life improved due to the sudden lack of car bombings and terrorist attacks since this information gathering policy was set in place. No, quality of life due to reduced violence and terrorism has been unchanged (or taken a turn for the worse depending on whom you ask) - it's not simply not a result of
What is more likely is that more threats to the political and business status quo have been found and rooted out. Threats in this context == valid non-violent protest groups, anti-corporate saboteurs and non-malicious hackers.
Even with Tivo, it might take a few seconds to grab the remote and skip past those SOBs, and those few seconds, it can still blare at you.
True, which is why I really like ad-free (or ad-between-shows) channels like Nick Jr. (which is pretty much the only broadcast tv that gets watched in our house - exception being the Dance reality shows). The worst is when it's an ad for some horror movie - do not like my kids being exposed to suggested gore and violence in a damn advert.
The best thing for Zawi to do is probably just call it a loss. They have done the chest thumping and legal threats and probably have gotten most units back. Going to court would probably cost more time and money than the value of the PS. Offer anyone that did send their units back a gift card to reward honesty for a decent amount so no one would think that they would have been better off keeping the PS. The next step is getting your shit together so that it doesn't happen again.
Well, gosh, that'd just make me feel like an idiot if I was one of those that hadn't returned the items. At this point, I think they're past the point of no return - best course would have been to silent about the missing units, show due diligence in re-acquiring product, and move on, but now that they've complained about it won't people wonder what happened?
I sure as hell haven't noticed ad volume - of course, I gave up broadcast TV with ads since I got my first TiVo in 2003. DVRs all they way, but nowadays I don't even watch TV that's not Netflix - only the kiddos have time to watch TV in our house (how else would I have time to post on/. ?)
Slashdot Mirror
Oh no! There is no default value. It's in the tiny print in the paperwork you must sign when you buy the car. The ONLY value is accept. You can not-accept or you can buy the car. Those are your choices.
This is untrue, simply have your lawyer (or if you want, on your own) change the text to read what you want. It's a contract. Now, the dealership may not sell you the car under those conditions, and in fact, given the size of the corporation vs. you, one could argue it's a contract of adhesion and therefore unconscionable.
But its a contract and it's not just Ford that can change the contract text.
My main PC is a 2.5-year-old Fujitsu Siemens workstation with an 8-core Xeon and 4 hdds in it. It will prolly run fine for another 3 years.
As for building your own: at work, I recently proposed we build our own server, for a certain project - at a cost of about € 4000 - rather than buying a COTS Dell box for about € 10,000. The proposal was met with enthusiasm by colleagues, only died because of archaic in-house regulations. The PC is not dead, in spite of what is being heard each year again. It is changing. That's all.
Did your quote include integration testing and support? WHat about service contracts?
Yeah, the ASUS Black Knight AC router is half this price and also able to run open source firmware. Sure the CPU and other specs seem very nice, but that's a lot of dough for a consumer router where one half as expensive will work basically just as well.
Warning: Anecdote ahead: I have one of those, and it died on me after I tried to reset it back to factory specs. It simply would not wake or route after that reset. I haven't had time to call support, and in the interim am using my 5-year old Apple AEBS. I haven't noticed a major change in speeds or bandwidth, though I do admit I only have one AC capable client so far.
YMMV, but I'm pretty disappointed with the experience on my RT-AC66U.
I want knobs. Knobs and physical buttons. Let them surround a fancy whizz-bang touchscreen if you want, but I damn well want to be able to turn up the heat or volume without looking.
That's what on-wheel controls are for. I've driven a car with touchscreen inputs for quite some time (2005 Prius), and I've never ever had issues (and neither have my parents) in using the car interface even while driving.
The key to usability is, as you say, an appropriate set of on-wheel controls, and knobs/buttons for the key non-wheel controls (i.e., audio interface has both touchscreen and knob/button interface) where appropriate (i.e., high traffic controls) and the touch interface for the non-key, complex controls (i.e., monitoring fuel efficiency status, synch, navigation setup, etc).
Is Tesla any different than Toyota's implementation of touchscreen?
Really you can say the same thing about any fiat currency.
Like playing a game of poker and saying "Ok, red chips are worth $1, white chips $5, and blue chips $10". Even the US dollar is this way -- its value is very much arbitrary.
Now just because it is only worth whatever you think its worth does not necessarily make it worth nothing.
No, you can't. Fiat currencies are backed by the will of countries or large organizations, often with armies/guns to support their decisions. That some fiat currencies are effectively worthless says more about the country/organization than it does about fiat currencies in general.
Sure a crypto currency could be used as the main currency of some large organization, but until then they all have very little intrinsic worth and no guarantee of guns and/or a large populace to back up their worth.
So sad that a criminal is listed as an influential person. Especially one so cowardly and spineless as to flee instead of actually staying and working towards what he believed in. I hope he lives to a ripe old age and has to spend his life constantly hiding in the shadows in fear. In countries with worse personal liberties and freedoms than the one he fled from.
I'm sorry you feel this way. Very few people here feel that way, in fact, the only people here that feel that way you do usually work for the NSA.
The NSA and their numerous sockpuppets enabled through Palantir technology [1] - that could be millions of "people" who "support" the NSA. They exist everywhere, even heavily moderated forums like /. and dailykos.
Let's see if the sockpuppets mod this comment down - it's happened before when I brought it up.
[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All
This guy is probably creaming his jeans just thinking of all the new war spending that can be accomplished by tarring and feathering his new favorite scapegoat Snowden (remember, even if he's retired, he's connected to all the defense contractors and defense "community" where his gravy train is tied to.
Demanding authority and accountability means we need some standard, reliable source of truth to measure them against. Where do we get it from?
No, that's not what's needed. There's a lot of bullshit out there that nobody thinks is "news". What's at issue here is that these propoganda organizations that try to dip into that pool and not filter it for sanity (e.g.: Fox "news" - entertainment posing as reportage).
I see this hoax news as a good movement. People need to understand that these organizations where they get their "facts" need to be correlated and cross-checked. Especially from the internet, but it's easier there because some folks generally push back against bullshit that poses as facts (Politifact, Snopes). Some people don't worry about dressing warmly until they get a cold.
It's like when Colbert decided to claim Wikipedia was the "truth" then had his ColbertNation change the wiki to refrerence bald-faced lies as truth (these changes were later reverted, but the message was to question authority).
While I agree with your assessment, I think the pressure that Apple is putting on Microsoft in the enterprise space won't be seen for a few years. And Apple isn't the only factor, just one of the many. Then all of a sudden, Microsoft will have massive resistance at the enterprise level in keeping their margins on standard 2-version licensing contracts where they used to be able to ask the customer for anything they wanted (i.e., they used to have the customer over a barrel).
For now, like Blackberry, their profits will continue to rise, but once their enterprise dominance is broken it will be like the floodgates opening, and either Microsoft will see a steady lowering of licensing revenues, or they will see a sharp drop-off of renewals (i.e., sudden drop of revenues). In either case, it will force Microsoft to revisit their company culture and attitude towards customers.
But...corporate America is still solidly entrenched, and they are just now moving on from Windows XP to Windows 7. In 10 years or so, when Windows 7 is as old as XP is now, That's when they will start to think about where to go next, and whatever it is, that option isn't around yet. So we'll see!
This is not my experience. I consult and visit quite a few customers, and I'm seeing more and more Macs around. Not just tech companies, insurance firms, colleges, etc.
Macs are a non-trivial part of corporate purchases and increasing. Of course, this is because Microsoft pretty much lost out to open-source software and the web, and if you want a machine that can run Office (which sadly, isn't going anywhere as Excel is a truly entrenched product), Macs are decent hardware and a status symbol.
Who literally owe their current non-occupied existence to the work performed by heroes like Mr. Turing?
... should have taken the offered cash and start a new venture, producing more in long term value.
Most buyout offers have these annoying things called conditions - one of them could have been that a) founders must stay to certain period/goal or achieve a result post-acquisition (usually monetary, might be tied to purchasing company's metrics) or the payout offered (often in purchasing company's stock) would be reduced (sometimes it's worded positively like $X without conditions, but $5*X if conditions are met, with partial work being rewarded appropriately) or b) preventing founders from starting a competing venture using same idea/basis as purchased company.
Companies purchasing others aren't idiots - FB wouldn't buy Snapchat just to have the founders ditch - their effort/involvement is likely a large part of the purchasing price.
Federal Communication Commision regulates cell phones. Federal law preempts state law. Any California law could be nulified by the FCC.
Federal Law only pre-empts state law when there is a contradiction. Is there a federal law that specifically says cell phones must not have a remote killswitch?
The endgame of this legislation for totalitarian-loving legislators is that ultimately that's what will happen - they propose onerous conditions on the manufacturers and carriers who can't say no to the 12th largest market [1] in the world (probably even more important for cell phones), who then complain and ask the Feds to step in and propose their own laws that supersede the CA law, which then requires their client states and treaty members to follow along (for those nice economic treaties mandating matching legislation to promote copyright and favorable business environment for US corporations).
At each point in this chain of corruption, the law can be "enhanced" to provide more power to the TSA, CIA, FSB, Mossad, etc so wealth interests can keep increasing their profit margins.
Sounds like a win/win/win to me*
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California
* Only wealthy and powerful may participate. Political "donations" apply. Offer only valid in participating jurisdictions.
Your still on tivo how very 90's of you. Automatic commercial skipping has been around forever now.
I'm actually not any longer - Dish due to needing TV5 (French channel) and not trusting Comcast which is the only other place I could get that. Though I miss the UX on the Tivo. Dish DVR sucks to use.
Bingo. Maybe the taxpayers have a very incompetent portfolio manager. The federal government.
Which is filled with cronies to assist their "helpless" megacorps like GM. Yes, the federal government is not nearly as competent as it should be - mostly because it's representing it's funders.
We the taxpayer have allowed corporations to control our government. We live in a socialist corporatocracy - where the corporations get bailouts and emergency loans while the citizens get taxed, spied on and are not represented.
Those who blame government are correct, but the answer - to cede more power to the corporations that are undermining it - is like going from the frying pan into the fire.
I can see myself following a policy of "never type directly into a web browser, only copy and paste" in the near future. (And here's yet another reason to avoid "cloud" services and prefer local storage for anything personal.)
Then add the Chrome browser location bar as well - since it's clear that Google is doing auto-completion against their search indexes. In fact, many "web 2.0" text entry boxes do auto-completion.
Or you could simply accept that Google and Facebook are working hard to make the web a panopticon, and act accordingly.
Exactly, The evol libertarians are destroying america with all their small government and individual freedoms
Remember, small government = big business. i.e., someones going to be making the big decisions. In one case you get a vote, in the other, you get shafted (unless you happen to be one of the few who are profiting from everyone else's misery).
Retention: "I see you are not the account holder. We will need permission from the account holder."
Me: "She's at work. I'm her husband."
Retention: "Well, we'll need her permission."
This is a major issue with not only Comcast but many other services.
If your relationship is on solid ground, I recommend having one person do all the account management/ownership - the support from major companies/utilities on whom can actually update the account is pretty shitty. It can apply to healthcare accounts, financial accounts, etc. The hoops it takes to add a 2nd "authorized user" can be more trouble than actually signing up for service.
We share a 1Password profile for our shared services, which works for some cases, but in other cases, it's all me.
And enhance!
Context for those who don't get it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMIHNiR3CP8
So, as far as I can tell, Safari doesn't actually block 3rd party cookies despite saying it does, and stores your credentials in plain text.
Sounds like Apple have some issues on their hands.
Hell, in my experience with Safari on Windows, deleting a cookie causes WebKit2WebProcess to crash.
Looks like the only major browser that really your needs seriously is Firefox. Given thats the sole purpose of the organization that produces it, that is a lot more re-assuring to me. Go FF.
If someone else is reading files on your computer, you're already screwed!
This has issues for backups as well - you may have been very good at prevent physical/console access to your computer, but if someone gets an old backup that happens to be unencrypted, your secure browsing history is now exposed.
Your entire premise is an argument against defense-in-depth multilayered security policy. I'd go with the expert-guided policy against your pithy analysis.
You cannot have complete security and freedom. You may want your cake and to eat it to, but it is impossible. Since providing complete security is impossible all by itself, I choose freedom. I believe the only reasonable compromise is that the government can monitor Americans only with a court order. There is no need to spy on grandma, and it is a waste of resources with no tangible benefit anyways.
It's ridiculous that you're presenting this as a dichotomy. It's false. Why were there so few attacks on the US prior to 9/11 and so few afterwards despite the rash of changes to how we collected information on all Americans?
From what I can tell, security is orthogonal to privacy. Security is doing proper detective work, targeted information collection, and
No one is saying that we should throw away the logs and make everything anonymous (well, not very many people). What is at issue is that these logs are being mined on a continual basis which leads to the amazingly depressing leaks exposed by Snowden and the unbelievable ex-girlfriend snooping that even low-level analysts have power to do.
That. Should. Not. Be happening on a daily basis against large groups of innocent Americans. That's at issue here. Contrary to the concocted reality posed in The Dark Knight, the authorities do NOT need a real-time panopticon in order to find and defeat the Jokers of the world. That's fantasy. Otherwise, we'd be praising all this data gathering as our quality of life improved due to the sudden lack of car bombings and terrorist attacks since this information gathering policy was set in place. No, quality of life due to reduced violence and terrorism has been unchanged (or taken a turn for the worse depending on whom you ask) - it's not simply not a result of
What is more likely is that more threats to the political and business status quo have been found and rooted out. Threats in this context == valid non-violent protest groups, anti-corporate saboteurs and non-malicious hackers.
Even with Tivo, it might take a few seconds to grab the remote and skip past those SOBs, and those few seconds, it can still blare at you.
True, which is why I really like ad-free (or ad-between-shows) channels like Nick Jr. (which is pretty much the only broadcast tv that gets watched in our house - exception being the Dance reality shows). The worst is when it's an ad for some horror movie - do not like my kids being exposed to suggested gore and violence in a damn advert.
The best thing for Zawi to do is probably just call it a loss. They have done the chest thumping and legal threats and probably have gotten most units back. Going to court would probably cost more time and money than the value of the PS. Offer anyone that did send their units back a gift card to reward honesty for a decent amount so no one would think that they would have been better off keeping the PS. The next step is getting your shit together so that it doesn't happen again.
Well, gosh, that'd just make me feel like an idiot if I was one of those that hadn't returned the items. At this point, I think they're past the point of no return - best course would have been to silent about the missing units, show due diligence in re-acquiring product, and move on, but now that they've complained about it won't people wonder what happened?
Most /.'s I image don't put up with Ads.
I sure as hell haven't noticed ad volume - of course, I gave up broadcast TV with ads since I got my first TiVo in 2003. DVRs all they way, but nowadays I don't even watch TV that's not Netflix - only the kiddos have time to watch TV in our house (how else would I have time to post on /. ?)