Right but the friction and cost of payments and the regulation involved with becoming a payments processor erases the possibility of utilizing micro transactions. So our micro transaction conduit is ad revenue.
$2-$5/month is above the microtransaction level. Redbox has a very successful model with those amounts and Netflix is only slightly higher. Microtransactions sound great in theory and I would occasionally pay 25 cents to read a random article but something like Facebook would likely not work well with microtransaction even if they existed. Would you charge 5 cents a page load? This would literally reinvent the term "nickle and diming". A small monthly or yearly subscription would make more sense. Lots of people would pay $20/year to remove ads from Facebook and the friction would be minimal on a yearly subscription.
The user is the one who was tricked into installing the fake app. Personally, I don't think that apps and websites should be sharing passwords. If I download a new app, I expect to have to type in the password the first time I use it. But even requiring the user to type in the password doesn't fix the problem they are talking about which is when the user thinks it's the real app and willingly gives the app their password either from a password manager or manually.
With all due respect, it's overwhelmingly women who become primary school teachers and nurses which are two of the absolutely most dead-end and poorly paying careers relative to their education level.
Teaching yes but not nursing. Nursing is a fairly highly paid job that only requires 2 years of school. My ex-wife had a bachelors in english and went back for an associates(RN) in nursing because nursing pays much better than almost any job you can get with a english degree.
Great. So go do it. The point is that rational people would rather work in sales or marketing than shovel sludge.
Luckily there are a lot of different types of people in the world or we would be in trouble. I have a coworker that quit an office job to go back to pouring concrete because he hated being inside all the time. The show Dirty Jobs is full of millionaires who do essential work to keep the world running, it just happens to be gross at times. Related to the topic at hand, there are very few women on Dirty Jobs. Men are more inclined to fill a need and do a dirty job than women and they get paid well for doing it.
The key is to become an asset not an expense. Salespeople generate sales so they pay their own salaries. The only way to do this in STEM is to work for a firm where they bill you out per hour. Even this is somewhat self defeating though because the other side still sees you as an expense so they want to keep your hourly rate low.
was going to come from? If the users don't pay, their privacy will. Until someone figures out a biz model that actually makes the users customers instead of the product, this will continue.
This isn't a very hard business model. Facebook makes less than $2/month per user. They could easily offer a version of their service for $2/month where they stopped tracking, stopped displaying ads, and protected your privacy. Even at $5/month or more there would likely be some users that would pay for it. Many other companies already offer an ad-free version of their product.
Investing the money they made from Ads. They also might have other miscellaneous things like peering/licensing agreements, renting out unused space in property they own, etc...
There is nothing to maintain. Skills don't just rot away.
Yes they do. Ask any foreign language speaker. They have to constantly maintain their language or they start to forget it. I used to be an excellent at C++. I haven't used it in 10 years and my skills are definitely a lot more rusty. I've forgotten many of the shortcuts for debugging, etc... I've also forgotten most of the calculus and physics I've learned in college as well as no longer have the periodical table memorized. I once read that you need to read X (don't remember the number) books per year just to not go backwards. This is the reason that most professional certifications require continuous education in order to maintain your certificate and license.
aking a job as a COBOL programmer, you lose all the niceties of modern languages and you also put your career on hold for the duration of the job. In america perhaps! There are plenty of other places where an odd language on your resume gives you huge bonus points! Why the funk I would I not hire someone who did the previous 5 years an interesting COBOL project?
On odd language gives you huge bonus points if you also know the language of the job you are applying for. Same goes for an interesting COBOL project (likely not interesting though but rather just maintaining dying code). They problem is that you are now either 5 years behind in the other stacks or you have been doing double time during your off time to maintain your more relevant skills. Either case should command a premium.
You're demanding that salary only 15 years out of college? Wow, just... wow. That's well above the norm even in Silicon Valley.
That's his point. If you want someone to learn a language that is old-fashion, tedious, has limited growth potential, and is full of bureaucracy then you need to pay above market rates. At most programming jobs you are paid marketing rates and continue to stay up to date with technology and therefore can get a new job when your current job ends. Many programmers are even willing to take below market rate jobs if the work is interesting and has learning potential. Taking a job as a COBOL programmer, you lose all the niceties of modern languages and you also put your career on hold for the duration of the job. They could improve their recruiting a little if they paid people while they learned COBOL but companies don't want to invest in people like that anymore. To improve their odds even more they could pay people while they learned AND give out five year contracts AND find people who only have 5 years till retirement so that people are willing send their careers down a black hole.
The other option might be to do something similar to what many open source projects do and let people spend 50% of their time pursuing personal projects. This still requires them to basically pay double what the market rate is (as they are only getting 50% of the work) but is probably the most workable solution.
That is why the MP model worked so well in San Fran, they went out and made deals with pretty much all the theaters and then the customer didn't have to give a shit if the movie they wanted to see was playing at theater X or only at theater Y, they just went to the most convenient location that was showing what they wanted and that was that.
Don't most people always go to the closest theatre? There are only 2 theatres in my town and they are about 15 minutes apart. They are competitors but they always show pretty much the exact same movies at the exact same time. A moviepass at either one would be fine. It would make zero difference to me if it was one or the other. The driving distance and amenities are similar enough that something like a moviepass at one and not the other could easily draw in customers slightly further away.
The sad part is if they kept the original model and simply expanded to other cities with high costs of living and a glut of movie theaters? They could have had a modestly successful little franchise, but that model simply wouldn't work in places where theaters have no issue getting customers.
I think it could work almost anyplace where you have deals with the theatre. People who are going to the movies for free are much more likely to buy the high priced snacks. Moviepass seems like a workable solution if they can get the theatres to give them free/discounted tickets and/or a cut of the snack revenue. The biggest problem I see is that it is way too easy for the local theatre to roll their own plan and cut moviepass out. For that reason, the most sustainable business model for Moviepass is likely the franchise model where they provide the technology needed for movie theatres to offer subscription services to their customers.
London seems like a bad place to do experiments like this. Antarctica would seem like a much better place as there is much less chance of an escape causing havoc.
There are suggestive correlations between reduced child mortality and reduced family size.
If that were true then surely the great improvements in medicine and reduction in child mortality that happened from late 19th century to late 20th century would've resulted in smaller family size and smaller global population. Did the global population shrink from 1890 to 1990?
Not globally but definiately regionally. Without immigration, ALL first world countries would have declining populations. Paradoxically, countries with low child mortality rates do have reduced family sizes and native population decline. Part of this is likely do to better access to birth control and also to being less agrarian where large family size is not needed to work the fields. The USA is a perfect example where families of a dozen children used to be common and now are almost non-existent. It's rare to see families larger than 3-4 kids in the USA now with many couples having zero, one, and two.
Baby dragonflies feast almost exclusively on baby mosquitoes. If you kill all the mosquitoes you will likely kill all the dragonflies. Adult dragonflies are an apex predator in the insect world and there are likely a lot of bugs that dragonflies eat that we wouldn't want more of.
A one time removal of energy to melt all the worlds glaciers has no effect on the equilibrium temperature.
It has no effect on the total energy in the system but it does have an effect on the perceived temperature and where the concentration of temperature is. For instance, air and ocean currents passing near glaciers lose some of their heat to the glaciers and that lower temperature air/water is carried elsewhere on earth which affects both our measurements of air/water temperatures and the weather patterns themselves. If the glaciers disappeared tomorrow (or if you walled off/buried them) then they could no longer drop the temperature of the water and air that pass by. The gulf stream, probably one of the most famous ocean streams works by hot water flowing north and then glaciers cooling it off so it flows back south. Walling off the glaciers would prevent this.
Conversely buy enough buses to serve both elementary/middle schools and high schools and the problem goes away too.
It's not about the buses, it's about the bus drivers. My current town has 3 different start times staggered so that they can have full time 8-5 bus drivers. They basically work 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the afternoon with a lunch break like a normal job. Where I grew up, the bus drivers were mostly farmers or people who had other jobs. They would drive for 1 hour in the morning, go to work and then drive 1 hour in the afternoon. My current school also has a large number of before and after hour care which is even more needed now that schedules are staggered and the teenager can't be home to take care of the grade schooler. It seems like another easy solution to the busing problem is counter intuitively to extend the school day. If kids went to school the standard 8-5 then there would be less need for bus drivers and more bus drivers available. People could work a normal day job and then still run the buses in the afternoon. Another option would be to have the school teachers drive the buses. If the school teachers did the busing during a normal 8a-3p/9a-4p school day they would have a normal 8 hour 7a-4p/8a-5p 40 hour week.
Tell them when the start time is, nicely, and if they push back you tell them that if they don't like it they are welcome to look for another school with a start time that is more to their liking.
You can't just change public schools in most states. My town has staggered school start times and multiple elementary schools in the same school district. You have to go to your assigned school district. They are very strict about it. In some towns, parents have even been arrested for enrolling their kids in their babysitter's or grandparent's school district. My school district does have a decent solution though. They offer before and/or after school care from about 6am-7pm so if the school schedule is in conflict with your work schedule then you can pay for before and/or after school care.
This is a human problem. If you built your house on high ground, you didn't build that. You were lucky. If you chose to live somewhere sane, then you basically won the lottery. People who chose to invest in land that has never once in the history of the world been a good place to stake a claim are victims
Matthew 7:24-27 English Standard Version (ESV) Build Your House on the Rock
24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
The melting glaciers are absorbing heat energy as they melt. If you stop them from melting then they stop absorbing heat and it would likely just cause the earth to heat up faster. Not necessarily a bad thing though as a faster rise in temperature would hopefully make more people take global warming seriously and you still would have the buffer available if things got really bad.
The same happens with computing resources. We've been getting faster computers with more storage capacity for so long that the people spending those resources (programmers) do so with reckless abandon.
It's also somewhat tragedy of the commons. A programmer doesn't really care that their program is 300megs on the iphone because there is 16G available. The problems only start happening when there are 20 programs that are all 300-500 megs. Programmers and Companies need to realize though that people with smaller capacity phones will many times start deleting the "larger" apps on their phones so it does hurt companies to have huge bloatware whether they realize it or not.
It was once revealed to me that for about 15 cents more per tire manufacturers could make tires that could last the entire life of a car. They choose not to for just this reason.
This would only work in a market where there is no competitors. The tire market has lots of competing players. Tires are rated based on miles you can drive them. If a manufacturer could create this magic tire you speak of, they could market it as million mile tire and sell it at a significant premium. If such a tire does exist, which I doubt, it's likely not sold for other reasons. For instance, a solid rubber tire would last a really long time and be impervious to most road hazards but a solid rubber tire gives a terrible ride and therefore is only used on heavy machinery where it makes sense.
10 years ago, outages were 10% bugs, and 90% human error, now it seems to be the other way around. Everyone's chasing features, because that's what sells, so there's no time for efficiency/stability/security any more.
This is a consumer problem. It's the classic Mustang problem. A Mustang is a reasonably priced "muscle car" with plenty of bells and whistles. It's not a great car but it's a decent sports car someone can afford. It has a market niche. If someone wants an ultra reliable, awesome car then they are going have to pay considerably more than what the Mustang costs. If consumers (including b2b consumers) started holding companies responsible for bugs and were willing to pay the extra money for more stable routers then companies would invest more time in testing before releasing products. It's also a bandwagon problem. As long as your software is just as reliable as your competitors, there is nowhere for consumers who want more stability to turn and if you can't charge a premium for having significantly better reliability than your competitors then you're stuck with aiming for "good enough" reliability just like everyone else. The solution is for consumers to start demanding better reliability and being willing to pay the price premium (and justify the price premium to their managers).
If i'm a dummy and don't update my webcam's password, or refuse to heed the warnings that its security has been compromised -- well guess what? That's my fault, and no on elses.
That's fine but ISPs should also start terminating connections of people whose devices are unknowing participants of botnets. The other problem is that you're assuming there are updates. What happens when that webcam has a security flaw and the company doesn't fix its firmware (or even has the ability to do so). Changing the default password isn't the only problem, it is the idea that the manufacturer's responsibility ends as soon as money is exchanged. There should probably some sort of contract with all but the cheapest devices that the device will get security updates for X number of years. Many cell phones never get a single update after they are sold and cheaper consumer devices get even fewer updates if any.
My idea is, everytime a vendor has a security issue on their device, I want a refund. They sold me a defective device with defective software. We need to stop calling software buggy and call it what it really is, DEFECTIVE.
Everything internet connected should be sold with a lifespan and support for X number of years (and labeled as such on the package). They do this with carbon monoxide detectors. After 7 years, they turn off and won't work anymore and just beep constantly. This is safety feature. IOT devices should probably come with the same thing. After they stop receiving patches, they should stop connecting to the internet. This would be a safety feature not only for the purchaser but to protect the rest of the internet too. (On a somewhat unrelated note, DRM "purchases" should also be clearly labeled with an expiration date thru which the company guarantees your ability to play that song/movie)
As far as a bug being a defect, bug free software doesn't exist. For that matter, defect free anything doesn't really exist. We already have a system in place for unknown problems that are discovered after the fact. The products are either recalled and repaired or recalled and replaced depending on what the defect is and how hard it is to fix it. Software shouldn't be treated any different than car seats, airbags, or anything else where defects are sometimes discovered after the fact. With software, it should be easier as in most cases it can be remotely fixed without actually having to send the devices in to be repaired.
Slashdot Mirror
Right but the friction and cost of payments and the regulation involved with becoming a payments processor erases the possibility of utilizing micro transactions. So our micro transaction conduit is ad revenue.
$2-$5/month is above the microtransaction level. Redbox has a very successful model with those amounts and Netflix is only slightly higher. Microtransactions sound great in theory and I would occasionally pay 25 cents to read a random article but something like Facebook would likely not work well with microtransaction even if they existed. Would you charge 5 cents a page load? This would literally reinvent the term "nickle and diming". A small monthly or yearly subscription would make more sense. Lots of people would pay $20/year to remove ads from Facebook and the friction would be minimal on a yearly subscription.
The user is the one who was tricked into installing the fake app. Personally, I don't think that apps and websites should be sharing passwords. If I download a new app, I expect to have to type in the password the first time I use it. But even requiring the user to type in the password doesn't fix the problem they are talking about which is when the user thinks it's the real app and willingly gives the app their password either from a password manager or manually.
With all due respect, it's overwhelmingly women who become primary school teachers and nurses which are two of the absolutely most dead-end and poorly paying careers relative to their education level.
Teaching yes but not nursing. Nursing is a fairly highly paid job that only requires 2 years of school. My ex-wife had a bachelors in english and went back for an associates(RN) in nursing because nursing pays much better than almost any job you can get with a english degree.
Great. So go do it. The point is that rational people would rather work in sales or marketing than shovel sludge.
Luckily there are a lot of different types of people in the world or we would be in trouble. I have a coworker that quit an office job to go back to pouring concrete because he hated being inside all the time. The show Dirty Jobs is full of millionaires who do essential work to keep the world running, it just happens to be gross at times. Related to the topic at hand, there are very few women on Dirty Jobs. Men are more inclined to fill a need and do a dirty job than women and they get paid well for doing it.
The key is to become an asset not an expense. Salespeople generate sales so they pay their own salaries. The only way to do this in STEM is to work for a firm where they bill you out per hour. Even this is somewhat self defeating though because the other side still sees you as an expense so they want to keep your hourly rate low.
was going to come from? If the users don't pay, their privacy will. Until someone figures out a biz model that actually makes the users customers instead of the product, this will continue.
This isn't a very hard business model. Facebook makes less than $2/month per user. They could easily offer a version of their service for $2/month where they stopped tracking, stopped displaying ads, and protected your privacy. Even at $5/month or more there would likely be some users that would pay for it. Many other companies already offer an ad-free version of their product.
What makes up the other 2%, if not from ads?
Investing the money they made from Ads. They also might have other miscellaneous things like peering/licensing agreements, renting out unused space in property they own, etc...
There is nothing to maintain. Skills don't just rot away.
Yes they do. Ask any foreign language speaker. They have to constantly maintain their language or they start to forget it. I used to be an excellent at C++. I haven't used it in 10 years and my skills are definitely a lot more rusty. I've forgotten many of the shortcuts for debugging, etc... I've also forgotten most of the calculus and physics I've learned in college as well as no longer have the periodical table memorized. I once read that you need to read X (don't remember the number) books per year just to not go backwards. This is the reason that most professional certifications require continuous education in order to maintain your certificate and license.
aking a job as a COBOL programmer, you lose all the niceties of modern languages and you also put your career on hold for the duration of the job.
In america perhaps! There are plenty of other places where an odd language on your resume gives you huge bonus points!
Why the funk I would I not hire someone who did the previous 5 years an interesting COBOL project?
On odd language gives you huge bonus points if you also know the language of the job you are applying for. Same goes for an interesting COBOL project (likely not interesting though but rather just maintaining dying code). They problem is that you are now either 5 years behind in the other stacks or you have been doing double time during your off time to maintain your more relevant skills. Either case should command a premium.
You're demanding that salary only 15 years out of college? Wow, just... wow. That's well above the norm even in Silicon Valley.
That's his point. If you want someone to learn a language that is old-fashion, tedious, has limited growth potential, and is full of bureaucracy then you need to pay above market rates. At most programming jobs you are paid marketing rates and continue to stay up to date with technology and therefore can get a new job when your current job ends. Many programmers are even willing to take below market rate jobs if the work is interesting and has learning potential. Taking a job as a COBOL programmer, you lose all the niceties of modern languages and you also put your career on hold for the duration of the job. They could improve their recruiting a little if they paid people while they learned COBOL but companies don't want to invest in people like that anymore. To improve their odds even more they could pay people while they learned AND give out five year contracts AND find people who only have 5 years till retirement so that people are willing send their careers down a black hole.
The other option might be to do something similar to what many open source projects do and let people spend 50% of their time pursuing personal projects. This still requires them to basically pay double what the market rate is (as they are only getting 50% of the work) but is probably the most workable solution.
That is why the MP model worked so well in San Fran, they went out and made deals with pretty much all the theaters and then the customer didn't have to give a shit if the movie they wanted to see was playing at theater X or only at theater Y, they just went to the most convenient location that was showing what they wanted and that was that.
Don't most people always go to the closest theatre? There are only 2 theatres in my town and they are about 15 minutes apart. They are competitors but they always show pretty much the exact same movies at the exact same time. A moviepass at either one would be fine. It would make zero difference to me if it was one or the other. The driving distance and amenities are similar enough that something like a moviepass at one and not the other could easily draw in customers slightly further away.
The sad part is if they kept the original model and simply expanded to other cities with high costs of living and a glut of movie theaters? They could have had a modestly successful little franchise, but that model simply wouldn't work in places where theaters have no issue getting customers.
I think it could work almost anyplace where you have deals with the theatre. People who are going to the movies for free are much more likely to buy the high priced snacks. Moviepass seems like a workable solution if they can get the theatres to give them free/discounted tickets and/or a cut of the snack revenue. The biggest problem I see is that it is way too easy for the local theatre to roll their own plan and cut moviepass out. For that reason, the most sustainable business model for Moviepass is likely the franchise model where they provide the technology needed for movie theatres to offer subscription services to their customers.
London seems like a bad place to do experiments like this.
Antarctica would seem like a much better place as there is much less chance of an escape causing havoc.
There are suggestive correlations between reduced child mortality and reduced family size.
If that were true then surely the great improvements in medicine and reduction in child mortality that happened from late 19th century to late 20th century would've resulted in smaller family size and smaller global population. Did the global population shrink from 1890 to 1990?
Not globally but definiately regionally. Without immigration, ALL first world countries would have declining populations. Paradoxically, countries with low child mortality rates do have reduced family sizes and native population decline. Part of this is likely do to better access to birth control and also to being less agrarian where large family size is not needed to work the fields. The USA is a perfect example where families of a dozen children used to be common and now are almost non-existent. It's rare to see families larger than 3-4 kids in the USA now with many couples having zero, one, and two.
Baby dragonflies feast almost exclusively on baby mosquitoes. If you kill all the mosquitoes you will likely kill all the dragonflies. Adult dragonflies are an apex predator in the insect world and there are likely a lot of bugs that dragonflies eat that we wouldn't want more of.
A one time removal of energy to melt all the worlds glaciers has no effect on the equilibrium temperature.
It has no effect on the total energy in the system but it does have an effect on the perceived temperature and where the concentration of temperature is. For instance, air and ocean currents passing near glaciers lose some of their heat to the glaciers and that lower temperature air/water is carried elsewhere on earth which affects both our measurements of air/water temperatures and the weather patterns themselves. If the glaciers disappeared tomorrow (or if you walled off/buried them) then they could no longer drop the temperature of the water and air that pass by. The gulf stream, probably one of the most famous ocean streams works by hot water flowing north and then glaciers cooling it off so it flows back south. Walling off the glaciers would prevent this.
Conversely buy enough buses to serve both elementary/middle schools and high schools and the problem goes away too.
It's not about the buses, it's about the bus drivers. My current town has 3 different start times staggered so that they can have full time 8-5 bus drivers. They basically work 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the afternoon with a lunch break like a normal job. Where I grew up, the bus drivers were mostly farmers or people who had other jobs. They would drive for 1 hour in the morning, go to work and then drive 1 hour in the afternoon. My current school also has a large number of before and after hour care which is even more needed now that schedules are staggered and the teenager can't be home to take care of the grade schooler. It seems like another easy solution to the busing problem is counter intuitively to extend the school day. If kids went to school the standard 8-5 then there would be less need for bus drivers and more bus drivers available. People could work a normal day job and then still run the buses in the afternoon. Another option would be to have the school teachers drive the buses. If the school teachers did the busing during a normal 8a-3p/9a-4p school day they would have a normal 8 hour 7a-4p/8a-5p 40 hour week.
Tell them when the start time is, nicely, and if they push back you tell them that if they don't like it they are welcome to look for another school with a start time that is more to their liking.
You can't just change public schools in most states. My town has staggered school start times and multiple elementary schools in the same school district. You have to go to your assigned school district. They are very strict about it. In some towns, parents have even been arrested for enrolling their kids in their babysitter's or grandparent's school district. My school district does have a decent solution though. They offer before and/or after school care from about 6am-7pm so if the school schedule is in conflict with your work schedule then you can pay for before and/or after school care.
This is a human problem. If you built your house on high ground, you didn't build that. You were lucky. If you chose to live somewhere sane, then you basically won the lottery. People who chose to invest in land that has never once in the history of the world been a good place to stake a claim are victims
Matthew 7:24-27 English Standard Version (ESV)
Build Your House on the Rock
24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. 25 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. 27 And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
https://www.biblegateway.com/p...
The melting glaciers are absorbing heat energy as they melt. If you stop them from melting then they stop absorbing heat and it would likely just cause the earth to heat up faster.
Not necessarily a bad thing though as a faster rise in temperature would hopefully make more people take global warming seriously and you still would have the buffer available if things got really bad.
The same happens with computing resources. We've been getting faster computers with more storage capacity for so long that the people spending those resources (programmers) do so with reckless abandon.
It's also somewhat tragedy of the commons. A programmer doesn't really care that their program is 300megs on the iphone because there is 16G available. The problems only start happening when there are 20 programs that are all 300-500 megs. Programmers and Companies need to realize though that people with smaller capacity phones will many times start deleting the "larger" apps on their phones so it does hurt companies to have huge bloatware whether they realize it or not.
It was once revealed to me that for about 15 cents more per tire manufacturers could make tires that could last the entire life of a car. They choose not to for just this reason.
This would only work in a market where there is no competitors. The tire market has lots of competing players. Tires are rated based on miles you can drive them. If a manufacturer could create this magic tire you speak of, they could market it as million mile tire and sell it at a significant premium. If such a tire does exist, which I doubt, it's likely not sold for other reasons. For instance, a solid rubber tire would last a really long time and be impervious to most road hazards but a solid rubber tire gives a terrible ride and therefore is only used on heavy machinery where it makes sense.
10 years ago, outages were 10% bugs, and 90% human error, now it seems to be the other way around. Everyone's chasing features, because that's what sells, so there's no time for efficiency/stability/security any more.
This is a consumer problem. It's the classic Mustang problem. A Mustang is a reasonably priced "muscle car" with plenty of bells and whistles. It's not a great car but it's a decent sports car someone can afford. It has a market niche. If someone wants an ultra reliable, awesome car then they are going have to pay considerably more than what the Mustang costs. If consumers (including b2b consumers) started holding companies responsible for bugs and were willing to pay the extra money for more stable routers then companies would invest more time in testing before releasing products. It's also a bandwagon problem. As long as your software is just as reliable as your competitors, there is nowhere for consumers who want more stability to turn and if you can't charge a premium for having significantly better reliability than your competitors then you're stuck with aiming for "good enough" reliability just like everyone else. The solution is for consumers to start demanding better reliability and being willing to pay the price premium (and justify the price premium to their managers).
If i'm a dummy and don't update my webcam's password, or refuse to heed the warnings that its security has been compromised -- well guess what? That's my fault, and no on elses.
That's fine but ISPs should also start terminating connections of people whose devices are unknowing participants of botnets.
The other problem is that you're assuming there are updates. What happens when that webcam has a security flaw and the company doesn't fix its firmware (or even has the ability to do so). Changing the default password isn't the only problem, it is the idea that the manufacturer's responsibility ends as soon as money is exchanged. There should probably some sort of contract with all but the cheapest devices that the device will get security updates for X number of years. Many cell phones never get a single update after they are sold and cheaper consumer devices get even fewer updates if any.
My idea is, everytime a vendor has a security issue on their device, I want a refund. They sold me a defective device with defective software. We need to stop calling software buggy and call it what it really is, DEFECTIVE.
Everything internet connected should be sold with a lifespan and support for X number of years (and labeled as such on the package). They do this with carbon monoxide detectors. After 7 years, they turn off and won't work anymore and just beep constantly. This is safety feature. IOT devices should probably come with the same thing. After they stop receiving patches, they should stop connecting to the internet. This would be a safety feature not only for the purchaser but to protect the rest of the internet too. (On a somewhat unrelated note, DRM "purchases" should also be clearly labeled with an expiration date thru which the company guarantees your ability to play that song/movie)
As far as a bug being a defect, bug free software doesn't exist. For that matter, defect free anything doesn't really exist. We already have a system in place for unknown problems that are discovered after the fact. The products are either recalled and repaired or recalled and replaced depending on what the defect is and how hard it is to fix it. Software shouldn't be treated any different than car seats, airbags, or anything else where defects are sometimes discovered after the fact. With software, it should be easier as in most cases it can be remotely fixed without actually having to send the devices in to be repaired.