Definitely smart, but I'm not sure it should be patentable.
I'd go as far as saying it should definitely not be patentable. This is the most obvious embodiment of a typical just-in-time manual practice "on a computer".
Any patent awarded should err on the side of invalid until proven valid, not the other way around. Just like proving guilt is required before someone can be deprived of freedom, so should a patent be held to the same standard before it can be used to deprive others of freedom to pedal their wares.
As an embedded systems programmer, I worked on at least 100 different systems between 1995 and 1999. Some problems were just cosmetic, others caused overrun buffers, infinite loops, code paths that would no longer run, and of course the usual date comparison and cosmetic problems.
The 'doom' wasn't so much a single system going down, but a sudden coordinated failure of hundreds or thousands of systems at the same time. At least 1 in 5 of the systems we worked on were 'critical' systems that would very likely have caused serious damage, injury and/or loss of life if they weren't fixed. The company I worked for primarily dealt with equipment used in hospitals, power plants / utilities, and industrial equipment. Other companies would audit a facility (eg. a hospital), and we'd be called whenever they found something that hadn't already been dealt with.
Sometimes we didn't have access to source code, and had to recommend replacements or rewrites.
Is an extra $1k enough to get you to leave one job for another. I don't think so.
You can also tell your new employer that your new position is far more senior/challenging/responsible/etc than your previous position. Your new employer has a baseline number, knows a little of your previous job (from your resume), and will tell you in detail what the new job entails. You on the other hand also have the exact details of your previous job to make the comparison a little more ambiguous.
Worse is if you don't know what anyone else was being paid. Then you end up agreeing to $85k (because you were previously being being paid $80k) when you should have been asking for at least $129k while a few of your colleagues were being paid $128k at your previous place of employ. Remember, you're up against a professional negotiator. Not some guy that does it a few times a decade.
'Success' is far better predicted by cut-throat underhanded behaviour and initial wealth than because someone 'worked hard'. An employee's ability to negotiate better than the next guy is also a huge advantage.
Here's an anecdote that I'm sure is a deja vu moment for many here:
At a company I worked at years ago, one of our best (and hardest working) software developers, was paid far less than one of the worst.
The 'worst guy' surely would have been a sales guy if it meant he could be more lazy. He'd normally just surf the net all day, but every now and then he'd spend a week or two working on what looked like foreign projects. When the big brass walked past, he'd go into 'super busy' mode where he'd frantically shuffle papers, tap keys at crazy speed, and move his head back and forth between paper specs and the monitor. I'm sure he pioneered the use of automated email sending scripts that would send out at 9pm emails drafted in the middle of the day. The guy used to do the bare minimum to fly under the radar, then when panic hit, he'd pull out and submit some work he'd been holding back and look like some sort of genius saviour. He'd even negotiate overtime rates to 'complete' the 'unfinished' work - from home, of course. One day he 'accidentally' walked in on one of the upper management guys (married) 'working overtime with the secretary'. I don't really know what he actually said, but, mysteriously, he got a pay rise - which naturally he told us all about. This guy was expert in the art of telling people just enough to come across as 'lucky' and 'hard working' rather than devious and opportunistic. He had no idea we could see right through his game, but then we weren't really the central part of his game.
That guy used to blow his own trumpet so hard that you'd be blinded in both eyes from all the stray saliva.
Luckily the guy only lasted a year before he moved on to riper pickings at a more gullible company. In fact, productivity (and morale) went up once he was gone. But, even after he'd left, the division manager and the CEO would swear blind that he was one of the most diligent and valuable guys ever to grace the company. I learned a lot from that guy (about how to play the 'system'), and I watch carefully for it in the teams that I manage. Sadly, this type of behaviour seems to be more prevalent the higher you look up in the corporate structure.
The age old idiom that 'shit floats to the top' seems to be well supported.
Individual people are by definition more moral than corporations, mobs, governments and politicians.
And beyond that, it is clear that Snowden is far more moral than the average person. So he doesn't only think he's more morally correct - he actually is.
An ad hominem attack implying he's a mouthpiece for some faceless agenda doesn't change anything either. Anyone going in front of the press should prepare what they are going to say. Running it past someone else in advance is probably a good idea. Calling it coached to turn it into a negative still does not negate the message.
The 'spy' would most likely turn out to be an unidentifiable homeless 'kid' having a bit of b&e 'fun' and then gets killed by your booby trap. Since booby traps are illegal in most jurisdictions, you'll be going down with your own evidence helping to convict you,
This is one rare case in real life where the agreement should have used the relativistic definition of time-space and have the agreement describe the time co-ords for release for each location.
It would have been even better if they had announced it after the markets had closed for the day.
I made no assertion that the big studio would orchestrate the demise of a work's author. I simply gave two examples of diametrically opposed entities making money.
The big studio could easily profit if it had already released a couple of movies and for years had wanted to further milk the franchise for another one, but couldn't because the author wasn't playing ball. Author dies, studio takes advantage of the situation. The same sort of applies today; if an obstinate copyright holder dies, it is quite possible the newly bequeathed owner would be more amenable to being bought out.
If she was that zealous about her privacy she would have shut down her site long ago, and likely done it far more gracefully. Something clearly happened to prompt this. I highly doubt she just woke up one morning and decided to shut down years of dedicated work on a whim. And so suddenly on an otherwise seemingly ordinary day.
I disagree. I think copyright should end when the person dies, if it is otherwise still under copyright. If it was copyrighted yesterday, and the person dies today, who is there to profit from it tomorrow?
The people that commissioned the work, and/or purchased the rights to it?
A big studio that didn't want to pay for the right to produce 'derivative' works?
What this translates to isn't that Groklaw doesn't like what's happening to others and is shutting down out of protest.
It is that it has been served with a demand for information/wire-tapping along with an attached gag order, courtesy of the 'Star Chamber'. The only 'legally' safe way for organisations to tell people that something like this has happened is to shut down their operations.
So, translation of Groklaw's announcement: the NSA/FBI/TLA have copied our hard drives and installed a data logger in our data centre. Oh yeah, and we're not allowed to talk about it.
The NSA / GCHQ recruit the best and brightest. That's not just an opinion they very aggressively recruit the brightest minds from the best universities and are headed by the brightest in military intelligence. This narrative that they are in some way inferior to the average-joe-forum-user is simply outlandish.
There is something that I like to call a singularity of knowledge and intellect. There are many many people that are brilliant in the specificity of what they do best, but when it comes to more general thought processes, particularly common sense, they are severely lacking.
In fact, I would almost expect these agencies to actively avoid recruiting people that excel at critical thought.
My Macbook Pro permanently sits on my desk at work. I always thought the battery was just for the built in UPS that cuts in whenever the power goes out.
Only last week I sat there peacefully working when I heard desperate screams of 'failing to save' reverberating over my partition wall. At first I assumed they'd experienced a bad throw on their d20. But, out of curiosity I prairie dogged up to see what was going on, and saw that some of my co-workers had succumbed to the dreaded power outage. They mostly just stared blankly at their partition walls murmuring incoherently, but at least one grown man was reduced to tears. It brought back memories of the crash fest that was Windows 95/98.
If your are being layed off/fired your employer is still required to give you 'notice'. However, they may opt to pay you for the duration of the termination notice period in lieu of requiring you to keep working during that time.
IMO, it is far more useful to be out looking for work for a few weeks than working for your soon-to-be-ex employer over that time. (You're still being paid.)
So no, an employer escorting you to the door with what seems like no notice, is still going to pay you for the termination period (at a minimum of two weeks or more depending on your contract and state laws) plus any obligated redundancy requirements. You just won't be 'working' on their premises.
As the prime contractor on a complex project, IBM must accept some responsibility for the issues experienced when the system went live in 2010, however, as acknowledged by the commission’s report, the successful delivery of the project was rendered near-impossible by the state failing to properly articulate its requirements or commit to a fixed scope.
IBM’s fees of $25.7 million accounted for less than 2 per cent of the total amount. The balance of the costs is made up of work streams which were never part of IBM’s scope.
There is an expectation that engaging a large professional specialist contractor would avoid the problems of using a smaller outfit or running the project in-house. You'd expect a specialist mega-corp would be able to help you define the scope and requirements of the project, as it's something of which they supposedly have prior experience.
IBM should have been the one asking the right questions at the start, and requesting access and authority to do their job. It's not like a health care payroll system is something new that no one's ever seen before. The QLD government is essentially employing IBM to be the experts in this area to deliver a suitable system.
I see this crap from these big end of town software outfits all the time. They sell products and customisations that the client doesn't need, features that in most cases just get in the way and make the systems unusable. They charge 10s to 100s of millions to build websites that are unstable and too cumbersome to maintain and use. And generally overcharge for a final product that they shoehorn to fit the actual requirements of the customer (and by extension, the customer's customers).
I don't think the general tendering/bidding process helps much either, as it doesn't always give enough access to scoping and requirements gathering to be able to generate a valid cost estimate. In many cases it comes down to the sales team getting a huge bonus contingent to signing off on the sale. And they'll say and promise anything upfront, and let the weasel^wlegal team rewrite the contracts to make every request for something that should have been included seem like an out-of-scope up-charge.
PS. I'm not defending patents here, just pointing out that patents were unlikely to be a motivation in the choice of Intel and others to go with little-endian byte order.
Likely example: the horrific clusterfuck of an abomination known as "little-endian binary". I don't know for sure it came about due to patent reasons, but I can't think of any sane reason why it would have ever come into existence otherwise.
From a purely machine theoretical standpoint, having the low order byte in the lowest memory location makes as much or more sense than the other way around.
Streaming transmission is a different matter, and in some instances can benefit from being able to receive the MSB first. This is especially true if the data gets acted upon in real time and the MSB is required earlier during the calculation. However, in may other cases, LSB first network byte order can be more advantageous (or at most at least not a disadvantage). So the decision to use either is really based on the algorithms chosen for the network traffic itself.
In creating interface code to opposite-endian systems, it's easier to think about avoiding translation and keeping both in the same format. But, I've personally never had trouble with this since I've always used reversed buffers where direct use of reversed multi-byte arithmetic was useful.
However, it stands to reason that the designers of the first little-endian processors didn't consider this a problem, as most byte traffic needs to be buffered and checked before it can be used in calculations, and that obviates the need for having network byte order being same-endian. Since these were all designed in the early days, I see no reason to assume that the choice to go with little-endian would have been any sort of compromise to the state of the art.
Some good suggestions, but they only protect against the most basic (and generally unreliable) detection techniques.
One of the most powerful methods of commercial detection is to correlate the feed against a database of known commercials. Autocorrelation of the feed is used to find all the repeating commercials across multiple shows (or within a given show). A human could be used to further validate whenever the level of uncertainty exceeds a set threshold. The longer the search period, the more accurate the database becomes.
So, to avoid falling victim to the above technique, the broadcasters would also have to make sure that no commercials were ever repeated. Which is not really an option for them.
"Chekov's gun" really translates to "tie up loose ends". Even most Bollywood films don't so far as to leave a subplot 'hanging" unresolved - even if it doesn't really advance the story, it usually resolves and takes the audience on a side journey.
In a Hollywood film, if a loose end doesn't get tied, you pretty much know they are already working on the sequel.
Don't forget the most painfully annoying, yet relied on way to instigate the #3 conflict is the 'misunderstanding', which in most cases is based on someone jumping to a incorrect conclusion based on gross stupidity on their part.
(e.g. girl sees boy hug another girl; storms out moments before the audience finds out it's just his sister; girlfriend then spends half the movie pouting and doesn't bother seeking clarification; until the last few minutes of the movie when she finds out the 'other' girl was just his terminally ill sister; and all is ok and love unsues.)
I don't know. If tracks were that cheap, I'd probably spend $20+/month just downloading tracks trying to find good ones. At $1+ per track, I'm far more careful, and spend less than half that, only buying a track or two every so often. Most of which I only listen to a few dozen times at most.
Worse is seeing a 'highly acclaimed' movie for $25+ at the cinema and being left bewildered as you realise the movie is really really really bad and you've wasted both your money (and 2 hours of your life while you sat there hoping against all odds that the last few minutes might offer some redeeming quality). You end up paying the big bucks and taking a huge risk that your money will be well spent. Well, these days I take that risk once or twice a year.
Could this be the technology behind The Doctor's sonic screwdriver?
Maybe prior to the reboot. But with the last few seasons, the Doctor's "sonic screwdriver" has been increasingly used as a generic device to magically resolve plot holes and compensate for poorly thought-out stories.
It used to turn screws and open locks. These days it does everything from neural force field generation to automatic computer hacking. Basically, whenever the bad guys provide a challenge that the Doctor can't solve, he just pulls the 'sonic' and... zaaap... problem solved!
Need a medical scanner, no problem, just pull the 'sonic'. Bad guy is projecting a super plasma/neural/whatever beam, no probs, just pull the 'sonic'. Computer system taking over the world? No probs, 'sonic' to the rescue.
They don't even bother calling it a "sonic screwdriver" anymore.
I just wish I had my own 'sonic' to deal with the incoming moderation black hole that may be coming this way.
If they do it enough times, eventually they'll find someone that doesn't incite the population to mass riot in dissatisfaction. Sometimes it takes a couple of goes for the people to realise what they really want (and don't want).
Slashdot Mirror
Definitely smart, but I'm not sure it should be patentable.
I'd go as far as saying it should definitely not be patentable. This is the most obvious embodiment of a typical just-in-time manual practice "on a computer".
Any patent awarded should err on the side of invalid until proven valid, not the other way around. Just like proving guilt is required before someone can be deprived of freedom, so should a patent be held to the same standard before it can be used to deprive others of freedom to pedal their wares.
As an embedded systems programmer, I worked on at least 100 different systems between 1995 and 1999. Some problems were just cosmetic, others caused overrun buffers, infinite loops, code paths that would no longer run, and of course the usual date comparison and cosmetic problems.
The 'doom' wasn't so much a single system going down, but a sudden coordinated failure of hundreds or thousands of systems at the same time. At least 1 in 5 of the systems we worked on were 'critical' systems that would very likely have caused serious damage, injury and/or loss of life if they weren't fixed. The company I worked for primarily dealt with equipment used in hospitals, power plants / utilities, and industrial equipment. Other companies would audit a facility (eg. a hospital), and we'd be called whenever they found something that hadn't already been dealt with.
Sometimes we didn't have access to source code, and had to recommend replacements or rewrites.
Is an extra $1k enough to get you to leave one job for another. I don't think so.
You can also tell your new employer that your new position is far more senior/challenging/responsible/etc than your previous position. Your new employer has a baseline number, knows a little of your previous job (from your resume), and will tell you in detail what the new job entails. You on the other hand also have the exact details of your previous job to make the comparison a little more ambiguous.
Worse is if you don't know what anyone else was being paid. Then you end up agreeing to $85k (because you were previously being being paid $80k) when you should have been asking for at least $129k while a few of your colleagues were being paid $128k at your previous place of employ. Remember, you're up against a professional negotiator. Not some guy that does it a few times a decade.
Someone please mod the parent up.
'Success' is far better predicted by cut-throat underhanded behaviour and initial wealth than because someone 'worked hard'. An employee's ability to negotiate better than the next guy is also a huge advantage.
Here's an anecdote that I'm sure is a deja vu moment for many here:
At a company I worked at years ago, one of our best (and hardest working) software developers, was paid far less than one of the worst.
The 'worst guy' surely would have been a sales guy if it meant he could be more lazy. He'd normally just surf the net all day, but every now and then he'd spend a week or two working on what looked like foreign projects. When the big brass walked past, he'd go into 'super busy' mode where he'd frantically shuffle papers, tap keys at crazy speed, and move his head back and forth between paper specs and the monitor. I'm sure he pioneered the use of automated email sending scripts that would send out at 9pm emails drafted in the middle of the day. The guy used to do the bare minimum to fly under the radar, then when panic hit, he'd pull out and submit some work he'd been holding back and look like some sort of genius saviour. He'd even negotiate overtime rates to 'complete' the 'unfinished' work - from home, of course. One day he 'accidentally' walked in on one of the upper management guys (married) 'working overtime with the secretary'. I don't really know what he actually said, but, mysteriously, he got a pay rise - which naturally he told us all about. This guy was expert in the art of telling people just enough to come across as 'lucky' and 'hard working' rather than devious and opportunistic. He had no idea we could see right through his game, but then we weren't really the central part of his game.
That guy used to blow his own trumpet so hard that you'd be blinded in both eyes from all the stray saliva.
Luckily the guy only lasted a year before he moved on to riper pickings at a more gullible company. In fact, productivity (and morale) went up once he was gone. But, even after he'd left, the division manager and the CEO would swear blind that he was one of the most diligent and valuable guys ever to grace the company. I learned a lot from that guy (about how to play the 'system'), and I watch carefully for it in the teams that I manage. Sadly, this type of behaviour seems to be more prevalent the higher you look up in the corporate structure.
The age old idiom that 'shit floats to the top' seems to be well supported.
Individual people are by definition more moral than corporations, mobs, governments and politicians.
And beyond that, it is clear that Snowden is far more moral than the average person. So he doesn't only think he's more morally correct - he actually is.
An ad hominem attack implying he's a mouthpiece for some faceless agenda doesn't change anything either. Anyone going in front of the press should prepare what they are going to say. Running it past someone else in advance is probably a good idea. Calling it coached to turn it into a negative still does not negate the message.
The 'spy' would most likely turn out to be an unidentifiable homeless 'kid' having a bit of b&e 'fun' and then gets killed by your booby trap. Since booby traps are illegal in most jurisdictions, you'll be going down with your own evidence helping to convict you,
So, no, 'rig it blow' is never a good idea.
You're right the XT was definitely an 8088. It wasn't until the PS/2 came out that they used an 8086.
I remember, because I replaced the 8088 in my XT with an NEC V20. The V30 was their 8086 variant.
This is one rare case in real life where the agreement should have used the relativistic definition of time-space and have the agreement describe the time co-ords for release for each location.
It would have been even better if they had announced it after the markets had closed for the day.
I made no assertion that the big studio would orchestrate the demise of a work's author. I simply gave two examples of diametrically opposed entities making money.
The big studio could easily profit if it had already released a couple of movies and for years had wanted to further milk the franchise for another one, but couldn't because the author wasn't playing ball. Author dies, studio takes advantage of the situation. The same sort of applies today; if an obstinate copyright holder dies, it is quite possible the newly bequeathed owner would be more amenable to being bought out.
If she was that zealous about her privacy she would have shut down her site long ago, and likely done it far more gracefully. Something clearly happened to prompt this. I highly doubt she just woke up one morning and decided to shut down years of dedicated work on a whim. And so suddenly on an otherwise seemingly ordinary day.
yeah, its a radical departure for some but discourages cashcowing a product or franchising something to death (the Matrix series anyone?)
It's a pity they never made sequels to that movie. Maybe they will one day, as that setting is ripe for some brilliant story telling.
I disagree. I think copyright should end when the person dies, if it is otherwise still under copyright. If it was copyrighted yesterday, and the person dies today, who is there to profit from it tomorrow?
The people that commissioned the work, and/or purchased the rights to it?
A big studio that didn't want to pay for the right to produce 'derivative' works?
What this translates to isn't that Groklaw doesn't like what's happening to others and is shutting down out of protest.
It is that it has been served with a demand for information/wire-tapping along with an attached gag order, courtesy of the 'Star Chamber'. The only 'legally' safe way for organisations to tell people that something like this has happened is to shut down their operations.
So, translation of Groklaw's announcement: the NSA/FBI/TLA have copied our hard drives and installed a data logger in our data centre. Oh yeah, and we're not allowed to talk about it.
HOW do people believe this?
The NSA / GCHQ recruit the best and brightest. That's not just an opinion they very aggressively recruit the brightest minds from the best universities and are headed by the brightest in military intelligence. This narrative that they are in some way inferior to the average-joe-forum-user is simply outlandish.
There is something that I like to call a singularity of knowledge and intellect. There are many many people that are brilliant in the specificity of what they do best, but when it comes to more general thought processes, particularly common sense, they are severely lacking.
In fact, I would almost expect these agencies to actively avoid recruiting people that excel at critical thought.
My Macbook Pro permanently sits on my desk at work. I always thought the battery was just for the built in UPS that cuts in whenever the power goes out.
Only last week I sat there peacefully working when I heard desperate screams of 'failing to save' reverberating over my partition wall. At first I assumed they'd experienced a bad throw on their d20. But, out of curiosity I prairie dogged up to see what was going on, and saw that some of my co-workers had succumbed to the dreaded power outage. They mostly just stared blankly at their partition walls murmuring incoherently, but at least one grown man was reduced to tears. It brought back memories of the crash fest that was Windows 95/98.
If your are being layed off/fired your employer is still required to give you 'notice'. However, they may opt to pay you for the duration of the termination notice period in lieu of requiring you to keep working during that time.
IMO, it is far more useful to be out looking for work for a few weeks than working for your soon-to-be-ex employer over that time. (You're still being paid.)
So no, an employer escorting you to the door with what seems like no notice, is still going to pay you for the termination period (at a minimum of two weeks or more depending on your contract and state laws) plus any obligated redundancy requirements. You just won't be 'working' on their premises.
In fact IBM did comment on this:
As the prime contractor on a complex project, IBM must accept some responsibility for the issues experienced when the system went live in 2010, however, as acknowledged by the commission’s report, the successful delivery of the project was rendered near-impossible by the state failing to properly articulate its requirements or commit to a fixed scope.
IBM’s fees of $25.7 million accounted for less than 2 per cent of the total amount. The balance of the costs is made up of work streams which were never part of IBM’s scope.
There is an expectation that engaging a large professional specialist contractor would avoid the problems of using a smaller outfit or running the project in-house. You'd expect a specialist mega-corp would be able to help you define the scope and requirements of the project, as it's something of which they supposedly have prior experience.
IBM should have been the one asking the right questions at the start, and requesting access and authority to do their job. It's not like a health care payroll system is something new that no one's ever seen before. The QLD government is essentially employing IBM to be the experts in this area to deliver a suitable system.
I see this crap from these big end of town software outfits all the time. They sell products and customisations that the client doesn't need, features that in most cases just get in the way and make the systems unusable. They charge 10s to 100s of millions to build websites that are unstable and too cumbersome to maintain and use. And generally overcharge for a final product that they shoehorn to fit the actual requirements of the customer (and by extension, the customer's customers).
I don't think the general tendering/bidding process helps much either, as it doesn't always give enough access to scoping and requirements gathering to be able to generate a valid cost estimate. In many cases it comes down to the sales team getting a huge bonus contingent to signing off on the sale. And they'll say and promise anything upfront, and let the weasel^wlegal team rewrite the contracts to make every request for something that should have been included seem like an out-of-scope up-charge.
PS. I'm not defending patents here, just pointing out that patents were unlikely to be a motivation in the choice of Intel and others to go with little-endian byte order.
Likely example: the horrific clusterfuck of an abomination known as "little-endian binary". I don't know for sure it came about due to patent reasons, but I can't think of any sane reason why it would have ever come into existence otherwise.
From a purely machine theoretical standpoint, having the low order byte in the lowest memory location makes as much or more sense than the other way around.
Streaming transmission is a different matter, and in some instances can benefit from being able to receive the MSB first. This is especially true if the data gets acted upon in real time and the MSB is required earlier during the calculation. However, in may other cases, LSB first network byte order can be more advantageous (or at most at least not a disadvantage). So the decision to use either is really based on the algorithms chosen for the network traffic itself.
In creating interface code to opposite-endian systems, it's easier to think about avoiding translation and keeping both in the same format. But, I've personally never had trouble with this since I've always used reversed buffers where direct use of reversed multi-byte arithmetic was useful.
However, it stands to reason that the designers of the first little-endian processors didn't consider this a problem, as most byte traffic needs to be buffered and checked before it can be used in calculations, and that obviates the need for having network byte order being same-endian. Since these were all designed in the early days, I see no reason to assume that the choice to go with little-endian would have been any sort of compromise to the state of the art.
Some good suggestions, but they only protect against the most basic (and generally unreliable) detection techniques.
One of the most powerful methods of commercial detection is to correlate the feed against a database of known commercials. Autocorrelation of the feed is used to find all the repeating commercials across multiple shows (or within a given show). A human could be used to further validate whenever the level of uncertainty exceeds a set threshold. The longer the search period, the more accurate the database becomes.
So, to avoid falling victim to the above technique, the broadcasters would also have to make sure that no commercials were ever repeated. Which is not really an option for them.
"Chekov's gun" really translates to "tie up loose ends". Even most Bollywood films don't so far as to leave a subplot 'hanging" unresolved - even if it doesn't really advance the story, it usually resolves and takes the audience on a side journey.
In a Hollywood film, if a loose end doesn't get tied, you pretty much know they are already working on the sequel.
Don't forget the most painfully annoying, yet relied on way to instigate the #3 conflict is the 'misunderstanding', which in most cases is based on someone jumping to a incorrect conclusion based on gross stupidity on their part.
(e.g. girl sees boy hug another girl; storms out moments before the audience finds out it's just his sister; girlfriend then spends half the movie pouting and doesn't bother seeking clarification; until the last few minutes of the movie when she finds out the 'other' girl was just his terminally ill sister; and all is ok and love unsues.)
I don't know. If tracks were that cheap, I'd probably spend $20+/month just downloading tracks trying to find good ones. At $1+ per track, I'm far more careful, and spend less than half that, only buying a track or two every so often. Most of which I only listen to a few dozen times at most.
Worse is seeing a 'highly acclaimed' movie for $25+ at the cinema and being left bewildered as you realise the movie is really really really bad and you've wasted both your money (and 2 hours of your life while you sat there hoping against all odds that the last few minutes might offer some redeeming quality). You end up paying the big bucks and taking a huge risk that your money will be well spent. Well, these days I take that risk once or twice a year.
Could this be the technology behind The Doctor's sonic screwdriver?
Maybe prior to the reboot. But with the last few seasons, the Doctor's "sonic screwdriver" has been increasingly used as a generic device to magically resolve plot holes and compensate for poorly thought-out stories.
It used to turn screws and open locks. These days it does everything from neural force field generation to automatic computer hacking. Basically, whenever the bad guys provide a challenge that the Doctor can't solve, he just pulls the 'sonic' and ... zaaap ... problem solved!
Need a medical scanner, no problem, just pull the 'sonic'. Bad guy is projecting a super plasma/neural/whatever beam, no probs, just pull the 'sonic'. Computer system taking over the world? No probs, 'sonic' to the rescue.
They don't even bother calling it a "sonic screwdriver" anymore.
I just wish I had my own 'sonic' to deal with the incoming moderation black hole that may be coming this way.
If they do it enough times, eventually they'll find someone that doesn't incite the population to mass riot in dissatisfaction. Sometimes it takes a couple of goes for the people to realise what they really want (and don't want).