Properly, software, as a written work, should be covered by copyright and not patents anyway.
And as others have pointed out, it is. However, this gives no real protection.
I could write a story about a boy who finds out he's a wizard, and goes off to a boarding school to learn magic, and has many adventures, and so long as it's not *too* much like JK Rowling's work (the adventures are different, the names are entirely dissimilar, etc.) I didn't violate copyright. The same is true for software: I could look at a program, then go about writing my own program that does the same thing, and without actually using any of your code, I'm clear on copyright. However, I *have* made a product that can replace yours. Sucks to be you.
Which doesn't mean that software patents are a good idea, either. Frankly, we probably need an entirely new category of IP protection for digital technology.
So why is it reasonable for there to be laws making the credit card companies responsible if we screw up with "our own equipment," but it's unreasonable to expect a little help from the utility company to detect and stop fraudulent usage?
Now, long distance telephone service was not a monopoly, so I could go to another carrier, however, if I didn't pay them, my phone service would be cut off, because it was billed through my local phone company, and they don't care whether you didn't pay the local or didn't pay the long distance. Either way, you didn't pay, so you are cut off.
That's actually not true. It's not legal for your local service to disconnect because of disputed unpaid long distance charges. You do have to give notice in writing of the charges disputed and why, but then they have to leave you connected if you pay the basic connection charges.
We're a 200-person non-profit healthcare provider. 140 of those people are the actual healthcare workers (doctors, nurses, med assistants, case managers) and then 60 of us do all the admin and management.
I'll see if there's a HRSA Section 330 expansion to pay for a WSUS server, though. I'm sure Microsoft can lobby their Fed contacts for one.;-)
I thought this was why we *should* pay by the megabyte. If we could suffer financially from our connections being hacked, we'd have more incentive to secure them.;-)
In general, "all you can eat" services make lower utilization subsidize high utilization. In some cases, that makes sense, but much of the time it just disincentivizes efficiency in utilization.
Because it should not be the service providers responsibility to police their customers (come on guys, doesnt that sound awfully familiar?), especially when their customers can provide their own equipment and the service provider cannot legally force equipment limitations.
There are wallets out there that will sound an alarm at you if you close them without returning your credit card to its pocket. No credit card company can require the use of such wallet, though.
And yet, they're still legally responsible for all fraudulent charges in excess of $50.
Why should the phone company be responsible for their customer's incompetence?
If they installed it... maybe... but they didn't.
Why are credit card companies responsible for their customers' incompetence? If I leave my credit card on a bench at the mall, and call to report it lost within a reasonable amount of time, I'm not liable for most of the charges. That's a legal limitation, too... not just customer service. The credit card company didn't leave my card lying around, or make it easier to lose in some way, but they still have to eat the charges.
Several years ago, our electric bill jumped suddenly. Our deadbeat tweaker roommate decided to run the AC 24/7 "Like they do in Hawaii." The (municipal) power department computers automatically detected the change in usage, flagged it, stopped our bill from being issued, and sent it to CS to contact us and find out if there was a physical problem. (Then something got dropped so they didn't contact us, and didn't send a bill... four months later they came knocking on our door, all apologies.)
So, yeah, I think it's reasonable for a utility company to auto-flag aberrant usage. Though true, the guy *should* have configured his phone system correctly too...
The article claims that India is "82% Out of serivce". Something that I've always been curious about through is smaller inter country links and Internet connectivity. That is to say, if minor yet not insignificant links exist between Indian Telecoms and Pakistani Telecoms, and also between Pakistani Telecoms and Iranian Telecoms, and so on and so on... Then is it still possible due to the capabilities of packet switching, that computers in India could still communicate with ones in the US via a very, very long and convoluted path through many, many local connections?
From TFA: "A first appraisal at 7:44 am UTC gave an estimate of the following impact on the voice traffic..."
So the 82% applies to voice phone service, not computer data. Voice can still be packet-switched, sure... but usually isn't.
PS... On a side note, why is a 20sec reboot really this horrible? Explain this, especially if the updates are applied at night while the computer is not being used or at via an Administrators scheduled update?
A 20 second reboot (if you're lucky enough to have a computer that reboots that fast) often also requires several minutes to reopen the files you were working on and find your place again. If you shut down your computer at night (to save your company money, and to ensure that it gets rebooted regularly to prevent senility), updates can't be auto-applied while you're gone. And if you don't want Windows installing things without your permission/approval, updating at night isn't an option anyway.
If you work for a 200-person company with two "IT guys" who run around to our dozen locations fighting fires, and no real "System Administrator", you're lucky I install the updates at all... I probably have the only up-to-date computer on site. I also have admin access on my network account, because that way they don't have to worry about installing stuff for me... I can just do it myself (and for everyone else in my department). It'd be nice to have a real IT department, and when I first started here I wrote up a paper (at my boss's behest) on what that would look like for us... but the only change has been that we have two IT guys instead of one, and an Exchange server instead of using Outlook just for POP mail. sigh...
And why would you assume a Windows restart is needed for an IE update?
I didn't assume it was required. I'm spoiled by using Linux at home. I was quite disappointed when prompted to reboot after installing that one little IE patch.
There's no need to restart for this update either, provided you close Internet Explorer before running the update.
At the risk of being modded redundant...
I basically never open IE on this computer. I shut down completely every day when I go home, so IE had not been open during the session when I got my little yellow shield and was told to install the update. Knowing what a big whoop-de-do this one is (and knowing that sometimes other people log on from my computer and do use IE), I installed it. And got told to reboot. And kept getting told every few minutes until I *did* give up and reboot.
On Vista, apparently, you don't have to reboot, but on XP you still do.
There is not a 7 day lag time, at least on Vista. I got a notice of new updates Tuesday, ran it yesterday and immediately after installing those, it popped up with another, new update--the IE patch.
If your system is configured to only check for updates once a week, and not get notified of critical updates in between, there will be a week lagtime (if you have it set to check weekly).
Oh, sorry. I've been touch-typing for so long, I forgot that some people still have to look at the keys.
Besides... in DOCUMENTS, you're not navigating to uTorrent. If you're naming your documents with Greek letters, I'm not going to apologize if they're harder to bring up.
It takes me a few seconds to bring up recent documents, with keyboard or mouse. It's not a process I've been thinking "Oh, if only this were *easier*!" Therefore, I'm not going to be impressed with an OS simply on that basis. If it was "It's [insert innovative upgrade here] AND it's even easier to open recent documents!" then more power to you... but the improvements people are talking about seem like 2.0 to 2.1 improvements, not major reasons to upgrade.
There are both serif and sans serif fonts designed for screen readability and print readability. Geneva (sans serif) and New York (serif) were the classic examples of screen fonts from the old Macintosh era. They look hideous when printed.
One convention dictates that sans serif fonts should be used for headings, and serif for paragraphs, due to readability.
(1) press ctrl+esc to bring up start menu (2) press N (first letter of "notepad" (3) press O (4) press Enter (autocompletion)
Five keystrokes, about 500ms, and way faster than navigating to it with the mouse. And similarly for launching most of the apps I use.
Ctrl+esc brings up the start menu in XP.
R opens the Run dialog.
N and the down arrow gets me the autocomplete for Notepad (except when I just now tried it, Notepad was already in there, since it's the last thing I used).
Hit enter.
You're right, you saved a keystroke over me. Vista is totally better. I'll go cry now.
It matters because if it makes someone less safe 99% of the time and safer 1% of the time, you're still better off not making calls while driving. It's a game of numbers: there are situateions where your seat belt will make you less safe in a collision, but these situations are far outweighed be the likely scenario. So we require all cars to have seat belts and most states have laws requiring you to wear them at all times.
But you don't have warning that there's going to be an accident, so you have to have your seatbelt fastened 100% of the time to realize the safety benefit. Whereas by better educating drivers about the importance of staying free of distractions (learning a bit about reaction time, what distraction does to your ability to pick up cues, etc.), we can cut down on the number of people TWD (talking while driving) unnecessarily, but still leave the safety benefit of making calls while moving in some situations. It's not an all-or-nothing problem, so all-or-nothing solutions aren't appropriate.
How in the world you gonna *COPY / BACKUP* your brand new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz ??
I'm not going to buy a brand-new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz until I can afford an insurance policy that will give me full repair cost/replacement value if any harm comes to it.
And I'm sure as hell not going to spend half a million dollars on a movie, especially if I can't back it up.
For that matter, I'm not going to buy any car if I can't back it up. Sounds like transmission trouble.
Then just don't let them handle the discs. Tell them they are off-limits, and that if they want to watch a movie, they should come to you.
Do you *have* kids?;-) Telling them it's off-limits is only useful insofar as you can make something ACTUALLY off-limits. His system makes it possible for the physical disks to be inaccessible, without imposing to much barrier to use of content, which is pretty much ideal. I can see why he wouldn't want to give that up, and instead have to chase his kids around their own home telling them "do not touch!"
That all being said, my four-year-old has yet to scratch a PS2 game or DVD. He usually demands we change the disks for him, however.
There are many other products that have limitations to their use after you buy it, even though you do not sign a contract for that.
For example, your car. You are limited to certain roads/areas to drive it, limited in speed, sometimes even in direction. Some places you are allowed to drive by but not stop.
Or the house you own, even when the mortgage is over there are limitations on it's use. Maybe you are not allowed to run certain businesses their (brothels being an easy example), and more of those limitations. You can not just start expanding it for example, that you will have to apply for.
So no I don't think there is the need for an explicit licence agreement to be signed when you buy the DVD to make the restrictions valid. Unless you want special liberties (e.g. republishing, showing it to an open audience, etc) in which you will have to open special negotiations with the copyright holder.
The restrictions on how you may use your car or your house are laws duly enacted for the public good. The restrictions on how you may use your Blu-Ray movie are contracts between you and the publisher, which are subject to certain laws. The laws that exist are to protect either buyers (fair use doctrine) or sellers (the rest of copyright). None of those laws exist for the public good.
If someone drives their car 100 miles an hour down my sidewalk, that threatens my own safety. If someone next door to me rips a million hours of movies, that doesn't threaten my safety one bit. It also doesn't even threaten the profits of the movie studios, *unless* the person then copies the ripped movies and distributes them.
So we're someplace where 911 is unavailable, but 411 is? No.
411 is a service of the telephone provider, not the County Emergency Services departments. ALL phones have 411 (though you may pay through the nose for it).
Now answer me this: out of all the teenagers that make calls while driving, what percentage of them are in this scenario that you describe?
Why does it matter? If there are legitimate reasons to make a call while the car is moving, is it a good idea to block someone from *ever* doing it? Most people sharing files over peer-to-peer are pirating music, films, or software... so does that mean that we should find magic ways to make peer-to-peer file sharing impossible?
My camera came with a strap. If I were dangling my camera by its strap, not holding the actual camera body, and the strap broke and my camera smashed to the pavement, it would never occur to me to sue the camera manufacturer. My thoughts, after the "oh shit" would be, "I shouldn't have been doing that and should have been more careful."
And yet, if you drop an item when dangling it by the strap, the consequence is that it falls *down*. It does not fly into the TV.
So I doubt that people broke their TVs while dangling their Wiimotes by the straps.
If your Wiimote flies into your TV, and the strap is broken, yes, it's possible you were abusing the Wiimote or playing incorrectly, but it seems at least as likely that it happened in the course of play. When I serve in Wii Tennis, there's definitely a point where the momentum of the controller is forward, toward the TV, and if the remote slipped from my hand and the strap was faulty, it would go flying into the screen. Fortunately, I'm a Luddite with a CRT TV, but that would cause some nasty damage to a Plasma screen, and yeah, the strap *shouldn't* break under those circumstances.
I don't know why everyone's so quick to *assume* that people who broke their TVs this way must have been doing something wrong. It's nice that it hasn't happened to any of us, but do we really have enough information to say that it *can't* happen?
No, my point is teaching that when you have an accident, you need to brush it off and try again. It's important to explain to them that the ice cream isn't free, that you're spending money, and to be careful. If the kid threw the ice cream on the ground, or was running around carrying the ice cream, that's another story, but kids have poor motor coordination. Accidents happen for no fault of their own.
I totally agree.
Now, here's a scenario where I might *not* replace the treat (it wouldn't be ice cream, as he's allergic to dairy;-): I get my son his treat, I say, "Let's sit down to eat it so you don't spill." We find a place to sit down, but he keeps getting up and generally being playful in ways that are hazardous to his treat. I remind him: "When you jump up and down like that, you're more likely to spill your treat. Please sit down."
Continues happening, I say this time: "You'll be very sad if you spill your treat and there's no more." NOW, if he spills it, fair warning: he gets no more. finite resource.
I see way, WAY too many kids expected to do things that they don't have the developmental capability to do, and even more expected to know the potential consequences of actions before they happen. If you don't help him draw the connection between the careless behavior and the loss of the treat until the loss occurs, he's going to be too distracted with his disappointment to learn from the experience. If you draw the connection *in advance*, and then follow through (with empathy: "Oh, you're sad that your treat is all gone!" [hugs etc. as appropriate]), they don't turn you into the enemy who deprived them of their treat, and instead recognize that it's a natural consequence of the behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow... so they want to patent the usual way of conducting medical research?
1. Come up with an intervention
2. Try that intervention on animals
3. Collect data on what happens
4. Analyze data and publish results
The tiny conspiracy theorist in me thinks that someone wants to be able to quash rigorous scientific research on the long-term effects of vaccines.
Properly, software, as a written work, should be covered by copyright and not patents anyway.
And as others have pointed out, it is. However, this gives no real protection.
I could write a story about a boy who finds out he's a wizard, and goes off to a boarding school to learn magic, and has many adventures, and so long as it's not *too* much like JK Rowling's work (the adventures are different, the names are entirely dissimilar, etc.) I didn't violate copyright. The same is true for software: I could look at a program, then go about writing my own program that does the same thing, and without actually using any of your code, I'm clear on copyright. However, I *have* made a product that can replace yours. Sucks to be you.
Which doesn't mean that software patents are a good idea, either. Frankly, we probably need an entirely new category of IP protection for digital technology.
So why is it reasonable for there to be laws making the credit card companies responsible if we screw up with "our own equipment," but it's unreasonable to expect a little help from the utility company to detect and stop fraudulent usage?
Now, long distance telephone service was not a monopoly, so I could go to another carrier, however, if I didn't pay them, my phone service would be cut off, because it was billed through my local phone company, and they don't care whether you didn't pay the local or didn't pay the long distance. Either way, you didn't pay, so you are cut off.
That's actually not true. It's not legal for your local service to disconnect because of disputed unpaid long distance charges. You do have to give notice in writing of the charges disputed and why, but then they have to leave you connected if you pay the basic connection charges.
That is a *really* good question. I wonder what this outage is doing to offshore tech support call centers?
We're a 200-person non-profit healthcare provider. 140 of those people are the actual healthcare workers (doctors, nurses, med assistants, case managers) and then 60 of us do all the admin and management.
I'll see if there's a HRSA Section 330 expansion to pay for a WSUS server, though. I'm sure Microsoft can lobby their Fed contacts for one. ;-)
I thought this was why we *should* pay by the megabyte. If we could suffer financially from our connections being hacked, we'd have more incentive to secure them. ;-)
In general, "all you can eat" services make lower utilization subsidize high utilization. In some cases, that makes sense, but much of the time it just disincentivizes efficiency in utilization.
Because it should not be the service providers responsibility to police their customers (come on guys, doesnt that sound awfully familiar?), especially when their customers can provide their own equipment and the service provider cannot legally force equipment limitations.
There are wallets out there that will sound an alarm at you if you close them without returning your credit card to its pocket. No credit card company can require the use of such wallet, though.
And yet, they're still legally responsible for all fraudulent charges in excess of $50.
Why should the phone company be responsible for their customer's incompetence?
If they installed it... maybe... but they didn't.
Why are credit card companies responsible for their customers' incompetence? If I leave my credit card on a bench at the mall, and call to report it lost within a reasonable amount of time, I'm not liable for most of the charges. That's a legal limitation, too... not just customer service. The credit card company didn't leave my card lying around, or make it easier to lose in some way, but they still have to eat the charges.
Several years ago, our electric bill jumped suddenly. Our deadbeat tweaker roommate decided to run the AC 24/7 "Like they do in Hawaii." The (municipal) power department computers automatically detected the change in usage, flagged it, stopped our bill from being issued, and sent it to CS to contact us and find out if there was a physical problem. (Then something got dropped so they didn't contact us, and didn't send a bill... four months later they came knocking on our door, all apologies.)
So, yeah, I think it's reasonable for a utility company to auto-flag aberrant usage. Though true, the guy *should* have configured his phone system correctly too...
The article claims that India is "82% Out of serivce". Something that I've always been curious about through is smaller inter country links and Internet connectivity. That is to say, if minor yet not insignificant links exist between Indian Telecoms and Pakistani Telecoms, and also between Pakistani Telecoms and Iranian Telecoms, and so on and so on... Then is it still possible due to the capabilities of packet switching, that computers in India could still communicate with ones in the US via a very, very long and convoluted path through many, many local connections?
From TFA:
"A first appraisal at 7:44 am UTC gave an estimate of the following impact on the voice traffic..."
So the 82% applies to voice phone service, not computer data. Voice can still be packet-switched, sure... but usually isn't.
PS...
On a side note, why is a 20sec reboot really this horrible? Explain this, especially if the updates are applied at night while the computer is not being used or at via an Administrators scheduled update?
A 20 second reboot (if you're lucky enough to have a computer that reboots that fast) often also requires several minutes to reopen the files you were working on and find your place again. If you shut down your computer at night (to save your company money, and to ensure that it gets rebooted regularly to prevent senility), updates can't be auto-applied while you're gone. And if you don't want Windows installing things without your permission/approval, updating at night isn't an option anyway.
If you work for a 200-person company with two "IT guys" who run around to our dozen locations fighting fires, and no real "System Administrator", you're lucky I install the updates at all... I probably have the only up-to-date computer on site. I also have admin access on my network account, because that way they don't have to worry about installing stuff for me... I can just do it myself (and for everyone else in my department). It'd be nice to have a real IT department, and when I first started here I wrote up a paper (at my boss's behest) on what that would look like for us... but the only change has been that we have two IT guys instead of one, and an Exchange server instead of using Outlook just for POP mail. sigh...
And why would you assume a Windows restart is needed for an IE update?
I didn't assume it was required. I'm spoiled by using Linux at home. I was quite disappointed when prompted to reboot after installing that one little IE patch.
There's no need to restart for this update either, provided you close Internet Explorer before running the update.
At the risk of being modded redundant...
I basically never open IE on this computer. I shut down completely every day when I go home, so IE had not been open during the session when I got my little yellow shield and was told to install the update. Knowing what a big whoop-de-do this one is (and knowing that sometimes other people log on from my computer and do use IE), I installed it. And got told to reboot. And kept getting told every few minutes until I *did* give up and reboot.
On Vista, apparently, you don't have to reboot, but on XP you still do.
There is not a 7 day lag time, at least on Vista. I got a notice of new updates Tuesday, ran it yesterday and immediately after installing those, it popped up with another, new update--the IE patch.
If your system is configured to only check for updates once a week, and not get notified of critical updates in between, there will be a week lagtime (if you have it set to check weekly).
Oh, sorry. I've been touch-typing for so long, I forgot that some people still have to look at the keys.
Besides... in DOCUMENTS, you're not navigating to uTorrent. If you're naming your documents with Greek letters, I'm not going to apologize if they're harder to bring up.
It takes me a few seconds to bring up recent documents, with keyboard or mouse. It's not a process I've been thinking "Oh, if only this were *easier*!" Therefore, I'm not going to be impressed with an OS simply on that basis. If it was "It's [insert innovative upgrade here] AND it's even easier to open recent documents!" then more power to you... but the improvements people are talking about seem like 2.0 to 2.1 improvements, not major reasons to upgrade.
There are both serif and sans serif fonts designed for screen readability and print readability. Geneva (sans serif) and New York (serif) were the classic examples of screen fonts from the old Macintosh era. They look hideous when printed.
One convention dictates that sans serif fonts should be used for headings, and serif for paragraphs, due to readability.
So, how do you "run" a recent document quickly from the keyboard in XP? Like Vista or like Quicksilver does it?
Window key or ctrl+esc to bring up Start Menu
D for Documents
hit letter document starts with
Use down arrow key to refine selection if necessary
Hit enter.
I'm sorry it took eight years for you to learn that. I would have told you sooner if I'd known you didn't know.
Launching applications is easier and faster:
(1) press ctrl+esc to bring up start menu
(2) press N (first letter of "notepad"
(3) press O
(4) press Enter (autocompletion)
Five keystrokes, about 500ms, and way faster than navigating to it with the mouse. And similarly for launching most of the apps I use.
Ctrl+esc brings up the start menu in XP.
R opens the Run dialog.
N and the down arrow gets me the autocomplete for Notepad (except when I just now tried it, Notepad was already in there, since it's the last thing I used).
Hit enter.
You're right, you saved a keystroke over me. Vista is totally better. I'll go cry now.
It matters because if it makes someone less safe 99% of the time and safer 1% of the time, you're still better off not making calls while driving. It's a game of numbers: there are situateions where your seat belt will make you less safe in a collision, but these situations are far outweighed be the likely scenario. So we require all cars to have seat belts and most states have laws requiring you to wear them at all times.
But you don't have warning that there's going to be an accident, so you have to have your seatbelt fastened 100% of the time to realize the safety benefit. Whereas by better educating drivers about the importance of staying free of distractions (learning a bit about reaction time, what distraction does to your ability to pick up cues, etc.), we can cut down on the number of people TWD (talking while driving) unnecessarily, but still leave the safety benefit of making calls while moving in some situations. It's not an all-or-nothing problem, so all-or-nothing solutions aren't appropriate.
How in the world you gonna *COPY / BACKUP* your brand new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz ??
I'm not going to buy a brand-new 2008 SLR McLaren Roadster Mercedes Benz until I can afford an insurance policy that will give me full repair cost/replacement value if any harm comes to it.
And I'm sure as hell not going to spend half a million dollars on a movie, especially if I can't back it up.
For that matter, I'm not going to buy any car if I can't back it up. Sounds like transmission trouble.
Then just don't let them handle the discs. Tell them they are off-limits, and that if they want to watch a movie, they should come to you.
Do you *have* kids? ;-) Telling them it's off-limits is only useful insofar as you can make something ACTUALLY off-limits. His system makes it possible for the physical disks to be inaccessible, without imposing to much barrier to use of content, which is pretty much ideal. I can see why he wouldn't want to give that up, and instead have to chase his kids around their own home telling them "do not touch!"
That all being said, my four-year-old has yet to scratch a PS2 game or DVD. He usually demands we change the disks for him, however.
There are many other products that have limitations to their use after you buy it, even though you do not sign a contract for that.
For example, your car. You are limited to certain roads/areas to drive it, limited in speed, sometimes even in direction. Some places you are allowed to drive by but not stop.
Or the house you own, even when the mortgage is over there are limitations on it's use. Maybe you are not allowed to run certain businesses their (brothels being an easy example), and more of those limitations. You can not just start expanding it for example, that you will have to apply for.
So no I don't think there is the need for an explicit licence agreement to be signed when you buy the DVD to make the restrictions valid. Unless you want special liberties (e.g. republishing, showing it to an open audience, etc) in which you will have to open special negotiations with the copyright holder.
The restrictions on how you may use your car or your house are laws duly enacted for the public good. The restrictions on how you may use your Blu-Ray movie are contracts between you and the publisher, which are subject to certain laws. The laws that exist are to protect either buyers (fair use doctrine) or sellers (the rest of copyright). None of those laws exist for the public good.
If someone drives their car 100 miles an hour down my sidewalk, that threatens my own safety. If someone next door to me rips a million hours of movies, that doesn't threaten my safety one bit. It also doesn't even threaten the profits of the movie studios, *unless* the person then copies the ripped movies and distributes them.
Bad comparison. Try again.
So we're someplace where 911 is unavailable, but 411 is? No.
411 is a service of the telephone provider, not the County Emergency Services departments. ALL phones have 411 (though you may pay through the nose for it).
Now answer me this: out of all the teenagers that make calls while driving, what percentage of them are in this scenario that you describe?
Why does it matter? If there are legitimate reasons to make a call while the car is moving, is it a good idea to block someone from *ever* doing it? Most people sharing files over peer-to-peer are pirating music, films, or software... so does that mean that we should find magic ways to make peer-to-peer file sharing impossible?
My camera came with a strap. If I were dangling my camera by its strap, not holding the actual camera body, and the strap broke and my camera smashed to the pavement, it would never occur to me to sue the camera manufacturer. My thoughts, after the "oh shit" would be, "I shouldn't have been doing that and should have been more careful."
And yet, if you drop an item when dangling it by the strap, the consequence is that it falls *down*. It does not fly into the TV.
So I doubt that people broke their TVs while dangling their Wiimotes by the straps.
If your Wiimote flies into your TV, and the strap is broken, yes, it's possible you were abusing the Wiimote or playing incorrectly, but it seems at least as likely that it happened in the course of play. When I serve in Wii Tennis, there's definitely a point where the momentum of the controller is forward, toward the TV, and if the remote slipped from my hand and the strap was faulty, it would go flying into the screen. Fortunately, I'm a Luddite with a CRT TV, but that would cause some nasty damage to a Plasma screen, and yeah, the strap *shouldn't* break under those circumstances.
I don't know why everyone's so quick to *assume* that people who broke their TVs this way must have been doing something wrong. It's nice that it hasn't happened to any of us, but do we really have enough information to say that it *can't* happen?
No, my point is teaching that when you have an accident, you need to brush it off and try again. It's important to explain to them that the ice cream isn't free, that you're spending money, and to be careful. If the kid threw the ice cream on the ground, or was running around carrying the ice cream, that's another story, but kids have poor motor coordination. Accidents happen for no fault of their own.
I totally agree.
Now, here's a scenario where I might *not* replace the treat (it wouldn't be ice cream, as he's allergic to dairy ;-): I get my son his treat, I say, "Let's sit down to eat it so you don't spill." We find a place to sit down, but he keeps getting up and generally being playful in ways that are hazardous to his treat. I remind him: "When you jump up and down like that, you're more likely to spill your treat. Please sit down."
Continues happening, I say this time: "You'll be very sad if you spill your treat and there's no more." NOW, if he spills it, fair warning: he gets no more. finite resource.
I see way, WAY too many kids expected to do things that they don't have the developmental capability to do, and even more expected to know the potential consequences of actions before they happen. If you don't help him draw the connection between the careless behavior and the loss of the treat until the loss occurs, he's going to be too distracted with his disappointment to learn from the experience. If you draw the connection *in advance*, and then follow through (with empathy: "Oh, you're sad that your treat is all gone!" [hugs etc. as appropriate]), they don't turn you into the enemy who deprived them of their treat, and instead recognize that it's a natural consequence of the behavior.