I recently tried selling a generic brand, unused toner cartridge for an HP printer I no longer owned on the classifieds site kijiji. It was taken down within a day for a "Verified Rights Owner (VeRO)" complaint. In no point in the add did I try to pass it off as a genuine HP cartridge, and the picture I used to post it certainly made clear who's sticker it had on it. I did mention it was for HP printers, which I seemed relevant. I tried pushing back, but was told that any reference to "HP" would result in take down. I guess I'm back to boycotting HP.
Are there any printer manufacturers that aren't evil?
Is it any surprise that a printer started RMS on his holy crusade? Too bad it seems we are losing that that battle so completely.
So some idiot bends his car because he was driving too fast. He is inconvenienced, insurance premiums go up, is late for work, etc, and just maybe learns a valuable lesson about driving defensively, all without endangering anyone else's life. Care to explain what the downside is?
I like you books analogy. It helps clear up what the intended meaning is.
Arguing the semantics of it, though, distracts from the real issue. It's all well and good to understand what the writers of the amendment meant, and to understand why they wrote it when they wrote it. The appropriate question should be: Is it still relevant today? Is it still serving its intended purpose. It was amended into the constitution. It can be amended out. It was not an infallible law handed down by God.
Today, the free and easy access to guns granted by that amendment is responsible for many times more lost innocent lives than it is preventing. Are the benefits of that freedom really worth all those lost lives? Is this what the writers really wanted?
To continue your analogy, what would be the proper recourse if people started using those books for something other than their intended purpose? If a bunch of teenagers started throwing their textbooks at each other in a classroom, the appropriate recourse is to confiscate their textbooks, not to blindly follow the constitution.
There's more to it than that. In most jurisdictions the taxi companies have been subject to more rigorous (i.e. expensive) standards than Uber has been following. For example, the taxi companies are regulated as to what what cars can be driven, the quality and inspection of those cars, insurance level, background checks, fee control, artificial scarcity of operating licenses (eg New York Taxi medallions) etc. All of these add to the cost of operating a conventional taxi business, and are things that Uber has been ignoring under its completely bogus "we are not a taxi company" claim. I am glad Uber is coming in to shake things up because a number of the above are simply there to protect a monopoly or outdated business model and desperately need revision. BUT Uber IS (or at least in just about every meaningful way behaves as) a a taxi company that is simply ignoring the regulations and is thus undercutting the competition and this is fundamentally not fair either.
Are you trying to demonstrate how much of a "consumer" you are? Your Android 2.2 likely does everything it did back when you thought it was all cool and new. Now you're lusting over new stuff just because it is new stuff (HW, SW, same thing). Buy quality, fix it when it breaks, keep it forever, and above all else, learn to enjoy what you have. Stop lusting over stuff. THAT is how you stop participating.
It sounds like this is modelled after the SETI@home project (which I think evolved into BOINC?), though maybe in reverse
Berkeley:
Hello, world, you're wasting CPU cycles, do you mind if we use them?
Google:
We've got a bunch of underutilized CPUs. Hello, World, how do you want to use them?
I suspect the Google model would work better for data that can't be broken into parallel tasks as easily, but overall it sounds like both approaches are designed for similar things.
I've had the same experience. I don't mind tasteful, appropriate ads. I recognize that they are a source of revenue for website operators, and thus potentially lower costs to me. I hadn't even heard of adblock until I started running into websites that would crash and hang at the point of loading the ad and some others were brought to a crawl, and now ABP just blocks everything by default. The advertises burned themselves.
A few websites have presented "Please unblock ads on our site" pop-ups, and as long as the ads don't significantly detract from the experience I'm more than happy to do that.
It's not hard to image that the families thought they had done their fact checking. From the summary: "tens of millions of Internet users have free access to Wikipedia Zero, but cannot afford the data charges to access the rest of the Internet". So a person, who is saving every last bit of money they can (i.e. not paying data charges) gets a flyer that says: "attend our awesome business school", and they "fact check" using the only source easily available to them: Wikipedia. It's easy to critisize them from our priveledge position in the west, with dozens, if not thousands of independent sources freely and easily available to us, but the situation is different elsewhere.
I miss the days when there were maybe two classes (eg the original pentium 1 through 4 vs celeron) of chip running with a few different speeds each. Now it's as if they want to make it as complicated as possible with an overabundance of options. X3 X5 X7 is at least some attempt at simplification for those that don't have days to spend poring over all the options and combinations of options currently available.
I used to think that vertical was better, but I've found I've just adapted my usage habits. Now I just use the horizontal layout to tile content side by side. Sometimes when coding I'll have two views of the same file side by side. On one I'll be coding, and I'll use the other view to scroll and jump around for context. Now that I've gotten used to this, I couldn't imagine using vertical, but I'm sure I'd also adapt and get used to it.
I've also heard that the human visual system (including neck motion) is adapted for horizontal field of view. I.e. Stuff our ancestors needed to worry about (food, predators) would typically come from somewhere along the horizon (L-R) but not necessary above and below. Don't have reference. Sorry.
I'll agree. The key is polite, assertive escalation. If you aren't making progress, a few iterations of a polite, "You seem to have done all you can do, but I'm still not happy, can I please speak to your supervisor" has generally gotten me to a reasonable solution, and even to the president of HP once. Always ask for a case number or the name of who you are talking to. Helps for follow up and lets them know that you know what you are doing. Emails generally are the worst form of communication for this (too easily ignored or misinterpreted), but sometimes are your only alternative.
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I recently tried selling a generic brand, unused toner cartridge for an HP printer I no longer owned on the classifieds site kijiji. It was taken down within a day for a "Verified Rights Owner (VeRO)" complaint. In no point in the add did I try to pass it off as a genuine HP cartridge, and the picture I used to post it certainly made clear who's sticker it had on it. I did mention it was for HP printers, which I seemed relevant. I tried pushing back, but was told that any reference to "HP" would result in take down. I guess I'm back to boycotting HP.
Are there any printer manufacturers that aren't evil?
Is it any surprise that a printer started RMS on his holy crusade? Too bad it seems we are losing that that battle so completely.
So some idiot bends his car because he was driving too fast. He is inconvenienced, insurance premiums go up, is late for work, etc, and just maybe learns a valuable lesson about driving defensively, all without endangering anyone else's life. Care to explain what the downside is?
I like you books analogy. It helps clear up what the intended meaning is.
Arguing the semantics of it, though, distracts from the real issue. It's all well and good to understand what the writers of the amendment meant, and to understand why they wrote it when they wrote it. The appropriate question should be: Is it still relevant today? Is it still serving its intended purpose. It was amended into the constitution. It can be amended out. It was not an infallible law handed down by God.
Today, the free and easy access to guns granted by that amendment is responsible for many times more lost innocent lives than it is preventing. Are the benefits of that freedom really worth all those lost lives? Is this what the writers really wanted?
To continue your analogy, what would be the proper recourse if people started using those books for something other than their intended purpose? If a bunch of teenagers started throwing their textbooks at each other in a classroom, the appropriate recourse is to confiscate their textbooks, not to blindly follow the constitution.
There's more to it than that. In most jurisdictions the taxi companies have been subject to more rigorous (i.e. expensive) standards than Uber has been following. For example, the taxi companies are regulated as to what what cars can be driven, the quality and inspection of those cars, insurance level, background checks, fee control, artificial scarcity of operating licenses (eg New York Taxi medallions) etc. All of these add to the cost of operating a conventional taxi business, and are things that Uber has been ignoring under its completely bogus "we are not a taxi company" claim. I am glad Uber is coming in to shake things up because a number of the above are simply there to protect a monopoly or outdated business model and desperately need revision. BUT Uber IS (or at least in just about every meaningful way behaves as) a a taxi company that is simply ignoring the regulations and is thus undercutting the competition and this is fundamentally not fair either.
Are you trying to demonstrate how much of a "consumer" you are? Your Android 2.2 likely does everything it did back when you thought it was all cool and new. Now you're lusting over new stuff just because it is new stuff (HW, SW, same thing). Buy quality, fix it when it breaks, keep it forever, and above all else, learn to enjoy what you have. Stop lusting over stuff. THAT is how you stop participating.
It sounds like this is modelled after the SETI@home project (which I think evolved into BOINC?), though maybe in reverse
Berkeley: Hello, world, you're wasting CPU cycles, do you mind if we use them?
Google: We've got a bunch of underutilized CPUs. Hello, World, how do you want to use them?
I suspect the Google model would work better for data that can't be broken into parallel tasks as easily, but overall it sounds like both approaches are designed for similar things.
I've had the same experience. I don't mind tasteful, appropriate ads. I recognize that they are a source of revenue for website operators, and thus potentially lower costs to me. I hadn't even heard of adblock until I started running into websites that would crash and hang at the point of loading the ad and some others were brought to a crawl, and now ABP just blocks everything by default. The advertises burned themselves. A few websites have presented "Please unblock ads on our site" pop-ups, and as long as the ads don't significantly detract from the experience I'm more than happy to do that.
It's not hard to image that the families thought they had done their fact checking. From the summary: "tens of millions of Internet users have free access to Wikipedia Zero, but cannot afford the data charges to access the rest of the Internet". So a person, who is saving every last bit of money they can (i.e. not paying data charges) gets a flyer that says: "attend our awesome business school", and they "fact check" using the only source easily available to them: Wikipedia. It's easy to critisize them from our priveledge position in the west, with dozens, if not thousands of independent sources freely and easily available to us, but the situation is different elsewhere.
I miss the days when there were maybe two classes (eg the original pentium 1 through 4 vs celeron) of chip running with a few different speeds each. Now it's as if they want to make it as complicated as possible with an overabundance of options. X3 X5 X7 is at least some attempt at simplification for those that don't have days to spend poring over all the options and combinations of options currently available.
I used to think that vertical was better, but I've found I've just adapted my usage habits. Now I just use the horizontal layout to tile content side by side. Sometimes when coding I'll have two views of the same file side by side. On one I'll be coding, and I'll use the other view to scroll and jump around for context. Now that I've gotten used to this, I couldn't imagine using vertical, but I'm sure I'd also adapt and get used to it. I've also heard that the human visual system (including neck motion) is adapted for horizontal field of view. I.e. Stuff our ancestors needed to worry about (food, predators) would typically come from somewhere along the horizon (L-R) but not necessary above and below. Don't have reference. Sorry.
I'll agree. The key is polite, assertive escalation. If you aren't making progress, a few iterations of a polite, "You seem to have done all you can do, but I'm still not happy, can I please speak to your supervisor" has generally gotten me to a reasonable solution, and even to the president of HP once. Always ask for a case number or the name of who you are talking to. Helps for follow up and lets them know that you know what you are doing. Emails generally are the worst form of communication for this (too easily ignored or misinterpreted), but sometimes are your only alternative.