He does make a good point though. Holding the corporation liable for outright criminal action, but not the individuals who actually give the order, means there is little reason not to take the risk and break the law. If the executive doesn't get caught, they make a ton of money for the company and can enjoy the resulting bonuses and personal wealth. If they do get caught, no big deal - the company pays a fine (which is often less than the money gained by the criminal action) and they carry on working.
It also creates the sort of class difference that fuels resentment: The lower-income groups see how easily those with wealth and corporate connections can get away with actions that the ordinary person would be jailed for, and this leads to a lot of "fight the corporations!" and "We are the ninety-nine percent!" protests.
I am not sure quite what the solution for this is, but the current approach is far from ideal.
There is a lot of pressure for laptops to be as thin and light as possible - it's one of the main factors people take into consideration when choosing a laptop. Just as in phones, compromises are made to reduce thickness and weight. Removable components take up more space, so they have to go.
So, if you want to be sure you can walk down the street safely, you have to be rich enough to buy bodyguards?
You can't trust in self-defense to protect you from all criminals. That just makes sure the criminals will shoot you in the back. And what about property? No matter how good you are at defending yourself, you can't defend your home while you are not in it. Without some form of police force, the only people who can be sure of the security of their house are those who can afford a guard. Everyone else gets robbed blind.
I suppose you could get together with some of your neighbors and set up some sort of collective arrangement where everybody agrees on rules for appropriate behaviour and collectively uses force to make sure that outsiders do not violate these agreements, but that that point you've basically reinvented government.
Erotic photography is also unprofitable. You can't compete with the internet, which has a lot more such photos and a near-zero distribution cost. Playboy today is a shadow of what it was. 800,000 issues in 2015, down from a peak of 7,100,000. Much of their income comes from just licensing out their logo.
There is a tremendous variety in pornography. If a person keeps looking at the porn that devalues women, it is because that is the sort of porn they like and seek out.
The SJW faction may not be big in number, but they are concentrated in the student population, so they wield a lot of influence in the way universities are run.
For the same reason every other company that uses Apple does so: We have certain employees with authority and an insistence that they really need Apple and nothing else will do.
It's worse than that. At work, we use trolleys for charging macbooks. Each trolley has fifteen slots, and fifteen magsafe cables coming from a common power supply.
Except that there is no way to get those cables.
Apple holds the patent. They make exactly as many connectors as they do chargers. They don't sell the connectors or cables separately. They will not allow anyone else to manufacture them. So on every one of those trolleys, for every one of those fifteen bays, we had to sacrifice an Apple charger. We chopped off the connector and had it incorporated into the trolley, and threw the charger body itsself away.
And every time a connector needs replacing - which happens a lot, see above post on how awful magsafe connectors are from a durabiity standpoint - we have to buy another expensive charger, chop off the connector, and throw the rest away.
You can get magsafe connectors on eBay, which I assume come from some knock-off-shop in China who are happily ignoring the patent. Supply is erratic, and we can't use them because they don't come from a known trustworthy supplier.
"Case in point: MacBook Pro chargers have been known to suffer from frayed cables due to Apple's insistence on a design that lacks adequate strain relief."
And their choice of an awful insulation plastic that just falls apart after a year.
And an awful connector design in which the positive wire is pressed tight against a razor-sharp edge of a grounded metal sheet, relying only on that ineffective strain relief to prevent it cutting through the insulation.
As someone who spent half a day with a soldering iron and a magnifying eyepiece last weekend reattaching magsafe connectors, then covering some in hot-glue to keep the cables coming out again, I can say that the magsafe connectors are awful things from a construction and durability standpoint. Inadequate strain relief, poor materials, and practically no spacing between positive and negative at all. I've had to fix a lot of them, and many I can't fix because the wires actually did tug enough to short out and the inside is now a blob of soot and goo.
No, anarchy is the state of everyone being their own ruler: If someone rules they have the right to shoot you, or rob your house, or burn it down because you offended them somehow, then there is nothing to stop them. If you want to see anarchy in action, look at Somalia and see what happens without some form of government. Even under the most brutal dictatorships the people have gotten to enjoy some form of stability.
It used to be a lack of service issue. When piracy first florished, it was a time when you just could not get very much popular media online legitimately. It took four years between the launch of Napster, the first practical p2p file sharing network, and the iTunes store. Even then the early music purchasing services were crippled with DRM that made it very difficult to actually use your purchase, limiting customers to listening only on one PC and the mobile device the store supported. It wasn't until 2009, ten years after Napster, that the labels finally allowed the iTunes store to go DRM-free.
A great many pirates who got into it back then have now been lured away by the convenience of Netflix, iTunes and Steam. Others continue because piracy is about more than free stuff now - it's a hobby, a community, and a political cause.
I see a bunch of angry SJWs fighting a bunch of angry alt-right conspiracy theorists. American politics has become the most entertaining thing on television. The extremes dominate, the media shines a spotlight on them to maximise ratings, and serious debate is crushed in between them.
Every form of social media service from the smallest blogging site up has some form of vague clause like that. It's a basic legal CYA: Make sure you have a way to get rid of anyone who threatens the respectability of the service. Twitter wants to be known as a place where you can advertise your stuff and draw in custom, not as Troll Central.
Slashdot Mirror
That old paradigm is called 'economy of scale' and it works very well in most industries.
As an added bonus, you can boast that your lab is home to what may be the greatest temperature gradient in the entire universe.
No, but we have enough to last a fairly reasonable amount of time. Couple billion years or so, before the sun goes boom.
He does make a good point though. Holding the corporation liable for outright criminal action, but not the individuals who actually give the order, means there is little reason not to take the risk and break the law. If the executive doesn't get caught, they make a ton of money for the company and can enjoy the resulting bonuses and personal wealth. If they do get caught, no big deal - the company pays a fine (which is often less than the money gained by the criminal action) and they carry on working.
It also creates the sort of class difference that fuels resentment: The lower-income groups see how easily those with wealth and corporate connections can get away with actions that the ordinary person would be jailed for, and this leads to a lot of "fight the corporations!" and "We are the ninety-nine percent!" protests.
I am not sure quite what the solution for this is, but the current approach is far from ideal.
There is a lot of pressure for laptops to be as thin and light as possible - it's one of the main factors people take into consideration when choosing a laptop. Just as in phones, compromises are made to reduce thickness and weight. Removable components take up more space, so they have to go.
Or your user finds some way to enable it so they can watch for Facebook posts.
There is another difference too: The spotify users are willing to pay.
So what happens when the members of your service provider are in conflict with the members of another service provider?
Your utopia is nothing but a simple tribal society. You've already reinvented government, and you're close to reinventing war.
To quote the ministerial adviser from a well-known British poltical satire:
"Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, this must be done."
I routinely print pieces of laptops for my workplace. We are always losing hinge caps and dock covers.
So, if you want to be sure you can walk down the street safely, you have to be rich enough to buy bodyguards?
You can't trust in self-defense to protect you from all criminals. That just makes sure the criminals will shoot you in the back. And what about property? No matter how good you are at defending yourself, you can't defend your home while you are not in it. Without some form of police force, the only people who can be sure of the security of their house are those who can afford a guard. Everyone else gets robbed blind.
I suppose you could get together with some of your neighbors and set up some sort of collective arrangement where everybody agrees on rules for appropriate behaviour and collectively uses force to make sure that outsiders do not violate these agreements, but that that point you've basically reinvented government.
Erotic photography is also unprofitable. You can't compete with the internet, which has a lot more such photos and a near-zero distribution cost. Playboy today is a shadow of what it was. 800,000 issues in 2015, down from a peak of 7,100,000. Much of their income comes from just licensing out their logo.
There is a tremendous variety in pornography. If a person keeps looking at the porn that devalues women, it is because that is the sort of porn they like and seek out.
The SJW faction may not be big in number, but they are concentrated in the student population, so they wield a lot of influence in the way universities are run.
The Integral Trees/The Smoke Ring, Larry Niven.
They fit on power strips here fine. I'm guessing it depends on the spacing of the strip and the national design of the socket.
How would that help? The magsafe connectors are still going to fail, and the charger would still need replacing.
For the same reason every other company that uses Apple does so: We have certain employees with authority and an insistence that they really need Apple and nothing else will do.
It's worse than that. At work, we use trolleys for charging macbooks. Each trolley has fifteen slots, and fifteen magsafe cables coming from a common power supply.
Except that there is no way to get those cables.
Apple holds the patent. They make exactly as many connectors as they do chargers. They don't sell the connectors or cables separately. They will not allow anyone else to manufacture them. So on every one of those trolleys, for every one of those fifteen bays, we had to sacrifice an Apple charger. We chopped off the connector and had it incorporated into the trolley, and threw the charger body itsself away.
And every time a connector needs replacing - which happens a lot, see above post on how awful magsafe connectors are from a durabiity standpoint - we have to buy another expensive charger, chop off the connector, and throw the rest away.
You can get magsafe connectors on eBay, which I assume come from some knock-off-shop in China who are happily ignoring the patent. Supply is erratic, and we can't use them because they don't come from a known trustworthy supplier.
The Apple brand also demands a premium.
If you are a counterfeiter, it makes perfect sense to make your knock-off look like an Apple product. You can charge twice as much for it.
"Case in point: MacBook Pro chargers have been known to suffer from frayed cables due to Apple's insistence on a design that lacks adequate strain relief."
And their choice of an awful insulation plastic that just falls apart after a year.
And an awful connector design in which the positive wire is pressed tight against a razor-sharp edge of a grounded metal sheet, relying only on that ineffective strain relief to prevent it cutting through the insulation.
As someone who spent half a day with a soldering iron and a magnifying eyepiece last weekend reattaching magsafe connectors, then covering some in hot-glue to keep the cables coming out again, I can say that the magsafe connectors are awful things from a construction and durability standpoint. Inadequate strain relief, poor materials, and practically no spacing between positive and negative at all. I've had to fix a lot of them, and many I can't fix because the wires actually did tug enough to short out and the inside is now a blob of soot and goo.
No, anarchy is the state of everyone being their own ruler: If someone rules they have the right to shoot you, or rob your house, or burn it down because you offended them somehow, then there is nothing to stop them. If you want to see anarchy in action, look at Somalia and see what happens without some form of government. Even under the most brutal dictatorships the people have gotten to enjoy some form of stability.
It used to be a lack of service issue. When piracy first florished, it was a time when you just could not get very much popular media online legitimately. It took four years between the launch of Napster, the first practical p2p file sharing network, and the iTunes store. Even then the early music purchasing services were crippled with DRM that made it very difficult to actually use your purchase, limiting customers to listening only on one PC and the mobile device the store supported. It wasn't until 2009, ten years after Napster, that the labels finally allowed the iTunes store to go DRM-free.
A great many pirates who got into it back then have now been lured away by the convenience of Netflix, iTunes and Steam. Others continue because piracy is about more than free stuff now - it's a hobby, a community, and a political cause.
I see a bunch of angry SJWs fighting a bunch of angry alt-right conspiracy theorists. American politics has become the most entertaining thing on television. The extremes dominate, the media shines a spotlight on them to maximise ratings, and serious debate is crushed in between them.
Every form of social media service from the smallest blogging site up has some form of vague clause like that. It's a basic legal CYA: Make sure you have a way to get rid of anyone who threatens the respectability of the service. Twitter wants to be known as a place where you can advertise your stuff and draw in custom, not as Troll Central.