This whole chain of argument is specious, at best.
The obvious solution to playing Blu-Ray movies on Linux is not to bother trying to do so in the first place: At no point has a Linux distribution ever proclaimed "Hey, guys: We play Blu-Ray!!!!"
It is plainly unsupported. And anyone who understands even a small bit about the DRM in place on Blu-Ray can also understand that Linux (in any completely open-source incarnation) isn't likely to gain proper support for it any time soon.
The conclusion of this argument is, thus, one of the following:
1. Forget Blu-Ray (and likely forget high-def Hollywood movies altogether). Vote with your wallet!!! (or something.) 2. Forget Linux (oh noes!!!) and run something that can actually deal with the format 3. Steal it. 4. Buy hardware that can play it natively. 5. Rip it to a more compatible format (Anydvd both kills Blu-Ray DRM and runs under Wine, last I checked).
Myself, I've chosen #4: Buy suitable hardware. My PS3 plays Blu-Ray just fine in the living room, and so does the boy's Blu-Ray machine in his bedroom. I can't play Blu-Ray directly on any of the PCs in the house (irrespective of OS, I don't have the hardware), but I've never found myself missing that functionality....
If I did miss that functionality, and I was a Linux devotee (I'm not a devotee to any particular OS), I'd probably just extend option 4, buy a random cheap Blu-Ray player, and plug it into my second monitor's HDMI+HDCP port for 1080p fun. Or, if I was feeling really anxious, I'd just temporarily move one of those two players to the office and play the movie in native 1080p.
Seriously: I have my collection of stuff at home available from wherever, however, via Subsonic.
It works well enough for pocket-sized video (and works great for audio), and it's free. I watched an episode of Dirty Jobs the other day with this using 3G connection on my Droid
That said, I also pay for Netflix, and my family watches a ton of streaming stuff that I myself would never bother with putting on the network.
Comparing a bunch of local storage (even if you can get to it remotely) to Netflix is like comparing a large, populated bookshelf at home with the local library. Neither is going to have everything you might ever want, and they serve rather different purposes.
I've been using a Sandisk Cruzer Micro on my keychain for about five years*. It just hangs there, all bunched up with the myriad of other stuff on my keychain, hanging from the carabiner on my belt loop by nothing more than a small split ring.
It works fine.
It fell off once (it was later returned): The failure was not of the housing, but of the split ring, which got stretched/opened up as I was loading up a heavy box full of batteries for work. It now has a heavier split ring.
It's pretty well beat up, all scarred and ugly and covered in brass that has rubbed off of the keys next to it, but it doesn't seem to care.
They don't make them like this anymore.
*: Five years, more or less. At some point during that period, I upgraded from it from 2GB to 8GB.
I borrowed a 9600 bps account on a local VAX/VMS machine for years before the Internet was popular enough for anyone to actually bother letting me buy access. I used that to connect to io.com in Texas, who were selling FreeBSD shell accounts (with an awesome Netapps backend) and Usenet for $10/month.
The VMS environment was pretty baren, and the combination was almost 8-bit clean. I had my share of fun keeping escape characters from ruining things.
The only REXX scripting I've ever done was a nifty little kit which fingered the terminal servers at a local ISP, and would deduce the current IP address of a given username. After that it would introduce a healthy dose of ping -f, eventually slowing to the point that the PPP session itself would timeout and it would hang up.
Always was amusing that their terminal servers were so broken that this was possible to do, while my own dialup connection at another ISP never batted an eye at the abuse while it shoved packets their way.
I used to be able to tell which user was about to sign into my board by listening to the connect tones from the modem.
The v.32bis Supra I had back then could be tweaked pretty severely. I remember setting the DTMF tone and inter-digit durations to be so short that they were just barely recognized by Ameritech's switch, with busy detection so short that it would trigger after just a few milliseconds. Redial delay was just long enough to reset the switch, and then it'd rinse and repeat until something answered.
It was so perfectly fast that, several times, I was able to catch another sysop trying to call out from his own modem: In the short space between their own redial attempts, I'd duck right in. Their modem would pick up the line to dial out, before it recognized that the line was already ringing.
I'd get a moment of silence on my end instead of a blip of a busy signal, which was instantly recognizable due to the change in cadence. A quick ATX3DT later, and they'd be connected to my Telemate session instead of whoever they thought they were calling.
I'd then dump the hijacked connection into my BBS's login screen. Much confusion ensued on their part.
I had more fun with computers back then. Nowadays, my quad-core desktop mostly sits idle unless I'm reading Slashdot, and I'm far less impressed with the speed of my 12Mbps VDSL circuit today than I was with v.32bis back in the day...
I think the main problem with floppies, these days, is that the hardware to read them is old, dirty, and/or broken.
On PCs, in particular, the floppy drives served mostly as dust collectors that filtered the incoming air. A good cleaning (as in, take it apart and clean it properly) can fix up part of that, if there aren't other issues (alignment, old capacitors, etc).
For drives that haven't seen eons of powered-on dust-catching duty, things work surprisingly well. I keep a USB 3.5" drive handy, just in case, and it's worked fine reading ancient disks at least several times*.
I'd expect a 1541, in good running order, to do just as well.
*: Even though I'm properly-equipped, I still seldom find a use for floppies. Once every year or two, at most.
One other non-discount reason to give them your e-mail and use the Loyalty Card is that if an item is recalled they can track who bought the item and send them an e-mail stating what was recalled, the reason it was recalled, and what to do with the item to safely fix it or discard it or return it for a refund.
Yeah, the recall stuff is nice. Sometimes.
I bought some ground beef from Kroger using the card. I cooked it and ate it. It was yummy.
A couple of weeks later, I bought something else from Kroger, and again used my card. The machine printed an extra-long receipt, with recall notification on the beef that I'd bought before.
The instructions said to throw it away, or either return the tainted goods or the original receipt for a refund.
I, of course, already ate the stuff, and tossed the receipt (who actually keeps receipts for groceries?). So there was no option for me to get my money back, EVEN THOUGH THEY ALREADY KNEW THAT I BOUGHT IT.
I don't buy anything at Kroger, anymore. That's just one of the reasons why. Their policies are bad, their employees are idiots, their prices aren't all that great, their service is opposite of helpful, and I've found more expired and just plain bad food on their shelves than I have anywhere else. There's plenty of cheaper, better, friendlier, cleaner places with fresher food around here, and none of them have a loyalty card.
Ever since I started using NoScript on/., things have been fine.
I currently have no complaints about the new interface, because I don't ever see it.
Whether the behavior you describe is a feature, a bug, or both, when I'm moderating (and for whatever reason, it seems I usually have mod points) I do generally read at -1, or at least make sure I've read the whole thread first. It just makes good sense to do so.
I have no opinion on whether or not folks should be confusingly forced into doing so.
I don't know, the Top Gear review of the Veyron Super Sport made me want to buy one... Where'd I leave that semi full of cash, again?
*nod*
Likewise, I can think of a few Playboy models that I wouldn't mind buying just to have around.
Alas, there is no Veyron in the driveway, and no absurdly pretty girl locked away in the closet. Just my usual collection of much-more-affordable cars, and my wife.:)
I wish they would offer a simple option to pay with money instead and gave a binding guarantee of absolutely no advertising, data mining, sharing or storage of log info beyond the barest minimum required for technical (troubleshooting, et al) reasons, like 7 days or so.
I'd gladly pay 50+ bucks/year for something like that with
Perhaps you and your data are already worth more than "50+ bucks/year."
If you do not have an existing router, then we will ask you to install the Netgear WNR3500L as you would with any other router.
If you have a cable/DSL modem and an existing separate router we will ask you to replace it with the Netgear WNR3500L.
If you cannot replace your existing router (due to it being an integrated DSL/cable modem and router, for example), then we will ask you to install the Netgear WNR3500L behind your existing router and reconnect all of your devices to the Netgear WNR3500L (both wired and wireless).
AT&T U-Verse customers will be asked to connect the Netgear WNR3500L to their U-Verse gateway and do nothing further.
For U-Verse, the instructions don't let their magic router do any meaningfully-invasive data tracking*, as long as the user already has their own router.
The reason the instructions are different for U-Verse is likely because is easy/trivial to glean some statistic information from a U-Verse gateway without a password, so perhaps that's good enough for them to determine when to run their tests. Plus, every U-Verse customer has the same software interface on their gateway -- it's completely homogenous and predictable.
Meanwhile, I don't use the gateway as a firewall, and consider the network at that point to be completely untrusted anyway. (I use it when troubleshooting crapfested Windows boxes, and for the Wii, and for anything else that I want to have Internet access but which has no business on my private network.)
Based on this, I signed up. It can sit beside my Tomato-running WRT54GL and do its thing -- no problem. I've got plenty of bandwidth to spare, and I doubt this program uses very much at all.
When it's done, I'll recycle the box into something more useful. The WRT54GL has been seeming a bit RAM and CPU starved, lately, and this should fix that up neatly....plus the USB port does sound like it has a few uses.
(*: Without ugly hacks like ARP poisoning/table overflows and such that are exceedingly unlikely to be used in this sort of application.)
My intuition says that it doesn't matter who is "right."
Top Gear is a comedy show full that happens to be full of car porn. And that is exactly why I watch it -- not because it is technical and correct, but because it is hilarious and awesome.
Using its "reviews" to make decisions about buying specific cars is rather like using Playboy to make decisions about buying specific girls.
Anyone who finds themselves taking this show at all seriously really needs to consider taking their bullshit detector in for adjustment.
Better to get rid of both personal income taxes, and business taxes.
It'll mean a bit of an increase in the sales tax that folks pay (someone's gotta keep the wheels turning, and it probably should be the constituents), but afterward we'll never ever see another story like this again, the IRS will become deprecated, and GE will be able to get rid of 975 bean counters who they will no longer need around to game a tax system because that system won't exist.
I said n*1, but I misspoke -- that's completely wrong. More like n=1, per program
It's just multicast. The AT&T head-end sends 1 stream per active channel and any number of folks on that node can watch that stream without using any additional bandwidth between the node and the head-end. (There's certainly some overhead in setting these multicast connections up, but I'm ignoring that because it is positively dwarfed by 1080i video...)
Meanwhile, the path from the node to the local head-end is all new fiber, and presumably is not constrained by bandwidth at all. So, yeah: In practical terms, as many folks can watch TV at one time as they want, for as long as they want, for no additional cost on AT&T's part. It's not too far off in terms of efficiency from conventional broadcast, or analog cable TV networks, despite being wrapped inside of IP packets.
Sorry for the confusion. I blame the vodka. =)
And, as I alluded to, U-Verse supports 4 streams per house. When I had their TV service, this meant that I could record 4 things at once while watching a fifth one from the DVR. Even if I kept this habit going 24/7 (which is possible, but difficult to schedule....) it wouldn't really cost them anything.
It worked OK, but between the expense and the horrible quality on my particular TV with standard-def programming, I decided that it wasn't worth paying for anymore. (High-def was very pretty, but that's a different story altogether...)
I get my TV from the local PBS (think BBC, only more limited) affiliate using a simple antenna I built myself, and either buy or torrent whatever else we want to see.
Meanwhile, if you're still listening: What do you mean when you say "moving to another country that doubles everything on TV"? I have no idea what that means, but it sounds like something I'd hate myself.
Ol' Roy does what I want it to do better than every other kind of dog food that I've tried, so that's what I buy. If Iams or Eukanuba or Science Diet or $special_gourmet_brand were to offer better performance for the parameters that I care about (fewer farts and faster-decomposing shit), I'd buy that instead.
They don't, though -- and I've tried a *lot* of different brands.
In particular I'd love to feed my dog Iams: It's made in a factory not far from here and is clearly the most responsible dog food I can get from the "Buy Local" standpoint, but it doesn't do what I want, so I don't buy Iams. (Perhaps more to the point, it does what I don't want: With Iams, the dog farts noisily and stinkily damn near every time she sits down. It is, frankly, hilarious to watch. But the smell that hangs around afterward leaves a lot to be desired...)
If other companies want me to buy their stuff instead, they first need to offer a product that I actually want to be buying.
If my buying habits fuck over a farmer or a factory worker or a truck driver or whoever, then that's really not my fault. They're the ones producing/delivering stuff that I do not want to buy, and are simply fucking over themselves by doing so. If they want my business, they must first begin by offering a product that I want to buy.
But, again (and again and again), they don't.
I don't mind paying extra for a superior product -- in fact, I always prefer to buy the best product for my needs, whatever they might be, as long as it is within my means to do so (and I can certainly afford to spend a LOT more on dog food than I do). But I'm not going to buy an inferior product if I can do anything to avoid it, even if it is more socially responsible for me to do so, especially if I have to endure more shit-smelling dog farts because of it.
I only reward companies that, in my opinion, offer good products with my business.
Slashdot Mirror
Having seen my share of people give up on fun as they get older, I'm afraid that I'm not "pretty sure" of anything.
Hence, the question.
So have you given up on fun or moved onto other endeavors that you consider fun?
Feh.
This whole chain of argument is specious, at best.
The obvious solution to playing Blu-Ray movies on Linux is not to bother trying to do so in the first place: At no point has a Linux distribution ever proclaimed "Hey, guys: We play Blu-Ray!!!!"
It is plainly unsupported. And anyone who understands even a small bit about the DRM in place on Blu-Ray can also understand that Linux (in any completely open-source incarnation) isn't likely to gain proper support for it any time soon.
The conclusion of this argument is, thus, one of the following:
1. Forget Blu-Ray (and likely forget high-def Hollywood movies altogether). Vote with your wallet!!! (or something.)
2. Forget Linux (oh noes!!!) and run something that can actually deal with the format
3. Steal it.
4. Buy hardware that can play it natively.
5. Rip it to a more compatible format (Anydvd both kills Blu-Ray DRM and runs under Wine, last I checked).
Myself, I've chosen #4: Buy suitable hardware. My PS3 plays Blu-Ray just fine in the living room, and so does the boy's Blu-Ray machine in his bedroom. I can't play Blu-Ray directly on any of the PCs in the house (irrespective of OS, I don't have the hardware), but I've never found myself missing that functionality....
If I did miss that functionality, and I was a Linux devotee (I'm not a devotee to any particular OS), I'd probably just extend option 4, buy a random cheap Blu-Ray player, and plug it into my second monitor's HDMI+HDCP port for 1080p fun. Or, if I was feeling really anxious, I'd just temporarily move one of those two players to the office and play the movie in native 1080p.
*shrug*
Define "course," pseudo-pedant.
Disposable cameras smaller than a grain of "course salt" have been commonly available for decades.
[/pedantic]
Seriously: I have my collection of stuff at home available from wherever, however, via Subsonic.
It works well enough for pocket-sized video (and works great for audio), and it's free. I watched an episode of Dirty Jobs the other day with this using 3G connection on my Droid
That said, I also pay for Netflix, and my family watches a ton of streaming stuff that I myself would never bother with putting on the network.
Comparing a bunch of local storage (even if you can get to it remotely) to Netflix is like comparing a large, populated bookshelf at home with the local library. Neither is going to have everything you might ever want, and they serve rather different purposes.
I've been using a Sandisk Cruzer Micro on my keychain for about five years*. It just hangs there, all bunched up with the myriad of other stuff on my keychain, hanging from the carabiner on my belt loop by nothing more than a small split ring.
It works fine.
It fell off once (it was later returned): The failure was not of the housing, but of the split ring, which got stretched/opened up as I was loading up a heavy box full of batteries for work. It now has a heavier split ring.
It's pretty well beat up, all scarred and ugly and covered in brass that has rubbed off of the keys next to it, but it doesn't seem to care.
They don't make them like this anymore.
*: Five years, more or less. At some point during that period, I upgraded from it from 2GB to 8GB.
Heh.
I borrowed a 9600 bps account on a local VAX/VMS machine for years before the Internet was popular enough for anyone to actually bother letting me buy access. I used that to connect to io.com in Texas, who were selling FreeBSD shell accounts (with an awesome Netapps backend) and Usenet for $10/month.
The VMS environment was pretty baren, and the combination was almost 8-bit clean. I had my share of fun keeping escape characters from ruining things.
The only REXX scripting I've ever done was a nifty little kit which fingered the terminal servers at a local ISP, and would deduce the current IP address of a given username. After that it would introduce a healthy dose of ping -f, eventually slowing to the point that the PPP session itself would timeout and it would hang up.
Always was amusing that their terminal servers were so broken that this was possible to do, while my own dialup connection at another ISP never batted an eye at the abuse while it shoved packets their way.
Ah well. I'm too old for that shit, now. ;)
I used to be able to tell which user was about to sign into my board by listening to the connect tones from the modem.
The v.32bis Supra I had back then could be tweaked pretty severely. I remember setting the DTMF tone and inter-digit durations to be so short that they were just barely recognized by Ameritech's switch, with busy detection so short that it would trigger after just a few milliseconds. Redial delay was just long enough to reset the switch, and then it'd rinse and repeat until something answered.
It was so perfectly fast that, several times, I was able to catch another sysop trying to call out from his own modem: In the short space between their own redial attempts, I'd duck right in. Their modem would pick up the line to dial out, before it recognized that the line was already ringing.
I'd get a moment of silence on my end instead of a blip of a busy signal, which was instantly recognizable due to the change in cadence. A quick ATX3DT later, and they'd be connected to my Telemate session instead of whoever they thought they were calling.
I'd then dump the hijacked connection into my BBS's login screen. Much confusion ensued on their part.
I had more fun with computers back then. Nowadays, my quad-core desktop mostly sits idle unless I'm reading Slashdot, and I'm far less impressed with the speed of my 12Mbps VDSL circuit today than I was with v.32bis back in the day...
I think the main problem with floppies, these days, is that the hardware to read them is old, dirty, and/or broken.
On PCs, in particular, the floppy drives served mostly as dust collectors that filtered the incoming air. A good cleaning (as in, take it apart and clean it properly) can fix up part of that, if there aren't other issues (alignment, old capacitors, etc).
For drives that haven't seen eons of powered-on dust-catching duty, things work surprisingly well. I keep a USB 3.5" drive handy, just in case, and it's worked fine reading ancient disks at least several times*.
I'd expect a 1541, in good running order, to do just as well.
*: Even though I'm properly-equipped, I still seldom find a use for floppies. Once every year or two, at most.
That's a strange world you live in.
Where do I sign up to become a member?
Which part of "dupe" do you not fully understand?
Yeah, the recall stuff is nice. Sometimes.
I bought some ground beef from Kroger using the card. I cooked it and ate it. It was yummy.
A couple of weeks later, I bought something else from Kroger, and again used my card. The machine printed an extra-long receipt, with recall notification on the beef that I'd bought before.
The instructions said to throw it away, or either return the tainted goods or the original receipt for a refund.
I, of course, already ate the stuff, and tossed the receipt (who actually keeps receipts for groceries?). So there was no option for me to get my money back, EVEN THOUGH THEY ALREADY KNEW THAT I BOUGHT IT.
I don't buy anything at Kroger, anymore. That's just one of the reasons why. Their policies are bad, their employees are idiots, their prices aren't all that great, their service is opposite of helpful, and I've found more expired and just plain bad food on their shelves than I have anywhere else. There's plenty of cheaper, better, friendlier, cleaner places with fresher food around here, and none of them have a loyalty card.
Ever since I started using NoScript on /., things have been fine.
I currently have no complaints about the new interface, because I don't ever see it.
Whether the behavior you describe is a feature, a bug, or both, when I'm moderating (and for whatever reason, it seems I usually have mod points) I do generally read at -1, or at least make sure I've read the whole thread first. It just makes good sense to do so.
I have no opinion on whether or not folks should be confusingly forced into doing so.
Don't forget Fat Stig, or Black Stig.
There's been a few Stigs popping in and out. But of the regular Stigs, there are but two: The first one, and the other one.
And when the first Stig got fired/quit/whatever, there was no Stig until a replacement Stig was found.
Meanwhile Other Stig's driving style seems rather different from First Stig, while they're both apparently rather consistent with themselves.
We needn't see their faces to understand that the Stig is consistently the same person (if indeed it is a person) unless otherwise noted.
*nod*
Likewise, I can think of a few Playboy models that I wouldn't mind buying just to have around.
Alas, there is no Veyron in the driveway, and no absurdly pretty girl locked away in the closet. Just my usual collection of much-more-affordable cars, and my wife. :)
Perhaps you and your data are already worth more than "50+ bucks/year."
The instructions:
For U-Verse, the instructions don't let their magic router do any meaningfully-invasive data tracking*, as long as the user already has their own router.
The reason the instructions are different for U-Verse is likely because is easy/trivial to glean some statistic information from a U-Verse gateway without a password, so perhaps that's good enough for them to determine when to run their tests. Plus, every U-Verse customer has the same software interface on their gateway -- it's completely homogenous and predictable.
Meanwhile, I don't use the gateway as a firewall, and consider the network at that point to be completely untrusted anyway. (I use it when troubleshooting crapfested Windows boxes, and for the Wii, and for anything else that I want to have Internet access but which has no business on my private network.)
Based on this, I signed up. It can sit beside my Tomato-running WRT54GL and do its thing -- no problem. I've got plenty of bandwidth to spare, and I doubt this program uses very much at all.
When it's done, I'll recycle the box into something more useful. The WRT54GL has been seeming a bit RAM and CPU starved, lately, and this should fix that up neatly....plus the USB port does sound like it has a few uses.
(*: Without ugly hacks like ARP poisoning/table overflows and such that are exceedingly unlikely to be used in this sort of application.)
My intuition says that it doesn't matter who is "right."
Top Gear is a comedy show full that happens to be full of car porn. And that is exactly why I watch it -- not because it is technical and correct, but because it is hilarious and awesome.
Using its "reviews" to make decisions about buying specific cars is rather like using Playboy to make decisions about buying specific girls.
Anyone who finds themselves taking this show at all seriously really needs to consider taking their bullshit detector in for adjustment.
News flash: We (the people) already pay business taxes in the cost of the goods that we buy.
Second flash: We (the people) already pay for any subsidies that are provided to businesses to attract or retain them.
So I figure (and I know this sounds simple) that we (the people) might as well pay for all of that shit up-front.
Better to get rid of both personal income taxes, and business taxes.
It'll mean a bit of an increase in the sales tax that folks pay (someone's gotta keep the wheels turning, and it probably should be the constituents), but afterward we'll never ever see another story like this again, the IRS will become deprecated, and GE will be able to get rid of 975 bean counters who they will no longer need around to game a tax system because that system won't exist.
All of you fail.
The comment I modded up was part of the previous story. The comment I replied to was beneath this newer dupe.
Context, FTW.
Modded your comment up. Thanks for the reference.
(And they say there's no way to both post and moderate in the same story! Hogwash.)
You misunderstand. It's my fault.
I said n*1, but I misspoke -- that's completely wrong. More like n=1, per program
It's just multicast. The AT&T head-end sends 1 stream per active channel and any number of folks on that node can watch that stream without using any additional bandwidth between the node and the head-end. (There's certainly some overhead in setting these multicast connections up, but I'm ignoring that because it is positively dwarfed by 1080i video...)
Meanwhile, the path from the node to the local head-end is all new fiber, and presumably is not constrained by bandwidth at all. So, yeah: In practical terms, as many folks can watch TV at one time as they want, for as long as they want, for no additional cost on AT&T's part. It's not too far off in terms of efficiency from conventional broadcast, or analog cable TV networks, despite being wrapped inside of IP packets.
Sorry for the confusion. I blame the vodka. =)
And, as I alluded to, U-Verse supports 4 streams per house. When I had their TV service, this meant that I could record 4 things at once while watching a fifth one from the DVR. Even if I kept this habit going 24/7 (which is possible, but difficult to schedule....) it wouldn't really cost them anything.
It worked OK, but between the expense and the horrible quality on my particular TV with standard-def programming, I decided that it wasn't worth paying for anymore. (High-def was very pretty, but that's a different story altogether...)
I get my TV from the local PBS (think BBC, only more limited) affiliate using a simple antenna I built myself, and either buy or torrent whatever else we want to see.
Meanwhile, if you're still listening: What do you mean when you say "moving to another country that doubles everything on TV"? I have no idea what that means, but it sounds like something I'd hate myself.
I think you missed my point:
Ol' Roy does what I want it to do better than every other kind of dog food that I've tried, so that's what I buy. If Iams or Eukanuba or Science Diet or $special_gourmet_brand were to offer better performance for the parameters that I care about (fewer farts and faster-decomposing shit), I'd buy that instead.
They don't, though -- and I've tried a *lot* of different brands.
In particular I'd love to feed my dog Iams: It's made in a factory not far from here and is clearly the most responsible dog food I can get from the "Buy Local" standpoint, but it doesn't do what I want, so I don't buy Iams. (Perhaps more to the point, it does what I don't want: With Iams, the dog farts noisily and stinkily damn near every time she sits down. It is, frankly, hilarious to watch. But the smell that hangs around afterward leaves a lot to be desired...)
If other companies want me to buy their stuff instead, they first need to offer a product that I actually want to be buying.
If my buying habits fuck over a farmer or a factory worker or a truck driver or whoever, then that's really not my fault. They're the ones producing/delivering stuff that I do not want to buy, and are simply fucking over themselves by doing so. If they want my business, they must first begin by offering a product that I want to buy.
But, again (and again and again), they don't.
I don't mind paying extra for a superior product -- in fact, I always prefer to buy the best product for my needs, whatever they might be, as long as it is within my means to do so (and I can certainly afford to spend a LOT more on dog food than I do). But I'm not going to buy an inferior product if I can do anything to avoid it, even if it is more socially responsible for me to do so, especially if I have to endure more shit-smelling dog farts because of it.
I only reward companies that, in my opinion, offer good products with my business.
So should you.