Hardly. In my youth, I bought a new car and changed the oil once. At 26,000 miles, I rebuilt the engine after the bearings failed. Expensive lesson learned.
Not missing the point, this is just not the car for you. This is something a lot of people (including me, formerly) get wrong when decrying a product as a bad idea. Sometimes you're just not the target market.
For me, the 300 mile range is good enough for 99.9% of my trips. A few times a year I have to drive farther than that, and I wouldn't mind renting a car for those times. Then again, I own 4 cars anyway, so it's not really an issue.
Everything Tesla makes is not intended for mass market. Yes, one factor or another rules their products out for a great many people. That's really not relevant to its future success. It just has to be a good fit for enough of a market to be profitable. That market doesn't have to include you.
I note that cars still only move on the ground and move at pretty much the same speeds.
And having seen how people drive them (just yesterday some moron decided he wanted to be in my lane, in the precise spot where I was in, and leaning on the horn did nothing to persuade him he COULDN'T actually occupy the same space I'm in at the same time), I say again "Thank $DIETY!".
Cars will fly until people no longer drive them. The carnage would be prohibitive. Thankfully, self driving cars are a very active area of research.
To be honest, I don't like this either but I think it's inevitable. These things are happening because it's finally become easy enough. It's only going to become easier.
I have a bigger problem with the idea that someone can get my SSN and do anything with it. It's used as a key to my financial identity and to get credit in my name, but it is NOT an authenticator. Knowing it doesn't prove you're me. Knowing it shouldn't be enough to convince some company to give you things and charge an account for them that's linked to me.
As for stalkers, yes that's a real risk, but perhaps we should stop letting dangerous people play with the rest of us. This whole nice, shiny society thing we've built? It doesn't have to include the people who try to tear it down.
No, actually it's just observation. We all look around and see that houses usually don't fall down, so we trust them. Virtually none of us actually goes through the trouble to find out whether the people who built our houses are skilled professionals. I recall a story not too long ago in my neck of the woods where the "skilled professionals" were in the habit of pissing on on the floors of the houses they were building. A friend bought a house built by an allegedly reputable builder that turned out to have problem after problem. All things that should never happen in a house built by a reputable company employing skilled, licensed professionals.
If you read the proposal, it isn't likely to harm hobbyists much -- it basically exempts open source from the requirements. The likely result will be for proprietary software companies to either go out of business and become service companies, and for software to be developed in the future as open source by hardware and service companies.
No, actually what will happen is that this thing will escape Mr. Kemp's idealistic world and will be rewritten by lawyers with the help of special interests (which includes people like us), industry lobbyists, congressional aides (college kids), and others. In the end, Clause 1 will likely be entirely stripped out, or modified such that the people who buy your congressmen aren't left swinging in the wind by it.
Idealism is all well and good, so long as it doesn't distract you from how these things really play out.
Don't count on it. You write an office suite. I buy a copy for $300, and am using it to write a proposal for a $100 million government project. At crunch time, your product goes nuts and corrupts my computer, causing me to miss the submission deadline. I can prove to you based on past history that I had at least a 40% chance of winning the contract. You, sir, just cost me $40 million in expected value.
This is why licenses disclaim liability for consequential or incidental damages. Anyone who wants the vendor to carry liability for such things is really asking for a liability policy bundled with the product.
Solution: Employee, the following concerns exist about the quality of your work: <list>. Consequently, you are no longer authorized to work weird hours.
Then you simply fire his ass when he can't be bothered to show up at normal o'clock like everybody else.
So according to TFA, Netflix had 12 million people paying $10/month for streaming+DVD. Those 12 million people will now pay $16/month. That's an extra $72m/month.
10 million (like me) are streaming only at $8/month. They're losing 200,000 of those, or $1.6 million/month.
3 million get the DVD only plan. They're losing 800,000 of those. I don't know what the average DVD only customer pays, but let's be generous and say it's $20/month. This'll cost Netflix $16m/month. They're still $55 million/month in the black.
So you're all saying Netflix has done something really stupid because they're...making more money?
Netflix has pissed people off simply because people don't want to pay more, not because the service isn't worth it. I get TONS of value for my $8/month. I may get around to adding the DVD bit for those shows I can't stream because another $8/month is peanuts. I spend more than that for one movie ticket. I spent more than that on lunch today. But somehow I'm supposed to be all outraged that a service I actually like wants me to pay that much to watch movies all month long. I just don't see it. Sorry.
Anyone know how to tell if they have your papers? I've attended several different colleges and am very opposed to my work being used by this service. Before anyone asks, yes I looked at the site and don't see any way to find out. They also claim to be following copyright (they're not) so I doubt they're freely giving this info out.
You work within the system you have, not the system you wish you had.
Very true. I made that point myself in another post.
Yes, and that's exactly how it's supposed to work, assuming no prior art.
No, it's not. Patents are supposed to be non obvious. Let's go a step farther. You invent a car that can go to the store, buy your groceries, and put them away. You patent it, and all is well with the world. *I* rush off and patent washing a grocery-buying car with a bucket, soap, water, and a rag--something that has NEVER been done before (but is the obvious way to do it)! Patents are a completely artificial construct society built to encourage innovation. You invest time and money to build something and we'll give you exclusivity for a period of time. It's an incentive to innovate, not some natural right to deprive everyone else in the world the right to build something or perform a certain process.
See the problem? Your grocery-buying car is a REAL invention. It's not obvious. Mine wasn't. Mine is in the class of patents which get granted when someone takes a common idea and tacks "on the internet!" on the end. Patents were never intended to cover such things.
As to why "nerds" think such things, it's simply because we're practitioners of the discipline and are familiar with how to solve these kinds of problems. I don't presume to speak for everyone, but I don't have an issue with all patents, or even all software patents. I have a problem with patents which solve a problem in the way 90+ out of 100 competent developers would solve it. If they can, it is obvious and fails the patentability test.
If Google was serious about patent reform, why would they spend $12 billion to acquire Motorola Mobility to get their patents?
Because Google is not a majority of Congress. Being serious about patent reform does not mean being successful at patent reform. If it was as simple as throwing money at Congress, smoking would still be allowed everywhere, Joe Camel would be selling cigarettes to kids, and cigarette packs would warn you that smoking makes you dangerously sexy.
Um, no. Apple is just telling Android handset makers to come up with their own stuff.
That would be reasonable in a sane patent system. To make the obligatory car analogy, you and I both have dirty cars but own buckets, rags, water and soap. Both of us realize putting water and soap in the bucket, then using a rag to wash the car would get the car clean. You think of it a little bit before I do, or perhaps run off to the patent office first, and I now can't wash my car for the next 17 years, or have to pay you every time I do.
People would get much less bent out of shape if patent quality wasn't such absolute crap and getting crap patents overturned wasn't expensive.
It's simply false to bother comparing them. I don't want to be shot. I -also- don't want to be blinded, and the fact that blinding won't kill me isn't really much consolation. I'm not much concerned with people owning guns because, while I've been around them a LOT, I've never witnessed unsafe handling or firing of them. In contrast, I've seen mass groups of idiots waving lasers around haphazardly in areas with large crowds.
I really hate things like this. Nitwits at a local beach vacation spot buy the lower powered versions ($30-$130, don't recall the wattage) and shine them EVERYWHERE. I know kids who have had them shined in their eyes, though briefly and without any damage. At night stretches of hotels are nothing but roaming green dots.
The difference between these and guns is that guns go BOOM, kick, and are well known to produce devastating damage to humans. Laser pointers are silent, have no recoil, and just make bright spots on things. So yeah, somebody's going to end up blinded by this, held by some moron a football field away, lost in a crowd of similar idiots waving less dangerous lasers at buildings full of people.
Actually, a profit motive gives a reason to care about profit. Bernie Madoff, for example, was quite motivated by profit, but the investing services he offered were rather low in quality.
This sounds great if you're going on a fishing expedition
Nonsense. It's a fishing expedition if you search through my possessions looking for evidence of a crime without having any specific crime you're investigating. In other words, just pawing through my personal effects trying to find something to pin on me. That didn't happen at all in this case. This was a stolen item. The evidence specifically relates to where it is, and who has it.
There are specific rules for gathering evidence
Yes, there are, and they don't apply to private citizens UNLESS they are acting under color of law. Me paying a company to access my webcam when my laptop goes missing does not qualify.
The woman who bought the laptop is clearly a victim here, she's just not the victim of the laptop owner. She's the victim of her criminal student who sold her stolen property.
No, she's not being punished. There'd be a case there if her pictures were posted on the internet, but they weren't. They were acquired by a company acting with the authorization of the laptop owner, and given to the police. Good luck making the case that giving evidence of a crime to the police is itself a crime. Had the police recovered the laptop, they might well have analyzed the laptop to find out who had it and found the pictures themselves. Sorry, it's unfortunate for this woman that her pictures fell into hands she didn't intend, but the laptop owner didn't do anything wrong. She should sue the idiot student who sold her stolen property.
The police did, however, do something wrong. I don't see an issue with them getting the pictures, but they quite frankly need to stfu as far as their opinion on her sexual conduct goes. It's none of their concern, and they should respect her right to act any way she wishes with another consenting adult. I don't know if it's actionable or not, but I won't feel bad if the police get into hot water for it.
Who predicted this? I looked at the NOAA advisories and the forecast advisory made on Friday morning shows a possible windspeed of 95 KT, and the forecast advisory made on Saturday morning at 5AM EDT shows a prediction of 80 KT wind.
NOAA and/or the Weather Channel. I was checking both plus a local station numerous times a day. I've been watching this since it was first forecast to be coming to the US East Coast. For a day or two they were predicting landfall with wind speeds of 115 mph. As time got closer to actual landfall, Irene weakened instead of strengthened and those numbers came down.
Keep in mind, I'm not a meteorologist, it's just my neck of the woods and I love a good storm, so any time a tropical storm shows signs of landing in my backyard I start paying attention.
The part that always makes me laugh are the intrepid reporters out in the middle of the storm telling people that they shouldn't be out in the middle of the storm. Well, then, why are you out there?
Ha! Agreed. My favorite this time around was the reporter who went so far as to direct the camera at 3 young men crossing the street and calling them idiots on camera for doing exactly what he was doing, being out in a hurricane. Of course, they're quick to point out how they're "trained professionals". Come on guys, you're journalists. You're trained to ask questions and talk pretty. You're not swift water rescue or anything. Bonus points for the other guy who got right on top of the downed power lines and said that we shouldn't, and he was only doing it because he'd conferred with the power guys who assured him they were off. I bet trained power guys wouldn't screw around with downed power lines regardless of whether they were off or not unless they were actually fixing them.
I watched this storm closely. The bottom line is it was expected to strengthen before landfall. I recall seeing predictions of 130-135 mph winds. That didn't happen. In fact, Irene kind of fell apart on the way to the Carolina coast, so the devastating storm the news machine had hyped up simply never materialized. That's why there was so much news coverage. It WAS expected to be big. Why didn't they start reporting on Irene falling apart and saying "Whoops, my bad..."? I have no idea.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: 'I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.'
Cute, but fallacious. SOME taxes buy civilization. Some are simply squandered. Some buy oppression, including of those who pay the taxes. Some buy wars we didn't need. There's also a lack of causality. If a building falls on you tomorrow, we still have civilization. Something like 50% of USians don't pay taxes (ok, federal income) and yet we still have way more government than many of us want. Those of you who don't think that are, in my not so humble opinion, just ignorant of how the sausage is made. It also assumes paying taxes is the only way to get civilization, or the best. It makes as much sense as "I like amputations. With them I remove splinters from my fingertips." or "I like chemotherapy. With it I slow or stop cancer." In both cases the end is great, but if there's a way to do it with fewer or no amputations, less or no chemotherapy, or lower or no taxes, that's obviously much better.
The no-nonsense version of this quote would be "I like civilization, and I accept some taxation as the price we have to pay for it."
Gamestop makes its money on people who don't realize they could get much better deals online, they're not exactly "informed" customers.
Not always. The closest store to me that sells video games is Gamestop. If I want a physical copy of a game right now, it's the easiest way to get it. Could I get it cheaper at Wal-Mart? Sure, but it's 15 minutes farther, might or might not have it, and if I get it there, I might get hassled by the door Nazis, which I really don't like. For some customers, the cheapest option isn't the best. Sometimes other factors outweigh price.
It's much the same for books. I'll buy a book in a brick and mortar store because I can have it right now if I do, vs tomorrow if I'm willing to pay a lot in shipping, or a couple days if I'm not. I'll pay $5-6 for a magazine when I can get half a year's subscription for that price because I want something to read while I'm having lunch.
Bottom line, sometimes apparently dumb consumers simply have different priorities than you do.
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Not missing the point, this is just not the car for you. This is something a lot of people (including me, formerly) get wrong when decrying a product as a bad idea. Sometimes you're just not the target market.
For me, the 300 mile range is good enough for 99.9% of my trips. A few times a year I have to drive farther than that, and I wouldn't mind renting a car for those times. Then again, I own 4 cars anyway, so it's not really an issue.
Everything Tesla makes is not intended for mass market. Yes, one factor or another rules their products out for a great many people. That's really not relevant to its future success. It just has to be a good fit for enough of a market to be profitable. That market doesn't have to include you.
And having seen how people drive them (just yesterday some moron decided he wanted to be in my lane, in the precise spot where I was in, and leaning on the horn did nothing to persuade him he COULDN'T actually occupy the same space I'm in at the same time), I say again "Thank $DIETY!".
Cars will fly until people no longer drive them. The carnage would be prohibitive. Thankfully, self driving cars are a very active area of research.
To be honest, I don't like this either but I think it's inevitable. These things are happening because it's finally become easy enough. It's only going to become easier.
I have a bigger problem with the idea that someone can get my SSN and do anything with it. It's used as a key to my financial identity and to get credit in my name, but it is NOT an authenticator. Knowing it doesn't prove you're me. Knowing it shouldn't be enough to convince some company to give you things and charge an account for them that's linked to me.
As for stalkers, yes that's a real risk, but perhaps we should stop letting dangerous people play with the rest of us. This whole nice, shiny society thing we've built? It doesn't have to include the people who try to tear it down.
No, actually it's just observation. We all look around and see that houses usually don't fall down, so we trust them. Virtually none of us actually goes through the trouble to find out whether the people who built our houses are skilled professionals. I recall a story not too long ago in my neck of the woods where the "skilled professionals" were in the habit of pissing on on the floors of the houses they were building. A friend bought a house built by an allegedly reputable builder that turned out to have problem after problem. All things that should never happen in a house built by a reputable company employing skilled, licensed professionals.
No, actually what will happen is that this thing will escape Mr. Kemp's idealistic world and will be rewritten by lawyers with the help of special interests (which includes people like us), industry lobbyists, congressional aides (college kids), and others. In the end, Clause 1 will likely be entirely stripped out, or modified such that the people who buy your congressmen aren't left swinging in the wind by it.
Idealism is all well and good, so long as it doesn't distract you from how these things really play out.
Don't count on it. You write an office suite. I buy a copy for $300, and am using it to write a proposal for a $100 million government project. At crunch time, your product goes nuts and corrupts my computer, causing me to miss the submission deadline. I can prove to you based on past history that I had at least a 40% chance of winning the contract. You, sir, just cost me $40 million in expected value.
This is why licenses disclaim liability for consequential or incidental damages. Anyone who wants the vendor to carry liability for such things is really asking for a liability policy bundled with the product.
Solution: Employee, the following concerns exist about the quality of your work: <list>. Consequently, you are no longer authorized to work weird hours.
Then you simply fire his ass when he can't be bothered to show up at normal o'clock like everybody else.
So according to TFA, Netflix had 12 million people paying $10/month for streaming+DVD. Those 12 million people will now pay $16/month. That's an extra $72m/month.
10 million (like me) are streaming only at $8/month. They're losing 200,000 of those, or $1.6 million/month.
3 million get the DVD only plan. They're losing 800,000 of those. I don't know what the average DVD only customer pays, but let's be generous and say it's $20/month. This'll cost Netflix $16m/month. They're still $55 million/month in the black.
So you're all saying Netflix has done something really stupid because they're...making more money?
Netflix has pissed people off simply because people don't want to pay more, not because the service isn't worth it. I get TONS of value for my $8/month. I may get around to adding the DVD bit for those shows I can't stream because another $8/month is peanuts. I spend more than that for one movie ticket. I spent more than that on lunch today. But somehow I'm supposed to be all outraged that a service I actually like wants me to pay that much to watch movies all month long. I just don't see it. Sorry.
Anyone know how to tell if they have your papers? I've attended several different colleges and am very opposed to my work being used by this service. Before anyone asks, yes I looked at the site and don't see any way to find out. They also claim to be following copyright (they're not) so I doubt they're freely giving this info out.
Very true. I made that point myself in another post.
No, it's not. Patents are supposed to be non obvious. Let's go a step farther. You invent a car that can go to the store, buy your groceries, and put them away. You patent it, and all is well with the world. *I* rush off and patent washing a grocery-buying car with a bucket, soap, water, and a rag--something that has NEVER been done before (but is the obvious way to do it)! Patents are a completely artificial construct society built to encourage innovation. You invest time and money to build something and we'll give you exclusivity for a period of time. It's an incentive to innovate, not some natural right to deprive everyone else in the world the right to build something or perform a certain process.
See the problem? Your grocery-buying car is a REAL invention. It's not obvious. Mine wasn't. Mine is in the class of patents which get granted when someone takes a common idea and tacks "on the internet!" on the end. Patents were never intended to cover such things.
As to why "nerds" think such things, it's simply because we're practitioners of the discipline and are familiar with how to solve these kinds of problems. I don't presume to speak for everyone, but I don't have an issue with all patents, or even all software patents. I have a problem with patents which solve a problem in the way 90+ out of 100 competent developers would solve it. If they can, it is obvious and fails the patentability test.
Because Google is not a majority of Congress. Being serious about patent reform does not mean being successful at patent reform. If it was as simple as throwing money at Congress, smoking would still be allowed everywhere, Joe Camel would be selling cigarettes to kids, and cigarette packs would warn you that smoking makes you dangerously sexy.
That would be reasonable in a sane patent system. To make the obligatory car analogy, you and I both have dirty cars but own buckets, rags, water and soap. Both of us realize putting water and soap in the bucket, then using a rag to wash the car would get the car clean. You think of it a little bit before I do, or perhaps run off to the patent office first, and I now can't wash my car for the next 17 years, or have to pay you every time I do.
People would get much less bent out of shape if patent quality wasn't such absolute crap and getting crap patents overturned wasn't expensive.
Everywhere, yes. Some of them pretend to be morally or intellectually superior to others, too.
It's simply false to bother comparing them. I don't want to be shot. I -also- don't want to be blinded, and the fact that blinding won't kill me isn't really much consolation. I'm not much concerned with people owning guns because, while I've been around them a LOT, I've never witnessed unsafe handling or firing of them. In contrast, I've seen mass groups of idiots waving lasers around haphazardly in areas with large crowds.
I really hate things like this. Nitwits at a local beach vacation spot buy the lower powered versions ($30-$130, don't recall the wattage) and shine them EVERYWHERE. I know kids who have had them shined in their eyes, though briefly and without any damage. At night stretches of hotels are nothing but roaming green dots.
The difference between these and guns is that guns go BOOM, kick, and are well known to produce devastating damage to humans. Laser pointers are silent, have no recoil, and just make bright spots on things. So yeah, somebody's going to end up blinded by this, held by some moron a football field away, lost in a crowd of similar idiots waving less dangerous lasers at buildings full of people.
Actually, a profit motive gives a reason to care about profit. Bernie Madoff, for example, was quite motivated by profit, but the investing services he offered were rather low in quality.
Counter argument: You cannot conduct "private electronic communication" on MY laptop, especially when you're doing so without my consent.
Nonsense. It's a fishing expedition if you search through my possessions looking for evidence of a crime without having any specific crime you're investigating. In other words, just pawing through my personal effects trying to find something to pin on me. That didn't happen at all in this case. This was a stolen item. The evidence specifically relates to where it is, and who has it.
Yes, there are, and they don't apply to private citizens UNLESS they are acting under color of law. Me paying a company to access my webcam when my laptop goes missing does not qualify.
The woman who bought the laptop is clearly a victim here, she's just not the victim of the laptop owner. She's the victim of her criminal student who sold her stolen property.
No, she's not being punished. There'd be a case there if her pictures were posted on the internet, but they weren't. They were acquired by a company acting with the authorization of the laptop owner, and given to the police. Good luck making the case that giving evidence of a crime to the police is itself a crime. Had the police recovered the laptop, they might well have analyzed the laptop to find out who had it and found the pictures themselves. Sorry, it's unfortunate for this woman that her pictures fell into hands she didn't intend, but the laptop owner didn't do anything wrong. She should sue the idiot student who sold her stolen property.
The police did, however, do something wrong. I don't see an issue with them getting the pictures, but they quite frankly need to stfu as far as their opinion on her sexual conduct goes. It's none of their concern, and they should respect her right to act any way she wishes with another consenting adult. I don't know if it's actionable or not, but I won't feel bad if the police get into hot water for it.
NOAA and/or the Weather Channel. I was checking both plus a local station numerous times a day. I've been watching this since it was first forecast to be coming to the US East Coast. For a day or two they were predicting landfall with wind speeds of 115 mph. As time got closer to actual landfall, Irene weakened instead of strengthened and those numbers came down.
Keep in mind, I'm not a meteorologist, it's just my neck of the woods and I love a good storm, so any time a tropical storm shows signs of landing in my backyard I start paying attention.
Ha! Agreed. My favorite this time around was the reporter who went so far as to direct the camera at 3 young men crossing the street and calling them idiots on camera for doing exactly what he was doing, being out in a hurricane. Of course, they're quick to point out how they're "trained professionals". Come on guys, you're journalists. You're trained to ask questions and talk pretty. You're not swift water rescue or anything. Bonus points for the other guy who got right on top of the downed power lines and said that we shouldn't, and he was only doing it because he'd conferred with the power guys who assured him they were off. I bet trained power guys wouldn't screw around with downed power lines regardless of whether they were off or not unless they were actually fixing them.
I watched this storm closely. The bottom line is it was expected to strengthen before landfall. I recall seeing predictions of 130-135 mph winds. That didn't happen. In fact, Irene kind of fell apart on the way to the Carolina coast, so the devastating storm the news machine had hyped up simply never materialized. That's why there was so much news coverage. It WAS expected to be big. Why didn't they start reporting on Irene falling apart and saying "Whoops, my bad..."? I have no idea.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.: 'I like to pay taxes. With them, I buy civilization.'
Cute, but fallacious. SOME taxes buy civilization. Some are simply squandered. Some buy oppression, including of those who pay the taxes. Some buy wars we didn't need. There's also a lack of causality. If a building falls on you tomorrow, we still have civilization. Something like 50% of USians don't pay taxes (ok, federal income) and yet we still have way more government than many of us want. Those of you who don't think that are, in my not so humble opinion, just ignorant of how the sausage is made. It also assumes paying taxes is the only way to get civilization, or the best. It makes as much sense as "I like amputations. With them I remove splinters from my fingertips." or "I like chemotherapy. With it I slow or stop cancer." In both cases the end is great, but if there's a way to do it with fewer or no amputations, less or no chemotherapy, or lower or no taxes, that's obviously much better.
The no-nonsense version of this quote would be "I like civilization, and I accept some taxation as the price we have to pay for it."
Not always. The closest store to me that sells video games is Gamestop. If I want a physical copy of a game right now, it's the easiest way to get it. Could I get it cheaper at Wal-Mart? Sure, but it's 15 minutes farther, might or might not have it, and if I get it there, I might get hassled by the door Nazis, which I really don't like. For some customers, the cheapest option isn't the best. Sometimes other factors outweigh price.
It's much the same for books. I'll buy a book in a brick and mortar store because I can have it right now if I do, vs tomorrow if I'm willing to pay a lot in shipping, or a couple days if I'm not. I'll pay $5-6 for a magazine when I can get half a year's subscription for that price because I want something to read while I'm having lunch.
Bottom line, sometimes apparently dumb consumers simply have different priorities than you do.