Honestly, I'd fully support metered billing for internet connectivity, provided internet was once and for all declared a public utility subject to regulation in much the same way as the terrestrial telephone companies are, or at least, they open up the lines like they did with telephone service in the 90's so that consumers can shop around for their carrier and not be locked into the local monopolies we deal with today concerning our ISPs here in the States. For instance, our local power company can't just arbitrarily raise rates like our ISPs do year after year, they have to ask permission from our local Public Utility Commission and have public hearings anytime they need to raise rates.
It would be interesting to see how "expensive" all this bandwidth truly is for the ISPs if they had to compete in the same markets for customers. It's the same story as with long-distance telephone service; when everyone was locked into their local phone service; long-distance charges were a fucking fortune, but once they opened up the lines, all the 10-10 numbers started cropping up, and rates plummeted. It would be interesting to see how much differently things would be if Comcast, Charter, Time-Warner, Cox, etc, all had to compete with each other in every market. I have a feeling that these "problems" with bandwidth would be solved pretty quickly.
Besides, it's funny how quickly these major ISPs fall all over themselves to prevent any competition in the first place, even to the point of rolling out their own fiber to prevent a small town from spinning up it's own ISP after repeatedly telling those same people that they just couldn't afford to upgrade. Funny how the threat of competition makes things like that suddenly "affordable".
And even that, only until someone like Hulu manages to perfect the whole TV-over-the-internet thing, at which point cable TV will die almost overnight.
Which makes me wonder if the terrestrial cable companies and Big Media are going to start partnering up in earnest over the next decade. The cable companies (most of which are ISPs as well) are already taking steps to try and stave off the whole-scale abandonment of traditional cable TV service with bandwidth caps (since bundling isn't working as well as it used to), and it seems like the next logical step in the chess match between format-shifting users and Big Media.
The fact that so many of the big players in this fight are dinosaurs that have been lumbering around for decades certainly can't be ignored, either. The last thing I expect out of these guys is any sort of innovation and forward momentum as far as new ways to consume media are concerned. If everyone is watching TV via an internet connection in the future, I doubt they're going to be watching much content produced by the big networks we know today.
That's what strikes me, not the question itself, but the fact that the lawyers obviously hadn't prepped him for it and coached him on an answer. Well, unless the way he responded was how they coached him to handle it...
Something like 70% of people openly share music among family and friends, according to a poll I read a few months ago (came out around the SOPA brouhaha, think it was through Stanford but can't remember, there's a Dutch equivalent floating around). Obviously those people are putting that music on iDevices, and that still requires a computer to sync.
I'll accept your personal anecdote, however, provided you accept mine: I literally do not know anyone that purchases media solely through iTunes.
To be fair, I've found that the quality of IKEA furniture is directly proportional to the price. The cheaper IKEA stuff is just euro-styled Wal-mart tier particleboard crap, but their higher-end stuff is comparable in quality to most good furniture out there...
At least, that's been my experience among friends and family that shop there. I don't have much IKEA stuff myself just because I prefer antiques and more traditional styles of furniture...
So not only do you want total freedom for your music to be able play it on any device, you want every vendor to hand-hold you through the procedure of moving it from one device to another?
The fact that the procedure requires hand-holding at all is ridiculous. It's a fucking digital file. It should be as simple a matter as cut and paste, but God Forbid someone do that, a rights holder's head would probably explode somewhere...
Yeah, it would be out of character for Google not to at least offer this to existing Google account holders, unless they're going to do it invite only initially to slow down adoption like they did with Google Music.
Just because they've made a few fuck ups doesn't mean I'm going to purposely pay more for a TV.
Yes, because Sony, of all brands, is known for it's cheap products. Give me a fucking break...Sony's been charging premium prices for it's shit for decades, the only difference is that once upon a time, it was actually worth it.
My Sony CD player still works as new over 20 years later. [...] my Sony MD players are still like new and I even pulled out my walkman last year to see if it works and it does.
I haven't used a music CD, outside of an automobile, in literally years. I haven't actually purchased a music CD since the early 2000's. How long do you think you'll even be able to buy physical CDs? That working CD player is going to look nice stacked on top of the Laserdisc player in the garage, am I right? And Minidisc? Are you kidding? Was that ever a viable format? There's Sony again with their proprietary bullshit. Just like their UMD movies...another hot seller, there. Boy am I glad I didn't invest in any of that stupid shit. As for casettes, who's used one of them in the last decade? What the hell good is a working Walkman when nobody makes tapes anymore?
Life as an angry butt-hurt nerd must suck when you have so many things you can't buy.
Or as a butt-hurt fanboy with such an empty-life he's become attached to a fucking consumer electronics corporation...
Strange that Sony would rather sell 30 discs in a cartridge instead of just 1. Not very efficient.
Not strange at all, just Sony doing what Sony does...they just love their proprietary formats. Why sell a disc when you can create a cartridge of discs that only Sony produces hardware capable of reading? Might as well call it Memory Stick 2: Electric Boogaloo...
I remember that ad. I remember they played an ad before the third one (shudder) for that ridiculous Matrix phone Nokia made that cost 3 times what every other phone back then cost and had half the features...
If I recall correctly, there was a bill proposed a few years ago that would have regulated ad volume and pegged the ad volume to the volume of the program that encapsulated them, but of course there wasn't anyone dumping wheelbarrows of cash on our congressmen to make it happen so it died. At least, I'm assuming it died, because I never heard much about it after that, and Lord knows my commercials are still loud enough to trigger my 5.1 receiver's clipping function and require anyone watching to dive for the remote every 12 minutes to crank the volume down. So fucking irritating...
Well yeah, I remember those. I didn't mind them so much because they were something to look at while you were waiting for the movie to start and, like you said, they got rid of them when they dimmed the lights and started the movie.
Plus, as a movie buff, the trivia and stuff was actually a fun way to pass the time before the movie started. My local theater used to do trivia, but for whatever reason they stopped and just started serving up the static ads full-time, which leads into the commercials, which leads into the previews...so at best you're looking at 10 minutes after the printed time before the movie itself actually starts.
I suppose I wouldn't care as much if I wasn't paying upwards of $20 a person when you factor concessions...
Anyone buying a Sony product these days should have their head examined. I'm not going to bother listing the numerous ways they've fucked over their customers over the last decade (at least), but it's enough for me to greet every new product of theirs with a great, big middle finger.
Damn right. These huge corporations are able to go wherever is most financially beneficial to their interests when they're scoping out labor and raw materials, but they want to try and region-lock the final product so that we can't do exactly the same fucking thing and get around their arbitrarily inflated prices? Give me a fucking break...
If these assholes can go to India or China to have these books made for 3 fucking cents a piece, I should be able to go buy one there for a nickle if I choose to do so. If they want to region-lock the books, then they need to be forced to region-lock the fucking labor so that we're not being bent over due to the economic disparity between the first world and the third world.
The fact that it's not limited to tangible goods but services (i.e., call centers) these days is even more ridiculous. All of these companies claim they must do this to remain "competitive" but the cost savings are never passed along to the consumer. Books are just as expensive today as they ever were, if not more so. Even eBooks and eTextbooks cost a ridiculous amount when you take into account the fact that there is almost no overhead after the book itself is completed, and since they can't entirely stop students from sharing eTextbooks, well, they just build it in to your fucking tuition now. Remember when you could go to the library and borrow an expensive textbook you couldn't afford as you needed it and 'get by'? No more of that communist bullshit allowed, am I right? You filthy socialists get back in the fields and make room for the rich kids who can properly afford their education...
Just another 20th century institution trying to shove a 20th century business model into a 21st century market. I won't shed a fucking tear for these assholes when they're belly up, because the book publishers have been ripping off authors for far, far longer than the RIAA and MPAA have been, and there ain't no sympathy here for those fuckwads either, believe me. I just wish more schools would tell these publishers to go pound sand and move to open source textbooks, but unfortunately, this kind of thing is just as politically motivated (and corruptible) as anything else these days. Too much money involved, too many palms being greased...same old song and fucking dance...
Of all those things, the commercials they show before movies now is the most egregious thing in my opinion. I can't say for sure when I saw my first ad before a movie at the theater (but it can't have been before the mid-90's, because I don't remember it happening when I was growing up) but it's pretty much ubiquitous now.
Still, I guess it doesn't really matter much to me because I go to the movies maybe 3 or 4 times a year, mainly because it's getting ridiculously expensive on top of all that "monetizing" going on and it's hard to justify the expense for a couple hours of entertainment when the shitting movie is going to be out on Bluray within a few months and Netflix and Cable a month or so after that.
The only movie I even care to see this year in theaters is The Hobbit, and that's mainly because I've been following the production diaries and am intrigued to see what the quality of the film and the 3D work is going to be given the extensive amount of technical expertise involved in the filming. Nothing else, not even The Dark Knight, has me excited to go to the theater. I probably spend more time watching home made shit on Youtube than I do consuming Hollywood crap these days, honestly...
Or the open hostility some of the judiciary has shown in the various Obamacare lawsuits...
As someone that's been watching the members of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court literally come to blows over partisan bickering, I have absolutely no doubt that many of the cases coming before the courts in this country are decided based solely on who the involved parties are or the political ramifications of a decision, regardless of the arguments.
The fact that your government screws up is reason to be active about fixing it, but as soon as you call it failed, you're inviting a revolution. I wish you don't have to live through one, because your sense of justice will not survive.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - John F. Kennedy
All of the protests and outrage right now, all of the political activism right now (I live in Wisconsin, where just over a year ago 100,000+ of us occupied our state capital for weeks in response to a Tea Party led, ALEC funded, large scale attack on union rights)...this is just the beginning. This is the "peaceful revolution", and the government is doing everything it can to try and stop it or marginalize it on behalf of it's corporate masters that want everyone to just shut the fuck up and keep buying those iPads like good little serfs.
I don't want revolution, I want a government that puts the rights and needs of actual human beings above the rights and needs of corporate "people". These fucking banks managed to steal billions of dollars from the American people, more and more evidence comes out every day that those fuckers in the SEC knew that this shit was going on and did nothing. Rob a convenience store clerk and you're going to pound-me-in-the-ass prison, but rob an entire country for billions and you get a "don't do that anymore" with a wink and a fine for less than 1% of what you fucking stole.
The U.S. government may not be failed yet, but it's failing. Whether it can pull itself out of the pockets of a disproportionate few extremely wealthy individuals and corporations remains to be seen, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. I live 5 hours from the Canadian border, so believe me, when the shit hits the fan here, I'm throwing the family in the car and we're bugging out.
I don't understand why they just can't reimburse the hosting company for the hard drives with all the data on them (so they can buy replacements and continue operating their business) and put the ones with all the data on them in storage.
I mean, I get that we're talking about a massive amount of data here, but hard drives aren't that big. It's not like they're going to need to clear room in that warehouse where they store the Ark of the Covenant or anything.
If that's too much work, why not just mirror the data somewhere and let the hosting company wipe the drives and got on with life?
It just seems like these issues are trivial but the players involved are making them out to be far more complicated then it needs to be (in some cases deliberately, I'm sure). It's all a bunch of fucking ones and zeros and the people involved in the case are making it out to be a lot more than that.
The money that corporations have to put into systems like this to protect idiots from themselves are passed on to responsible consumers like myself.
You do understand that they can already do this, right? I mean, you worked there. What money do they have to spend? They've already spent that money, being able to uniquely identify every handset on the network is a necessity for the things to work in the first place, obviously. All anyone is asking is that they brick a phone that is reported stolen by the owner with a police report on file. It is completely trivial for AT&T to do this, and you know this. What compelling reason is there for them not to?
What the fuck does it matter to AT&T what the circumstances are? So what if I lost the phone, does that mean that someone else should be able to pick it up, say "Alright! Free iPhone!!" and than bop on down to AT&T and get it wiped and registered in their name, especially when the company in question knows that the phone is lost or stolen? What if someone brought the phone in to AT&T and said, "Hey, I found this, but I don't know who it belongs to..." Wouldn't you expect AT&T to at least put in a little effort to find out who's phone that was? Or would you consider it reasonable if they just said "Ha ha, sucks to be that loser!" and put it on the shelf to sell later?
The fact that you worked at AT&T for seven years explains your attitude perfectly, because you're totally coming off as a bitter ex-Customer Service Rep harboring long-term resentment with your eagerness to "stick it to" a bunch of people you've never even met...payback for the years you were forced to hold your tongue. Let it go, man.
Cars are located and disabled with OnStar, but all vehicles do not have OnStar. If a car with OnStar is reported as stolen, OnStar will work hand in hand with police to get the car recovered. This is a core feature that sells the OnStar service. Ditto with services like LoJack (which they provide for computers now, I used to sell it myself). However, you cannot register a stolen car with any DMV in this country. They check their databases specifically for this reason. The DMV is not a police officer, but I'm betting most reasonable people are cool with them electing not to register cars reported stolen.
For one thing, 99 times out of 100, the police do not recover the phone at all. If it's not resold and reactivated, it either ends up a toy for some thief's kid to play with or broken into a million pieces or rotting at the bottom of a lake or river. How many reasonable people have ever lost or had stolen something like a cell phone and actually expected to see it again? Stolen property, especially stolen property that's relatively cheap like a cell-phone, is not a priority for any police department in this country. If they come across it while investigating other crimes, they'll be good enough to give you a ring and have you come pick it up (unless they need to keep it as evidence), but they don't actively check personal electronics to see if they're stolen unless they have a compelling reason to do so. They don't have the time. No police force in this country has that kind of time, obviously.
Your only recourse now if your phone gets stolen is to call the police and buy a new one. Nobody is expecting anything any different there. All they're asking is that the thief not be able to take that stolen cell phone into another store and reactivate it when AT&T can tell perfectly well that it is a stolen phone. AT&T is not being singled out here. Any time a person has a reasonable suspicion that a good may be stolen they're required to act accordingly regardless of their relationship with that person. If someone offered to sell you a brand new PS3, still in the box, for $50 out of the back of a van, for instance, and it turns out it's stolen, you can't feign ignorance because a reasonable person would have known better and you are guilty of a crime. If a used car salesmen agrees to buy a car with scratched off or non-matching VINs, they are guilty of a crime.
Your "Orwellian society" and "Corporatocracy" claims are pretty ridiculous when people are trying to make a corporation be accountable for once, and requiring them to brick phones they know to be stolen is part of that. As I said above, there is plenty of precedent already covering this, the concept is not new.
What exactly is it that you're worried about here? That AT&T is going to vindictively brick cell phones? That they're going to just let any old person call up and brick any phone he wishes? You can't even talk about your fucking bill without giving them a whole bunch of personal information first, so what exactly are you worried about here? What power is this going to give the corporation to abuse? They've already got this power, so if they were going to abuse it, they would have long before now...
On a less sarcastic note, the police have often refused to get involved even after a police report is filed _and_ the person knows exactly where the cell phone is (hello? They're radio transmitters). Police resources are only used in cases of violence, property damage, or theft of corporate property. Theft of private property is just... not important.
Oh, I know, and I'm sure that very few people that report a cell phone stolen ever really expect to see it again. Honestly, the few times we've gotten ripped off (stuff stolen out of our garage, stuff stolen out of our car) the police themselves told us that recovering stolen property was an extremely low priority in the grand scheme of things but if the stuff turned up they'd let us know (it never did). We were bummed obviously that our stuff was stolen, but our insurance covered the theft, and that was what we were most concerned about, and what we needed the police report for in the first place. I had two bikes stolen from me growing up and we didn't even bother filing a report with the police because there was no point, the bikes were likely repainted within hours and the cops of Philadelphia don't give a fuck about stolen bicycles. If they'd been insured I obviously would have...well, my mother would have anyway.
Still, AT&T should at least accept a police report as good faith evidence that a particular handset was indeed stolen or lost and brick it. There's really no valid reason I can see why they would refuse to do so (outside of the obvious financial benefits). I'm hoping that the courts will see it the same way, but I won't hold my breath.
All of those things you mention are pretty much completely untraceable. Obviously, this is not the case with the iPhone, since the service requires the handsets to be uniquely identifiable at all times on their network.
Besides, go ahead and try and register a car reported as stolen with your local DMV. Watch what happens.
No one expects AT&T to do anything that is not already completely within their power to do, nor is it something that any reasonable person would consider out of line at all.
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Honestly, I'd fully support metered billing for internet connectivity, provided internet was once and for all declared a public utility subject to regulation in much the same way as the terrestrial telephone companies are, or at least, they open up the lines like they did with telephone service in the 90's so that consumers can shop around for their carrier and not be locked into the local monopolies we deal with today concerning our ISPs here in the States. For instance, our local power company can't just arbitrarily raise rates like our ISPs do year after year, they have to ask permission from our local Public Utility Commission and have public hearings anytime they need to raise rates.
It would be interesting to see how "expensive" all this bandwidth truly is for the ISPs if they had to compete in the same markets for customers. It's the same story as with long-distance telephone service; when everyone was locked into their local phone service; long-distance charges were a fucking fortune, but once they opened up the lines, all the 10-10 numbers started cropping up, and rates plummeted. It would be interesting to see how much differently things would be if Comcast, Charter, Time-Warner, Cox, etc, all had to compete with each other in every market. I have a feeling that these "problems" with bandwidth would be solved pretty quickly.
Besides, it's funny how quickly these major ISPs fall all over themselves to prevent any competition in the first place, even to the point of rolling out their own fiber to prevent a small town from spinning up it's own ISP after repeatedly telling those same people that they just couldn't afford to upgrade. Funny how the threat of competition makes things like that suddenly "affordable".
And even that, only until someone like Hulu manages to perfect the whole TV-over-the-internet thing, at which point cable TV will die almost overnight.
Which makes me wonder if the terrestrial cable companies and Big Media are going to start partnering up in earnest over the next decade. The cable companies (most of which are ISPs as well) are already taking steps to try and stave off the whole-scale abandonment of traditional cable TV service with bandwidth caps (since bundling isn't working as well as it used to), and it seems like the next logical step in the chess match between format-shifting users and Big Media.
The fact that so many of the big players in this fight are dinosaurs that have been lumbering around for decades certainly can't be ignored, either. The last thing I expect out of these guys is any sort of innovation and forward momentum as far as new ways to consume media are concerned. If everyone is watching TV via an internet connection in the future, I doubt they're going to be watching much content produced by the big networks we know today.
That's what strikes me, not the question itself, but the fact that the lawyers obviously hadn't prepped him for it and coached him on an answer. Well, unless the way he responded was how they coached him to handle it...
That's no moon!
Yes, but that is still a tiny minority of people.
Something like 70% of people openly share music among family and friends, according to a poll I read a few months ago (came out around the SOPA brouhaha, think it was through Stanford but can't remember, there's a Dutch equivalent floating around). Obviously those people are putting that music on iDevices, and that still requires a computer to sync.
I'll accept your personal anecdote, however, provided you accept mine: I literally do not know anyone that purchases media solely through iTunes.
To be fair, I've found that the quality of IKEA furniture is directly proportional to the price. The cheaper IKEA stuff is just euro-styled Wal-mart tier particleboard crap, but their higher-end stuff is comparable in quality to most good furniture out there...
At least, that's been my experience among friends and family that shop there. I don't have much IKEA stuff myself just because I prefer antiques and more traditional styles of furniture...
Don't know if that was your intention or not, but I really wanna watch Goodfellas now...
So not only do you want total freedom for your music to be able play it on any device, you want every vendor to hand-hold you through the procedure of moving it from one device to another?
The fact that the procedure requires hand-holding at all is ridiculous. It's a fucking digital file. It should be as simple a matter as cut and paste, but God Forbid someone do that, a rights holder's head would probably explode somewhere...
Yeah, it would be out of character for Google not to at least offer this to existing Google account holders, unless they're going to do it invite only initially to slow down adoption like they did with Google Music.
Just because they've made a few fuck ups doesn't mean I'm going to purposely pay more for a TV.
Yes, because Sony, of all brands, is known for it's cheap products. Give me a fucking break...Sony's been charging premium prices for it's shit for decades, the only difference is that once upon a time, it was actually worth it.
My Sony CD player still works as new over 20 years later. [...] my Sony MD players are still like new and I even pulled out my walkman last year to see if it works and it does.
I haven't used a music CD, outside of an automobile, in literally years. I haven't actually purchased a music CD since the early 2000's. How long do you think you'll even be able to buy physical CDs? That working CD player is going to look nice stacked on top of the Laserdisc player in the garage, am I right? And Minidisc? Are you kidding? Was that ever a viable format? There's Sony again with their proprietary bullshit. Just like their UMD movies...another hot seller, there. Boy am I glad I didn't invest in any of that stupid shit. As for casettes, who's used one of them in the last decade? What the hell good is a working Walkman when nobody makes tapes anymore?
Life as an angry butt-hurt nerd must suck when you have so many things you can't buy.
Or as a butt-hurt fanboy with such an empty-life he's become attached to a fucking consumer electronics corporation...
Modded flamebait because - while you had some valid points - you were an unmitigated ass in presenting them.
If you want to be heard, the way you phrase your arguments *does* matter.
Yeah, well, that's, like, your opinion, man...
Strange that Sony would rather sell 30 discs in a cartridge instead of just 1. Not very efficient.
Not strange at all, just Sony doing what Sony does...they just love their proprietary formats. Why sell a disc when you can create a cartridge of discs that only Sony produces hardware capable of reading? Might as well call it Memory Stick 2: Electric Boogaloo...
I remember that ad. I remember they played an ad before the third one (shudder) for that ridiculous Matrix phone Nokia made that cost 3 times what every other phone back then cost and had half the features...
If I recall correctly, there was a bill proposed a few years ago that would have regulated ad volume and pegged the ad volume to the volume of the program that encapsulated them, but of course there wasn't anyone dumping wheelbarrows of cash on our congressmen to make it happen so it died. At least, I'm assuming it died, because I never heard much about it after that, and Lord knows my commercials are still loud enough to trigger my 5.1 receiver's clipping function and require anyone watching to dive for the remote every 12 minutes to crank the volume down. So fucking irritating...
Well yeah, I remember those. I didn't mind them so much because they were something to look at while you were waiting for the movie to start and, like you said, they got rid of them when they dimmed the lights and started the movie.
Plus, as a movie buff, the trivia and stuff was actually a fun way to pass the time before the movie started. My local theater used to do trivia, but for whatever reason they stopped and just started serving up the static ads full-time, which leads into the commercials, which leads into the previews...so at best you're looking at 10 minutes after the printed time before the movie itself actually starts.
I suppose I wouldn't care as much if I wasn't paying upwards of $20 a person when you factor concessions...
Anyone buying a Sony product these days should have their head examined. I'm not going to bother listing the numerous ways they've fucked over their customers over the last decade (at least), but it's enough for me to greet every new product of theirs with a great, big middle finger.
Then again, it seems there's always someone ready to throw money at Sony for their newest piece of fucking shit that doesn't do what it's goddamned supposed to.
Damn right. These huge corporations are able to go wherever is most financially beneficial to their interests when they're scoping out labor and raw materials, but they want to try and region-lock the final product so that we can't do exactly the same fucking thing and get around their arbitrarily inflated prices? Give me a fucking break...
If these assholes can go to India or China to have these books made for 3 fucking cents a piece, I should be able to go buy one there for a nickle if I choose to do so. If they want to region-lock the books, then they need to be forced to region-lock the fucking labor so that we're not being bent over due to the economic disparity between the first world and the third world.
The fact that it's not limited to tangible goods but services (i.e., call centers) these days is even more ridiculous. All of these companies claim they must do this to remain "competitive" but the cost savings are never passed along to the consumer. Books are just as expensive today as they ever were, if not more so. Even eBooks and eTextbooks cost a ridiculous amount when you take into account the fact that there is almost no overhead after the book itself is completed, and since they can't entirely stop students from sharing eTextbooks, well, they just build it in to your fucking tuition now. Remember when you could go to the library and borrow an expensive textbook you couldn't afford as you needed it and 'get by'? No more of that communist bullshit allowed, am I right? You filthy socialists get back in the fields and make room for the rich kids who can properly afford their education...
Just another 20th century institution trying to shove a 20th century business model into a 21st century market. I won't shed a fucking tear for these assholes when they're belly up, because the book publishers have been ripping off authors for far, far longer than the RIAA and MPAA have been, and there ain't no sympathy here for those fuckwads either, believe me. I just wish more schools would tell these publishers to go pound sand and move to open source textbooks, but unfortunately, this kind of thing is just as politically motivated (and corruptible) as anything else these days. Too much money involved, too many palms being greased...same old song and fucking dance...
Of all those things, the commercials they show before movies now is the most egregious thing in my opinion. I can't say for sure when I saw my first ad before a movie at the theater (but it can't have been before the mid-90's, because I don't remember it happening when I was growing up) but it's pretty much ubiquitous now.
Still, I guess it doesn't really matter much to me because I go to the movies maybe 3 or 4 times a year, mainly because it's getting ridiculously expensive on top of all that "monetizing" going on and it's hard to justify the expense for a couple hours of entertainment when the shitting movie is going to be out on Bluray within a few months and Netflix and Cable a month or so after that.
The only movie I even care to see this year in theaters is The Hobbit, and that's mainly because I've been following the production diaries and am intrigued to see what the quality of the film and the 3D work is going to be given the extensive amount of technical expertise involved in the filming. Nothing else, not even The Dark Knight, has me excited to go to the theater. I probably spend more time watching home made shit on Youtube than I do consuming Hollywood crap these days, honestly...
Or the open hostility some of the judiciary has shown in the various Obamacare lawsuits...
As someone that's been watching the members of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court literally come to blows over partisan bickering, I have absolutely no doubt that many of the cases coming before the courts in this country are decided based solely on who the involved parties are or the political ramifications of a decision, regardless of the arguments.
The fact that your government screws up is reason to be active about fixing it, but as soon as you call it failed, you're inviting a revolution. I wish you don't have to live through one, because your sense of justice will not survive.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." - John F. Kennedy
All of the protests and outrage right now, all of the political activism right now (I live in Wisconsin, where just over a year ago 100,000+ of us occupied our state capital for weeks in response to a Tea Party led, ALEC funded, large scale attack on union rights)...this is just the beginning. This is the "peaceful revolution", and the government is doing everything it can to try and stop it or marginalize it on behalf of it's corporate masters that want everyone to just shut the fuck up and keep buying those iPads like good little serfs.
I don't want revolution, I want a government that puts the rights and needs of actual human beings above the rights and needs of corporate "people". These fucking banks managed to steal billions of dollars from the American people, more and more evidence comes out every day that those fuckers in the SEC knew that this shit was going on and did nothing. Rob a convenience store clerk and you're going to pound-me-in-the-ass prison, but rob an entire country for billions and you get a "don't do that anymore" with a wink and a fine for less than 1% of what you fucking stole.
The U.S. government may not be failed yet, but it's failing. Whether it can pull itself out of the pockets of a disproportionate few extremely wealthy individuals and corporations remains to be seen, but I'm not going to get my hopes up. I live 5 hours from the Canadian border, so believe me, when the shit hits the fan here, I'm throwing the family in the car and we're bugging out.
I don't understand why they just can't reimburse the hosting company for the hard drives with all the data on them (so they can buy replacements and continue operating their business) and put the ones with all the data on them in storage.
I mean, I get that we're talking about a massive amount of data here, but hard drives aren't that big. It's not like they're going to need to clear room in that warehouse where they store the Ark of the Covenant or anything.
If that's too much work, why not just mirror the data somewhere and let the hosting company wipe the drives and got on with life?
It just seems like these issues are trivial but the players involved are making them out to be far more complicated then it needs to be (in some cases deliberately, I'm sure). It's all a bunch of fucking ones and zeros and the people involved in the case are making it out to be a lot more than that.
The money that corporations have to put into systems like this to protect idiots from themselves are passed on to responsible consumers like myself.
You do understand that they can already do this, right? I mean, you worked there. What money do they have to spend? They've already spent that money, being able to uniquely identify every handset on the network is a necessity for the things to work in the first place, obviously. All anyone is asking is that they brick a phone that is reported stolen by the owner with a police report on file. It is completely trivial for AT&T to do this, and you know this. What compelling reason is there for them not to?
What the fuck does it matter to AT&T what the circumstances are? So what if I lost the phone, does that mean that someone else should be able to pick it up, say "Alright! Free iPhone!!" and than bop on down to AT&T and get it wiped and registered in their name, especially when the company in question knows that the phone is lost or stolen? What if someone brought the phone in to AT&T and said, "Hey, I found this, but I don't know who it belongs to..." Wouldn't you expect AT&T to at least put in a little effort to find out who's phone that was? Or would you consider it reasonable if they just said "Ha ha, sucks to be that loser!" and put it on the shelf to sell later?
The fact that you worked at AT&T for seven years explains your attitude perfectly, because you're totally coming off as a bitter ex-Customer Service Rep harboring long-term resentment with your eagerness to "stick it to" a bunch of people you've never even met...payback for the years you were forced to hold your tongue. Let it go, man.
Cars are located and disabled with OnStar, but all vehicles do not have OnStar. If a car with OnStar is reported as stolen, OnStar will work hand in hand with police to get the car recovered. This is a core feature that sells the OnStar service. Ditto with services like LoJack (which they provide for computers now, I used to sell it myself). However, you cannot register a stolen car with any DMV in this country. They check their databases specifically for this reason. The DMV is not a police officer, but I'm betting most reasonable people are cool with them electing not to register cars reported stolen.
For one thing, 99 times out of 100, the police do not recover the phone at all. If it's not resold and reactivated, it either ends up a toy for some thief's kid to play with or broken into a million pieces or rotting at the bottom of a lake or river. How many reasonable people have ever lost or had stolen something like a cell phone and actually expected to see it again? Stolen property, especially stolen property that's relatively cheap like a cell-phone, is not a priority for any police department in this country. If they come across it while investigating other crimes, they'll be good enough to give you a ring and have you come pick it up (unless they need to keep it as evidence), but they don't actively check personal electronics to see if they're stolen unless they have a compelling reason to do so. They don't have the time. No police force in this country has that kind of time, obviously.
Your only recourse now if your phone gets stolen is to call the police and buy a new one. Nobody is expecting anything any different there. All they're asking is that the thief not be able to take that stolen cell phone into another store and reactivate it when AT&T can tell perfectly well that it is a stolen phone. AT&T is not being singled out here. Any time a person has a reasonable suspicion that a good may be stolen they're required to act accordingly regardless of their relationship with that person. If someone offered to sell you a brand new PS3, still in the box, for $50 out of the back of a van, for instance, and it turns out it's stolen, you can't feign ignorance because a reasonable person would have known better and you are guilty of a crime. If a used car salesmen agrees to buy a car with scratched off or non-matching VINs, they are guilty of a crime.
Your "Orwellian society" and "Corporatocracy" claims are pretty ridiculous when people are trying to make a corporation be accountable for once, and requiring them to brick phones they know to be stolen is part of that. As I said above, there is plenty of precedent already covering this, the concept is not new.
What exactly is it that you're worried about here? That AT&T is going to vindictively brick cell phones? That they're going to just let any old person call up and brick any phone he wishes? You can't even talk about your fucking bill without giving them a whole bunch of personal information first, so what exactly are you worried about here? What power is this going to give the corporation to abuse? They've already got this power, so if they were going to abuse it, they would have long before now...
On a less sarcastic note, the police have often refused to get involved even after a police report is filed _and_ the person knows exactly where the cell phone is (hello? They're radio transmitters). Police resources are only used in cases of violence, property damage, or theft of corporate property. Theft of private property is just... not important.
Oh, I know, and I'm sure that very few people that report a cell phone stolen ever really expect to see it again. Honestly, the few times we've gotten ripped off (stuff stolen out of our garage, stuff stolen out of our car) the police themselves told us that recovering stolen property was an extremely low priority in the grand scheme of things but if the stuff turned up they'd let us know (it never did). We were bummed obviously that our stuff was stolen, but our insurance covered the theft, and that was what we were most concerned about, and what we needed the police report for in the first place. I had two bikes stolen from me growing up and we didn't even bother filing a report with the police because there was no point, the bikes were likely repainted within hours and the cops of Philadelphia don't give a fuck about stolen bicycles. If they'd been insured I obviously would have...well, my mother would have anyway.
Still, AT&T should at least accept a police report as good faith evidence that a particular handset was indeed stolen or lost and brick it. There's really no valid reason I can see why they would refuse to do so (outside of the obvious financial benefits). I'm hoping that the courts will see it the same way, but I won't hold my breath.
All of those things you mention are pretty much completely untraceable. Obviously, this is not the case with the iPhone, since the service requires the handsets to be uniquely identifiable at all times on their network.
Besides, go ahead and try and register a car reported as stolen with your local DMV. Watch what happens.
No one expects AT&T to do anything that is not already completely within their power to do, nor is it something that any reasonable person would consider out of line at all.