Hey, can I still get in on that Obama vs Romney thing? I mean, sure, the odds have gotten worse for Romney since November, but just think of the payout if he wins!
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go buy my weekly Megabucks tickets - Remember, "You can't win if you don't play!"
Because of course SMTP administration competence of the company's (possibly hosted) email is directly proportional to competence in the field the company works in.
Yup, pretty much. If you walk around - alone - wearing an "i'm with stupid" t-shirt, I don't care if you make Stephen Hawking look like Forest Gump, people will steer clear of you.
Pull your head out of your arse - in the real world, businesses need to communicate.
Yes. Yes, they very much do. And if they don't take that function seriously enough to make sure their audience can hear them, do you really want to do business with them?
They also need to make pay their bills - Do you also overlook your customers just "forgetting" to pay you because they have their AP system set up poorly?
Unless, of course, your core business depends on a steady stream of "bigger idiots", in which case, just reverse the polarity of the SPFion flux.
Those are local emergencies, those are immediate emergencies. If you can't get the terminology for emergency events correct why should anyone take your advice on what is the ideal tool for reporting emergencies?
I didn't intend to put forth a grand unified theory of disaster-situation communication. I merely suggested someone ditch their land line for a cell phone, if they have adequate cell coverage at home. That said, thank you for correcting my terminology. Perhaps next time I attempt to make a similar point, the thread won't get derailed by pedants arguing about how many neighboring towns/states/continents have to get wiped out by the asteroid before I stop caring about making phone calls while physically at home.;)
And who said anything about reporting it? In the event of an actual disaster, I don't particularly care about who gets to the smoking crater first. I just want the ability to make normal phone calls from the hotel I end up living in for a few weeks, without paying Hilton $3.50/minute for the luxury.
I work there 6 consecutive years. In that time I increase revenue by 300%, stock price doubles, everyones happy, and I even got a boost to 1.9M 18 months ago. I've now established that I'm not only good at what I do
Now let's look at reality. The last CEO got caught tapping the mayor's wife (take that as you will) and the company had to write down a $20M golden parachute to get rid of him. The payoff almost zeroed out revenue for the year, and the scandal dropped the company's stock price by half.
You came on as a hired gun to make some nasty changes and take the heat off the "real" next CEO. You outsource the only employment within 100 miles of a small town in Nebraska, to Bangalore. Over the next five years, the stock price and revenue recover back to normal. In the sixth year, you announce plans to destroy another small town, and step down when the PR backlash gets too intense. The company officially denounces you, but you have your choice of three positions already lined up to do the exact same thing.
Sorry, but no CEO can boost revenue by 300% through anything even remotely creditable as "skill". A really good CEO might sustain 10% "real" growth on average, in a good economy. When you see BS numbers like that, it just screams "bookkeeping games".
/ Bernie Madoff reported near-legendary gains of a mere 11% per year for an equally amazing decade and a half. He should have just hired you for six months, eh?
At under a buck for a book it will be the writers who will starve in a gutter unless their work sells millions.
Ever seen people buy from a used bookstore, where they can get physical books for a buck or two? They walk out of those places with crates full of books.
Yes, at a buck a book, writers will need to sell more. But they will sell more, as people load their Kindles with cheaply purchased books rather than a dump of Project Gutenberg and one or two best sellers.
Of course, the real issue here involves the continuing use of obsolete middle-men. A self (or minimally-managed) published ebook only needs to sell a few tens of thousands of copies at a buck each for the author to make a living. When you have authors taking the same crappy terms that traditionally included not only editing and marketing, but most importantly, access to a printing and distribution network - Do we really wonder why someone can sell 50k copies of a $20 book and still need to take a day job to pay their bills?
You'd have about a whole dozen profitable writers under your plan.
For every Tom Clancy or JK Rowling, you have a thousand "serious" writers who already can't make a living on the $200/year royalty checks they get.
Frankly if authors made more as a % (thus more absolute dollars), we might see more people go into this field of work.
If the authors made more as a percent, a lot more people (including myself) would feel willing to pay more for their work. When the lion's share goes to an obsolete publishing and distribution industry that has zero relevance to digital works? No thanks, but can you direct me to the author's online tip jar?
Crazy, it seems Amazon, Google, Apple are having no trouble finding customers.
Because they offer albums and episodes under the magical $10 price point. Since you obviously didn't read it, TFA involves Amazon trying to enforce artificial scarcity (specifically on the resale market, which the producers would vastly prefer to obliterate entirely by using licensing terms to illegally deprive us of our right of first sale) on a digital market for the purpose of driving prices up.
Starve in the gutter? Too bad most people aren't malcontents / sociopaths like yourself.
Fortunately, they do, however, grasp the concept of hyperbole.
Specific dollar values (and sociopathic tendencies) aside, most people would rather pay what they consider a "fair" price for what they want. But if they can't get what they want for what they consider a fair price, the internet has demonstrated that people feel little hesitation about setting their own terms for obtaining non-physical goods.
You will sell countless millions of your products at under a buck each. At >$10 each, a significant number of people will pirate it. And if you don't even offer it for sale (or play tricks to have a limited number of copies available), you guarantee everyone who wants it will just pirate it.
Don't like it? Starve in the gutter. We don't care. Give us what we want or vanish, simple as that.
Why bother letting them know that you're listening to and giving consideration to their threats? Why bother making a paper trail of any kind?
You mean, as opposed to asking Slashdot and making it to the FP?
Yeah, sure, no one at Piriform reads Slashdot. Whatever response the asker comes up with will no doubt totally surprise them. And anyway, they probably send out a hundred such requests to remove compatibility features daily, right?
At this point, I think they have their answer, and already need to decide whether to up the stakes and lawyer up, or forget about it completely.
This is plus 5 Insightful? More like plus 5 Sad. Or are most people here Americans with scientifically proven zero empathy.
"Empathy" means the ability to understand and share the feelings of a fellow human. Mitt's assertions to the contrary aside, "businesses are [not] people too". So empathy has nothing to do with it.
A business exists solely for the exchange of goods and/or services for money (or other goods and/or services). If a business can't provide me with the goods and/or services I want, they have no reason to continue to exist for all it matters to me. I would only even give them that few days I mentioned to restore service, as a matter of convenience to me - If I could realistically switch ISPs, for example, 15 seconds after discovering my internet had gone down again, Verizon could kiss my hairy white ass goodbye.
Now if you want to talk about loyalty - I have loyalty to my friends. I have loyalty to my family. I have loyalty to people that have given me a reason to care about them. The company that, despite my opting out of everything possible on their privacy policy still has their "partners" send me life insurance offers once a month? Yeah, not so much loyalty there - More like "simmering resentment" that such complete bastards manage to have the best game in town.
ISTM that you're an unreasonable little snot, since the speed of the resolution of the problem is completely dependent upon the cause of the problem. What is reasonable, though, is timely customer feedback.
Sorry, but 100% wrong. Yeah, timely feedback (including the magic phrase "prorated refund for downtime") will buy you a few days (at most). But if I actually pay for your service, I don't give two shits if your only datacenter just got hit by a Tsunami - Get your service back up now, or by next week your competition will provide it for me.
If I get something for free, then obviously not an issue. File a bug report, and if they don't fix it before you lose interest, move on, but you can't really complain too much about it.
If I pay for a service, then my willingness to put up with outages depends entirely on their willingness to not charge me during downtimes.
Now, if I need the service in question, they only get a few days before I find someone else to provide it, regardless of free or not.
Note that this assumes having no real contract in place specifying an SLA. If you have that, then you have the acceptable downtimes and repercussions for exceeding them all nice and neatly spelled out.
That is patently false. Landlines have been proven to be far more resilient to local emergencies than cell phones dozens of times.
By "local", I mean "house on fire", "gas main explosion on my block", that sort of thing. Local.
Hurricane Sandy did not count as "local". Earthquakes don't count as local. A three million acre wildfire does not count as local. Yes, in widespread emergencies, landlines hold up better - But as I already said, they don't do you much good from your car, two states away.
That said, really, do what you want. Go ahead and pay $50 a month for crappy home phone service. Every little "necessity" in the minds of the old and stupid adds to what we consider a living wage in this country, which makes my disposable income all the higher by not caring in the least about having a physical copper wire running through the wall and to my phone.;)
In the style of Bruce Schneier's movie-plot threat scenarios, what's the most nefarious use you can anticipate such remote outlet control being used for?
Turn off the fridge after the victim goes to work for the day, and turn it back on about an hour before they get home.
Repeat until they die... of Botulism! <Cue evil laugh>
Aww, I only want to make my bathroom nice and toasty by remote control before I get out of bed, you cretin!:)
But yeah, seriously. Great tool for lights or remotely cycling power to a home server. Dumb dumb dumb idea to connect anything intended to make large amounts of heat (coffee pot) or dangerous motions (table saw).
Oddly, I thought UL/CE wouldn't approve products like this specifically for that reason - That we simply can't trust most people to have the common sense not to try to remote-start their electric self-propelled lawnmower. Nice to see networked outlets finally exist, but I fully expect we'll hear about plenty of Darwin awards as a result of plain ol' misuse, no need to require malware in that equation.
I've arrived at the point where I hate my land line. I'd drop it in a second but my wife thinks it's important.
Grow a pair and cancel it. Duh.
"Sorry honey, but we waste way too much money on a useless, obsolete service that no one but fraudsters ever uses. In a local emergency, our cell phones have a better chance of working than the land line; and in a wide-scale emergency, you can't use the land-line from the car as we flee the coming Tsunami."
So the government botched a sting operation called Fast and Furious and you're going to frame them as if it's standard operating procedure?
Only the "botched" part. The rest suggests that our government had more of a clue than normal.
/ Still waiting on that 1998 budget... // No, they did not - In 2009, they passed an "omnibus spending bill". Spending approval does not equal a budget, not by a long shot.
Perhaps one of our resident "IAAL"s can clarify this, but in the absence of an explicit license, doesn't copyright still apply to a code snippet by default? So rejecting the use of the GPL or other FOSS doesn't mean just any corporate asshat can come along and steal your work - Quite the opposite, it means no one can legally use your code.
Which works out perfectly for the hobbyist coders - including these so-called "POSS" coders - who really don't give a damn about who "owns" a given code snippet. As the only real down side, such an approach makes it impossible for a company like RedHat to contribute to the community by improving that code, because without some sort of explicit license, no sane company will touch it ("Yeah, that Windows 9 thing you guys wrote? It counts as a derivative work of MyFirstPokerApp, thanks for giving me that private Caribbean island I always wanted, Redmond!"). But the original author still very much enjoys the protection of copyright-by-default, at least in the US.
Why stop there? Have a separate camera, a separate music player too. What a wonderful future that will be where instead of one device capable of doing lots of things we have lots of individual devices dedicated to a single purpose.
I know you jest, but seriously, some functions just don't conveniently tie into an all-in-one device. Smartphones take crap pictures, for example. And as TFA points out, they really don't make a very good form-factor as phones, either.
I actually kinda like your (and TFA's) idea, taken to an extreme. Use your tablet as a sort of personal server for storage and "real" communication, and everything else can just talk back to it via NFC.
Only annoyance there - Power. If we can solve that one without needing to plug in half a dozen peripherals every night, I'd call this a winner.
Why bother? Not only won't they enforce immigration laws, they outright sue state and town PDs who attempt to do so to force them to stop.
Visas? Immigration? Meh, c'mon in, apply for welfare, and retire. Only those of us dumb enough to work for a living as natural born citizens have anything to complain about here.
The firmware of a mobile phone is covered by copyright law.
To which the manufacturer, not the carrier, holds the copyright. But okay so far...
In order to unlock the phone, either an official lock code is required (which may be obtained unofficially, and whose legal status if obtained unofficially is dubious) or the firmware needs to be replaced
If I replace the firmware, then the phone no longer contains the original copyrighted code. This seems like a self-correcting "problem".
That said, the new firmware most likely just contains a slightly modified version of the original, so back to copyright violation; but if someone actually wrote a clean-room implementation, the DMCA should no longer apply.
Realistically, of course, none of this matters. As they've always done, the government will just use this as yet another selective enforcement tool to fuck over anyone they want to go after while happily ignoring the vast majority of violations.
do you really need every point update of android? what does it give you?
Wrong question. Try "Should anyone but me get to decide which updates I need?". Then we can at least start that discussion (not the same one in TFA, BTW) in a meaningful way.
As for the "real" topic from TFA - Should I have the right, if I visit the UK this summer, to put in a local prepaid SIM card (legally obtained and paid for - They actually have sane rules over there about this stuff, and you can buy minutes for a pittance) so I can use my own phone without paying my normal carrier their insane international roaming fees? Keep in mind that my carrier still gets paid their normal monthly contract fee (the one they agreed to when they subsidized my phone up front) during my vacation, and they don't even need to route calls for me during that time.
I would tend to say "yes, I damned well should". But then, I wouldn't buy a locked phone in the first place.
I did point out I don't consider it "fair", but you can't just make basic human behavior go away by calling it retarded.
dealing with the assholes of this world is down to all of us.
Absolutely - But how do you prove yourself as one of the "good guys" rather than one of the assholes, if you sit idly by while others tarnish your name?
However, if you *did* look at the numbers of westerners killed by muslims versus muslims killed by westerners in last 20 years, it comes to around 10,000 westerners versus, um.. well, over a million, but who's counting.
Important difference - How many of those killed specifically in the name of their god? Yes, the most well equipped military forces in the world have caused a higher body count than savages wielding 30 year old former-soviet scrap. Only one of those sides has made a point of waging war in the name of Allah. Only one side hijacks oil refineries because they want Sharia and the French won't let them. Only one side crashes planes into buildings in an explicitly declared jihad.
Don't get me wrong, I in no way supported any of our recent wars in the sandbox - I even consider Kuwait a mistake, since Saddam seemed like the only guy in the region who had any shot of eventually heeling all the dogs under one alpha male (and a fairly secular one at that). But thus it stands - One side kills in the name of god, the other just responds in kind.
I lean atheist, does that mean its up to me to keep the actions of other atheists in check?
Of course not! If other atheists, in the name of atheism, went around torturing and killing people - Well, you'd have a choice. You'd either need to very visibly try to keep "your side" in check; or you'd want to ditch that particular banner and distance yourself from it as far and as fast as possible.
You only need to make people under the same banner behave if you actually care about that banner. Conversely, if you care about your group affiliations, you'd damned well better keep other members of your group in check. Otherwise, we end up back at my earlier post - The rest of the world will hold your friends against you. Simple as that.
If you are so fucked up that you can't recognize that countries need militaries then perhaps you should go live in Somalia.
Countries only need militaries because other countries need militaries. Perfect chain of iterated circular logic.
If you think that you are better than those who willingly serve then I propose that you do the world a favor and completely remove yourself from society.
I've never killed a man because some greybac... er... hair handed me a gun, mailed me to a faraway desert, and told me to hate the people I found there. Living nicely with my conscience in that regard, thanks. You?
The issue that concerns you as a non muslim is "Can or should I tar all Muslims with the same brush?"
No you shouldn't, and your actions will actually worsen relations between different groups
I think you have made the mistake of confusing this world for an ideal one.
I don't claim this as "fair", but humans will judge others based on the group labels they wear. Non-Muslims will not take the time to learn someone's stance on which Caliphs count for which purposes.
A disturbingly large number of people who identify themselves as Muslims go around blowing up buildings, hijacking refineries, chopping off heads, raping Western reporters to celebrate "democracy", and generally doing their damnedest to make the rest of the world hate them. The rest of the world has no obligation to give a shit about why we shouldn't consider the left hand as bad as the right; The burden rests on "the good ones" to get their own house in order.
And this applies just as well to any other religion, to races, to entire cultures. You don't "just" need to live as a role-model - You need to live as a role model and get everyone else under the same banners as you to do the same.
Are all Christians the same as Westboro Baptist?
No, but I would point to Phelps as yet another reason our species needs to do away with all overt expressions of religion (the biggest applicable "banner" in this situation). Believe whatever the hell you want, but keep it to yourself. We need people like that medicated or even committed, not protected because of the particular brand of vitriol they spew.
it's not efficiency that matters, but cost per watt of capacity. Make solar cheaper per watt than coal plants (we're getting close now), and then watch all the rooftops in the country get covered with solar panels.
+5 insightful. So many of the haters miss that point - We don't all live in Urban Hell. I don't care about finding a way to squeeze 99% of the energy out of the 10 square feet of sunlight falling on the south side of my apartment between the skyscrapers; I care about about the cost per Watt.
And never mind just rooftops - Find a way to sell me nearly-disposable panels for a few bucks per square meter, and I'll pave a quarter acre of my yard with the damned things, and sell all the extra clean power to those trapped in Urbia (hmm, why do we say "suburbia" but not "urbia"?).
As it stands, we can already get panels that will break even vs their purchase price within a few years. Make that a couple of months, without a 20-30k upfront cost, and watch our present energy crunch vanish overnight.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, can I still get in on that Obama vs Romney thing? I mean, sure, the odds have gotten worse for Romney since November, but just think of the payout if he wins!
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go buy my weekly Megabucks tickets - Remember, "You can't win if you don't play!"
Because of course SMTP administration competence of the company's (possibly hosted) email is directly proportional to competence in the field the company works in.
Yup, pretty much. If you walk around - alone - wearing an "i'm with stupid" t-shirt, I don't care if you make Stephen Hawking look like Forest Gump, people will steer clear of you.
Pull your head out of your arse - in the real world, businesses need to communicate.
Yes. Yes, they very much do. And if they don't take that function seriously enough to make sure their audience can hear them, do you really want to do business with them?
They also need to make pay their bills - Do you also overlook your customers just "forgetting" to pay you because they have their AP system set up poorly?
Unless, of course, your core business depends on a steady stream of "bigger idiots", in which case, just reverse the polarity of the SPFion flux.
Those are local emergencies, those are immediate emergencies. If you can't get the terminology for emergency events correct why should anyone take your advice on what is the ideal tool for reporting emergencies?
;)
I didn't intend to put forth a grand unified theory of disaster-situation communication. I merely suggested someone ditch their land line for a cell phone, if they have adequate cell coverage at home. That said, thank you for correcting my terminology. Perhaps next time I attempt to make a similar point, the thread won't get derailed by pedants arguing about how many neighboring towns/states/continents have to get wiped out by the asteroid before I stop caring about making phone calls while physically at home.
And who said anything about reporting it? In the event of an actual disaster, I don't particularly care about who gets to the smoking crater first. I just want the ability to make normal phone calls from the hotel I end up living in for a few weeks, without paying Hilton $3.50/minute for the luxury.
I work there 6 consecutive years. In that time I increase revenue by 300%, stock price doubles, everyones happy, and I even got a boost to 1.9M 18 months ago. I've now established that I'm not only good at what I do
Now let's look at reality. The last CEO got caught tapping the mayor's wife (take that as you will) and the company had to write down a $20M golden parachute to get rid of him. The payoff almost zeroed out revenue for the year, and the scandal dropped the company's stock price by half.
You came on as a hired gun to make some nasty changes and take the heat off the "real" next CEO. You outsource the only employment within 100 miles of a small town in Nebraska, to Bangalore. Over the next five years, the stock price and revenue recover back to normal. In the sixth year, you announce plans to destroy another small town, and step down when the PR backlash gets too intense. The company officially denounces you, but you have your choice of three positions already lined up to do the exact same thing.
Sorry, but no CEO can boost revenue by 300% through anything even remotely creditable as "skill". A really good CEO might sustain 10% "real" growth on average, in a good economy. When you see BS numbers like that, it just screams "bookkeeping games".
/ Bernie Madoff reported near-legendary gains of a mere 11% per year for an equally amazing decade and a half. He should have just hired you for six months, eh?
At under a buck for a book it will be the writers who will starve in a gutter unless their work sells millions.
Ever seen people buy from a used bookstore, where they can get physical books for a buck or two? They walk out of those places with crates full of books.
Yes, at a buck a book, writers will need to sell more. But they will sell more, as people load their Kindles with cheaply purchased books rather than a dump of Project Gutenberg and one or two best sellers.
Of course, the real issue here involves the continuing use of obsolete middle-men. A self (or minimally-managed) published ebook only needs to sell a few tens of thousands of copies at a buck each for the author to make a living. When you have authors taking the same crappy terms that traditionally included not only editing and marketing, but most importantly, access to a printing and distribution network - Do we really wonder why someone can sell 50k copies of a $20 book and still need to take a day job to pay their bills?
You'd have about a whole dozen profitable writers under your plan.
For every Tom Clancy or JK Rowling, you have a thousand "serious" writers who already can't make a living on the $200/year royalty checks they get.
Frankly if authors made more as a % (thus more absolute dollars), we might see more people go into this field of work.
If the authors made more as a percent, a lot more people (including myself) would feel willing to pay more for their work. When the lion's share goes to an obsolete publishing and distribution industry that has zero relevance to digital works? No thanks, but can you direct me to the author's online tip jar?
Crazy, it seems Amazon, Google, Apple are having no trouble finding customers.
Because they offer albums and episodes under the magical $10 price point. Since you obviously didn't read it, TFA involves Amazon trying to enforce artificial scarcity (specifically on the resale market, which the producers would vastly prefer to obliterate entirely by using licensing terms to illegally deprive us of our right of first sale) on a digital market for the purpose of driving prices up.
Starve in the gutter? Too bad most people aren't malcontents / sociopaths like yourself.
Fortunately, they do, however, grasp the concept of hyperbole.
Specific dollar values (and sociopathic tendencies) aside, most people would rather pay what they consider a "fair" price for what they want. But if they can't get what they want for what they consider a fair price, the internet has demonstrated that people feel little hesitation about setting their own terms for obtaining non-physical goods.
Psst - Dear merchants and content providers...
You will sell countless millions of your products at under a buck each. At >$10 each, a significant number of people will pirate it. And if you don't even offer it for sale (or play tricks to have a limited number of copies available), you guarantee everyone who wants it will just pirate it.
Don't like it? Starve in the gutter. We don't care. Give us what we want or vanish, simple as that.
Why bother letting them know that you're listening to and giving consideration to their threats? Why bother making a paper trail of any kind?
You mean, as opposed to asking Slashdot and making it to the FP?
Yeah, sure, no one at Piriform reads Slashdot. Whatever response the asker comes up with will no doubt totally surprise them. And anyway, they probably send out a hundred such requests to remove compatibility features daily, right?
At this point, I think they have their answer, and already need to decide whether to up the stakes and lawyer up, or forget about it completely.
This is plus 5 Insightful? More like plus 5 Sad. Or are most people here Americans with scientifically proven zero empathy.
"Empathy" means the ability to understand and share the feelings of a fellow human. Mitt's assertions to the contrary aside, "businesses are [not] people too". So empathy has nothing to do with it.
A business exists solely for the exchange of goods and/or services for money (or other goods and/or services). If a business can't provide me with the goods and/or services I want, they have no reason to continue to exist for all it matters to me. I would only even give them that few days I mentioned to restore service, as a matter of convenience to me - If I could realistically switch ISPs, for example, 15 seconds after discovering my internet had gone down again, Verizon could kiss my hairy white ass goodbye.
Now if you want to talk about loyalty - I have loyalty to my friends. I have loyalty to my family. I have loyalty to people that have given me a reason to care about them. The company that, despite my opting out of everything possible on their privacy policy still has their "partners" send me life insurance offers once a month? Yeah, not so much loyalty there - More like "simmering resentment" that such complete bastards manage to have the best game in town.
ISTM that you're an unreasonable little snot, since the speed of the resolution of the problem is completely dependent upon the cause of the problem. What is reasonable, though, is timely customer feedback.
Sorry, but 100% wrong. Yeah, timely feedback (including the magic phrase "prorated refund for downtime") will buy you a few days (at most). But if I actually pay for your service, I don't give two shits if your only datacenter just got hit by a Tsunami - Get your service back up now, or by next week your competition will provide it for me.
If I get something for free, then obviously not an issue. File a bug report, and if they don't fix it before you lose interest, move on, but you can't really complain too much about it.
If I pay for a service, then my willingness to put up with outages depends entirely on their willingness to not charge me during downtimes.
Now, if I need the service in question, they only get a few days before I find someone else to provide it, regardless of free or not.
Note that this assumes having no real contract in place specifying an SLA. If you have that, then you have the acceptable downtimes and repercussions for exceeding them all nice and neatly spelled out.
That is patently false. Landlines have been proven to be far more resilient to local emergencies than cell phones dozens of times.
;)
By "local", I mean "house on fire", "gas main explosion on my block", that sort of thing. Local.
Hurricane Sandy did not count as "local". Earthquakes don't count as local. A three million acre wildfire does not count as local. Yes, in widespread emergencies, landlines hold up better - But as I already said, they don't do you much good from your car, two states away.
That said, really, do what you want. Go ahead and pay $50 a month for crappy home phone service. Every little "necessity" in the minds of the old and stupid adds to what we consider a living wage in this country, which makes my disposable income all the higher by not caring in the least about having a physical copper wire running through the wall and to my phone.
In the style of Bruce Schneier's movie-plot threat scenarios, what's the most nefarious use you can anticipate such remote outlet control being used for?
Turn off the fridge after the victim goes to work for the day, and turn it back on about an hour before they get home.
Repeat until they die... of Botulism! <Cue evil laugh>
Aww, I only want to make my bathroom nice and toasty by remote control before I get out of bed, you cretin! :)
But yeah, seriously. Great tool for lights or remotely cycling power to a home server. Dumb dumb dumb idea to connect anything intended to make large amounts of heat (coffee pot) or dangerous motions (table saw).
Oddly, I thought UL/CE wouldn't approve products like this specifically for that reason - That we simply can't trust most people to have the common sense not to try to remote-start their electric self-propelled lawnmower. Nice to see networked outlets finally exist, but I fully expect we'll hear about plenty of Darwin awards as a result of plain ol' misuse, no need to require malware in that equation.
I've arrived at the point where I hate my land line. I'd drop it in a second but my wife thinks it's important.
Grow a pair and cancel it. Duh.
"Sorry honey, but we waste way too much money on a useless, obsolete service that no one but fraudsters ever uses. In a local emergency, our cell phones have a better chance of working than the land line; and in a wide-scale emergency, you can't use the land-line from the car as we flee the coming Tsunami."
So the government botched a sting operation called Fast and Furious and you're going to frame them as if it's standard operating procedure?
// No, they did not - In 2009, they passed an "omnibus spending bill". Spending approval does not equal a budget, not by a long shot.
Only the "botched" part. The rest suggests that our government had more of a clue than normal.
/ Still waiting on that 1998 budget...
Perhaps one of our resident "IAAL"s can clarify this, but in the absence of an explicit license, doesn't copyright still apply to a code snippet by default? So rejecting the use of the GPL or other FOSS doesn't mean just any corporate asshat can come along and steal your work - Quite the opposite, it means no one can legally use your code.
Which works out perfectly for the hobbyist coders - including these so-called "POSS" coders - who really don't give a damn about who "owns" a given code snippet. As the only real down side, such an approach makes it impossible for a company like RedHat to contribute to the community by improving that code, because without some sort of explicit license, no sane company will touch it ("Yeah, that Windows 9 thing you guys wrote? It counts as a derivative work of MyFirstPokerApp, thanks for giving me that private Caribbean island I always wanted, Redmond!"). But the original author still very much enjoys the protection of copyright-by-default, at least in the US.
Why stop there? Have a separate camera, a separate music player too. What a wonderful future that will be where instead of one device capable of doing lots of things we have lots of individual devices dedicated to a single purpose.
I know you jest, but seriously, some functions just don't conveniently tie into an all-in-one device. Smartphones take crap pictures, for example. And as TFA points out, they really don't make a very good form-factor as phones, either.
I actually kinda like your (and TFA's) idea, taken to an extreme. Use your tablet as a sort of personal server for storage and "real" communication, and everything else can just talk back to it via NFC.
Only annoyance there - Power. If we can solve that one without needing to plug in half a dozen peripherals every night, I'd call this a winner.
I wish they did that to green card caps, though.
Why bother? Not only won't they enforce immigration laws, they outright sue state and town PDs who attempt to do so to force them to stop.
Visas? Immigration? Meh, c'mon in, apply for welfare, and retire. Only those of us dumb enough to work for a living as natural born citizens have anything to complain about here.
The firmware of a mobile phone is covered by copyright law.
To which the manufacturer, not the carrier, holds the copyright. But okay so far...
In order to unlock the phone, either an official lock code is required (which may be obtained unofficially, and whose legal status if obtained unofficially is dubious) or the firmware needs to be replaced
If I replace the firmware, then the phone no longer contains the original copyrighted code. This seems like a self-correcting "problem".
That said, the new firmware most likely just contains a slightly modified version of the original, so back to copyright violation; but if someone actually wrote a clean-room implementation, the DMCA should no longer apply.
Realistically, of course, none of this matters. As they've always done, the government will just use this as yet another selective enforcement tool to fuck over anyone they want to go after while happily ignoring the vast majority of violations.
do you really need every point update of android? what does it give you?
Wrong question. Try "Should anyone but me get to decide which updates I need?". Then we can at least start that discussion (not the same one in TFA, BTW) in a meaningful way.
As for the "real" topic from TFA - Should I have the right, if I visit the UK this summer, to put in a local prepaid SIM card (legally obtained and paid for - They actually have sane rules over there about this stuff, and you can buy minutes for a pittance) so I can use my own phone without paying my normal carrier their insane international roaming fees? Keep in mind that my carrier still gets paid their normal monthly contract fee (the one they agreed to when they subsidized my phone up front) during my vacation, and they don't even need to route calls for me during that time.
I would tend to say "yes, I damned well should". But then, I wouldn't buy a locked phone in the first place.
That's a fucking retarded viewpoint
I did point out I don't consider it "fair", but you can't just make basic human behavior go away by calling it retarded.
dealing with the assholes of this world is down to all of us.
Absolutely - But how do you prove yourself as one of the "good guys" rather than one of the assholes, if you sit idly by while others tarnish your name?
However, if you *did* look at the numbers of westerners killed by muslims versus muslims killed by westerners in last 20 years, it comes to around 10,000 westerners versus, um.. well, over a million, but who's counting.
Important difference - How many of those killed specifically in the name of their god? Yes, the most well equipped military forces in the world have caused a higher body count than savages wielding 30 year old former-soviet scrap. Only one of those sides has made a point of waging war in the name of Allah. Only one side hijacks oil refineries because they want Sharia and the French won't let them. Only one side crashes planes into buildings in an explicitly declared jihad.
Don't get me wrong, I in no way supported any of our recent wars in the sandbox - I even consider Kuwait a mistake, since Saddam seemed like the only guy in the region who had any shot of eventually heeling all the dogs under one alpha male (and a fairly secular one at that). But thus it stands - One side kills in the name of god, the other just responds in kind.
I lean atheist, does that mean its up to me to keep the actions of other atheists in check?
Of course not! If other atheists, in the name of atheism, went around torturing and killing people - Well, you'd have a choice. You'd either need to very visibly try to keep "your side" in check; or you'd want to ditch that particular banner and distance yourself from it as far and as fast as possible.
You only need to make people under the same banner behave if you actually care about that banner. Conversely, if you care about your group affiliations, you'd damned well better keep other members of your group in check. Otherwise, we end up back at my earlier post - The rest of the world will hold your friends against you. Simple as that.
If you are so fucked up that you can't recognize that countries need militaries then perhaps you should go live in Somalia.
Countries only need militaries because other countries need militaries. Perfect chain of iterated circular logic.
If you think that you are better than those who willingly serve then I propose that you do the world a favor and completely remove yourself from society.
I've never killed a man because some greybac... er... hair handed me a gun, mailed me to a faraway desert, and told me to hate the people I found there. Living nicely with my conscience in that regard, thanks. You?
The issue that concerns you as a non muslim is "Can or should I tar all Muslims with the same brush?" No you shouldn't, and your actions will actually worsen relations between different groups
I think you have made the mistake of confusing this world for an ideal one.
I don't claim this as "fair", but humans will judge others based on the group labels they wear. Non-Muslims will not take the time to learn someone's stance on which Caliphs count for which purposes.
A disturbingly large number of people who identify themselves as Muslims go around blowing up buildings, hijacking refineries, chopping off heads, raping Western reporters to celebrate "democracy", and generally doing their damnedest to make the rest of the world hate them. The rest of the world has no obligation to give a shit about why we shouldn't consider the left hand as bad as the right; The burden rests on "the good ones" to get their own house in order.
And this applies just as well to any other religion, to races, to entire cultures. You don't "just" need to live as a role-model - You need to live as a role model and get everyone else under the same banners as you to do the same.
Are all Christians the same as Westboro Baptist?
No, but I would point to Phelps as yet another reason our species needs to do away with all overt expressions of religion (the biggest applicable "banner" in this situation). Believe whatever the hell you want, but keep it to yourself. We need people like that medicated or even committed, not protected because of the particular brand of vitriol they spew.
it's not efficiency that matters, but cost per watt of capacity. Make solar cheaper per watt than coal plants (we're getting close now), and then watch all the rooftops in the country get covered with solar panels.
+5 insightful. So many of the haters miss that point - We don't all live in Urban Hell. I don't care about finding a way to squeeze 99% of the energy out of the 10 square feet of sunlight falling on the south side of my apartment between the skyscrapers; I care about about the cost per Watt.
And never mind just rooftops - Find a way to sell me nearly-disposable panels for a few bucks per square meter, and I'll pave a quarter acre of my yard with the damned things, and sell all the extra clean power to those trapped in Urbia (hmm, why do we say "suburbia" but not "urbia"?).
As it stands, we can already get panels that will break even vs their purchase price within a few years. Make that a couple of months, without a 20-30k upfront cost, and watch our present energy crunch vanish overnight.