If I recall the claims about fracking causing flammable water were debunked.
Only by the people doing the fracking who go to great lengths to deny it. Everyone else is still studying it, or has already found evidence fracking leads to contamination.
Contamination at one point could take decades or even centuries to spread significantly throughout the aquifer
It could, but apparently, it doesn't.
TFA is pointing out that it was supposed to be hundreds of years, when it's really very fast (like weeks or months).
And the source of the whole raft of jokes which come down to "A Mathematician, a Physicist, and an Engineer".
In the high school gym, all the girls in the class were lined up against one wall, and all the boys against the opposite wall. Then, every ten seconds, they walked toward each other until they were half the previous distance apart. A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were asked, "When will the girls and boys meet?" The mathematician said: "Never." The physicist said: "In an infinite amount of time." The engineer said: "Well... in about two minutes, they'll be close enough for all practical purposes."
In other words, in a perfect world where their idealized model actually applied, they were right.
But in reality, they had a set of unfounded/incomplete assumptions, acted on that, and then subsequently discovered that the duck isn't perfectly spherical.
But if anybody points out at the time that the assumptions are based on a lot of unknowns, they get dismissed as being alarmist and raising hypothetical concerns when their team of crack scienticians can pat our heads and tell us our fears are unfounded.
By the time you figure out they had no real way of knowing if this was safe, it's too damned late.
And in the modern context where lobbyists and special interests want to muddy the waters with their mouth-piece organizations and fake journals, they get what they want, and the rest of us will be left to deal with the consequences.
Privatize the profits, socialize the risk is a winning formula if you can prevent people from believing the dangers posed by putting up your own "competing theory", which is usually from a bought and paid for "research institute" or "academic journal".
This is what happens when you say "in the absence of evidence it's harmful, we'll assume it's safe".
It seems entirely reasonable that it going to move around underground. Water tends to do that.
Sadly, this is not much different from all of the fracking and the like going on -- everybody says "well, it must be safe since there's no evidence to the contrary", and then people find themselves with flammable tap water. Then the companies try hard to deny that what they did had any impact, and that it must have been contaminated before (even when things were tested and came up clean).
Water will move around in cracks, and penetrate wherever it can. Human sewage is going to be full of pathogens, and those aren't going to stay put because we want them to.
That actually doesn't matter. If only self-selected "wine tasters" can taste the best wines, it still only matters to them, and the rest of us can do just fine with a bottle of Ripple or whatever.
That doesn't mean the good wines aren't of a better quality, it might just mean that people don't have enough knowledge to know the difference. But I've certainly seen that you can educate someone a little about wine and actually see their perception of wines change. I'm not talking about going from $5 bottles to $500, but I've definitely seen people go up one price point after they learned a little and got walked through some tasting.
See also expensive stereo equipment where people blow $10,000 on a turntable because it's got vacuum-sealed rotary overhead cams and a fucking flux capacitor built in
Well, if it actually had a flux capacitor in it, someone would definitely give you $10K for it.:-P
There's a lot of money in prestige, and perception is more important than reality.
I won't dispute you there. Diamonds are expensive and desired for wedding rings because DeBoers tells us so. We can make diamonds in the lab.
Some things are just more expensive because they're more rare. Kopi Luwac for sure because it's not produced on a huge scale -- I've never tried it, so I couldn't say anything about it.
In the example of truffles which came up earlier in this thread -- truffles are rare, hard to find, and not something you can cultivate. You need a dog or a pig to help you find them by smell.
So in large part, scarcity is what makes them expensive. And in most of those cases, I fall firmly into the camp of not being able to tell the difference.
But I also know there are things I can tell the difference between a $10 example and a $20 one. So I won't concede that in all cases it's without any benefit.
4DX-equipped theaters deliver smells, seat motions, and additional effects such as strobe lights and fog, all in sync with events as they appear on the screen
I already get headaches from 3D films, so I don't watch them.
Smells, strobe lights, fog, and moving seats? No thanks.
There's only a few movies I'll see in a movie theater each year (with Iron Man 3 being one of the planned ones), but for the most part I'd rather watch it at home on my own setup, which lets me enjoy the movie more and be able to eat/drink what I like and pause it to hit the head.
My home theater and my lazy-boy sofa are fine for me for most movies.
There have been lots of blind test; even one done by the Freakonics guys that determined many people could not reliably distinguish and those who could expressed a preference for the in expensive bottle almost as frequently as the expensive one.
Well, not knowing anything about the tests, I don't know what they were made up of. Were they people who were drinkers of cheap wine, or actual oneophiles? Because the people who drink the cheap plonk might not be a good sample. But even across 'better' wines, there's differences in what people like and don't like.
So there is lot of subjectivity is what a "good wine" actually is and it may come down to personal preference
Absolutely there is, it's taste which is highly subjective.
I usually don't like southern hemisphere wines for instance, because there's just something about them I'm not a fan of that I can't define. There's a few exceptions, but generally I don't enjoy them. Given a group of Chardonnay wines, some I will really like and some not so much even though they're the same varietal.
As a general rule, I can say that Australia, South Africa, and Chile don't produce wines I am partial to -- but I've certainly found a few examples which I rather enjoy. Jacob's Creek from Australia, for instance, makes wines I've consistently found to be really nice -- and I'm sure others find them pedestrian and boring.
On the other hand, I absolutely love grappa, which I know an awful lot of people think is utterly disgusting and tastes like paint thinner.
There's certain dishes with eggplant I don't like, because the eggplant ends up with bluish tint, and tastes very alkaline to me. It's immediate and unpleasant to me and I can't eat it. My wife can't taste it at all, but there's things she tastes the difference between that I can't even register.
Taste is a very subjective thing and not everybody experiences it the same.
Truffles are full of umami compounds like all fungus is.
I know lots of people who are absolutely crazy about the taste of mushrooms and will eat anything with them in it and seek it out. I also know people who don't like the taste of them at all and won't touch them.
I won't dispute your point, because let's face it, celebrities aren't drinking Cristal because they're wine connoiseurs, they order it because it's expensive and cool to do so. But even I can certainly tell the differences between wines of the same varietal but of differing qualities up to a certain point. That $40 bottle of wine really is better than that $5 bottle.
There's always going to be people who want to buy the stuff that the snooty people buy. But that doesn't mean that the chefs and other people with really good palettes don't taste it and say "wow, is that awesome" are wrong.
I suspect most people who drink Grey Goose don't have a good enough palette to tell the difference. But that doesn't mean that when the people who can tell the difference taste it they can't say "this is the best one".
There will always be a small amount of people with really well developed sense of taste, and there will always be those who get it because it's cool. That doesn't make the people with the well developed sense of taste wrong.
I have a hard time believing that they will make all their revenue on hardware alone.
No, they're just telling other people they can't sell advertising. Google still will sell advertising to you and use your information.
The biggest thing that leaped out to me was when Google has informed people they can't resell the device.
Now, that may just apply to the people who got early access to this, but as companies go down the road of "you don't own it, you just licensed it"... the response will be increasingly "if I don't own it, WTF did I pay you for?"
This whole licensing shit which says you don't actually own your device is crap. And every week Google slips increasingly into a company whose "do no evil"motto is a joke.
So many of these sites do that "hey, give us your username and password and we'll find people for you".
No way no how would I give any of them my password for my email account to sift through and find people. If I want to put information in there, I'll do it myself.
Though, it wouldn't surprise me if they used some other annoying mechanism to do these invites the user didn't do.
Like all social networking, your contacts and friends are extremely valuable to them. They want to expand it as much as possible, and might get a little overzealous in doing that.
As it is, I periodically get invites from people I don't know in LinkedIn, but if I don't know you or haven't worked with you, it's not happening.
Hey, you can do anything you want on your lawn. You can even come over to my lawn and tell me how awesome your lawn is.
But I'm not going to run out and buy pink flamingos and lawn jockeys because you think they're awesome.;-)
I don't get it, but that doesn't mean I care about your choice to do it. I'm obviously not going to deny that loads of people use Facebook and like it, because that would be silly.
But since every site now links to Facebook, I'm betting they get to know pretty much everything you do on the web since it reports back to the mother ship. I don't have any trust in Zukerfuck, so I wouldn't provide him with any of this stuff. What you choose to do is entirely up to you.
Take Apple's Ping, for example: launched in September 2010 as part of an iTunes update, the ambitious social-networking and music-recommendation engine immediately ran into a number of problems, including a lack of Facebook integration
Is lack of Facebook integration really a problem?
Admittedly, I see no value in Apple's Ping or most forms of social networking, so I'm clearly too old and grumpy, and therefore not their target market. But I can't see wanting to tell Facebook such information about myself.
To me, lack of Facebook integration is a good thing. (And, yes, I'm aware of the fact that for lots of people apparently it's the most awesome thing ever)
Trapping and force-feeding something that the animal would not normally eat is just wrong.
They didn't discover this coffee by feeding something to the civets they wouldn't eat normally.
The civets already eat the fruit and crap out the seed. The civets clearly already liked eating it.
Now, as to how someone made the leap of taking the seeds which have passed through the civet and decided to make coffee out of it... I couldn't even begin to guess at.
But they are NOT force feeding them something they wouldn't eat normally.
It's just another stupid food fad for people with too much money on their hands, like "truffles": horribly-expensive mushrooms that just taste like dirt.
Truffles have been prized for hundreds of years, and so has coffee.
Truffles taste earthy, that's true, but that doesn't mean that it is going to stop being a prized culinary item because you don't see the point. You may not like them, but many people do.
Fugu is horribly expensive and you need a special license to prepare it, but that hasn't slowed demand for it.
If it's food, and it's tasty, people will always want it. And, there's always going to be a certain cache to having something which is so rare and expensive.
I've never had occasion to try kopi luac, but I know that Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is also ridiculously expensive because of the micro climate and soil it grows in -- because you can't just grow the same coffee elsewhere and get the same results. It's entirely dependent on the soil and the climate.
But lobster used to be considered poor people's food until people discovered how tasty it was. So were oysters, so was sushi. Then people discovered how yummy they were.
Why not get a device that might actually get updates?
I've already updated it, but the ones with 2.x Android on it I wasn't interested in at all, even if they had better specs.
You voted for this system with your purchase, you are part of why it exists.
Bah, the company I've had my cell phone with for years gave me a new phone, it doesn't suck. But I'm not spending several hundred on a phone to prove a point either. Once I disabled the crapware it was a nice phone.:-P
Do I all of a sudden like them and think they're not money grubbing bastards? Absolutely not. Would I have been with them another two years any way? Probably.
I still got a free phone out of it, and it's a damned sight better than my ancient Motorolla Krazr phone. Texting is a lot easier at least.
A couple of months ago my carrier was offering me a new phone.
In the set of phones they were offering me, there were some Samsung models running Android 2.x, and an HTC model running 4.x. The Samsung had better specs, but since it was running such an old version of the OS I decided I'd rather have the HTC.
Of course the big problem is that carriers all put on their own shit to make as much money from you as possible. Selling ringtones, wallpapers, their own app stores, all sorts of crap. They don't want to have to re-certify their apps for new versions, so they're not interested in getting these updates rolled out to customers. In fact, I've heard that many of them actively prevent it.
It took me several days of disabling/uninstalling the crap my carrier had installed to make the phone mostly usable, because they literally try to inject their branding/cash grabs into as much as they can do. I'm not sure I've gotten it all, but there was an awful lot of extra crap that needed to be culled.
Carriers aren't interested in your security, they're interested in maximizing their own revenue. If that leaves you with an old and insecure phone, well, the contract shields them from any liability doesn't it?
OK, so I'll confess my ignorance on this one, and maybe someone can clarify it.
Does this have anything to do with if the universe will go through a big crunch? Or is this more about the models about the mechanics of the big bang?
I have no idea what this summary is saying since it's outside of my field, so I have no idea if this is good news, bad news, or a different in understanding something which is pretty abstract anyway.:-P
Astroturfing is a different thing; it's when a company creates a political lobbying group disguised as a "grassroots" organization.
Now that you've said all that. Go google for the definition of astroturfing and tell me if any of them support your assertion. Every one I can find also includes pumping products in it. Or are you going to assert that your own personal definition trumps all of the other ones?
Calling this "astroturfing" makes no sense, since there is no such thing real grassroots support for a company like Samsung.
Sure there is, actual paying customers who bought the product. You know, people who would be posting reviews.
Shilling is to advertising as astroturfing is to lobbying.
Well, as often happens on Slashdot, we're not the arbiters of how language gets used. Just because we want to make these arbitrary distinctions, it doesn't mean they're actually true.
In how I've seen it used and seen it defined, your definition is after the fact, arbitrary, and inconsistent with how the term is actually used.
So I'm afraid I have to discount your claim that astroturfing is only political as something you think, and may want to be true, but that isn't consistent with anything else.
The fact that we have the word 'astroturfing' to describe this kind of thing should be a pretty good hint that this happens.
People pay for fake Twitter followers, good reviews, bad reviews of competitors, position papers, and all sorts of crap. It's all about managing your brand and the message.
I find nothing at all surprising about this revelation, and I strongly suspect many corporations do the exact same thing.
Hell, Microsoft, the oil industry, the tobacco industry, political parties and the *AAs routinely cite 'research papers' from organizations which are really there just to be paid mouth pieces in order to support the version of the truth one organization wants to get out there. It's all marketing sleight of hand.
This is just the normal way of doing business these days. I've just come to assume that anything *too* much in favor of anything was purchased or was otherwise put out by someone with a stake in the game.
News flash, the average person doesn't apply a lot of critical thinking to these things, and companies are highly motivated to get a leg up on the competition.
When you grow up and start working for a company, you'll start to understand this.
Well there skippy, I've been in the software industry for pushing 20 years now, most of that at multinationals. I'm well aware of the fact that different divisions do different things -- that doesn't change the fact that, overall, Sony is one of the most anti-consumer companies going.
Maybe you should either grow the fuck up or shut the fuck up.
If you did know, well shame on you for circle jerking over "evil sony". Give it a break already, it happened 6 years ago. they apologized, learned their lesson, and they haven't done it since. What more do you want? Kazuo Hirai to personally come to your home and blow you? Get off it.
Sony can apologize for being assholes all they want. To me, they are still and always will be assholes, and I choose not to give Sony my business any more than I can avoid.
If you want to give them a break, go ahead. For me, I have seen 25+ years of how Sony treats their customers. And I have concluded that I put no trust in them as an entity.
I don't care if you think Sony is awesome and you'd like to suck their collective dicks -- they can kiss my ass, and certainly won't be getting my business.
I don't know how Sony treats people in Japan, but for me Sony would be the last company I would trust as my ISP.
People who install root-kits on computers are going to go to great lengths to look out for their own interests. They also don't have the greatest track record for security.
I'm probably just a tad bitter and cynical, but there's a lot of ways in which my distrust/dislike of Sony would make me think this isn't something I'd want. They'll probably be doing DPI and everything else shady you can imagine.
Whens the last time you ever heard anyone say "You HAVE to try the new Windows"?
Windows 1.0, Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8. All have been rather news worthy events that gathered a lot of attention.
Microsoft has NEVER been cool
No, but it was necessary, which meant for a very long time when Microsoft put out a new OS, people flocked to either buy new machines that could run it, or try to upgrade their machine in place. Frequently the new machine being necessary since specs changed so fast back then.
and I dont know that many people have cared enough about their computer to care what version MS released
Well, back in the way back, a new version of DOS was a huge thing since it was either DOS or a Mac at the time. Pretty much everybody knew about it. (OK, the Amiga guys didn't care)
Windows 95 was released with music from the Rolling Stones, if you don't think people have ever cared about what version MS released, you either weren't there or weren't paying attention.
But the real numbers are of course that 92% of desktop users world wide are using Windows. Hell, they could lose almost half their users and they still wouldn't be over.
True, but gone are the days when everybody rushed out to get the latest and greatest as soon as it was released.
If a sizable chunk of your customer base skips every other version of your OS, and if people are starting to buy more tablet/mobile devices than your PC market... your income base is eroding.
Microsoft makes most of their money from Windows and Office, and if people are deciding that the older version works just fine (I'm still running Vista for instance), that's going to really hurt their bottom line.
If all Microsoft can do is announce they'll be making a smart watch too, they're going to have to start actually working to get people to buy their stuff. And for a very long time they haven't had to do that, upgrades were just a matter of course.
From the sounds of it, the traditional desktop PC is being cannibalized in favor of tablet type devices -- and I don't get the impression that Microsoft's offerings in that category are exactly huge sellers.
As has been pointed out several times, the license probably doesn't allow for that.
Take your hypothetical death out of the equation, and ask: how would I transfer ownership of my digital media to someone else right now? I think you'll find the answer is the companies involved have stacked the deck in their favor, and there is no mechanism to do that.
In their interpretation, you don't own it, you bought a limited license to use it only how they approve.
If there's no legal mechanism you can transfer ownership of it while you're alive, what makes you think your death changes anything?
It's not 'property' per se. It's the new fangled digital property, which you don't own and have very few actual rights to. And those rights aren't transferable.
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Only by the people doing the fracking who go to great lengths to deny it. Everyone else is still studying it, or has already found evidence fracking leads to contamination.
It could, but apparently, it doesn't.
TFA is pointing out that it was supposed to be hundreds of years, when it's really very fast (like weeks or months).
And the source of the whole raft of jokes which come down to "A Mathematician, a Physicist, and an Engineer".
In other words, in a perfect world where their idealized model actually applied, they were right.
But in reality, they had a set of unfounded/incomplete assumptions, acted on that, and then subsequently discovered that the duck isn't perfectly spherical.
But if anybody points out at the time that the assumptions are based on a lot of unknowns, they get dismissed as being alarmist and raising hypothetical concerns when their team of crack scienticians can pat our heads and tell us our fears are unfounded.
By the time you figure out they had no real way of knowing if this was safe, it's too damned late.
And in the modern context where lobbyists and special interests want to muddy the waters with their mouth-piece organizations and fake journals, they get what they want, and the rest of us will be left to deal with the consequences.
Privatize the profits, socialize the risk is a winning formula if you can prevent people from believing the dangers posed by putting up your own "competing theory", which is usually from a bought and paid for "research institute" or "academic journal".
Where do you think the water for beer comes from? :-P
This is what happens when you say "in the absence of evidence it's harmful, we'll assume it's safe".
It seems entirely reasonable that it going to move around underground. Water tends to do that.
Sadly, this is not much different from all of the fracking and the like going on -- everybody says "well, it must be safe since there's no evidence to the contrary", and then people find themselves with flammable tap water. Then the companies try hard to deny that what they did had any impact, and that it must have been contaminated before (even when things were tested and came up clean).
Water will move around in cracks, and penetrate wherever it can. Human sewage is going to be full of pathogens, and those aren't going to stay put because we want them to.
That doesn't mean the good wines aren't of a better quality, it might just mean that people don't have enough knowledge to know the difference. But I've certainly seen that you can educate someone a little about wine and actually see their perception of wines change. I'm not talking about going from $5 bottles to $500, but I've definitely seen people go up one price point after they learned a little and got walked through some tasting.
Well, if it actually had a flux capacitor in it, someone would definitely give you $10K for it. :-P
I won't dispute you there. Diamonds are expensive and desired for wedding rings because DeBoers tells us so. We can make diamonds in the lab.
Some things are just more expensive because they're more rare. Kopi Luwac for sure because it's not produced on a huge scale -- I've never tried it, so I couldn't say anything about it.
In the example of truffles which came up earlier in this thread -- truffles are rare, hard to find, and not something you can cultivate. You need a dog or a pig to help you find them by smell.
So in large part, scarcity is what makes them expensive. And in most of those cases, I fall firmly into the camp of not being able to tell the difference.
But I also know there are things I can tell the difference between a $10 example and a $20 one. So I won't concede that in all cases it's without any benefit.
I already get headaches from 3D films, so I don't watch them.
Smells, strobe lights, fog, and moving seats? No thanks.
There's only a few movies I'll see in a movie theater each year (with Iron Man 3 being one of the planned ones), but for the most part I'd rather watch it at home on my own setup, which lets me enjoy the movie more and be able to eat/drink what I like and pause it to hit the head.
My home theater and my lazy-boy sofa are fine for me for most movies.
Well, not knowing anything about the tests, I don't know what they were made up of. Were they people who were drinkers of cheap wine, or actual oneophiles? Because the people who drink the cheap plonk might not be a good sample. But even across 'better' wines, there's differences in what people like and don't like.
Absolutely there is, it's taste which is highly subjective.
I usually don't like southern hemisphere wines for instance, because there's just something about them I'm not a fan of that I can't define. There's a few exceptions, but generally I don't enjoy them. Given a group of Chardonnay wines, some I will really like and some not so much even though they're the same varietal.
As a general rule, I can say that Australia, South Africa, and Chile don't produce wines I am partial to -- but I've certainly found a few examples which I rather enjoy. Jacob's Creek from Australia, for instance, makes wines I've consistently found to be really nice -- and I'm sure others find them pedestrian and boring.
On the other hand, I absolutely love grappa, which I know an awful lot of people think is utterly disgusting and tastes like paint thinner.
There's certain dishes with eggplant I don't like, because the eggplant ends up with bluish tint, and tastes very alkaline to me. It's immediate and unpleasant to me and I can't eat it. My wife can't taste it at all, but there's things she tastes the difference between that I can't even register.
Taste is a very subjective thing and not everybody experiences it the same.
Well, it depends really.
Truffles are full of umami compounds like all fungus is.
I know lots of people who are absolutely crazy about the taste of mushrooms and will eat anything with them in it and seek it out. I also know people who don't like the taste of them at all and won't touch them.
I won't dispute your point, because let's face it, celebrities aren't drinking Cristal because they're wine connoiseurs, they order it because it's expensive and cool to do so. But even I can certainly tell the differences between wines of the same varietal but of differing qualities up to a certain point. That $40 bottle of wine really is better than that $5 bottle.
There's always going to be people who want to buy the stuff that the snooty people buy. But that doesn't mean that the chefs and other people with really good palettes don't taste it and say "wow, is that awesome" are wrong.
I suspect most people who drink Grey Goose don't have a good enough palette to tell the difference. But that doesn't mean that when the people who can tell the difference taste it they can't say "this is the best one".
There will always be a small amount of people with really well developed sense of taste, and there will always be those who get it because it's cool. That doesn't make the people with the well developed sense of taste wrong.
No, they're just telling other people they can't sell advertising. Google still will sell advertising to you and use your information.
The biggest thing that leaped out to me was when Google has informed people they can't resell the device.
Now, that may just apply to the people who got early access to this, but as companies go down the road of "you don't own it, you just licensed it" ... the response will be increasingly "if I don't own it, WTF did I pay you for?"
This whole licensing shit which says you don't actually own your device is crap. And every week Google slips increasingly into a company whose "do no evil"motto is a joke.
So many of these sites do that "hey, give us your username and password and we'll find people for you".
No way no how would I give any of them my password for my email account to sift through and find people. If I want to put information in there, I'll do it myself.
Though, it wouldn't surprise me if they used some other annoying mechanism to do these invites the user didn't do.
Like all social networking, your contacts and friends are extremely valuable to them. They want to expand it as much as possible, and might get a little overzealous in doing that.
As it is, I periodically get invites from people I don't know in LinkedIn, but if I don't know you or haven't worked with you, it's not happening.
Hey, you can do anything you want on your lawn. You can even come over to my lawn and tell me how awesome your lawn is.
But I'm not going to run out and buy pink flamingos and lawn jockeys because you think they're awesome. ;-)
I don't get it, but that doesn't mean I care about your choice to do it. I'm obviously not going to deny that loads of people use Facebook and like it, because that would be silly.
But since every site now links to Facebook, I'm betting they get to know pretty much everything you do on the web since it reports back to the mother ship. I don't have any trust in Zukerfuck, so I wouldn't provide him with any of this stuff. What you choose to do is entirely up to you.
Is lack of Facebook integration really a problem?
Admittedly, I see no value in Apple's Ping or most forms of social networking, so I'm clearly too old and grumpy, and therefore not their target market. But I can't see wanting to tell Facebook such information about myself.
To me, lack of Facebook integration is a good thing. (And, yes, I'm aware of the fact that for lots of people apparently it's the most awesome thing ever)
They didn't discover this coffee by feeding something to the civets they wouldn't eat normally.
The civets already eat the fruit and crap out the seed. The civets clearly already liked eating it.
Now, as to how someone made the leap of taking the seeds which have passed through the civet and decided to make coffee out of it ... I couldn't even begin to guess at.
But they are NOT force feeding them something they wouldn't eat normally.
Truffles have been prized for hundreds of years, and so has coffee.
Truffles taste earthy, that's true, but that doesn't mean that it is going to stop being a prized culinary item because you don't see the point. You may not like them, but many people do.
Fugu is horribly expensive and you need a special license to prepare it, but that hasn't slowed demand for it.
If it's food, and it's tasty, people will always want it. And, there's always going to be a certain cache to having something which is so rare and expensive.
I've never had occasion to try kopi luac, but I know that Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee is also ridiculously expensive because of the micro climate and soil it grows in -- because you can't just grow the same coffee elsewhere and get the same results. It's entirely dependent on the soil and the climate.
But lobster used to be considered poor people's food until people discovered how tasty it was. So were oysters, so was sushi. Then people discovered how yummy they were.
It was 'free' with renewal of my contract.
I've already updated it, but the ones with 2.x Android on it I wasn't interested in at all, even if they had better specs.
Bah, the company I've had my cell phone with for years gave me a new phone, it doesn't suck. But I'm not spending several hundred on a phone to prove a point either. Once I disabled the crapware it was a nice phone. :-P
Do I all of a sudden like them and think they're not money grubbing bastards? Absolutely not. Would I have been with them another two years any way? Probably.
I still got a free phone out of it, and it's a damned sight better than my ancient Motorolla Krazr phone. Texting is a lot easier at least.
A couple of months ago my carrier was offering me a new phone.
In the set of phones they were offering me, there were some Samsung models running Android 2.x, and an HTC model running 4.x. The Samsung had better specs, but since it was running such an old version of the OS I decided I'd rather have the HTC.
Of course the big problem is that carriers all put on their own shit to make as much money from you as possible. Selling ringtones, wallpapers, their own app stores, all sorts of crap. They don't want to have to re-certify their apps for new versions, so they're not interested in getting these updates rolled out to customers. In fact, I've heard that many of them actively prevent it.
It took me several days of disabling/uninstalling the crap my carrier had installed to make the phone mostly usable, because they literally try to inject their branding/cash grabs into as much as they can do. I'm not sure I've gotten it all, but there was an awful lot of extra crap that needed to be culled.
Carriers aren't interested in your security, they're interested in maximizing their own revenue. If that leaves you with an old and insecure phone, well, the contract shields them from any liability doesn't it?
OK, so I'll confess my ignorance on this one, and maybe someone can clarify it.
Does this have anything to do with if the universe will go through a big crunch? Or is this more about the models about the mechanics of the big bang?
I have no idea what this summary is saying since it's outside of my field, so I have no idea if this is good news, bad news, or a different in understanding something which is pretty abstract anyway. :-P
Now that you've said all that. Go google for the definition of astroturfing and tell me if any of them support your assertion. Every one I can find also includes pumping products in it. Or are you going to assert that your own personal definition trumps all of the other ones?
Sure there is, actual paying customers who bought the product. You know, people who would be posting reviews.
Well, as often happens on Slashdot, we're not the arbiters of how language gets used. Just because we want to make these arbitrary distinctions, it doesn't mean they're actually true.
In how I've seen it used and seen it defined, your definition is after the fact, arbitrary, and inconsistent with how the term is actually used.
So I'm afraid I have to discount your claim that astroturfing is only political as something you think, and may want to be true, but that isn't consistent with anything else.
The fact that we have the word 'astroturfing' to describe this kind of thing should be a pretty good hint that this happens.
People pay for fake Twitter followers, good reviews, bad reviews of competitors, position papers, and all sorts of crap. It's all about managing your brand and the message.
I find nothing at all surprising about this revelation, and I strongly suspect many corporations do the exact same thing.
Hell, Microsoft, the oil industry, the tobacco industry, political parties and the *AAs routinely cite 'research papers' from organizations which are really there just to be paid mouth pieces in order to support the version of the truth one organization wants to get out there. It's all marketing sleight of hand.
This is just the normal way of doing business these days. I've just come to assume that anything *too* much in favor of anything was purchased or was otherwise put out by someone with a stake in the game.
News flash, the average person doesn't apply a lot of critical thinking to these things, and companies are highly motivated to get a leg up on the competition.
Well there skippy, I've been in the software industry for pushing 20 years now, most of that at multinationals. I'm well aware of the fact that different divisions do different things -- that doesn't change the fact that, overall, Sony is one of the most anti-consumer companies going.
Maybe you should either grow the fuck up or shut the fuck up.
Sony can apologize for being assholes all they want. To me, they are still and always will be assholes, and I choose not to give Sony my business any more than I can avoid.
If you want to give them a break, go ahead. For me, I have seen 25+ years of how Sony treats their customers. And I have concluded that I put no trust in them as an entity.
I don't care if you think Sony is awesome and you'd like to suck their collective dicks -- they can kiss my ass, and certainly won't be getting my business.
I don't know how Sony treats people in Japan, but for me Sony would be the last company I would trust as my ISP.
People who install root-kits on computers are going to go to great lengths to look out for their own interests. They also don't have the greatest track record for security.
I'm probably just a tad bitter and cynical, but there's a lot of ways in which my distrust/dislike of Sony would make me think this isn't something I'd want. They'll probably be doing DPI and everything else shady you can imagine.
Windows 1.0, Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows XP, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8. All have been rather news worthy events that gathered a lot of attention.
No, but it was necessary, which meant for a very long time when Microsoft put out a new OS, people flocked to either buy new machines that could run it, or try to upgrade their machine in place. Frequently the new machine being necessary since specs changed so fast back then.
Well, back in the way back, a new version of DOS was a huge thing since it was either DOS or a Mac at the time. Pretty much everybody knew about it. (OK, the Amiga guys didn't care)
Windows 95 was released with music from the Rolling Stones, if you don't think people have ever cared about what version MS released, you either weren't there or weren't paying attention.
True, but gone are the days when everybody rushed out to get the latest and greatest as soon as it was released.
If a sizable chunk of your customer base skips every other version of your OS, and if people are starting to buy more tablet/mobile devices than your PC market ... your income base is eroding.
Microsoft makes most of their money from Windows and Office, and if people are deciding that the older version works just fine (I'm still running Vista for instance), that's going to really hurt their bottom line.
If all Microsoft can do is announce they'll be making a smart watch too, they're going to have to start actually working to get people to buy their stuff. And for a very long time they haven't had to do that, upgrades were just a matter of course.
From the sounds of it, the traditional desktop PC is being cannibalized in favor of tablet type devices -- and I don't get the impression that Microsoft's offerings in that category are exactly huge sellers.
As has been pointed out several times, the license probably doesn't allow for that.
Take your hypothetical death out of the equation, and ask: how would I transfer ownership of my digital media to someone else right now? I think you'll find the answer is the companies involved have stacked the deck in their favor, and there is no mechanism to do that.
In their interpretation, you don't own it, you bought a limited license to use it only how they approve.
If there's no legal mechanism you can transfer ownership of it while you're alive, what makes you think your death changes anything?
It's not 'property' per se. It's the new fangled digital property, which you don't own and have very few actual rights to. And those rights aren't transferable.