I know this is slashdot, but really, Read The Fine Original Post, the one at the very top before all the comments.
For practicality reasons, an external USB keypad is less convenient than a built-in one.
I know this is slashdot, but really, you should have clicked on the link he referenced. It is not an "external USB keypad". It's a built-in tray, just like one you might use for Reading/Writing CDs/DVDs on a laptop, but instead of having a CD/DVD tray that pops out from inside your laptop, it's a numeric keypad that pops out instead.
And the only issue I see is that this solution looks great on a ten year old A31p huge beast of a laptop, but I don't know how many newer laptops these days would have the room for it and the corresponding sturdy structural support for such a huge tray. I guess, a thinner tray for the keypad could be made for newer thinner laptops, but these days I don't trust big manufacturers to implement something like this very well. It would have to be made by an independent hardware shop that was obsessed with making high quality products, before I'd even consider buying such an accessory at all.
Slightly offtopic, but I like my keyboard centered. I don't get it how someone can use a laptop keyboard with numeric keypad.
I second that. I'm currently typing on an uncentered HP laptop keyboard, with actually a decent numeric keypad, but I don't like it.
When I first saw my HP laptop coming out of the box, I loved it because it had a huge screen, and it had a full-size keyboard, but that doesn't make up for the fact the keyboard is not centered and that the track-pad is also uncentered.
And this problem is only compounded by the fact that HP wants to make their full-sized keyboards laptops still look cool despite their lack of symmetry, so they made the trackpad mostly the same color as the rest of the laptop and they made the trackpad so flush with the rest of the surface that I had to add my own layers of scotch tape to create a bigger edge (otherwise, I wasn't able to initially locate my trackpad by touch alone).
Yes, I wonder how long it takes for North Korea to start calling its nuclear program a "tactical nuclear weapons program" and that they will "preemptively defend themselves from the American Empire" and launch an operation called "operation freedom" that will "liberate" their countrymen down south.
Posting a bond for a royalty rate of 33 cents per device in the US for the next 60 days is a far cry from the original ~$8 per device Microsoft originally wanted. Me thinks Motorola won't have any problem paying that amount to get around the ban (even if, worst case scenario, the pending ban in Germany for Windows 7 and Xbox itself never goes into effect).
If any inmates are running the asylum, it's the Slashdot editors and the ArsTechnica editors that are using their headlines as cheap click-bait. It's like they both are trying to inflate their traffic numbers for some reason.
Its about having apps screened and approved not about sales. Free apps (gratis) from the App Store can use iCloud for storage too.
You mean free to the consumer, not free to the developer. The last I checked, there was still an annual fee for being a developer on iOS, even if you were publishing a free app.
Why would there ever be a reason to enforce such a small maximum length?
A little empathy please. It's not so easy to memorize hundreds of thousands of such passwords for your online customers. And I'm shocked that those little men sitting inside those ATM machines can even do something like that at all.
Clothes. Get a change of clothes. I know you want to look cool with your gadgets in that briefcase, but you're not going to impress anyone if you've been wearing the same clothes for the past two to three weeks. It also goes without saying that you should put a toothbrush in there, with toothpaste, soap, shampoo, etc (in those little TSA-approved bottles of course).
And please, do not take your gadgets abroad unless you really have to. Just assume that they're going to get broken, stolen, and/or scanned by border officials, and that even if nothing happens to them, you'll be so worried about losing them, that you won't be able to enjoy your travels as much.
And personally, if it was just a vacation I was going on, the only thing I'd bring is a cheap kindle and a cheap pocket digital camera, but even those two items would be optional. The Kindle is cheap enough, it's no big deal if you lose it/break it. It's less likely to standout as a slick gadget, so you're less likely to be attacked for it. It has 3g worldwide mobile data access (if I remember correctly). And I assume that if it gets stolen, there is a way to block the thief from accessing your account.
Good for them, as casual piracy really is hurting the industry.
And a Denial Of Service attack on your dynamic IP address, or on your neighbor's IP address, isn't going to hurt your internet connection or anyone else's. Right?
but now everyone is pirating.
Yes, even Microsoft is doing it. For a long while companies like Microsoft and Macromedia (now part of Adobe) would seed their own cracked products on torrent sites, just so that they could gain market share (while maintaining their high official listed price). It seems piracy was helping those companies, not hurting them.
Sometimes, I wish companies couldn't have it both ways.
He wasn't much of an American. He had U.S. citizenship for a grand total of... 14 years. Apparently he wasn't very honest when he took the oath of citizenship in 1998. The U.S. doesn't need more people who lie under oath; we've got quite enough, so one less is an improvement.
Dishonest? What are you talking about? He's not coming back to his original Brazilian citizenship, that would be financial taxation suicide. He's going for Singapore residency instead (and eventually, Singapore nationality I assume).
It is possible to be without nationality. You get a white passport when that's the case. And when you're super rich, it's very easy to have most countries welcome you with open arms (countries like the US, Switzerland, Singapore, are great for billionaires).
And sometimes, even if you acquire the US citizenship and are asked to give up your original nationality, some countries refuse to acknowledge your renouncing of your nationality, so if you ever get back on their soil, they may throw you in prison for dodging the draft or dodging your taxes, or if you don't owe them anything, you can just reapply for a passport and they'll give you one the next day (not that this is what happened in this case, like I said, it would be financial taxation suicide for a super rich guy to reacquire a Brazilian citizenship anyhow, and that's not what he's doing anyway).
Five editions? Of course, it's an ebook, they can claim it's a new edition every time they make an edit and press the save button. Considering that they call their book a bestseller (during a tiny little period of time on amazon.fr), I wouldn't surprised if they would stoop to that level of exaggeration when it came to numbering their editions as well.
And who is their publisher anyway? Lulu is a print-on-demand outfit for self-publishers. My understanding is that you just need to sell one book, in order for yourself to make your royalty.
And also, Lulu doesn't edit your work, nor does it promote it in any way. In that sense, they're just like your local Kinkos or your local copy store, except that Lulu provisions your book a ISBN number for you to be able to get it listed on Amazon (or make it look more like a real book at least), and they take care of doing the printing-on-demand procurement for your customers (although, it's not immediately obvious to your customers that "ships in in 3 - 5 business days" really means "will print and ship in 3 - 5 business days").
Please do not associate Consumer Reports/Consumers Union with JD Powers. The former is a non-profit organization which doesn't even take freebies for the products they review. They go buy it themselves anonymously.
And the latter, JD Powers & Associates, is a for-profit company and a paid shill, that will design survey questions/results in a such a way that the company paying them will always be coming out on top. And of course, their revenues comes mostly from the actual companies of the products they've reviewed, in either the form of payments for the actual detailed data they've gathered, or in the form of licensing deals where the company receiving their awards pays them for mentioning their public endorsement in their advertisements.
Of course, being an immigrant is, in itself, a filter. Leaving your native country for better opportunities is a strong sign of entrepreneurship.
And also, it can be a variable filter as well. On average, it takes a lot more effort/resources/skills/education to cross the iron curtain and then cross the ocean to get into the US, then to simply walk over from Canada/Mexico.
When will journalists learn?
Probably never. It would contradict too much the simple narratives they're trying to tell.
Because in most cases, Google is mining all those accounts for data and showing ads.
No, Google Apps for Education has no ads. And Google also claims not to be mining your data for advertisement purposes (although, they claim it is just mining your data for spam/malware, documents so that it can send you to Google Docs, calendaring items so it can send you to Calendars, etc.)
Of course, the real problem is that this second claim of theirs, that they're not mining student's data for advertising, can not be verified. And considering what happened with the recent wifi FTC incident, it's very possible that the people at the very top of Google actually have no idea what their managers and employees are doing at the lower levels.
In some cases, students may be involved with research that includes confidential data. Google does not provide guarantees that they won't mine/archive or protect that data in accordance with laws/regulations surrounding that data.
Sorry, but it is not Google's job to ensure that the students doing research actually follow the additional laws they're supposed to follow, just like it is not the school's sysadmin's job to do the same for an internally-hosted email system.
For instance, if a student is given the social security numbers of his research subjects and puts it in a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet, locks the document with a password, but does not encrypt the file, and then emails it to someone else, or leaves the file unencrypted on his laptop during his daily commute, he's breaking a number of Privacy laws in the United States (but it's certainly not the job of his school email system to rectify his mistakes).
Don't be so quick to spend your money, there are most likely better books on this topic. The book was never a "bestseller" even in French (except for a very brief window of time on Amazon.com when the author had his entire family and all his friends buy the same book at the same time). And the stellar reviews found on the author's web site certainly didn't come from the one less than luke-warm review that can be found on amazon.fr
If the intent is not to deter piracy, what are they educating the public about?
Hopefully, the studios that haven't bought into this scheme will label their DVDs accordingly, this way I can just buy their movies and skip this entire idiotic nonsense.
Did he refuse treatment until he had personally verified that the ambulance and hospital computers were running open source software?
What about you? Let's say a bunch of evil communists take over the United States (or your own country), and place all hospitals and roads under their dominion. It would still be relatively easy for you to avoid working at an hospital, or avoid working on the roads, because supposedly, there would still be other types of jobs available, but what would you do if you still wanted to walk outside on the streets, or needed to get treated in an emergency? Would you really place your very life or the very life of your family below the priority of your ideals? I doubt that.
And regarding his personal political views, you do not need to like the guy to appreciate some of what he has done. Case in point, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has been in the past an horrible father and a horrible bully, but that doesn't negate everything else he has done.
He's an anti-progress luddite who doesn't even visit webpages--he actually emails a daemon that wgets the page and sends it to him.
As your link references, he sees this as a time-management strategy that works for him. He says nothing about suggesting others to do the same. And yes, some people do some pretty weird things to avoid getting distracted by the Internet, but in his case, since he's actually been a very productive software developer, compared to the overwhelming majority of developers which I've run across, he may be someone worth emulating when it comes to getting things done and avoiding distractions.
Techies worship him as if he's the only one who ever came up with the idea of free source code or there weren't any other free source movements (hello, Berkeley UNIX?).
RMS is respected by some Techies, yes, for some of his software contributions, and yes, some of his more extreme software licensing views are even respected by some Techies as well, but "worship" is a bit of an hyperbole here.
It's easy to say "never", but we all could come up with scenarios where it might save lives to cut off service.
It's easy to say it's to "save lives".
No doubt, some violence would have been prevented if the video of the Bart cop shooting an immobilized man in the back wouldn't have made it to youtube (although, the Bart police did try their best to confiscate all the cell phone images for "evidence"). And perhaps, the LA riots would have been prevented (or at least reduced) if there had been a media black out about the Rodney King beating.
In those cases, a cell phone blackout, or a media black out, could have saved some lives (may be), but really, is this really what we want? Do we really trust the government to be able to shut down that media/communication infrastructure at will -- when for some people their cell phones and their cell phone cameras are really their last line of defense against a poorly trained government agent, or a rogue local government agency.
Do we really want to become that kind of country? Where we are video recorded by the police to be held accountable, but where no one is allowed to video record the police or publicly broadcast the video of the police -- except for the police themselves.
Well may be, they should try forgetting about region-locking and staggered releases (unless they include new materials).
In my case for instance, I usually decide whether or not I'm going to get the DVD as I'm walking out of the movie theater after having just seen the movie. It's too bad they do not take advantage of my heightened emotional state at that point, because by the time the DVD is out -- it's really a gamble whether or not I'll buy that DVD then -- and by then, since I waited so long already and was able to survive without it, my rational brain (or my wife) has taken over and may delay the purchase even more, thinking that I should be able to get a better discount if I wait.
And it would be great if I could just pick up a copy of the DVD as I'm walking out, or in some cases where I absolutely know I will love the movie, it would be good also if they could just hand me the DVD as they're handing me the ticket (or just hand me the DVD without the ticket in case I didn't want to see the movie at the theater, because I was seeing another movie, or I arrived late for the last show time, or whatever...). And if the movie theater didn't have any DVDs left on hand, which I understand logistically can easily happen, it would be just as good to me if they could just ship the DVD to my home address in the next couple of days -- having made the purchase of the DVD already at the movie theater.
And regarding the issue of region-locking, or regional releases, they should just forget about that too, and release movies according to the language they're in. This way, all the people in the World who want to buy the English version of a particular DVD can do it at the same time (with the Internet, there is little reason not to allow that). If they still want to stagger something, stagger the Chinese subtitled version, or stagger the Mandarin/Cantonese dubbed version, since still most people are lazy and still prefer to wait until a movie is professionally dubbed into their own language before seeing it.
Slashdot Mirror
I know this is slashdot, but really, Read The Fine Original Post, the one at the very top before all the comments.
For practicality reasons, an external USB keypad is less convenient than a built-in one.
I know this is slashdot, but really, you should have clicked on the link he referenced. It is not an "external USB keypad". It's a built-in tray, just like one you might use for Reading/Writing CDs/DVDs on a laptop, but instead of having a CD/DVD tray that pops out from inside your laptop, it's a numeric keypad that pops out instead.
And the only issue I see is that this solution looks great on a ten year old A31p huge beast of a laptop, but I don't know how many newer laptops these days would have the room for it and the corresponding sturdy structural support for such a huge tray. I guess, a thinner tray for the keypad could be made for newer thinner laptops, but these days I don't trust big manufacturers to implement something like this very well. It would have to be made by an independent hardware shop that was obsessed with making high quality products, before I'd even consider buying such an accessory at all.
Slightly offtopic, but I like my keyboard centered. I don't get it how someone can use a laptop keyboard with numeric keypad.
I second that. I'm currently typing on an uncentered HP laptop keyboard, with actually a decent numeric keypad, but I don't like it.
When I first saw my HP laptop coming out of the box, I loved it because it had a huge screen, and it had a full-size keyboard, but that doesn't make up for the fact the keyboard is not centered and that the track-pad is also uncentered.
And this problem is only compounded by the fact that HP wants to make their full-sized keyboards laptops still look cool despite their lack of symmetry, so they made the trackpad mostly the same color as the rest of the laptop and they made the trackpad so flush with the rest of the surface that I had to add my own layers of scotch tape to create a bigger edge (otherwise, I wasn't able to initially locate my trackpad by touch alone).
Yes, I wonder how long it takes for North Korea to start calling its nuclear program a "tactical nuclear weapons program" and that they will "preemptively defend themselves from the American Empire" and launch an operation called "operation freedom" that will "liberate" their countrymen down south.
Posting a bond for a royalty rate of 33 cents per device in the US for the next 60 days is a far cry from the original ~$8 per device Microsoft originally wanted. Me thinks Motorola won't have any problem paying that amount to get around the ban (even if, worst case scenario, the pending ban in Germany for Windows 7 and Xbox itself never goes into effect).
If any inmates are running the asylum, it's the Slashdot editors and the ArsTechnica editors that are using their headlines as cheap click-bait. It's like they both are trying to inflate their traffic numbers for some reason.
Its about having apps screened and approved not about sales. Free apps (gratis) from the App Store can use iCloud for storage too.
You mean free to the consumer, not free to the developer. The last I checked, there was still an annual fee for being a developer on iOS, even if you were publishing a free app.
Why would there ever be a reason to enforce such a small maximum length?
A little empathy please. It's not so easy to memorize hundreds of thousands of such passwords for your online customers. And I'm shocked that those little men sitting inside those ATM machines can even do something like that at all.
That's it! You just ruined it for the rest of us. Why did you have to tell him?
Clothes. Get a change of clothes. I know you want to look cool with your gadgets in that briefcase, but you're not going to impress anyone if you've been wearing the same clothes for the past two to three weeks. It also goes without saying that you should put a toothbrush in there, with toothpaste, soap, shampoo, etc (in those little TSA-approved bottles of course).
And please, do not take your gadgets abroad unless you really have to. Just assume that they're going to get broken, stolen, and/or scanned by border officials, and that even if nothing happens to them, you'll be so worried about losing them, that you won't be able to enjoy your travels as much.
And personally, if it was just a vacation I was going on, the only thing I'd bring is a cheap kindle and a cheap pocket digital camera, but even those two items would be optional. The Kindle is cheap enough, it's no big deal if you lose it/break it. It's less likely to standout as a slick gadget, so you're less likely to be attacked for it. It has 3g worldwide mobile data access (if I remember correctly). And I assume that if it gets stolen, there is a way to block the thief from accessing your account.
Good for them, as casual piracy really is hurting the industry.
And a Denial Of Service attack on your dynamic IP address, or on your neighbor's IP address, isn't going to hurt your internet connection or anyone else's. Right?
but now everyone is pirating.
Yes, even Microsoft is doing it. For a long while companies like Microsoft and Macromedia (now part of Adobe) would seed their own cracked products on torrent sites, just so that they could gain market share (while maintaining their high official listed price). It seems piracy was helping those companies, not hurting them.
Sometimes, I wish companies couldn't have it both ways.
Personally I'd rather pay some taxes than condemn my kids to years in the military, but perhaps he has other priorities.
What kids? He doesn't even have girlfriend (according to his Facebook profile).
Besides if Singapore is anything like the US, there is always a legal loophole for the rich to dodge the draft.
He wasn't much of an American. He had U.S. citizenship for a grand total of... 14 years. Apparently he wasn't very honest when he took the oath of citizenship in 1998. The U.S. doesn't need more people who lie under oath; we've got quite enough, so one less is an improvement.
Dishonest? What are you talking about? He's not coming back to his original Brazilian citizenship, that would be financial taxation suicide. He's going for Singapore residency instead (and eventually, Singapore nationality I assume).
It is possible to be without nationality. You get a white passport when that's the case. And when you're super rich, it's very easy to have most countries welcome you with open arms (countries like the US, Switzerland, Singapore, are great for billionaires).
And sometimes, even if you acquire the US citizenship and are asked to give up your original nationality, some countries refuse to acknowledge your renouncing of your nationality, so if you ever get back on their soil, they may throw you in prison for dodging the draft or dodging your taxes, or if you don't owe them anything, you can just reapply for a passport and they'll give you one the next day (not that this is what happened in this case, like I said, it would be financial taxation suicide for a super rich guy to reacquire a Brazilian citizenship anyhow, and that's not what he's doing anyway).
Not just big media, but it also looks like some his former employees have it for him as well.
In compounds where certain idiots used the LRAD repeatedly, the detainees eventually learned to ignore it.
Either that, or the detainees became deaf.
Will the UK compensate someone for that life-long disability?
It's socialist UK, chances are the hooligans that will be targeted are already receiving benefits for a life-long disability of some kind.
Five editions? Of course, it's an ebook, they can claim it's a new edition every time they make an edit and press the save button. Considering that they call their book a bestseller (during a tiny little period of time on amazon.fr), I wouldn't surprised if they would stoop to that level of exaggeration when it came to numbering their editions as well.
And who is their publisher anyway? Lulu is a print-on-demand outfit for self-publishers. My understanding is that you just need to sell one book, in order for yourself to make your royalty.
And also, Lulu doesn't edit your work, nor does it promote it in any way. In that sense, they're just like your local Kinkos or your local copy store, except that Lulu provisions your book a ISBN number for you to be able to get it listed on Amazon (or make it look more like a real book at least), and they take care of doing the printing-on-demand procurement for your customers (although, it's not immediately obvious to your customers that "ships in in 3 - 5 business days" really means "will print and ship in 3 - 5 business days").
Please do not associate Consumer Reports/Consumers Union with JD Powers. The former is a non-profit organization which doesn't even take freebies for the products they review. They go buy it themselves anonymously.
And the latter, JD Powers & Associates, is a for-profit company and a paid shill, that will design survey questions/results in a such a way that the company paying them will always be coming out on top. And of course, their revenues comes mostly from the actual companies of the products they've reviewed, in either the form of payments for the actual detailed data they've gathered, or in the form of licensing deals where the company receiving their awards pays them for mentioning their public endorsement in their advertisements.
I work in the advertising industry...
Not for long.
Of course, being an immigrant is, in itself, a filter. Leaving your native country for better opportunities is a strong sign of entrepreneurship.
And also, it can be a variable filter as well. On average, it takes a lot more effort/resources/skills/education to cross the iron curtain and then cross the ocean to get into the US, then to simply walk over from Canada/Mexico.
When will journalists learn?
Probably never. It would contradict too much the simple narratives they're trying to tell.
Because in most cases, Google is mining all those accounts for data and showing ads.
No, Google Apps for Education has no ads. And Google also claims not to be mining your data for advertisement purposes (although, they claim it is just mining your data for spam/malware, documents so that it can send you to Google Docs, calendaring items so it can send you to Calendars, etc.)
Of course, the real problem is that this second claim of theirs, that they're not mining student's data for advertising, can not be verified. And considering what happened with the recent wifi FTC incident, it's very possible that the people at the very top of Google actually have no idea what their managers and employees are doing at the lower levels.
In some cases, students may be involved with research that includes confidential data. Google does not provide guarantees that they won't mine/archive or protect that data in accordance with laws/regulations surrounding that data.
Sorry, but it is not Google's job to ensure that the students doing research actually follow the additional laws they're supposed to follow, just like it is not the school's sysadmin's job to do the same for an internally-hosted email system.
For instance, if a student is given the social security numbers of his research subjects and puts it in a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet, locks the document with a password, but does not encrypt the file, and then emails it to someone else, or leaves the file unencrypted on his laptop during his daily commute, he's breaking a number of Privacy laws in the United States (but it's certainly not the job of his school email system to rectify his mistakes).
Don't be so quick to spend your money, there are most likely better books on this topic. The book was never a "bestseller" even in French (except for a very brief window of time on Amazon.com when the author had his entire family and all his friends buy the same book at the same time). And the stellar reviews found on the author's web site certainly didn't come from the one less than luke-warm review that can be found on amazon.fr
If the intent is not to deter piracy, what are they educating the public about?
Hopefully, the studios that haven't bought into this scheme will label their DVDs accordingly, this way I can just buy their movies and skip this entire idiotic nonsense.
Did he refuse treatment until he had personally verified that the ambulance and hospital computers were running open source software?
What about you? Let's say a bunch of evil communists take over the United States (or your own country), and place all hospitals and roads under their dominion. It would still be relatively easy for you to avoid working at an hospital, or avoid working on the roads, because supposedly, there would still be other types of jobs available, but what would you do if you still wanted to walk outside on the streets, or needed to get treated in an emergency? Would you really place your very life or the very life of your family below the priority of your ideals? I doubt that.
And regarding his personal political views, you do not need to like the guy to appreciate some of what he has done. Case in point, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has been in the past an horrible father and a horrible bully, but that doesn't negate everything else he has done.
He's an anti-progress luddite who doesn't even visit webpages--he actually emails a daemon that wgets the page and sends it to him.
As your link references, he sees this as a time-management strategy that works for him. He says nothing about suggesting others to do the same. And yes, some people do some pretty weird things to avoid getting distracted by the Internet, but in his case, since he's actually been a very productive software developer, compared to the overwhelming majority of developers which I've run across, he may be someone worth emulating when it comes to getting things done and avoiding distractions.
Techies worship him as if he's the only one who ever came up with the idea of free source code or there weren't any other free source movements (hello, Berkeley UNIX?).
RMS is respected by some Techies, yes, for some of his software contributions, and yes, some of his more extreme software licensing views are even respected by some Techies as well, but "worship" is a bit of an hyperbole here.
In any case, I hope he's alright.
It's easy to say "never", but we all could come up with scenarios where it might save lives to cut off service.
It's easy to say it's to "save lives".
No doubt, some violence would have been prevented if the video of the Bart cop shooting an immobilized man in the back wouldn't have made it to youtube (although, the Bart police did try their best to confiscate all the cell phone images for "evidence"). And perhaps, the LA riots would have been prevented (or at least reduced) if there had been a media black out about the Rodney King beating.
In those cases, a cell phone blackout, or a media black out, could have saved some lives (may be), but really, is this really what we want? Do we really trust the government to be able to shut down that media/communication infrastructure at will -- when for some people their cell phones and their cell phone cameras are really their last line of defense against a poorly trained government agent, or a rogue local government agency.
Do we really want to become that kind of country? Where we are video recorded by the police to be held accountable, but where no one is allowed to video record the police or publicly broadcast the video of the police -- except for the police themselves.
Well may be, they should try forgetting about region-locking and staggered releases (unless they include new materials).
In my case for instance, I usually decide whether or not I'm going to get the DVD as I'm walking out of the movie theater after having just seen the movie. It's too bad they do not take advantage of my heightened emotional state at that point, because by the time the DVD is out -- it's really a gamble whether or not I'll buy that DVD then -- and by then, since I waited so long already and was able to survive without it, my rational brain (or my wife) has taken over and may delay the purchase even more, thinking that I should be able to get a better discount if I wait.
And it would be great if I could just pick up a copy of the DVD as I'm walking out, or in some cases where I absolutely know I will love the movie, it would be good also if they could just hand me the DVD as they're handing me the ticket (or just hand me the DVD without the ticket in case I didn't want to see the movie at the theater, because I was seeing another movie, or I arrived late for the last show time, or whatever...). And if the movie theater didn't have any DVDs left on hand, which I understand logistically can easily happen, it would be just as good to me if they could just ship the DVD to my home address in the next couple of days -- having made the purchase of the DVD already at the movie theater.
And regarding the issue of region-locking, or regional releases, they should just forget about that too, and release movies according to the language they're in. This way, all the people in the World who want to buy the English version of a particular DVD can do it at the same time (with the Internet, there is little reason not to allow that). If they still want to stagger something, stagger the Chinese subtitled version, or stagger the Mandarin/Cantonese dubbed version, since still most people are lazy and still prefer to wait until a movie is professionally dubbed into their own language before seeing it.
Creating two new jobs for every single one lost. This sounds like this would be the work of some of very forward-looking Teamsters.