I agree. However, so are the vast majority of the replies here, at least most of those moderated up: nothing but semi-disguised (all the way to outright) Apple fanboism and punditry, with pretty well every negative connotation of the words.
My opinion is coming around to this: Perhaps a community gets the quality of articles that they deserve. I've already arrived there in believing that a nation gets the politicians that it deserves, so it's hardly a stretch.
Part of me wonders if they're going to include them some other way; it sounds like they won't leave them on the install medium by default (though who knows), but I could easily see them adding a step to the customization process right before they turn you loose on your system.
"Would you like to install the following software?:
[X] Windows Mail: For reading e-mail
[X] Windows Movie Maker: For downloading and editing home movies"
etc. It seems like most of Microsoft's installers these days are just a few KB programs that fetch from the web anyway. It would take them about 25 seconds to re-purpose one of those installers for all of this removed functionality and probably not much more to have it run right at the end of the installation process.
It sounds like that's a separate problem. Bad teachers need to be weeded out, in the same way that anybody who's bad at their jobs in any profession should be, but once they pass muster they should be paid well.
In other words: No, she shouldn't get $50k, but she also probably shouldn't be a teacher.
However, any high school with over 300 kids per grade-level, or part of a district with more than 12 total schools (of all types) are all but incapable of being decent schools. (That means that any city public schools automatically suck, and any suburb public schools suck if the suburb is too large, or if the suburb school is run by the city district)
Wow, hyperbole much?
My high school had a graduating class somewhere a bit shy of 700, and it still has roughly that many students per grade. It's rated one of the best high schools in the nation, has a 92% pass ratio for AP exams, ACT/SAT scores all beat national averages. Graduation rate's around 93%.
Granted, it's a fairly rich school (though we are not a rich family) and it's one data point, but the idea that having more than 300 students per grade somehow makes them "automatically suck" is ridiculous.
Schools are good or bad based on their community, teachers and administration, not their class size.
One might have thought you were trying to make a reasonable point, right up until your Apple fanboism shone through:
Why should they allow useless products?
Because clearly, once Apple has created a product it's PERFECTION! Nobody should even bother to do anything encroaching on so much as the realm surrounding the vision of the idea that Apple coded. By golly, if we were to have more than one email client on a computer the whole technology thing would never have picked up steam!
Or, perhaps competition is good? Perhaps there actually ARE multiple products that do essentially the same thing and the world hasn't coming crashing down on our heads? Perhaps we have these concepts of markets and supply and demand that are capable of weeding out useless products without bothering our Beneficent Apple Overlords with having to take time out of their day? I wonder why nobody's ever tried such a thing? Customers deciding whether they like a product or not? Whoddathunkit?
But I'll give you better than you deserve and actually look past the Jobs worship to reply.
It's Apple's platform, Apple's SDK, and Apple's store. Why should they allow any product on the shelf that competes with their own business?
For starters, competition is good for consumers and stifling it is wrong--sometimes legally, sometimes "just" morally. The idea that we should permit it to chase every last dollar is what's wrong with this country. Corporations exist and are given all sorts of benefits by our government. Our government is supposed to exist to do the things which are best for its populace as a whole. Holding up the idea that two products competing on their merits and one being crushed by the power of the company who produced the other as somehow equally beneficial to us is ridiculous. Would we be having this discussion if it were Microsoft or IBM of a few decades ago that was crushing its competition beneath its heel?
Beyond that, Apple isn't creating these things to be generous to you, even within the context of the iPhone. They're using your work to make money. A cursory glance at their developer program page shows they take a 30% cut off the top. But more to the point, they're using you to populate their application library so more people will shell out hundreds of dollars to get that shiny new iPhone.
There's nothing wrong with this, but all previous objections aside (and let's face it, storing a few Kb on their servers for apps that never sell isn't going to hurt Apple) the least they could do when you actually DO agree to let them use you that way is not spit in your face, wave their arms and scream "oh no no no! *WE* coded something like that already, you can't!" If it's so useless, let it languish in obscurity. Don't ruin somebody's hard work. If it's not useless, if it's something people actually would want and they're squashing it... well, maybe that Apple glow dims because that's no better than anything Microsoft ever did.
You don't get mad at Best Buy for not selling maps to Circuit City.
The better example, of course, would be "you don't get mad at Best Buy for not selling Circuit City's products." My response is simple: Best Buy doesn't have a program whereby they let you store your products on their shelves, integrate with their system and take a cut of your profits either. If they did, I would be equally pissed at them if they decided that nobody could produce anything that they already stocked. It's all a crappy example, though, since physical goods and digital ones vary in so many important ways. This IS Slashdot, I'd expect you to be aware of that. It comes up in every damn story about copyright infringement, which is like every other story as it is.
You don't get mad at Circuit City for not selling empty cardboard boxes for $999
Probably anybody here on/. has already made up their minds about Microsoft, one way or another. Seeing through their ad is completely irrelevant; you're not their target audience.
has consistently posted virtually every one of his baseless motions on his blog seeking to bolster his public relations campaign and embarrass plaintiffs
In a way, that reminds me of an Eleanor Roosevelt quote: "Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent." In the same vein, if the RIAA and their attornies are acting completely above-board, acting reasonably, doing due diligence and otherwise conducting themselves as reasonable professionals, how can posting court papers be embarrassing to them? Telling people what they're doing in a courtroom can only embarrass them if what they're doing is embarrassing. In other words, so far as I can tell, he's being accused of telling the truth. "Wah! We're being idiots and he's SAYING SO!!"
That said, aren't these court documents a matter of public record anyway? I fail to see how posting already-public documents can be vexatious, unless they're accusing the clerk of the courts they're filing in of the same.
Speaking as an agnostic (or atheist, depending on how we're defining it--I do not believe there is a god):
However you can't simultaneously hold the belief that the world was created in 6 days by a god and that it was created over billions of years and that life evolved over a long period.
This is true, but it's misleading. I see no reason to believe that one cannot simultaneously believe in evolution and a universe millions of years old and a god at the same time.
What you're essentially saying is that one cannot believe in the Bible as literal truth and science at the same time, and that perhaps if that foundation is unseated then one cannot even believe in Christianity and science at the same time. This I support completely, but it doesn't mean it's impossible or illogical to believe in the existence of a god--perhaps one described by some other religion, perhaps one we know absolutely nothing about except the rules that govern our universe that we determine through science.
As I said, I do not believe in any god and I absolutely loathe organized religion, so I'm not trying to rationalize my beliefs nor do I feel any pressure toward political correctness here.
If you've really been playing for 4 years, it most certainly is extremely reasonable. You can look at it in many ways, but here are some examples (I'll round the total up to $800):
$800 / 4 years = $200/year
$800 / 48 months = $16.67/month
$800 / 208 weeks = $3.86/week
$800 / 1456 days = $0.55/day
Or break it down hourly: $0.02/hr.
Now, clearly, some of those aren't realistic; nobody's playing 24 hours a day 7 days a week for 4 years, but they're each interesting points of reference. For example, if you rent one movie from Blockbuster per week you'd pay more than the weekly price of WOW over the course of four years. A three hour movie would be considered fairly long; most WOW players would play at least that long in a given week and probably considerably longer. Don't even bother comparing going to the movies, because you know what kind of dough you shell out for THAT--before you even pick up any popcorn or a drink. Cable TV over that period at $30/mo would cost you $1440 (and let's face it, $30/mo is cheap for most households with cable).
WOW costs a lot over the long term, there's no doubt. But it's also a lot of entertainment for its price. If people aren't getting their money's worth, they wouldn't be buying all the expansions and subscribing monthly from day one. If they are, why complain about what they spend their entertainment dollars on? Nobody's forcing you to believe it's a good deal, but others clearly do.
Yaknow. I don't agree with you making it into a big deal, but I was at least prepared to assume you had a reasonable point to make. Until this:
Offensive. Why do I as a non-American care about American export laws?
Now I know you're simply an asshat.
Seriously, give me a damn break. You're offended because a US-based company follows US law and notifies others under that jurisdiction that they're required to do the same? And just to prove your asshattery, here's what the license ACTUALLY says:
6. EXPORT CONTROLS. This license is subject to all applicable export restrictions. You must comply with all export and import laws and restrictions and regulations of any United States or foreign agency or authority relating to the Product and its use.
Hey gee! It's not even America-centric. Whodathunkit?
Why should I feel compelled to click "I agree" to something I disagree with?
Do you think anybody gives a shit if you agree with a law or not? They're notifying you of its potential to exist--definitely in the US, and potentially in other jurisdictions. Export AND import; you may not even have a legal right to PRESS that "I Agree" button where you live. If you have a problem with any such law pertaining to you, take it up with your government. Bitching about some company telling you about it just makes you look stupid.
Maybe some of your other points had some validity, but they're drowned out by the screaming idiocy of this one. I honestly don't even remember what they were, and it's clear you're one of those people who made up his mind long ago without any of the facts so there's no point in going back to review them anyway.
Re:Writing hello world is not a manager job
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Fire Your IT Boss
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I think it all depends on the size of the company. The larger the company, the less important it is for a manager to be technically competent; they'll be spending more of their time keeping the corporate politics from above off their employees' heads and being advocates for the solutions their employees are suggesting with decision-makers above. While they may not be able to specifically determine whether an employee is good or not, they'll begin to get an idea based on how the work comes out and in what timeframe. In hiring decisions, they could have other programmers sit in the interviews and get a technical perspective--though this is really more about knowing the sorts of questions to ask, which isn't necessarily related to technical knowledge.
Smaller companies it's much more important they be competent. If it's a manager and a programmer, the manager is probably going to be DOING some programming. But either way, if they have no knowledge of what's going on, they'll never find out if their programmer is good or bad. They have nobody to lean on for extra information for interviews, nobody to talk to about proposals. In short, there's nobody but them to help think through whatever's going on--and if they don't have any knowledge about it, they simply can't make educated decisions. At least not without a monumental time investment to independently research every idea they have to decide on.
Both of these are predicated, of course, on managers who 1) know their limitations, 2) are not afraid to ask other people for help or opinions, and 3) actually listen to and trust the people they've hired to do the work. Managers who fail at those three basic concepts are almost assuredly going to be bad managers regardless of whether or not they are(/were) hot shit from a technical perspective.
Apple seem to think that they have some say on what I can do with my shoes.
Technically they do. If they really do somehow have some DRM that can prevent you from using the sensor in other shoes, couldn't they--if they wanted to be truly evil bastards--claim that you're violating the DMCA by circumventing that DRM? Is there any standard within the law that says the DRM has to be plausible or non-trivial to bypass before it kicks in?
I highly doubt they would do this, it's just not practical. But at the same time I can't think of any GOOD reason that they would spend thousands of dollars on a patent application for this nonsense, much less however many thousands of dollars it cost them to develop, if they didn't have something in mind that we're all going to find even worse down the road.
I have trouble describing this as sensationalist shit, because I can't help but think that this can only be worse than it sounds. DRM on a shoe? Yeah, stupid, okay, but what's the point?
Let's be realistic. This has nothing to do with the Nike+ or the iPod sensor. If they want to install some DRM in there to prevent me from legally yanking it out and putting in a different brand of shoe or whatever, it has absolutely nothing to do with patents. Anti-circumvention is part of other laws such as the DMCA. If I have some DRM, I don't need to spend thousands of dollars to register a patent in order to legally forbid somebody from circumventing it. Apple is not stupid, they certainly know this.
So what is the business sense in paying thousands of dollars for something that's completely unnecessary to help you achieve a goal that's stupid to begin with? I can only think of two possibilities: One, that Apple wants to register it first because they think they're going to use this in other situations where it might actually have some effect; where people might actually give a shit more than moral outrage at the idiocy. Or two, that they're hoping somebody else does so that they can beat them with the lawsuit stick.
Both of these are significantly worse to me than "ZOMG SHOE DRM LULZ!"
Gosh, I don't even know how long I've been around/. these days. Years and years. And I've literally never complained about the stories or the editors. I suppose there's a first time for everything. This was literally the worst "article," the worst summary, the worst title and the downright worst piece of idiocy I've ever seen posted here. What absolute trash. At least the crap in Idle is tucked away in a section you know is trash.
Best post in this discussion. I'm glad to see there's an occasional poster on/. who even-handedly evaluates the situation and is willing to apportion blame where it's deserved, regardless of who that means deserves it.
Also, what's "not free" about the cellular phone market?
The fact that there is limited spectrum that is sold at ridiculously high prices, by the government, to the highest bidders. That imposes a crippling barrier to entry for those who are even able to get in, and once the auctions have been awarded the barrier to entry becomes insurmountable; the only way to enter such a market would be to buy out an existing entrant. It also means that the companies are encouraged to make their prices significantly higher than they might be otherwise in order to recoup billions of dollars of money sunk into the spectrum auction.
I don't know what that comment about bait and switch was doing in your post. Nothing you mentioned is a bait and switch, nor is anything to do with EULA terms.
If you sell something on "false pretenses," by which I assume you mean somebody intentionally makes a representation about the product that is false, that's fraud.
"Hiding an important caveat" is almost certainly nothing. It's rude, and I'll agree with you that it's ripping the customer off, but it's not illegal unless that caveat is so debilitating to the product that you run afoul of merchantability statutes. Beyond that, caveat emptor: Let the buyer beware.
Neither of these have anything to do with the concept of bait and switch, which is where you offer something (usually a low price or bundle deal or some sort) and then withdraw the offer when the customer comes to purchase it.
Imagine if every auto shop in town had a huge sign in bold print stating that per shop policy they reserve the right to bill you up to 100X the quoted rate if they end up feeling the need to do more work than was originally quoted.
Ignoring the fact that most auto shops do pretty much exactly that ("oh, we found some other problems and took the liberty to fix them!") it's not an accurate analogy. It didn't so happen that there was 100x's more work; the analogy would be 100 identical problems where the customer says "fix that," "fix that," "fix that." They could stop at any point; their agreement with the shop clearly spelled out how much it costs to "fix that." But they continued to ask for that service, and then were outraged at the cost of having it provided.
I hate data transfer rates on mobile phones. Hate. I think they're ridiculously high for the service they provide, and that's why I don't use them. And if I was forced to use them for anything less than an emergency, I'd ensure I had a plan with unlimited rates. That said, the rates being ridiculous doesn't mean somebody shouldn't be forced to pay them if they take the contract and use the service.
On a related note: My family's phones are with Sprint. My brother was in the hospital a couple months back with a blood clot and sent a lot of text messages. We actually got a call from Sprint asking if we'd like to add the text messaging service to the phone (and no, we didn't go to the press so it wasn't a fear of bad publicity). They even did it retroactively, so that instead of $40 or whatever he had racked up we only paid the $5 for a 300 text plan. What's better, they did it for only that month; they didn't simply sign up the account in hopes that over time it pays itself off. They basically asked if we'd like a $35 discount. According to the article, "[a]n AT&T representative said they're treating the matter seriously and looking into it. According to the company, they hope to have an answer for the family in the next few days." I'd be exceptionally surprised if they end up paying anything close to the billed amount. If they do, well, time to find a new service provider.
Do you know who disagrees with you? Yes, that third branch of government whose job it is to make those determinations.
But then again, declaring laws unconstitutional is also unconstitutional, so I guess it doesn't matter what is or isn't since nobody can decide and nobody has any authority to act even if somebody had decided. (Go ahead, I challenge you to find a right to judicial review in the Constitution; it's plenty easy to verify, since the entirety of the description of the judiciary is about a page long. Their job is to interpret laws, nothing more. And let's not pretend that it was some grand magnanimous gesture or Constitutional amendment that brought this power into being; John Marshall simply wanted to fuck over Thomas Jefferson and he couldn't find a legal way of doing it without inventing one. We've kept it because it works.)
Alternately, we can agree that strict construction fails entirely too often and begin to dig down into the REAL issues, namely whether these things should or shouldn't be the province of federal government. Personally I think infrastructure is the sort of thing that federal government was made for. There are simply some things so vital to the national interest that you don't want them done piecemeal; things like defense and electricity and roads and even Internet, more and more these days, are among them.
To steal a quote from West Wing, "there are times when we're 50 states and there are times when we're one nation." Absolutely no good comes of having fifty potentially contradictory decisions about our power grid or many other issues, and much harm can come from it.
The founding fathers would probably be pissed off about a lot of the things that have happened. Many of them would probably go grab their guns and start shooting. I admire that. But you know what they would do after the dust settles? They'd come up with solutions. What's your solution to fixing the power grid? "ZOMG CONSTITUTION!" is a wonderful appeal to authority, and maybe it's even the right thing to do. It solves nothing. So solve it. Solve telephone networks. Solve gas and oil. Solve Internet access. Fix education. Solve power inequities involving labor. And do it with 50 different groups of people making their own decisions about them.
If Google really had to pay less because of childcare then they wouldn't be able to get anyone good, especially the childless - they'd all go to higher paying companies, wouldn't they?
You're assuming "less" means "less than their competitors," whereas I think most people in this thread mean it as "less than they would pay if they didn't offer X." Maybe that drops them under another company, maybe it doesn't. Even if it does, maybe they also provide Y which is worth it to you, either monetarily because the costs are spread around or just from a comfort/better environment perspective.
The president sets policy. Even if Biden or anybody else wanted to become the first vice president in modern times (ever?) to vote against his president, the president could simply veto it if it's an issue he cares about. Since the VP voted at all in that case, it means you have a 50-50 Senate tie and obviously not enough votes to override.
Remember, breaking a tie in the Senate is the ONLY power that a vice president has Constitutionally (read: no matter what). Daniel Webster famously turned down the post, stating "I do not intend to be buried until I am dead." In a situation like this, the president may not want to spend political capital by publicly bitchslapping his VP that way. In that sense, the VP might get away with it. He could also be locked in a broom closet for the duration of the president's term, allowed no authority, permitted to offer no council, attend no functions. It's certainly what I would do with my VP if he tried to cross me.
Most politicians, whatever their ideologies or future presidential ambitions, want to get some things done. Giving up any chance of influencing policy with one bone-headed power grab from a hopeless position is not bright or productive. And that's ignoring the fact that VPs know what they're signing up for when they accept the gig. Just not going to happen.
An investigation doesn't mean anything. Hypothetically, they could decide "MediaSentry did everything right" still. It's not likely and almost certainly won't be the case, but until they've issued findings the fact that you're being investigated means little. It definitely shouldn't invalidate their evidence; innocent until proven guilty and all that. I wouldn't have an issue with judges postponing all related cases until a decision is rendered though.
[T]wo good friends of mine who I always thought were very intelligent fell victim to an Amway like scam [. ..] I truly believe that people who fall for scams like this should be forced to serve time.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. However, so are the vast majority of the replies here, at least most of those moderated up: nothing but semi-disguised (all the way to outright) Apple fanboism and punditry, with pretty well every negative connotation of the words.
My opinion is coming around to this: Perhaps a community gets the quality of articles that they deserve. I've already arrived there in believing that a nation gets the politicians that it deserves, so it's hardly a stretch.
Begin the mod-downs.
Part of me wonders if they're going to include them some other way; it sounds like they won't leave them on the install medium by default (though who knows), but I could easily see them adding a step to the customization process right before they turn you loose on your system.
"Would you like to install the following software?:
[X] Windows Mail: For reading e-mail
[X] Windows Movie Maker: For downloading and editing home movies"
etc. It seems like most of Microsoft's installers these days are just a few KB programs that fetch from the web anyway. It would take them about 25 seconds to re-purpose one of those installers for all of this removed functionality and probably not much more to have it run right at the end of the installation process.
It sounds like that's a separate problem. Bad teachers need to be weeded out, in the same way that anybody who's bad at their jobs in any profession should be, but once they pass muster they should be paid well.
In other words: No, she shouldn't get $50k, but she also probably shouldn't be a teacher.
Wow, hyperbole much?
My high school had a graduating class somewhere a bit shy of 700, and it still has roughly that many students per grade. It's rated one of the best high schools in the nation, has a 92% pass ratio for AP exams, ACT/SAT scores all beat national averages. Graduation rate's around 93%.
Granted, it's a fairly rich school (though we are not a rich family) and it's one data point, but the idea that having more than 300 students per grade somehow makes them "automatically suck" is ridiculous.
Schools are good or bad based on their community, teachers and administration, not their class size.
One might have thought you were trying to make a reasonable point, right up until your Apple fanboism shone through:
Because clearly, once Apple has created a product it's PERFECTION! Nobody should even bother to do anything encroaching on so much as the realm surrounding the vision of the idea that Apple coded. By golly, if we were to have more than one email client on a computer the whole technology thing would never have picked up steam!
Or, perhaps competition is good? Perhaps there actually ARE multiple products that do essentially the same thing and the world hasn't coming crashing down on our heads? Perhaps we have these concepts of markets and supply and demand that are capable of weeding out useless products without bothering our Beneficent Apple Overlords with having to take time out of their day? I wonder why nobody's ever tried such a thing? Customers deciding whether they like a product or not? Whoddathunkit?
But I'll give you better than you deserve and actually look past the Jobs worship to reply.
For starters, competition is good for consumers and stifling it is wrong--sometimes legally, sometimes "just" morally. The idea that we should permit it to chase every last dollar is what's wrong with this country. Corporations exist and are given all sorts of benefits by our government. Our government is supposed to exist to do the things which are best for its populace as a whole. Holding up the idea that two products competing on their merits and one being crushed by the power of the company who produced the other as somehow equally beneficial to us is ridiculous. Would we be having this discussion if it were Microsoft or IBM of a few decades ago that was crushing its competition beneath its heel?
Beyond that, Apple isn't creating these things to be generous to you, even within the context of the iPhone. They're using your work to make money. A cursory glance at their developer program page shows they take a 30% cut off the top. But more to the point, they're using you to populate their application library so more people will shell out hundreds of dollars to get that shiny new iPhone.
There's nothing wrong with this, but all previous objections aside (and let's face it, storing a few Kb on their servers for apps that never sell isn't going to hurt Apple) the least they could do when you actually DO agree to let them use you that way is not spit in your face, wave their arms and scream "oh no no no! *WE* coded something like that already, you can't!" If it's so useless, let it languish in obscurity. Don't ruin somebody's hard work. If it's not useless, if it's something people actually would want and they're squashing it... well, maybe that Apple glow dims because that's no better than anything Microsoft ever did.
The better example, of course, would be "you don't get mad at Best Buy for not selling Circuit City's products." My response is simple: Best Buy doesn't have a program whereby they let you store your products on their shelves, integrate with their system and take a cut of your profits either. If they did, I would be equally pissed at them if they decided that nobody could produce anything that they already stocked. It's all a crappy example, though, since physical goods and digital ones vary in so many important ways. This IS Slashdot, I'd expect you to be aware of that. It comes up in every damn story about copyright infringement, which is like every other story as it is.
Probably anybody here on /. has already made up their minds about Microsoft, one way or another. Seeing through their ad is completely irrelevant; you're not their target audience.
I call meme misuse.
In a way, that reminds me of an Eleanor Roosevelt quote: "Nobody can make you feel inferior without your consent." In the same vein, if the RIAA and their attornies are acting completely above-board, acting reasonably, doing due diligence and otherwise conducting themselves as reasonable professionals, how can posting court papers be embarrassing to them? Telling people what they're doing in a courtroom can only embarrass them if what they're doing is embarrassing. In other words, so far as I can tell, he's being accused of telling the truth. "Wah! We're being idiots and he's SAYING SO!!"
That said, aren't these court documents a matter of public record anyway? I fail to see how posting already-public documents can be vexatious, unless they're accusing the clerk of the courts they're filing in of the same.
I agree. I can't believe anybody would violate that poor dog's privacy!
Speaking as an agnostic (or atheist, depending on how we're defining it--I do not believe there is a god):
This is true, but it's misleading. I see no reason to believe that one cannot simultaneously believe in evolution and a universe millions of years old and a god at the same time.
What you're essentially saying is that one cannot believe in the Bible as literal truth and science at the same time, and that perhaps if that foundation is unseated then one cannot even believe in Christianity and science at the same time. This I support completely, but it doesn't mean it's impossible or illogical to believe in the existence of a god--perhaps one described by some other religion, perhaps one we know absolutely nothing about except the rules that govern our universe that we determine through science.
As I said, I do not believe in any god and I absolutely loathe organized religion, so I'm not trying to rationalize my beliefs nor do I feel any pressure toward political correctness here.
If you've really been playing for 4 years, it most certainly is extremely reasonable. You can look at it in many ways, but here are some examples (I'll round the total up to $800):
$800 / 4 years = $200/year
$800 / 48 months = $16.67/month
$800 / 208 weeks = $3.86/week
$800 / 1456 days = $0.55/day
Or break it down hourly: $0.02/hr.
Now, clearly, some of those aren't realistic; nobody's playing 24 hours a day 7 days a week for 4 years, but they're each interesting points of reference. For example, if you rent one movie from Blockbuster per week you'd pay more than the weekly price of WOW over the course of four years. A three hour movie would be considered fairly long; most WOW players would play at least that long in a given week and probably considerably longer. Don't even bother comparing going to the movies, because you know what kind of dough you shell out for THAT--before you even pick up any popcorn or a drink. Cable TV over that period at $30/mo would cost you $1440 (and let's face it, $30/mo is cheap for most households with cable).
WOW costs a lot over the long term, there's no doubt. But it's also a lot of entertainment for its price. If people aren't getting their money's worth, they wouldn't be buying all the expansions and subscribing monthly from day one. If they are, why complain about what they spend their entertainment dollars on? Nobody's forcing you to believe it's a good deal, but others clearly do.
Yaknow. I don't agree with you making it into a big deal, but I was at least prepared to assume you had a reasonable point to make. Until this:
Now I know you're simply an asshat.
Seriously, give me a damn break. You're offended because a US-based company follows US law and notifies others under that jurisdiction that they're required to do the same? And just to prove your asshattery, here's what the license ACTUALLY says:
Hey gee! It's not even America-centric. Whodathunkit?
Do you think anybody gives a shit if you agree with a law or not? They're notifying you of its potential to exist--definitely in the US, and potentially in other jurisdictions. Export AND import; you may not even have a legal right to PRESS that "I Agree" button where you live. If you have a problem with any such law pertaining to you, take it up with your government. Bitching about some company telling you about it just makes you look stupid.
Maybe some of your other points had some validity, but they're drowned out by the screaming idiocy of this one. I honestly don't even remember what they were, and it's clear you're one of those people who made up his mind long ago without any of the facts so there's no point in going back to review them anyway.
I think it all depends on the size of the company. The larger the company, the less important it is for a manager to be technically competent; they'll be spending more of their time keeping the corporate politics from above off their employees' heads and being advocates for the solutions their employees are suggesting with decision-makers above. While they may not be able to specifically determine whether an employee is good or not, they'll begin to get an idea based on how the work comes out and in what timeframe. In hiring decisions, they could have other programmers sit in the interviews and get a technical perspective--though this is really more about knowing the sorts of questions to ask, which isn't necessarily related to technical knowledge.
Smaller companies it's much more important they be competent. If it's a manager and a programmer, the manager is probably going to be DOING some programming. But either way, if they have no knowledge of what's going on, they'll never find out if their programmer is good or bad. They have nobody to lean on for extra information for interviews, nobody to talk to about proposals. In short, there's nobody but them to help think through whatever's going on--and if they don't have any knowledge about it, they simply can't make educated decisions. At least not without a monumental time investment to independently research every idea they have to decide on.
Both of these are predicated, of course, on managers who 1) know their limitations, 2) are not afraid to ask other people for help or opinions, and 3) actually listen to and trust the people they've hired to do the work. Managers who fail at those three basic concepts are almost assuredly going to be bad managers regardless of whether or not they are(/were) hot shit from a technical perspective.
Technically they do. If they really do somehow have some DRM that can prevent you from using the sensor in other shoes, couldn't they--if they wanted to be truly evil bastards--claim that you're violating the DMCA by circumventing that DRM? Is there any standard within the law that says the DRM has to be plausible or non-trivial to bypass before it kicks in?
I highly doubt they would do this, it's just not practical. But at the same time I can't think of any GOOD reason that they would spend thousands of dollars on a patent application for this nonsense, much less however many thousands of dollars it cost them to develop, if they didn't have something in mind that we're all going to find even worse down the road.
I have trouble describing this as sensationalist shit, because I can't help but think that this can only be worse than it sounds. DRM on a shoe? Yeah, stupid, okay, but what's the point?
Let's be realistic. This has nothing to do with the Nike+ or the iPod sensor. If they want to install some DRM in there to prevent me from legally yanking it out and putting in a different brand of shoe or whatever, it has absolutely nothing to do with patents. Anti-circumvention is part of other laws such as the DMCA. If I have some DRM, I don't need to spend thousands of dollars to register a patent in order to legally forbid somebody from circumventing it. Apple is not stupid, they certainly know this.
So what is the business sense in paying thousands of dollars for something that's completely unnecessary to help you achieve a goal that's stupid to begin with? I can only think of two possibilities: One, that Apple wants to register it first because they think they're going to use this in other situations where it might actually have some effect; where people might actually give a shit more than moral outrage at the idiocy. Or two, that they're hoping somebody else does so that they can beat them with the lawsuit stick.
Both of these are significantly worse to me than "ZOMG SHOE DRM LULZ!"
Gosh, I don't even know how long I've been around /. these days. Years and years. And I've literally never complained about the stories or the editors. I suppose there's a first time for everything. This was literally the worst "article," the worst summary, the worst title and the downright worst piece of idiocy I've ever seen posted here. What absolute trash. At least the crap in Idle is tucked away in a section you know is trash.
What-were-YOU-thinking-if-anything, kdawson? Ridiculous.
Best post in this discussion. I'm glad to see there's an occasional poster on /. who even-handedly evaluates the situation and is willing to apportion blame where it's deserved, regardless of who that means deserves it.
The fact that there is limited spectrum that is sold at ridiculously high prices, by the government, to the highest bidders. That imposes a crippling barrier to entry for those who are even able to get in, and once the auctions have been awarded the barrier to entry becomes insurmountable; the only way to enter such a market would be to buy out an existing entrant. It also means that the companies are encouraged to make their prices significantly higher than they might be otherwise in order to recoup billions of dollars of money sunk into the spectrum auction.
I don't know what that comment about bait and switch was doing in your post. Nothing you mentioned is a bait and switch, nor is anything to do with EULA terms.
If you sell something on "false pretenses," by which I assume you mean somebody intentionally makes a representation about the product that is false, that's fraud.
"Hiding an important caveat" is almost certainly nothing. It's rude, and I'll agree with you that it's ripping the customer off, but it's not illegal unless that caveat is so debilitating to the product that you run afoul of merchantability statutes. Beyond that, caveat emptor: Let the buyer beware.
Neither of these have anything to do with the concept of bait and switch, which is where you offer something (usually a low price or bundle deal or some sort) and then withdraw the offer when the customer comes to purchase it.
Ignoring the fact that most auto shops do pretty much exactly that ("oh, we found some other problems and took the liberty to fix them!") it's not an accurate analogy. It didn't so happen that there was 100x's more work; the analogy would be 100 identical problems where the customer says "fix that," "fix that," "fix that." They could stop at any point; their agreement with the shop clearly spelled out how much it costs to "fix that." But they continued to ask for that service, and then were outraged at the cost of having it provided.
I hate data transfer rates on mobile phones. Hate. I think they're ridiculously high for the service they provide, and that's why I don't use them. And if I was forced to use them for anything less than an emergency, I'd ensure I had a plan with unlimited rates. That said, the rates being ridiculous doesn't mean somebody shouldn't be forced to pay them if they take the contract and use the service.
On a related note: My family's phones are with Sprint. My brother was in the hospital a couple months back with a blood clot and sent a lot of text messages. We actually got a call from Sprint asking if we'd like to add the text messaging service to the phone (and no, we didn't go to the press so it wasn't a fear of bad publicity). They even did it retroactively, so that instead of $40 or whatever he had racked up we only paid the $5 for a 300 text plan. What's better, they did it for only that month; they didn't simply sign up the account in hopes that over time it pays itself off. They basically asked if we'd like a $35 discount. According to the article, "[a]n AT&T representative said they're treating the matter seriously and looking into it. According to the company, they hope to have an answer for the family in the next few days." I'd be exceptionally surprised if they end up paying anything close to the billed amount. If they do, well, time to find a new service provider.
Do you know who disagrees with you? Yes, that third branch of government whose job it is to make those determinations.
But then again, declaring laws unconstitutional is also unconstitutional, so I guess it doesn't matter what is or isn't since nobody can decide and nobody has any authority to act even if somebody had decided. (Go ahead, I challenge you to find a right to judicial review in the Constitution; it's plenty easy to verify, since the entirety of the description of the judiciary is about a page long. Their job is to interpret laws, nothing more. And let's not pretend that it was some grand magnanimous gesture or Constitutional amendment that brought this power into being; John Marshall simply wanted to fuck over Thomas Jefferson and he couldn't find a legal way of doing it without inventing one. We've kept it because it works.)
Alternately, we can agree that strict construction fails entirely too often and begin to dig down into the REAL issues, namely whether these things should or shouldn't be the province of federal government. Personally I think infrastructure is the sort of thing that federal government was made for. There are simply some things so vital to the national interest that you don't want them done piecemeal; things like defense and electricity and roads and even Internet, more and more these days, are among them.
To steal a quote from West Wing, "there are times when we're 50 states and there are times when we're one nation." Absolutely no good comes of having fifty potentially contradictory decisions about our power grid or many other issues, and much harm can come from it.
The founding fathers would probably be pissed off about a lot of the things that have happened. Many of them would probably go grab their guns and start shooting. I admire that. But you know what they would do after the dust settles? They'd come up with solutions. What's your solution to fixing the power grid? "ZOMG CONSTITUTION!" is a wonderful appeal to authority, and maybe it's even the right thing to do. It solves nothing. So solve it. Solve telephone networks. Solve gas and oil. Solve Internet access. Fix education. Solve power inequities involving labor. And do it with 50 different groups of people making their own decisions about them.
You're assuming "less" means "less than their competitors," whereas I think most people in this thread mean it as "less than they would pay if they didn't offer X." Maybe that drops them under another company, maybe it doesn't. Even if it does, maybe they also provide Y which is worth it to you, either monetarily because the costs are spread around or just from a comfort/better environment perspective.
The president sets policy. Even if Biden or anybody else wanted to become the first vice president in modern times (ever?) to vote against his president, the president could simply veto it if it's an issue he cares about. Since the VP voted at all in that case, it means you have a 50-50 Senate tie and obviously not enough votes to override.
Remember, breaking a tie in the Senate is the ONLY power that a vice president has Constitutionally (read: no matter what). Daniel Webster famously turned down the post, stating "I do not intend to be buried until I am dead." In a situation like this, the president may not want to spend political capital by publicly bitchslapping his VP that way. In that sense, the VP might get away with it. He could also be locked in a broom closet for the duration of the president's term, allowed no authority, permitted to offer no council, attend no functions. It's certainly what I would do with my VP if he tried to cross me.
Most politicians, whatever their ideologies or future presidential ambitions, want to get some things done. Giving up any chance of influencing policy with one bone-headed power grab from a hopeless position is not bright or productive. And that's ignoring the fact that VPs know what they're signing up for when they accept the gig. Just not going to happen.
An investigation doesn't mean anything. Hypothetically, they could decide "MediaSentry did everything right" still. It's not likely and almost certainly won't be the case, but until they've issued findings the fact that you're being investigated means little. It definitely shouldn't invalidate their evidence; innocent until proven guilty and all that. I wouldn't have an issue with judges postponing all related cases until a decision is rendered though.
Remind me never to be friends with you.