"Sorry, we can;t make the product that you've paid for do what we promised we would do so you would be able to use your purchase the way you want - we're too busy working on the task of making the product you paid for something that we can give to everyone else for free."
The software industry was the first to get away with shipping product known to be defective, at first using the "we'll fix it for you later" excuse, and then the "we'll make sure the NEW version works better, if you buy it... um, except for all of the new things that won't work."
Yeah, I know, this was a feature request and not a bug fix... but I see the software company influence pervading the actual hard PRODUCT market now too.
After all, what really is Newegg and Amazon feedback, often with bugfixes mentioned, driver updates, and techniques to get the product to work? It's handing part of the customer service work to the buyer, is what it is.
In an interview in the mid 1980s, an RIAA exec admitted that they were trying to get away from "selling" music and wanted to go to a "pay-per-listen" model. Mot even pay per format - they want pay per listen.
This was in the same article that he justified continued high prices for CDs, which were twice that of LPs (they were later found guilty of price-fixing) DESPITE the fact that CDs cost far LESS than LPs to produce.
His justification for colluding to fix prices to make a CHEAPER product to produce more EXPENSIVE to purchase was that it was a better value due to sound quality.
So apparently a massive increase in profit margin due to illegal activities = "a better value."
"How do you buy 'it' twice when the 'it' is two different things, unless you're talking about the text itself and not the form, formatting, etc.?"
You might better address that question to the Supreme Court, since they are the ones that ruled that it is NOT two different things, and that there is such a thing as fair use.
Maybe you can convince them to change their minds, um... because.
Can there be a person who reaches adulthood and has only minor issues?
No. Not unless they live in a society that has no issues.
In a society with rampant racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, unequally applied justice, massive wealth disparity, and which exalts militarism, nobody grows up without the need for some deep grappling with indoctrinated toxic values, even if they have largely escaped their effects.
In such a society it is perfectly possible to harbor prejudices resulting from that indoctrination without knowing it - even if you are aware of the larger implications and are fighting against them.
Even devoted civil rights activists need to check themselves, check their assumptions and reactions regularly.
You cannot live in a flawed society and be the product of a flawed society and completely escape internalizing some of those flaws.
Anyone who claims that they themselves don't have any problem are people who have done no introspection and therefore force others to have to deal with the effects of their own issues.
Nobody reaches adulthood without something they need to work on.
Sure, the US will not always be the dominant nation, and that's a good thing, since we don't deserve it. (Not that any nation does.)
But you hilariously cowardly nutjobs who can live in the richest most powerful nation the world have ever seen and STILL be freaking terrified are not worth paying attention to. Record-setting cowardice.
The system is crooked, yes. And we get the scraps. You're silly enough to think that you have more and therefore have more to lose.
Pawning your valuables every couple of centuries? How many centuries do you expect to live, dumbass?
Cowards. All of you. Me, I LIVE in the collapse of society. I live amongst the ruins, the gutted factories, the superfund toxic waste sites. I live in one of the ten most dangerous cities in America and I STILL am not as cowardly as you.
Because I actually know what the real threats are.
It's not that we in the US can't run a prison without rape, it's that as a society we don't WANT to.
We LIKE it that prisoners are raped - we joke about it.
Prison officials like it too. They have hundreds of inmates for each guard. Bad odds. So you encourage racism in prison so the prisoners are fighting and killing each other based on racial hatreds instead of fighting and killing the people holding them captive.
There are just under 7 billion people on earth. We are projected to hit 8 billion in around ten years or so. 9 billion an even shorter period of time after that.
That's true, but the process is different in that now Russians have two competing design companies rather than one bureau as we have. plus the Russians are poor enough to need international partners to pick up most of the tab. So this is a sales pitch by one of two competing Russian companies looking for both primacy within Russia, but also for foreign investment.
Whereas NASA is just trying to sell itself to Congress.
Not really. You have to understand the Russian process. They announce things like this at least twice a year.
This is not a program, it's a proposal. Every year they trot out a couple of proposals (remember klipr?) and see if they can get interest and funding.
If not (and so far "not" has always been the case) then they go back to the drawing board and make another proposal in 8 or 12 months.
Over and over.
And each time Slashdot and others announce what the Russians "are building," never stopping to notice that all of the previous plans that were "nearing completion" never even resulted in a single piece of flight hardware.
Just watch. This will go nowhere, and next year there will be a different plan for a different vehicle.
Instead of watching a movie with two people walking along a sidewalk on a flat screen, with a true 3D screen the images would pop right out and it would be like there were two-inch tall people walking around inside a diorama with Corgi cars and trucks and little miniature three-D buildings!
Imagine the realism!
Seriously, this is something I've thought about for a while. I think true 3D will dramatically alter the experience, and not necessarily in a good way.
When you look at a flat screen image, it's like your brain ignores the relative sizes of things compared to you and your room, as if you're seeing things from a distance.
With 3D, you'll see the distance between the person and the desk they just walked away from, and these items will be IN YOUR ROOM.
Suddenly you have far-away-sized objects with very-near-to-you spacial differentials. POOF. Illusion gone, now there are three inch tall people walking near a dollhouse desk in your viewing room.
You just found one. (But you weren't really serious, I know. You're just one of those "damned PC police won't let me smoke in kindergartens anymore" complainers-about-everyone-who-complains kind of people.)
And if I reproduce a digital file, then the companies that make their money reproducing and distributing digital files haven't done any labor.
A digital file has ceased to become "product." They can be reproduced and distributed by the tens of millions for virtually no effort or cost.
When something can be had by every human being that easily it becomes immoral to create artificial scarcity via global laws invading private communications, etc.
What you and others are doing is advocating that we take the process that for about 100,000 years has led to everything human culture means - agriculture, towns, housing, fire, cooking, all invention, all art, language... and deciding that the process that worked to take us from the caves to global civilization is not good enough.
You're advocating taking that process and privatizing it. Why? Because some people who had the money to lobby to get laws passed felt it was important that they get MORE money.
"It is trivially easy to call a plumber and then refuse to pay him for his time and labor. His business model requires laws prohibiting people from that behavior. I guess his business model is shit."
I don't use plumbers. I buy my own "blank" washers from Home Depot and burn my own new washer-fixed-faucet by unscrupulously copying the knowledge and behavior of that plumber.
Yes, laws have given us the right to our bodies and our possessions and our land.
Absolutely NONE of which were intellectual "property" laws. Intellectual property law does NOT recognize information as an owned possession. (information, not the information carrier. You own that CD).
Copyright law is derived from the understanding that release of information naturally passes that information on to all who access it, that this is normal, good, and necessary, that this is the basis for the development of human society.
And to ENCOURAGE people to create works that will obviously and necessarily become part of the commons and property of ALL, it might be good to try an incentive program - an artificial TEMPORARY monopoly for a short period of time during which the creator can solely recoup funds.
Which will expire and let knowledge go to it's natural state - property of all.
And that this temporary "copy right" therefore exists to serve the public good, NOT the creators, and that if it ceases to benefit primarily the public, then it can and should be changed.
Sex industry? I have condemned their practices only if they try to patent human genitals and photos and sex and women's bodies.
NO business model is "entitled" to profits. They have a right to TRY to be profitable.
I write music. I give it away free as I don't believe in copyright. However, I have the RIGHT to try to sell downloads of it too. I am not entitled to that plan being financially successful.
Well, stylus input may be slower than a good keyboard, but at least it's prone to being either unreadable, or needing lots of error correction if converted into text.
Efficiency!
Meanwhile all websites are now getting the stupid, slow, flash-based limited Fisher-Price interfaces that we all used to complain about just a short time ago... But now we're so enamored of them we want all to be like them. So more and more I face websites on my 24" screen that are simply navigation screens each with two buttons, eleventy-gazillion levels deep.
Tablets are making the web experience like the phone-hold experience.
"Press one if you have any of the following problems..." "Press 2 to go to the preceding menu options."
Despite what you think, the mere fact that you created something does NOT mean that you are "entitled" to profits.
If your business model requires a law to be passed that prohibits billions of people from exercising a trivially easy behavior that you would never personally notice otherwise, then your business model is shit.
The 64 bit branch of FireFox and loved it, it was much faster. Some recent update broke compatibility and I have to do a total uninstall and then reinstall while backing up every Firefox thing elsewhere to restore, since it uses the same profile, etc.
Too lazy to work out the issue, in other words.
But if you have a nice fast 64bit machine, try Wtaerfox, you'll probably love it. Unless it sucks now.
Slashdot Mirror
"Sorry, we can;t make the product that you've paid for do what we promised we would do so you would be able to use your purchase the way you want - we're too busy working on the task of making the product you paid for something that we can give to everyone else for free."
The software industry was the first to get away with shipping product known to be defective, at first using the "we'll fix it for you later" excuse, and then the "we'll make sure the NEW version works better, if you buy it... um, except for all of the new things that won't work."
Yeah, I know, this was a feature request and not a bug fix... but I see the software company influence pervading the actual hard PRODUCT market now too.
After all, what really is Newegg and Amazon feedback, often with bugfixes mentioned, driver updates, and techniques to get the product to work? It's handing part of the customer service work to the buyer, is what it is.
Exactly.
In an interview in the mid 1980s, an RIAA exec admitted that they were trying to get away from "selling" music and wanted to go to a "pay-per-listen" model. Mot even pay per format - they want pay per listen.
This was in the same article that he justified continued high prices for CDs, which were twice that of LPs (they were later found guilty of price-fixing) DESPITE the fact that CDs cost far LESS than LPs to produce.
His justification for colluding to fix prices to make a CHEAPER product to produce more EXPENSIVE to purchase was that it was a better value due to sound quality.
So apparently a massive increase in profit margin due to illegal activities = "a better value."
In short, the content cartels are scum.
"How do you buy 'it' twice when the 'it' is two different things, unless you're talking about the text itself and not the form, formatting, etc.?"
You might better address that question to the Supreme Court, since they are the ones that ruled that it is NOT two different things, and that there is such a thing as fair use.
Maybe you can convince them to change their minds, um... because.
Can there be a person who reaches adulthood and has only minor issues?
No. Not unless they live in a society that has no issues.
In a society with rampant racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, unequally applied justice, massive wealth disparity, and which exalts militarism, nobody grows up without the need for some deep grappling with indoctrinated toxic values, even if they have largely escaped their effects.
In such a society it is perfectly possible to harbor prejudices resulting from that indoctrination without knowing it - even if you are aware of the larger implications and are fighting against them.
Even devoted civil rights activists need to check themselves, check their assumptions and reactions regularly.
You cannot live in a flawed society and be the product of a flawed society and completely escape internalizing some of those flaws.
And every society is flawed.
Anyone who claims that they themselves don't have any problem are people who have done no introspection and therefore force others to have to deal with the effects of their own issues.
Nobody reaches adulthood without something they need to work on.
" Most people who try and succeed in committing suicide have pretty much in some form or other harbored daemons their entire life."
There's an unspoken assertion in your comment that there are people who exist who harbor no demons.
I'm pushing 50 and have known many people and I've yet to see one.
Or evidence of one.
The end of the world is nigh!
Sure, the US will not always be the dominant nation, and that's a good thing, since we don't deserve it. (Not that any nation does.)
But you hilariously cowardly nutjobs who can live in the richest most powerful nation the world have ever seen and STILL be freaking terrified are not worth paying attention to. Record-setting cowardice.
The system is crooked, yes. And we get the scraps. You're silly enough to think that you have more and therefore have more to lose.
Pawning your valuables every couple of centuries?
How many centuries do you expect to live, dumbass?
Cowards. All of you. Me, I LIVE in the collapse of society. I live amongst the ruins, the gutted factories, the superfund toxic waste sites. I live in one of the ten most dangerous cities in America and I STILL am not as cowardly as you.
Because I actually know what the real threats are.
Yeah, the US is more likely to fail in the next 5 years than Bitcoin.
Also, Obama's going to take your guns and put you into a FEMA camp.
Better start hoarding shit in your basement and storing your own urine in mason jars. You know...
just in case.
Never run short of lube again:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005MR3IVO
It's not that we in the US can't run a prison without rape, it's that as a society we don't WANT to.
We LIKE it that prisoners are raped - we joke about it.
Prison officials like it too. They have hundreds of inmates for each guard. Bad odds. So you encourage racism in prison so the prisoners are fighting and killing each other based on racial hatreds instead of fighting and killing the people holding them captive.
Same way we run our government.
and sometimes I have sales. It turns out that most of my customers that come in during my sales heard about the sale by word of mouth.
How to I sue all those people infringing on my sale by telling others about it?
There are just under 7 billion people on earth.
We are projected to hit 8 billion in around ten years or so.
9 billion an even shorter period of time after that.
We are not facing a shortage.
That's true, but the process is different in that now Russians have two competing design companies rather than one bureau as we have. plus the Russians are poor enough to need international partners to pick up most of the tab. So this is a sales pitch by one of two competing Russian companies looking for both primacy within Russia, but also for foreign investment.
Whereas NASA is just trying to sell itself to Congress.
Not really.
You have to understand the Russian process. They announce things like this at least twice a year.
This is not a program, it's a proposal. Every year they trot out a couple of proposals (remember klipr?) and see if they can get interest and funding.
If not (and so far "not" has always been the case) then they go back to the drawing board and make another proposal in 8 or 12 months.
Over and over.
And each time Slashdot and others announce what the Russians "are building," never stopping to notice that all of the previous plans that were "nearing completion" never even resulted in a single piece of flight hardware.
Just watch. This will go nowhere, and next year there will be a different plan for a different vehicle.
Just imagine the advantages of TRUE 3d!
Instead of watching a movie with two people walking along a sidewalk on a flat screen, with a true 3D screen the images would pop right out and it would be like there were two-inch tall people walking around inside a diorama with Corgi cars and trucks and little miniature three-D buildings!
Imagine the realism!
Seriously, this is something I've thought about for a while. I think true 3D will dramatically alter the experience, and not necessarily in a good way.
When you look at a flat screen image, it's like your brain ignores the relative sizes of things compared to you and your room, as if you're seeing things from a distance.
With 3D, you'll see the distance between the person and the desk they just walked away from, and these items will be IN YOUR ROOM.
Suddenly you have far-away-sized objects with very-near-to-you spacial differentials. POOF. Illusion gone, now there are three inch tall people walking near a dollhouse desk in your viewing room.
Congratulations. Let me be the first.
You just found one.
(But you weren't really serious, I know. You're just one of those "damned PC police won't let me smoke in kindergartens anymore" complainers-about-everyone-who-complains kind of people.)
Find me a film shot in Technicolor in the last 20 years.
How many people do sharks kill every year?
How many people does excess dietary fat kill every year?
Which of the two are people more afraid of?
People are nonsensical beings.
And if I reproduce a digital file, then the companies that make their money reproducing and distributing digital files haven't done any labor.
A digital file has ceased to become "product." They can be reproduced and distributed by the tens of millions for virtually no effort or cost.
When something can be had by every human being that easily it becomes immoral to create artificial scarcity via global laws invading private communications, etc.
What you and others are doing is advocating that we take the process that for about 100,000 years has led to everything human culture means - agriculture, towns, housing, fire, cooking, all invention, all art, language... and deciding that the process that worked to take us from the caves to global civilization is not good enough.
You're advocating taking that process and privatizing it. Why? Because some people who had the money to lobby to get laws passed felt it was important that they get MORE money.
"It is trivially easy to call a plumber and then refuse to pay him for his time and labor. His business model requires laws prohibiting people from that behavior. I guess his business model is shit."
I don't use plumbers. I buy my own "blank" washers from Home Depot and burn my own new washer-fixed-faucet by unscrupulously copying the knowledge and behavior of that plumber.
I'm such a bastard.
Yes, laws have given us the right to our bodies and our possessions and our land.
Absolutely NONE of which were intellectual "property" laws.
Intellectual property law does NOT recognize information as an owned possession. (information, not the information carrier. You own that CD).
Copyright law is derived from the understanding that release of information naturally passes that information on to all who access it, that this is normal, good, and necessary, that this is the basis for the development of human society.
And to ENCOURAGE people to create works that will obviously and necessarily become part of the commons and property of ALL, it might be good to try an incentive program - an artificial TEMPORARY monopoly for a short period of time during which the creator can solely recoup funds.
Which will expire and let knowledge go to it's natural state - property of all.
And that this temporary "copy right" therefore exists to serve the public good, NOT the creators, and that if it ceases to benefit primarily the public, then it can and should be changed.
Sex industry? I have condemned their practices only if they try to patent human genitals and photos and sex and women's bodies.
NO business model is "entitled" to profits. They have a right to TRY to be profitable.
I write music. I give it away free as I don't believe in copyright. However, I have the RIGHT to try to sell downloads of it too. I am not entitled to that plan being financially successful.
Well, stylus input may be slower than a good keyboard, but at least it's prone to being either unreadable, or needing lots of error correction if converted into text.
Efficiency!
Meanwhile all websites are now getting the stupid, slow, flash-based limited Fisher-Price interfaces that we all used to complain about just a short time ago...
But now we're so enamored of them we want all to be like them. So more and more I face websites on my 24" screen that are simply navigation screens each with two buttons, eleventy-gazillion levels deep.
Tablets are making the web experience like the phone-hold experience.
"Press one if you have any of the following problems..."
"Press 2 to go to the preceding menu options."
Guess what.
Despite what you think, the mere fact that you created something does NOT mean that you are "entitled" to profits.
If your business model requires a law to be passed that prohibits billions of people from exercising a trivially easy behavior that you would never personally notice otherwise, then your business model is shit.
Wow! That makes it worth almost 1 percent its weight in inkjet printer ink.
The 64 bit branch of FireFox and loved it, it was much faster. Some recent update broke compatibility and I have to do a total uninstall and then reinstall while backing up every Firefox thing elsewhere to restore, since it uses the same profile, etc.
Too lazy to work out the issue, in other words.
But if you have a nice fast 64bit machine, try Wtaerfox, you'll probably love it. Unless it sucks now.