So your claim is that McD's will get 100% of the "don't care about food quality" market?
I made no such claim. Please read the words.
They might -- but why should anyone care?
Because when you are accepting responsibility for feeding people who cannot afford to feed themselves, you must also accept responsibility for feeding them properly. You cannot ethically tell someone that you are going to feed them for free and then hand them a bag full of sawdust.
The claim that there is no substantial market for quality food is obviously false,
I made no such claim. Please read all the words.
Other restaurants that specialize in crap food might go out of business. BFD.
Well, your definition of "crap food" may not be the same as everyone else's.
You do realize that in any major city, there are literally hundreds of restaurants that are much more expensive than McDonald's,
And how many people who cannot afford better than McD for lunch go to them? But they do go to other places than McD that they can afford -- which they won't do when McD is free.
Can you explain what would be wrong with McDonald's offering free lunches to some people?
And what's wrong with T-Mobile offering zero-rated services to some people?
More seriously, if McDonalds did such a thing, then it would remove pressure to create a system to provide free lunches to people who really need them that WASN'T McDonalds, so other providers would see less reason to do it. Eventually you'll wind up with McDonalds as the only choice for a free lunch.
But since this offering doesn't prevent other ISPs from making competing offers (either free or for-pay)
No, it doesn't prevent them from making offers, but it does remove customers.
Are we really so much smarter than Facebook's potential customers that we know for sure that they would prefer no service to Facebook's crippled one?
If you read the fine summary, you'll note that this service is intended for "low-income and rural" who cannot afford internet at home or on smartphones. Those rural people who probably don't have cell service to start with, and low-income people who cannot afford it.
"Free internet on an app that you can't run because you don't have a phone or phone service, but sign up and give us your data anyway..."
In all likelyhood if things are so bad your wireless won't get through, the emergency service will be overwhelmed so your call is pointless.
Yes, but the call to your family outside the disaster area may not be, and it is not pointless to be able to call and let them know you are ok. or pointless to be able to call around town to locate family members who aren't at home to check on their safety.
Now, it is possible that the wireline CO is overloaded and your call won't go through. But with everyone switching to wireless because a wired phone is "useless", it is more likely that my wired call with get through and theirs won't. So thank you to them.
Or, better yet, use subaddressing, also known as plus addressing.
They're on to your trick. I know, because I do that all the time, or try to. One or more of the common javascript packages used in web commerce simply does not accept any non alphanumeric character in the local part of an email address. You cannot enter a "+" and have it accepted.
Then when you call customer service to report the problem, you wind up talking to someone with no internet messaging knowledge at all, who tells you that a '+' is invalid in email addresses because their website doesn't accept it and they've never seen it used there.
My bank was one of those when they changed to using Intuit's services. It was pretty funny, getting them to admit that the email address I had been using with them for years was suddenly not valid according to their website, and they were even discussing this "invalid email address" with me BY EMAIL. They accepted education, however, after I sat in the office of the director for online services for half an hour explaining the problem, and their website is now better. It does have the wonderful property of wanting to verify my identity by calling or emailing me every time I log in from a "new" location, and their method of keeping track of old locations routinely forgets I've been logged in from there before.
Neobits.com, however, remains willfully ignorant. When customer service said "the plus sign is not valid", I explained that it was, indeed, and when no further progress in solving the problem was apparent, I said "you've just lost this order" and hung up.
When I really need to create a temporary address and the destination won't accept a '+', I create an address in my own domain (usually along the lines of "f**k[insert company name here]@...").
Perhaps the funniest one is that many years ago I registered for linked-in using "no@example.com", and they actually registered the account and were still listing that address when I went back a couple of months ago. They were telling me when I logged in that one of my addresses was bouncing, and it wasn't until I went deep into the account that I saw they were still trying to send to an example.com address.
Really? When you're in the mall it's not the individual vendors who you're buying from, it's the mall you're buying from?
Amazon.com is not a mall. I am not in the spammer's store when I buy from Amazon, and I do not hand my money to an employee of the spammer. I am dealing with Amazon.com. And you can tell the difference, because you often CAN go to the spammer's website and deal with them, and often MUST go to their website to find technical information about the product. But you can tell, and you know, when you've left amazon.com and gone to the spammer's site.
When I order something FOB from a manufacturer while I'm shopping at a distributor's website, I am not a customer of the manufacturer, I do not pay the manufacturer, and I have not created a business relationship with that manufacturer. If I need customer service on that order, I talk to the distributor and it is the distributor who gets my money. What they do with my money after that is their business. And just like Amazon, that distributor doesn't want me talking directly to the manufacturer to buy the product because then the distributor doesn't get their cut of the sale.
You can argue, "I gave my money to Amazon, but not to the mall," and this is true.
Which absolutely destroys your mall analogy. Why did you even bother posting it when you know it is patently absurd?
If I purchased their product, I've initiated a relationship with this company
No, you haven't. You've initiated a relationship with Amazon. You're on the Amazon website and you pay Amazon. You don't deal with the vendor directly, and there is no business relationship to use as an excuse for unsolicited commercial email.
What I would have a problem with is getting a barrage of e-mails from companies that sell similar or competing products espousing the virtues of their superior versions.
What about companies that barrage you with requests for positive feedback and reviews and wanting to know how the product you haven't gotten yet is working out? You have to realize that the "how is it working" part of the email is just an excuse to spam you for good feedback, since they KNOW you can't tell them how well it works before it has even arrived.
This kind of customer service used to be appreciated.
By whom? By people who are incapable of autonomously complaining when something wasn't what they ordered or didn't work as it was supposed to?
I've gotten spam asking me if the product was working well TWO DAYS before it was scheduled to be delivered. And then repeated spam about the same product when I don't answer the first one. I've had them offering to give me money to write a positive review or feedback.
Count me in the "don't buy from spammers" column. And the companies behind the Amazon Marketplace are not who I ordered the product from -- that was Amazon. "Sold by" means nothing when I'm actually on amazon.com buying it.
I doubt Amazon will do anything about this, just like they don't do anything about the outright scammers and misrepresentations.
The alert on my phone was used to find a child 200 miles away. What more need be said. ---no question mark.
What more needs to be said is how that alert ON YOUR PHONE was used to find that child 200 miles away. Be specific. Words like "When I got that alert, I [took action X] that resulted in finding a child that was 200 miles away from me" would be good. The words "the alert was received by someone else who [took action Y]..." don't count when you claim it was the alert ON YOUR PHONE that resulted in the save.
Otherwise this is just more nonsense and arrogance from someone who claims he's been here since the big bang and likes to say 'fuck you' to other people.
Also, I can attest that it has returned at least a couple small kids to their rightful guardian over the years.
If an alert on your phone has rescued a "couple small kids", then you either need to go to prison for kidnapping or get a medal for saving a life. Either you've been scared into letting them go because you knew the cops were looking for you, or you went out and found them. Otherwise, if the alert on your phone did not leas to some direct action on your behalf that saved a child (as you have claimed), it was a waste of time. For the VAST VAST majority of people, an Amber alert does nothing but waste their time. I don't abduct children and I'm not going to jump in my car to go looking for one of them when they are, so don't bother screaming at me that there's one missing.
Are you going to complain about the TV you no longer watch and the radio you no longer listen to?
Non sequitor much? You are very good at it.
Fuck off and I hope you never have kids in a situation that makes you oh so personally give a shit.
Ahh, now I see. You're one of those irresponsible child owners who want to push the responsibility for keeping track of them off onto everyone else because you let them keep company of non-relative pedophiles. You think it should be the highest priority of everyone else within a 100 mile radius to go looking for your lost child because you managed to misplace one of them.
It is the right of the individual to decide if they want to be notified, because it is that individual that knows best if the alerts would be anything more than an annoyance. I, for one, have turned them off, because the first time my phone started screaming at me FOR A TEST was the last time I allowed a device I own to scream at me like that. And I don't care of you think my phone should scream at me when you manage to lose your child, because an alert on my phone isn't going to help you fix your problem in any way.
Now go look up the words "individual responsibility".
They should also reconsider paying the over-the-air networks for content. How did this happen?
No, the right question is "why did it take so long to start"? It happens because the OTA stations can charge to be carried. They used to be happy with must-carry rules just to make sure they were on the cable, now they know that people will complain to the cable company if their channel isn't on cable so they can extort the cable companies.
Isn't it an amazing irony that an OTA broadcaster can put a scroll on the bottom of the screen telling viewers to call their cable company because they might lose access, and the cable company has to carry this against their own best interests?
The networks charge Cable AND still show commercials?
Of course. The OTA channels are OTA content and not a separate feed. Your "NBC" channel is not "NBC", it's the local NBC affiliate. Why should they cut out the commercials? What would they put in their place? If they put in two minutes of "dead air" you'll just FF your DVR through that just like you FF it through the ads now. Or go to the bathroom or have your wench make you a sammich.
They won't lose any money, they just might not make as much.
This. The fine article is using the same kind of "lose" where a tax cut that leaves money in the pockets of the workers becomes a loss to the government. Or a 10% hike in funding for an agency or program when they asked for 20% is a "10% cut". It's starting with the assumption that the money belongs to the government or agency being funded (or the cable company) and if they don't get it for any reason it becomes a loss.
It becomes obvious when you look at the "loss" number ($1248/yr) and the "also found" (amazing discovery!) $104/month that the cord cutters save. Funny that -- a $104/month loss to the cable company is exactly what the customer was paying. I wonder if this "cg42" outfit realizes it is implying that cable companies are non-profits were these numbers true? (I.e., if my paying you $104 per month offsets your $104 per month loss, then you are making no profit!)
This is a good thing because I know when the mailman will come,
The "free two day shipping" I get from Prime is "two day by 8PM". Do you know your mailman delivers as late as 8PM? I know they don't here, and neither does UPS or FedEx. (I know when the UPS and FedEx trucks show up here, by the way.)
What IP is being protected exactly, by preventing consumers from using cheaper, third party ink?
None. But they're also making it harder to reverse engineer the IP they have in the cart by people who want to profit from HPs engineering without doing any of it.
Ink is not just water and black stuff. It has chemical and physical properties that the delivery system relies on. Use the wrong stuff and it doesn't work so well. It clogs, it drips, it smears on the paper. All things that people will blame the printer for when the ink is at fault.
I use fountain pens. They have no-tech cartridges that have a nice hole in the top which can be used to refill them with a simple syringe. I've given up a long time ago on trying to refill the carts for them, because more often than not the pen stops working and I have to clean it out. If a simple thing like a fountain pen needs certain properties in the ink it uses, then imagine a complicated bit of kit like an inkjet head. (And no, I'm not trying to use cheap junk ink, I'm trying to use high quality drafting ink.)
The ink has to have the right viscosity so it will flow to the head from the tank. It has to have the right reaction to the thermal system that causes just the right amount of bubble to force a droplet out. It isn't supposed to dry out and clog the outlet, but it has to dry fast enough so it doesn't spread out on the paper.
I know people who work in the ink department at HP. It isn't rocket science, but it also isn't just taking a bucket of carbon black and mixing it with water. The claim that there is IP involved is hardly ridiculous.
and in 4 months we'll issue a new auto-installed firmware which makes them unusable again.
You are ignoring the context. We've just had an "update" prevent the use of third party inks, and people are going to install an optional update that puts things back to the way they were.
In other words, these are users who are unhappy that their printers stopped doing what they wanted them to after an HP update, and who have manually installed an optional update to fix that. They have been burned once by updates and have taken specific action to undo one of them. If they then continue to automatically accept updates that HP wants to install, then they deserve to have their printers change back to whatever HP wants them to be. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you.
The only reason this fix would be temporary is if the USER CHOOSES IT TO BE SO, after an education on why they should not.
An optional temporary solution for certain OfficeJet printers?
An optional update that will fix the problem permanently for the printers in which it became an issue. I don't know why the word "temporary" applies. Software updates are not "temporary" fixes.
Yeah, if you're stupid enough to apply MORE updates after this one, then this fix will be temporary. If you say "please change my printer software" then you deserve to have your printer software change.
(try adding clothes to a front-loader after the cycle has started)
There is currently an ad campaign in the US touting one brand's "feature" where you can add things to the wash after it starts. This is something "special" that differentiates them from all the other washing machines, worthy of a special ad campaign.
Every time I see it, I say "just open the top and drop it in. What's the problem? Is there nothing more exciting in your life than adding stuff to an ongoing wash cycle"?
In a front loading machine, all the clothes have a tendency to lump together at the bottom.
Of course. When the drum is not moving, there is something called "gravity" that pulls things "down" towards the bottom of the drum.
Once the machine speeds up they stay put resulting in a very unbalanced load.
Fortunately, things that have mass also have something called "inertia". This property of inertia means that the drum cannot go from 0 rpm to maximum rpm instantaneously. While it is accelerating there will be a varying amount of force holding the clothes to the side of the drum. Some things will stick (those closest to the drum). Some will fall back to the bottom. As this acceleration continues, this process will cause the load to distribute around the drum, reducing the chances for unbalance.
Any halfway-decent washing machine will detect such an extreme imbalance and shut down.
Only after it happens. I don't know of any that have actual load sensors that will refuse to spin if the load is imbalanced. And mine is quite happy spinning with an unbalance.
Any washing machine that is so shoddily built that it can actually "explode"
It didn't explode. It broke apart from overload.
due to an unbalanced load shouldn't be legal for sale in the US.
Manufacturers cannot predict every use for their product. Such a prohibition on sale of anything that can be mechanically overloaded to the point of failure would mean you are stuck using a rock at the side of the river to wash your clothes -- as long as you promise not to hit the rock against another rock too hard.
Front-loaders spin around a horizontal axis, which means that when they start to spin the load is subject to gravity to assist in distribution around that axis. As it rotates, some things fall to the bottom, some stick to the side. As the speed increases, more things stick.
There is no similar distributive force in a top-loader. The lump at the bottom is pushed to the outside as soon as the tub spins and it sticks where it is.
If it isn't a bug, as you claim, then it must be a mechanical limitation.
Name one device that doesn't have at least one mechanical limitation.
If it's a mechanical limitation, then every washing machine on the planet would have this problem.
Mine does. And there are many many stories of washing machines walking across the floor due to such an imbalanced spin.
Since that obviously is not the case,
When an argument requires the word "obviously", it has failed. It is not obvious that washing machines have no mechanical limitations. In fact, it seems to be exactly the opposite, at least to anyone who has actually used a washing machine.
Were I to use a common/. meme, I'd say "go upstairs and ask your Mom who does your laundry", but that would be looking for "funny" mods.
This isn't a "bug". It's a case of an overloaded drum being spun at high speed creating forces that the drum cannot handle after some use.
Anyone who has used a top loader knows that it needs to be at least somewhat balanced when it goes into spin mode. The problem is certain kinds of "washables" that aren't distributing themselves around the drum and instead stay lumped up and heavy.
Try suing a centrifuge manufacturer when it self-destructs after you've put something in only one of the slots. That's that this is.
I have this printer that does everything it was advertised to do correctly and prints just like it is supposed to. I have never seen it fail to produce a document that doesn't match the electronic version it was sent, except for hardware related issues (out of toner, e.g.)
Why the hell would I want to "update" it when "update" means "change" and "change" means it may do something different than it used to? It is doing what I want; change is not necessary.
I have yet to have any of my HP printers update anything. Maybe that's because I'm smart enough to not put the gateway address into the networked ones so they couldn't talk to a remote update server even if they tried.
Slashdot Mirror
So your claim is that McD's will get 100% of the "don't care about food quality" market?
I made no such claim. Please read the words.
They might -- but why should anyone care?
Because when you are accepting responsibility for feeding people who cannot afford to feed themselves, you must also accept responsibility for feeding them properly. You cannot ethically tell someone that you are going to feed them for free and then hand them a bag full of sawdust.
The claim that there is no substantial market for quality food is obviously false,
I made no such claim. Please read all the words.
Other restaurants that specialize in crap food might go out of business. BFD.
Well, your definition of "crap food" may not be the same as everyone else's.
You do realize that in any major city, there are literally hundreds of restaurants that are much more expensive than McDonald's,
And how many people who cannot afford better than McD for lunch go to them? But they do go to other places than McD that they can afford -- which they won't do when McD is free.
Can you explain what would be wrong with McDonald's offering free lunches to some people?
And what's wrong with T-Mobile offering zero-rated services to some people?
More seriously, if McDonalds did such a thing, then it would remove pressure to create a system to provide free lunches to people who really need them that WASN'T McDonalds, so other providers would see less reason to do it. Eventually you'll wind up with McDonalds as the only choice for a free lunch.
But since this offering doesn't prevent other ISPs from making competing offers (either free or for-pay)
No, it doesn't prevent them from making offers, but it does remove customers.
Are we really so much smarter than Facebook's potential customers that we know for sure that they would prefer no service to Facebook's crippled one?
If you read the fine summary, you'll note that this service is intended for "low-income and rural" who cannot afford internet at home or on smartphones. Those rural people who probably don't have cell service to start with, and low-income people who cannot afford it.
"Free internet on an app that you can't run because you don't have a phone or phone service, but sign up and give us your data anyway..."
In all likelyhood if things are so bad your wireless won't get through, the emergency service will be overwhelmed so your call is pointless.
Yes, but the call to your family outside the disaster area may not be, and it is not pointless to be able to call and let them know you are ok. or pointless to be able to call around town to locate family members who aren't at home to check on their safety.
Now, it is possible that the wireline CO is overloaded and your call won't go through. But with everyone switching to wireless because a wired phone is "useless", it is more likely that my wired call with get through and theirs won't. So thank you to them.
Or, better yet, use subaddressing, also known as plus addressing.
They're on to your trick. I know, because I do that all the time, or try to. One or more of the common javascript packages used in web commerce simply does not accept any non alphanumeric character in the local part of an email address. You cannot enter a "+" and have it accepted.
Then when you call customer service to report the problem, you wind up talking to someone with no internet messaging knowledge at all, who tells you that a '+' is invalid in email addresses because their website doesn't accept it and they've never seen it used there.
My bank was one of those when they changed to using Intuit's services. It was pretty funny, getting them to admit that the email address I had been using with them for years was suddenly not valid according to their website, and they were even discussing this "invalid email address" with me BY EMAIL. They accepted education, however, after I sat in the office of the director for online services for half an hour explaining the problem, and their website is now better. It does have the wonderful property of wanting to verify my identity by calling or emailing me every time I log in from a "new" location, and their method of keeping track of old locations routinely forgets I've been logged in from there before.
Neobits.com, however, remains willfully ignorant. When customer service said "the plus sign is not valid", I explained that it was, indeed, and when no further progress in solving the problem was apparent, I said "you've just lost this order" and hung up.
When I really need to create a temporary address and the destination won't accept a '+', I create an address in my own domain (usually along the lines of "f**k[insert company name here]@...").
Perhaps the funniest one is that many years ago I registered for linked-in using "no@example.com", and they actually registered the account and were still listing that address when I went back a couple of months ago. They were telling me when I logged in that one of my addresses was bouncing, and it wasn't until I went deep into the account that I saw they were still trying to send to an example.com address.
Really? When you're in the mall it's not the individual vendors who you're buying from, it's the mall you're buying from?
Amazon.com is not a mall. I am not in the spammer's store when I buy from Amazon, and I do not hand my money to an employee of the spammer. I am dealing with Amazon.com. And you can tell the difference, because you often CAN go to the spammer's website and deal with them, and often MUST go to their website to find technical information about the product. But you can tell, and you know, when you've left amazon.com and gone to the spammer's site.
When I order something FOB from a manufacturer while I'm shopping at a distributor's website, I am not a customer of the manufacturer, I do not pay the manufacturer, and I have not created a business relationship with that manufacturer. If I need customer service on that order, I talk to the distributor and it is the distributor who gets my money. What they do with my money after that is their business. And just like Amazon, that distributor doesn't want me talking directly to the manufacturer to buy the product because then the distributor doesn't get their cut of the sale.
You can argue, "I gave my money to Amazon, but not to the mall," and this is true.
Which absolutely destroys your mall analogy. Why did you even bother posting it when you know it is patently absurd?
If I purchased their product, I've initiated a relationship with this company
No, you haven't. You've initiated a relationship with Amazon. You're on the Amazon website and you pay Amazon. You don't deal with the vendor directly, and there is no business relationship to use as an excuse for unsolicited commercial email.
What I would have a problem with is getting a barrage of e-mails from companies that sell similar or competing products espousing the virtues of their superior versions.
What about companies that barrage you with requests for positive feedback and reviews and wanting to know how the product you haven't gotten yet is working out? You have to realize that the "how is it working" part of the email is just an excuse to spam you for good feedback, since they KNOW you can't tell them how well it works before it has even arrived.
This kind of customer service used to be appreciated.
By whom? By people who are incapable of autonomously complaining when something wasn't what they ordered or didn't work as it was supposed to?
I've gotten spam asking me if the product was working well TWO DAYS before it was scheduled to be delivered. And then repeated spam about the same product when I don't answer the first one. I've had them offering to give me money to write a positive review or feedback.
Count me in the "don't buy from spammers" column. And the companies behind the Amazon Marketplace are not who I ordered the product from -- that was Amazon. "Sold by" means nothing when I'm actually on amazon.com buying it.
I doubt Amazon will do anything about this, just like they don't do anything about the outright scammers and misrepresentations.
The alert on my phone was used to find a child 200 miles away. What more need be said. ---no question mark.
What more needs to be said is how that alert ON YOUR PHONE was used to find that child 200 miles away. Be specific. Words like "When I got that alert, I [took action X] that resulted in finding a child that was 200 miles away from me" would be good. The words "the alert was received by someone else who [took action Y] ..." don't count when you claim it was the alert ON YOUR PHONE that resulted in the save.
Otherwise this is just more nonsense and arrogance from someone who claims he's been here since the big bang and likes to say 'fuck you' to other people.
Also, I can attest that it has returned at least a couple small kids to their rightful guardian over the years.
If an alert on your phone has rescued a "couple small kids", then you either need to go to prison for kidnapping or get a medal for saving a life. Either you've been scared into letting them go because you knew the cops were looking for you, or you went out and found them. Otherwise, if the alert on your phone did not leas to some direct action on your behalf that saved a child (as you have claimed), it was a waste of time. For the VAST VAST majority of people, an Amber alert does nothing but waste their time. I don't abduct children and I'm not going to jump in my car to go looking for one of them when they are, so don't bother screaming at me that there's one missing.
Are you going to complain about the TV you no longer watch and the radio you no longer listen to?
Non sequitor much? You are very good at it.
Fuck off and I hope you never have kids in a situation that makes you oh so personally give a shit.
Ahh, now I see. You're one of those irresponsible child owners who want to push the responsibility for keeping track of them off onto everyone else because you let them keep company of non-relative pedophiles. You think it should be the highest priority of everyone else within a 100 mile radius to go looking for your lost child because you managed to misplace one of them.
It is the right of the individual to decide if they want to be notified, because it is that individual that knows best if the alerts would be anything more than an annoyance. I, for one, have turned them off, because the first time my phone started screaming at me FOR A TEST was the last time I allowed a device I own to scream at me like that. And I don't care of you think my phone should scream at me when you manage to lose your child, because an alert on my phone isn't going to help you fix your problem in any way.
Now go look up the words "individual responsibility".
They should also reconsider paying the over-the-air networks for content. How did this happen?
No, the right question is "why did it take so long to start"? It happens because the OTA stations can charge to be carried. They used to be happy with must-carry rules just to make sure they were on the cable, now they know that people will complain to the cable company if their channel isn't on cable so they can extort the cable companies.
Isn't it an amazing irony that an OTA broadcaster can put a scroll on the bottom of the screen telling viewers to call their cable company because they might lose access, and the cable company has to carry this against their own best interests?
The networks charge Cable AND still show commercials?
Of course. The OTA channels are OTA content and not a separate feed. Your "NBC" channel is not "NBC", it's the local NBC affiliate. Why should they cut out the commercials? What would they put in their place? If they put in two minutes of "dead air" you'll just FF your DVR through that just like you FF it through the ads now. Or go to the bathroom or have your wench make you a sammich.
They won't lose any money, they just might not make as much.
This. The fine article is using the same kind of "lose" where a tax cut that leaves money in the pockets of the workers becomes a loss to the government. Or a 10% hike in funding for an agency or program when they asked for 20% is a "10% cut". It's starting with the assumption that the money belongs to the government or agency being funded (or the cable company) and if they don't get it for any reason it becomes a loss.
It becomes obvious when you look at the "loss" number ($1248/yr) and the "also found" (amazing discovery!) $104/month that the cord cutters save. Funny that -- a $104/month loss to the cable company is exactly what the customer was paying. I wonder if this "cg42" outfit realizes it is implying that cable companies are non-profits were these numbers true? (I.e., if my paying you $104 per month offsets your $104 per month loss, then you are making no profit!)
This is a good thing because I know when the mailman will come,
The "free two day shipping" I get from Prime is "two day by 8PM". Do you know your mailman delivers as late as 8PM? I know they don't here, and neither does UPS or FedEx. (I know when the UPS and FedEx trucks show up here, by the way.)
Fool me twice, shame on ME.
What IP is being protected exactly, by preventing consumers from using cheaper, third party ink?
None. But they're also making it harder to reverse engineer the IP they have in the cart by people who want to profit from HPs engineering without doing any of it.
Ink is not just water and black stuff. It has chemical and physical properties that the delivery system relies on. Use the wrong stuff and it doesn't work so well. It clogs, it drips, it smears on the paper. All things that people will blame the printer for when the ink is at fault.
I use fountain pens. They have no-tech cartridges that have a nice hole in the top which can be used to refill them with a simple syringe. I've given up a long time ago on trying to refill the carts for them, because more often than not the pen stops working and I have to clean it out. If a simple thing like a fountain pen needs certain properties in the ink it uses, then imagine a complicated bit of kit like an inkjet head. (And no, I'm not trying to use cheap junk ink, I'm trying to use high quality drafting ink.)
The ink has to have the right viscosity so it will flow to the head from the tank. It has to have the right reaction to the thermal system that causes just the right amount of bubble to force a droplet out. It isn't supposed to dry out and clog the outlet, but it has to dry fast enough so it doesn't spread out on the paper.
I know people who work in the ink department at HP. It isn't rocket science, but it also isn't just taking a bucket of carbon black and mixing it with water. The claim that there is IP involved is hardly ridiculous.
and in 4 months we'll issue a new auto-installed firmware which makes them unusable again.
You are ignoring the context. We've just had an "update" prevent the use of third party inks, and people are going to install an optional update that puts things back to the way they were.
In other words, these are users who are unhappy that their printers stopped doing what they wanted them to after an HP update, and who have manually installed an optional update to fix that. They have been burned once by updates and have taken specific action to undo one of them. If they then continue to automatically accept updates that HP wants to install, then they deserve to have their printers change back to whatever HP wants them to be. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you.
The only reason this fix would be temporary is if the USER CHOOSES IT TO BE SO, after an education on why they should not.
An optional temporary solution for certain OfficeJet printers?
An optional update that will fix the problem permanently for the printers in which it became an issue. I don't know why the word "temporary" applies. Software updates are not "temporary" fixes.
Yeah, if you're stupid enough to apply MORE updates after this one, then this fix will be temporary. If you say "please change my printer software" then you deserve to have your printer software change.
(try adding clothes to a front-loader after the cycle has started)
There is currently an ad campaign in the US touting one brand's "feature" where you can add things to the wash after it starts. This is something "special" that differentiates them from all the other washing machines, worthy of a special ad campaign.
Every time I see it, I say "just open the top and drop it in. What's the problem? Is there nothing more exciting in your life than adding stuff to an ongoing wash cycle"?
In a front loading machine, all the clothes have a tendency to lump together at the bottom.
Of course. When the drum is not moving, there is something called "gravity" that pulls things "down" towards the bottom of the drum.
Once the machine speeds up they stay put resulting in a very unbalanced load.
Fortunately, things that have mass also have something called "inertia". This property of inertia means that the drum cannot go from 0 rpm to maximum rpm instantaneously. While it is accelerating there will be a varying amount of force holding the clothes to the side of the drum. Some things will stick (those closest to the drum). Some will fall back to the bottom. As this acceleration continues, this process will cause the load to distribute around the drum, reducing the chances for unbalance.
Any halfway-decent washing machine will detect such an extreme imbalance and shut down.
Only after it happens. I don't know of any that have actual load sensors that will refuse to spin if the load is imbalanced. And mine is quite happy spinning with an unbalance.
Any washing machine that is so shoddily built that it can actually "explode"
It didn't explode. It broke apart from overload.
due to an unbalanced load shouldn't be legal for sale in the US.
Manufacturers cannot predict every use for their product. Such a prohibition on sale of anything that can be mechanically overloaded to the point of failure would mean you are stuck using a rock at the side of the river to wash your clothes -- as long as you promise not to hit the rock against another rock too hard.
The front loading ones seem to be more robust....
Front-loaders spin around a horizontal axis, which means that when they start to spin the load is subject to gravity to assist in distribution around that axis. As it rotates, some things fall to the bottom, some stick to the side. As the speed increases, more things stick.
There is no similar distributive force in a top-loader. The lump at the bottom is pushed to the outside as soon as the tub spins and it sticks where it is.
If it isn't a bug, as you claim, then it must be a mechanical limitation.
Name one device that doesn't have at least one mechanical limitation.
If it's a mechanical limitation, then every washing machine on the planet would have this problem.
Mine does. And there are many many stories of washing machines walking across the floor due to such an imbalanced spin.
Since that obviously is not the case,
When an argument requires the word "obviously", it has failed. It is not obvious that washing machines have no mechanical limitations. In fact, it seems to be exactly the opposite, at least to anyone who has actually used a washing machine.
Were I to use a common /. meme, I'd say "go upstairs and ask your Mom who does your laundry", but that would be looking for "funny" mods.
Anyone who has used a top loader knows that it needs to be at least somewhat balanced when it goes into spin mode. The problem is certain kinds of "washables" that aren't distributing themselves around the drum and instead stay lumped up and heavy.
Try suing a centrifuge manufacturer when it self-destructs after you've put something in only one of the slots. That's that this is.
He's advertising his rotary wing aircraft store.
Please show me this amazing code you have written
I have this printer that does everything it was advertised to do correctly and prints just like it is supposed to. I have never seen it fail to produce a document that doesn't match the electronic version it was sent, except for hardware related issues (out of toner, e.g.)
Why the hell would I want to "update" it when "update" means "change" and "change" means it may do something different than it used to? It is doing what I want; change is not necessary.
I have yet to have any of my HP printers update anything. Maybe that's because I'm smart enough to not put the gateway address into the networked ones so they couldn't talk to a remote update server even if they tried.