Best Foods now markets mayo in a 'squeezable' bottle that they explicitly claimed would enable "getting it all", in contrast to an old-fashioned jar of mayo. Well, the unvarnished truth is quite the opposite: the mayo sticks to the sides so aggressively that even swinging the container in a fast circle won't dislodge it all, and the inventive bell-shaped container and narrow mouth precludes the old tradition of using a knife to coax out the last of it.
The result: wasted mayo but extra profit for the makers of Best Foods.
Then there's toothpaste: marketed for decades with TV and print commercials showing actors using HUGE globs of the stuff, on the order of fifty times what is actually needed. More recently, there was the invention of rotating-head toothbrushes, which the toothpaste manufacturers realized were encouraging people to use less, god forbid! That resulted in the redesign of many such electric toothbrushes (e.g. Colgate ones), which now sport a fixed-bristle area surrounding the rotating part for - you guessed it - the sole purpose of brainwashing people to once again use more.
The result: excess toothpaste used, potential damage to tooth enamel from all the fluoride, pollution in our streams and rivers, but extra profit for Colgate and Crest et al.
Another completely different example: Norelco and Braun and Black and Decker making consumer products with cleverly embedded NiCad batteries that aren't "user serviceable".
The result: when the batteries fail, people toss the whole product and go buy a new one rather than getting the batteries replaced... toxic pollution in a landfill but tons of extra profit for the manufacturers.
The tactics may be varied, but industry has been selling "consumables" for decades with the single-minded intent of brainwashing or forcing people to use more than they actually need and waste the rest (in the form of pollution and landfill mass).
... as opposed to any of the other myriad products manufactured and marketed for decades by myriad corporations with a specific intent to encourage waste for the sake of profit... like, say, toothpaste or mayonnaise.
Does it really take an idiot to not see the obvious parallels and realize this isn't Slashdot-worthy news, and only news at all because these tactics have been ignored and even encouraged on a global scale for at least half a century? It was the Industrial Age and mass production which enabled it.
That's curious... considering China is a larger market than all of Europe, you'd think that a Chinese YuTube would be their first move. I wonder what the reason could be for ignoring the largest market of all?
Does anyone still remember once upon a time when AMD had no fabrication capability and was basically little more than a design firm? Back then Intel reigned even more supreme than it does now. Could AMD have made a serious dent in Intel's monopoly had they not chosen to cut the long-term cost of production, by cutting out the fabrication middleman's cut and moving it in-house? If not, then I'm confused... exactly how will this move to divest fabrication and increase total fabrication costs again - by once again paying middlemen to do it - help AMD to remain competitive in the long term?
This would seem to be an admission of defeat and the beginning of a long drawn-out whimper of an end for AMD. The company execs are going to increase short-term profits so that they can cash out and then leave the skeletal remainder for someone else to fret over.
It was fun rooting for the underdog while it lasted, but the vultures were always watching, even from within the company. Now the bones will be picked clean and the fight of the underdog relegated to song and poem.
"There can be no crime committed when it's God's will and work that is being done." That is the way such people have deluded themselves to reason. Machiavelli would be proud.
what is bad about gold farming? well, it allows some rich asshole to buy his way into a game he should have worked hard at
Ummm... how exactly is that different from real life in the physical world, where we constantly have to worry about money buying elections much less pretty much anything and everything else?
I'd argue that is exactly what money is intended to do and represent, whether real or virtual. The real problem in both paradigms, and I suspect your real complaint, is that such games are all about capitalism and concentration of wealth and resources and the inescapable undercurrent toward monopolies. If you don't like that sort of game, you might just have to create a socialist one that encourages social ethics and the greater/common good, because THAT is not what any of the existing games are about.
This is stupid; it's already a very well understood behavior and mindset, IFF you dispense with the stupid buzzword and define it as it traditionally has been, as just another form of dogma. Any search engine or library will reward you with plenty of information about the symptoms and emotional causes of dogmatism. You don't need to waste your time reading some pointless article from a TECH publication attempting to describe a PYSCH phenomenon.
Duh? Yeah, you'd think it would be obvious that our telecom and other communication networks are just as much a shared common infrastructure as are our roads, right? We don't allow the builders of our roads to retain ownership of the sections they build, do we? Why is the telecom network and Internet are so much different?
The true stupidity wasn't letting AT&T become a virtual monopoly: the mistake was allowing it to remain a for-profit entity and/or keep control of the infrastructure it built. The net-neutrality war is the price we pay now for that old stupidity of not ensuring that these very public resources were kept public, and instead allowing them to be owned by the self-interested hands that built them. Had we allowed road builders to own the roads they built, it's easy to envision a battle over access to those brick-and-mortar highways very similar to this battle over 'Net neutrality.
From here on out, the 'Net needs to be designed and built by consensus, not by profiteers at the end of a gun fueled by greed and a fistful of dollars. Let those profiteers make proposals and bid to build the 'Net, but DON'T let them make decisions or own what they build on our behalf. Relegate them to contractor status, just like the builders of our public roads.
Isn't it time to take back this shared public infrastructure from the profiteers who have only their own, not the public, good in mind? This is an instance where a little controlled socialism would really make more sense than unregulated capitalism.
The societal costs of gasoline include pollution and the health and environmental effects, most obviously. The entire petroleum process, from extraction to consumption (in some or other form) and even beyond, has consequences. I think you know what some of those are? There are other less obvious ones. That's part of the problem with such a complex materialism: the cumulative costs of everything are rarely fully understood. Even after we're "done" with a thing, it often remains in a form that has consequences.
If all that isn't a societal cost, I don't know what is. Since much of it is a non-obvious "hidden" cost, it makes perfect sense to enact a tax to pay for that cost. That's what we did, but the purpose seems to have been perverted or forgotten.
The idiots intent on taxing Bob Texeira, even after acknowledging the stupidity of it, need a refresher course in the intent and purpose of a GASOLINE tax. The tax is (or should) exist to defray the state and societal costs associated with our use of that specific fuel... it should have nothing to do with road construction or maintenance. That is what VEHICLE registration fees and drivers' licenses should be funding. Hmmm, I wonder where *that* money is going? If indeed registration fees are being used properly but there's not enough, then those fees should be increased instead of using another tax for something it shouldn't be used for. Bookkeeping problem or porking, you decide.
Any kind of a "deep" or extensive wound, that would damage the vascular system itself as much or more than the surface "skin". Well, heck, I suppose that wouldn't be so much different than biological systems, because that sort of injury is often fatal barring major intervention, right? Think of a burn patient, maybe... without massive skin grafts and anti-rejection drugs and steps to prevent infection during all of that, he'd be a goner otherwise. Maybe this polymer analogy really doesn't fall very short of human skin after all. Skin is limited, too.
Television commercials have had the volume artificially jacked-up for many years, perhaps decades now? To rephrase the OP quote: "It is because television companies don't trust the viewer to decide themselves if they want to pay attention during commercials." So they crank it up to make damned sure we do.
"The body really responds strongly to electric fields, which is why you can cook a chicken in a microwave," said Sir John. But it doesn't respond to magnetic fields. As far as we know the body has almost zero response to magnetic fields in terms of the amount of power it absorbs."
I wanna eat a Flintstones vitamin with lotsa iron in it and then stand within two meters of this 30-meter wave transmitter and get magnetized, baby! Not only will I finally be a chick magnet but I'll easily be able to find my way north to the habitable zones when Global Warming hits the fan.
I happen to think Fox's O'Reilly (not that *other* one) is obscene and indecent, regardless whether he does or doesn't use the words shit and fuck. Let's censor him in an arbitrary and capricious way.
Some Slashdotters have doubtless use Peltier devices to try to chill their massively overclocked PCs, but that's only one application of them: they can also be used in reverse to generate electricity from a thermal differential. I don't know how the efficiency would compare to this - an actual efficiency wasn't mentioned in TFA and I've never used a Peltier in this fashion - but I suspect it might be comparable. There's also the absence of moving parts to consider, too.
You missed the other half of my point: only works with a browser and Google's Web site, doesn't work with POP3 use of GMail. I'd like to see a POP3 proxy version of the same thing, if that's even possible, for those of us who don't touch the GMail Web interface except for occasional management.
FireGPG is great, I suppose, but doesn't help those of us who only use GMail via POP3/SMTP, both to avoid advertising and have mail archives under our own direct control.
In fact, FireGPG actually benefits Google and its advertising goals, since it only functions via Firefox and Google's ad-infested Web interface.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I was "complaining" that this is not news and as old as mass-produced consumables of all kinds. Even as tech news this story is ancient history.
Best Foods now markets mayo in a 'squeezable' bottle that they explicitly claimed would enable "getting it all", in contrast to an old-fashioned jar of mayo. Well, the unvarnished truth is quite the opposite: the mayo sticks to the sides so aggressively that even swinging the container in a fast circle won't dislodge it all, and the inventive bell-shaped container and narrow mouth precludes the old tradition of using a knife to coax out the last of it.
The result: wasted mayo but extra profit for the makers of Best Foods.
Then there's toothpaste: marketed for decades with TV and print commercials showing actors using HUGE globs of the stuff, on the order of fifty times what is actually needed. More recently, there was the invention of rotating-head toothbrushes, which the toothpaste manufacturers realized were encouraging people to use less, god forbid! That resulted in the redesign of many such electric toothbrushes (e.g. Colgate ones), which now sport a fixed-bristle area surrounding the rotating part for - you guessed it - the sole purpose of brainwashing people to once again use more.
The result: excess toothpaste used, potential damage to tooth enamel from all the fluoride, pollution in our streams and rivers, but extra profit for Colgate and Crest et al.
Another completely different example: Norelco and Braun and Black and Decker making consumer products with cleverly embedded NiCad batteries that aren't "user serviceable".
The result: when the batteries fail, people toss the whole product and go buy a new one rather than getting the batteries replaced... toxic pollution in a landfill but tons of extra profit for the manufacturers.
The tactics may be varied, but industry has been selling "consumables" for decades with the single-minded intent of brainwashing or forcing people to use more than they actually need and waste the rest (in the form of pollution and landfill mass).
... as opposed to any of the other myriad products manufactured and marketed for decades by myriad corporations with a specific intent to encourage waste for the sake of profit... like, say, toothpaste or mayonnaise.
Does it really take an idiot to not see the obvious parallels and realize this isn't Slashdot-worthy news, and only news at all because these tactics have been ignored and even encouraged on a global scale for at least half a century? It was the Industrial Age and mass production which enabled it.
Kinda my point in asking the question....
That's curious... considering China is a larger market than all of Europe, you'd think that a Chinese YuTube would be their first move. I wonder what the reason could be for ignoring the largest market of all?
Does anyone still remember once upon a time when AMD had no fabrication capability and was basically little more than a design firm? Back then Intel reigned even more supreme than it does now. Could AMD have made a serious dent in Intel's monopoly had they not chosen to cut the long-term cost of production, by cutting out the fabrication middleman's cut and moving it in-house? If not, then I'm confused... exactly how will this move to divest fabrication and increase total fabrication costs again - by once again paying middlemen to do it - help AMD to remain competitive in the long term?
This would seem to be an admission of defeat and the beginning of a long drawn-out whimper of an end for AMD. The company execs are going to increase short-term profits so that they can cash out and then leave the skeletal remainder for someone else to fret over.
It was fun rooting for the underdog while it lasted, but the vultures were always watching, even from within the company. Now the bones will be picked clean and the fight of the underdog relegated to song and poem.
"There can be no crime committed when it's God's will and work that is being done." That is the way such people have deluded themselves to reason. Machiavelli would be proud.
Ummm... how exactly is that different from real life in the physical world, where we constantly have to worry about money buying elections much less pretty much anything and everything else?
I'd argue that is exactly what money is intended to do and represent, whether real or virtual. The real problem in both paradigms, and I suspect your real complaint, is that such games are all about capitalism and concentration of wealth and resources and the inescapable undercurrent toward monopolies. If you don't like that sort of game, you might just have to create a socialist one that encourages social ethics and the greater/common good, because THAT is not what any of the existing games are about.
This is stupid; it's already a very well understood behavior and mindset, IFF you dispense with the stupid buzzword and define it as it traditionally has been, as just another form of dogma. Any search engine or library will reward you with plenty of information about the symptoms and emotional causes of dogmatism. You don't need to waste your time reading some pointless article from a TECH publication attempting to describe a PYSCH phenomenon.
Duh? Yeah, you'd think it would be obvious that our telecom and other communication networks are just as much a shared common infrastructure as are our roads, right? We don't allow the builders of our roads to retain ownership of the sections they build, do we? Why is the telecom network and Internet are so much different?
The true stupidity wasn't letting AT&T become a virtual monopoly: the mistake was allowing it to remain a for-profit entity and/or keep control of the infrastructure it built. The net-neutrality war is the price we pay now for that old stupidity of not ensuring that these very public resources were kept public, and instead allowing them to be owned by the self-interested hands that built them. Had we allowed road builders to own the roads they built, it's easy to envision a battle over access to those brick-and-mortar highways very similar to this battle over 'Net neutrality.
From here on out, the 'Net needs to be designed and built by consensus, not by profiteers at the end of a gun fueled by greed and a fistful of dollars. Let those profiteers make proposals and bid to build the 'Net, but DON'T let them make decisions or own what they build on our behalf. Relegate them to contractor status, just like the builders of our public roads.
Isn't it time to take back this shared public infrastructure from the profiteers who have only their own, not the public, good in mind? This is an instance where a little controlled socialism would really make more sense than unregulated capitalism.
The societal costs of gasoline include pollution and the health and environmental effects, most obviously. The entire petroleum process, from extraction to consumption (in some or other form) and even beyond, has consequences. I think you know what some of those are? There are other less obvious ones. That's part of the problem with such a complex materialism: the cumulative costs of everything are rarely fully understood. Even after we're "done" with a thing, it often remains in a form that has consequences.
If all that isn't a societal cost, I don't know what is. Since much of it is a non-obvious "hidden" cost, it makes perfect sense to enact a tax to pay for that cost. That's what we did, but the purpose seems to have been perverted or forgotten.
The idiots intent on taxing Bob Texeira, even after acknowledging the stupidity of it, need a refresher course in the intent and purpose of a GASOLINE tax. The tax is (or should) exist to defray the state and societal costs associated with our use of that specific fuel... it should have nothing to do with road construction or maintenance. That is what VEHICLE registration fees and drivers' licenses should be funding. Hmmm, I wonder where *that* money is going? If indeed registration fees are being used properly but there's not enough, then those fees should be increased instead of using another tax for something it shouldn't be used for. Bookkeeping problem or porking, you decide.
Not so Kramer-crazy after all, am I?
Any kind of a "deep" or extensive wound, that would damage the vascular system itself as much or more than the surface "skin". Well, heck, I suppose that wouldn't be so much different than biological systems, because that sort of injury is often fatal barring major intervention, right? Think of a burn patient, maybe... without massive skin grafts and anti-rejection drugs and steps to prevent infection during all of that, he'd be a goner otherwise. Maybe this polymer analogy really doesn't fall very short of human skin after all. Skin is limited, too.
What repairs the capillary vessels when they are damaged?
Just ask the former Confederate Union states.
Does this guy happen to look and talk anything like the Kramer character from Seinfeld?
Can I just wire an (air) compressor up to the backside of the execs who condone this and let 'er rip?
Television commercials have had the volume artificially jacked-up for many years, perhaps decades now? To rephrase the OP quote: "It is because television companies don't trust the viewer to decide themselves if they want to pay attention during commercials." So they crank it up to make damned sure we do.
I wanna eat a Flintstones vitamin with lotsa iron in it and then stand within two meters of this 30-meter wave transmitter and get magnetized, baby! Not only will I finally be a chick magnet but I'll easily be able to find my way north to the habitable zones when Global Warming hits the fan.
I happen to think Fox's O'Reilly (not that *other* one) is obscene and indecent, regardless whether he does or doesn't use the words shit and fuck. Let's censor him in an arbitrary and capricious way.
Some Slashdotters have doubtless use Peltier devices to try to chill their massively overclocked PCs, but that's only one application of them: they can also be used in reverse to generate electricity from a thermal differential. I don't know how the efficiency would compare to this - an actual efficiency wasn't mentioned in TFA and I've never used a Peltier in this fashion - but I suspect it might be comparable. There's also the absence of moving parts to consider, too.
You missed the other half of my point: only works with a browser and Google's Web site, doesn't work with POP3 use of GMail. I'd like to see a POP3 proxy version of the same thing, if that's even possible, for those of us who don't touch the GMail Web interface except for occasional management.
Or maybe it's just a slow-news Monday, so CmdrTaco thought it would be environmentally friendly to recycle some old news?
FireGPG is great, I suppose, but doesn't help those of us who only use GMail via POP3/SMTP, both to avoid advertising and have mail archives under our own direct control.
In fact, FireGPG actually benefits Google and its advertising goals, since it only functions via Firefox and Google's ad-infested Web interface.