The franchise monopolies are based on access rights through public easements. It's unrealistic for a private company to negotiate with every property owner for the right to string up a cable through each property, so the government sets up easements which cut through private property. (From the public's standpoint, it's also more efficient to have a single cable for each service, instead of a dozen different cables belonging to different companies all providing the same thing.) The government then controls who gets access to these easements, and frequently sets conditions on that access. For cable TV, it was usually required coverage in poor (unprofitable) areas in exchange for being the only cable TV company allowed to put wires in the easement.
Phone and Cable TV are considered different services and use different wire (twisted pair and coax). Hence they don't violate these government-granted monopolies. LIkewise, FIOS is fiber optic cable, not copper coax, and is not considered to be violating the coax cable monopoly rights granted to a cable TV company.
Not all municipalities grant monopolies. When I lived in Arlington, MA, it started off with a cable monopoly. But eventually the city got fed up with the poor cable service and altered the rules. They allowed a second cable company to put their wires through the easement (on power poles in Arlington; in some places it's in underground pipes and conduit). The week before the second cable company started offering service, the original cable company cut all its prices by about 15% and began rolling out approx 50% speed increases.
The only reason 90% of users have to look at the function keys to use them is because on 90% of laptops, some idiot accountant or designer decided that spacing the function keys equally was cheaper or looked cleaner than breaking them into groups of 4 like on a real keyboard. The few laptops which split the function keys into groups of 4 (the Thinkpads for one), I can use all day without looking at the keyboard.
For the Macbooks, Pro means for professional use - in this case for graphics artists, photographers, and videographers. The screens are pre-calibrated for the sRGB color space, they add (what used to be) faster PCIe SSDs which helps with video editing (one of the few applications where PCIe's advantage over SATA 3 makes an appreciable difference), and they give you the option for a better GPU (on the 15" model - important for video rendering). These are not people who are generally competent with tech and who will want to add memory or swap out SSDs. They're the type who are usually content with paying extra at the time of purchase to get the specs they'll need (or rather, the specs their techie friend tells them they should get). So I do think they will be appreciative of thinner and lighter, although I agree with you that they'd probably have been happier with longer battery life instead.
Unfortunately (fortunately for Apple), a lot of people who don't need and derive next to no benefit from these features have taken Pro to mean "best", and needlessly shell out the extra money for a Macbook Pro. Some of these folks are the ones who are interested in swapping out the SSD or adding more RAM. They're not the intended target audience.
I would imagine that on the black hat side, there's a price premium if a vulnerability has not yet been disclosed to the platform's vendor. If Exodus is agnostic and allowed Apple to join, that would increase the value of vulnerabilities sold elsewhere instead of to Exodus, meaning they are less likely to show up on Exodus. If Exodus is in it to maximize profit even if it means favoring the black hats, they have a profit incentive to keep Apple (and other vendors) out of their subscription base. Either way, it's unlikely Apple would recoup their subscription fee to Exodus as a cost-cutting measure as you are suggesting.
That's the tricky thing about the market and market pricing. It doesn't just influence the behavior of actors on the demand side as you're assuming. It also influences the behavior of actors on the supply side. The "value" of a vulnerability is basically how much a black hat could steal using it, minus the costs associated with effort and resources to exploit that vulnerability. Apple needs to pay more than that net value to get people to turn their vulnerability over to them instead of to someone else, any way you slice it.
"Organic" in chemistry just means the molecule has carbon atoms. It's not a naturally occurring substance. Well, maybe small amounts in really hot forest fires.
The commercial bottled water plants which use tap water (Pepsis/Aquafina, Coca Cola/Dasani, etc) use reverse osmosis on the tap water before bottling. Reverse osmosis removes all PFASes.
It's actually "natural" spring water in affected areas you have to worry about. They can pick up these substances from the environment.
Being borderline Aspergers/autistic, that's actually how I identify people - by their body shape, the way they move, and the clothes they tend to wear. I was able to identify a friend walking on the opposite side of a soccer stadium simply by the way he walked. I can usually identify people from behind as well. At a winter party, I surprised a my friends when I was able to pick out most of their jackets and coats correctly from the big pile as they were leaving.
In contrast, I have a really tough time identifying celebrities because normally you just mostly see their face. Something as simple as changing their hairstyle or sometimes even putting on lipstick is enough to fool me into not recognizing them anymore. Likewise, if I haven't seen someone in a long time and they've changed their taste in clothes and hairstyle (or if their face has aged), I usually won't recognize them. That is, until they're insulted and start to walk away and I recognize their gait from behind.
With wedding photography. It used to be that you'd hire a wedding photographer, and they'd shoot your wedding for a nominal fee or eve for free. But they'd charge you an arm and a leg for prints of the wedding photos. Reprints were priced similarly, allowing them to be paid multiple times for work that they'd already done.
In the 1990s, as the price of scanners plummeted and photo inkjet printer quality started to approach photographic prints, this business model stopped working. People simply scanned their wedding photos (sometimes even the contact sheet the photographer gave them to select which photos they wanted in prints), and printed off as many copies as they wanted.
Wedding photographers were forced to adapt. And they shifted to their current business model. They charge you an arm and a leg to shoot the wedding, but charge you a nominal fee for the prints or even give you digital copies for free. They still retain copyright, but they've acknowledged the reality that it's no longer cost-effective to try to enforce that copyright. And so their business model has normalized with everything non-IP related - they only get paid once for work that's done once.
So I don't see this having any impact on 3D printing. Once 3D printers become cheap and commonplace, it's going to be impossible to enforce the copyright on things like furniture. If a company does successfully win some court cases for violating the design copyright on their furniture, all they'll be doing is signing their own death warrant. Yeah nobody will copy their furniture, but nobody will buy their furniture either. Everyone will simply print furniture using a different design made by a company or individual who doesn't try to enforce their design copyright. The companies trying to enforce their design copyright will go out of business, while the folks who allow people to freely print their designs will become well-known. And the rich guy who wants custom-crafted instead of 3D printed furniture will hire them to design it instead of the company which used to be a big furniture maker but now nobody knows who they are anymore.
The only thing I'd worry about is some company trying to obtain an overreaching design copyright - like Apple trying to claim ownership of the concept of a flat slate with rounded corners. If some company successfully sues for 3D printed copyright violation of a modern equivalent of a dovetail joint, that could have huge implications for the things you can 3D print for over 100 years.
I used to live in Point Roberts, WA and power was very unreliable. I worked from home half the week, so I bought two UPSes (one for the computer, one for the cable modem and router), and kept a charged car battery in the house with a 12V inverter which would give me by my calculations about 10 hours on my laptop (on top of my laptop's 5 hour battery). I had plans to buy a generator as well.
One day the power went out. The UPS kicked in. Power usually came back within a couple minutes so I kept working. After about 10 min, the UPS began warning it was nearly drained. So I shut down the desktop and switched to my laptop. Unfortunately I hadn't charged it so I got a low battery warning after about an hour. I lugged out the car battery, clamped on the leads for the inverter, plugged the laptop into the inverter, and fired it up. I was back in business again.
Got on the laptop, logged in to work. 30 seconds later the Internet went down. No cable TV as well. The battery keeping the cable company's equipment powered must've died.
You can make all your systems redundant, distributed, and robust. But unless you control all the network lines between you and all the places you need to communicate with, you're not in total control over the reliability of the system. (And if you're curious, I was without power for 3 days. I had to move my refrigerator's contents outside to keep them cool since it was winter, and use a wood stove to keep the house warm and cook my meals. I dropped plans to buy a generator since there was no point if my Internet connection would only last about 90 minutes.)
The software started off innocently enough. Audi developed it in 1999. They were trying to figure out a way to reduce the diesel clatter when you've started the engine cold. The solution they came up with was to make the fuel mixture richer to increase lubrication. But that caused emissions to spike. They figured since this was being doing only during warmup after the engine was cold started, and wasn't how the engine would normally run, it was OK to disable the emissions controls for that period. An exception being if a emissions test was being run - then they'd leave the emissions controls running normally to better reflect how the engine runs outside of this warmup phase.
Gradually over time, they began relying on it more and more. With the 2.0 liter diesel engine, they didn't want to pay Mercedes to license the urea injection system. So they began used the software instead. (On the 3.0 liter engines which have urea injection, it appears to have been used as a crutch so they could get away with putting in a smaller, cheaper catalytic converter and not have to use as much urea.)
Sears.com is what you get when a store decides to sell its brand name as a storefront. The vast majority of items on the sears.com site are sold by third party sellers who are paying Sears a commission to appear on their website. eBay has pretty much become the same thing. Newegg does it as well, though they do provide an easy way for you to restrict your search to only Newegg items.
Most troubling, Amazon is doing this now. You'll notice that sometimes an item on Amazon is listed as "sold by FooBar, fulfilled by Amazon." This is a huge, huge problem. It means FooBar sends their inventory to Amazon who stores it in their warehouse, then Amazon ships it to you when you order it. The problem is, Amazon doesn't keep track of FooBar's inventory - they intermingle it with their regular inventory. If FooBar sends Amazon fake memory cards, that means you can order memory cards from Amazon (not sold by FooBar), and still end up receiving some of FooBar's fake memory cards. It's gotten so bad I've completely stopped buying easily counterfeited items like memory cards from Amazon, and pay a little more to buy them from a local big box store who buys in bulk directly from the manufacturer or a big distributor.
Drove to the local Walmart 5 miles away. I needed to pick up some stuff from Home Depot, so I was going to be in the area anyway.
Walk in. There are no obvious signs saying where to pick up Internet orders. I ask an employee (there are a lot of them near the front). He says I need to go to a counter near the back of the store.
Walk to back of the store and find what looks like the right counter. Nobody is there.
Wait 3 minutes in case the person had just stepped away for a bit. Finally decide there's really nobody there.
Spend 5 min wandering around trying to find a Walmart employee (not so many of them near the back). Finally find one. She says that's not her department, but she'll page the guy who's supposed to be there.
Wait at counter for 5 more minutes. Just as I decide the lady lied to get rid of me, two other Walmart employees walk out a door next to the counter. I ask them for help. They say the guy who works the counter is eating lunch. One of them helpfully says she'll tell him someone is waiting, and goes back in. She walks back out a minute later and says he'll be right out.
Wait 5 more minutes. Just as I'm about to go in search of another employee, the guy comes out still chewing (apparently finishing what he was eating was more important than a waiting customer). I show him my Internet purchase receipt. He walks to the back of the room and starts digging through mounds of haphazardly piled items.
After 5 minutes of searching, he finds my item, brings it to me, has me sign saying I've received it.
I walk out wishing I'd ordered on Amazon so I could have the last half hour of my life back.
I've done ship to local store at a lot of places. Staples, Office Depot, Home Depot, Lowes, Fry's (their prices for small items tend to be better than Amazon's). All of them get it right - in and out in less than 5 minutes. Not so for Walmart. If it's not on their store shelves, or they won't ship it for free or a reasonable cost, I get it elsewhere. I'm never doing a local Walmart pickup again.
iOS actually has a lot more vulnerabilities than Android. Most of the folks in the press are just enamored by Apple, so they downplay stories about flaws in iOS, while publicizing stories about flaws in Android to try to warp reality to fit their biases.
File menus were developed after a decade of research having users try different things to figure out what worked. It evolved into a consistent set of UI paradigms which allows both consistency of experience across applications (e.g. the command to Print is always under the File menu), makes it easier tor new users to learn how to use the app by organizing commands in a clear hierarchical structure, and prevents conflicts by reserving common shortcuts so they're consistent between apps.
By comparison, most of the hamburger menus I've used have been thrown together willy-nilly with no consistent organization, thus requiring you to learn each app's specific commands and settings organization. I could buy your argument that this was about "focusing on the content rather than the icing" if they'd done research similar to CUA and strived to organize hamburger menus for maximum consistency and ease of use. But from what I've seen the prevailing philosophy seems to be ease of programming - the programmer doesn't want to bother learning or adhering to UI guidelines developed for consistency, so they just do whatever the hell they want.
Exactly this. Tech used to have a (relatively) high barrier to entry. You had to be a geek, and know your way around electronics and operating systems in order to be "good" at using a tech device. Nowadays, it's been simplified so much for the masses (iOS and Android) that you can lack the first clue about how the stuff works, but still use it. Smartphones aren't the first place I've seen it happen. Anyone 30+ years old will remember the VCR always flashing 12:00 because the owner how to push record, stop, and play, but didn't know how to set the time.
Same thing happened with cars. You used to have to be a gearhead so you could diagnose problems, make tweaks to refine it's operation, and competently shift manually. Nowadays they're so reliable and automated that you can drive one for years without the faintest clue how they work, just take it to a service station for regular oil changes. Heck, my 25 yo cousin was helping me move stuff, and while we were driving he exclaimed with surprise that the moving van had windows which couldn't open. He'd never seen a car without power windows.
I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. As an engineer, as much as it riles me to see people using stuff without a clue how it works, more widespread use of technology is a good thing. Just that when comparing across generations of people who "use" tech, you're comparing different segments of their respective populations.
Windows 95 sucked as well (numerous lockups - most people's first introduction to blue screens). Everyone just tolerated it because it was the first time Microsoft included a TCP/IP stack in Windows. (Contrary to popular belief, the Internet/Web did not become big when Windows joined. It became big in 1994, when I started seeing URLs being advertised on billboards, trucks, and TV commercials. Gates was convinced the walled garden approach that AOL used was the future. MSN was their version of AOL - it was a pay service initially. User demand dragged him kicking and screaming into adding Internet capability to Windows.)
Microsoft has had a pretty reliable pattern of every other release of Windows sucking.
Windows 3.0 (mid-1990) - sucked
Windows 3.1 (mid-1992) - decent
Windows 95 (mid-1995) - sucked
Windows 98 (mid-1998) - decent
Windows ME (late-2000) - sucked, probably the worst one they've made
Windows XP (late-2001) - decent
Windows Vista (early 2007) - sucked on the hardware of the time
Windows 7 (late-2009) - decent
Windows 8.x (late-2012) - sucked (I don't really count 8.1 as separate since all they really did was tweak the UI)
Windows 10 (mid-2015) - remains to be seen
Oddly, it seems like the longer they have to work on a release, the worse it is. Either they're biting off more than they can chew, or they know it sucks from internal testing and take more time trying to make it better but not really succeeding. (I left out Windows NT and 2000 since those were really enterprise releases, not general use. NT was ok, 2000 was really good and formed the basis of XP.)
I've got a small speedboat that will do slightly over 40 mph on a calm inland lake, the notion that this can cruise at a similar speed is astonishing giving its size and open ocean conditions.
It's not that astonishing. The main speed constraint on a displacement hull like an ocean liner's is the bow wave. As a ship moves forward, the water it pushes aside has its pressure increased slightly, so it bulges upward at the bow. What goes up must come down, so this bulge eventually drops down to sea level, then overshoots and drops below sea level. This is called a bow wave. The key here is that this motion of this wave is dictated purely by the physics of the water (and the water depth, but that effect is small enough it can be ignored in the ocean). And that the front of this induced pressure wave is stuck to the bow of your ship (it's a standing wave when viewed from the ship), hence why it's called a bow wave.
I'll skip the math, but the net effect is that at slow speeds, your ship is moving through multiple waves of its own creation and stays relatively level. But at a certain speed called the hull speed, the wavelength almost exactly matches the length of the ship, and the bulk of the ship's mass sinks down into the trough of its self-induced bow wave. At that point, your ship is basically trying to power itself "uphill" through the water (opposite of surfing), and the energy required to move faster increases dramatically.
There are two ways to bypass this problem.
Stop displacing water. That's what your speedboat does. At speeds above about 20 knots, it starts planing on top of the water, instead of forcing its way through it. This lifts the hull out of the water, and thus no more standing wave problem.
Make the ship longer. The longer the ship is, the faster it can go before this standing bow wave lengthens to match the length of your ship. This is how displacement ships like ocean liners, cargo ships, and navy ships get around the problem. (Actually the nuclear powered navy ships can just increase energy output to power through this - it's not an absolute limit like the speed of light; and if you go fast enough the back of your ship climbs higher out of the trough so the energy requirement decreases).
This is also the rationale for the bulb underneath the bow of large oil tankers and cargo ships. It's location underneath the water slightly forward of the ship makes the water act as if the ship is slightly longer (the bow wave starts earlier), allowing it to eek out a tiny bit more speed at the same amount of wave resistance.
Open the door and get in (either the car is unlocked, or they break in triggering the alarm).
Plug the laptop into the OBD port. Command the alarm to turn off (if it was triggered).
Reprogram the car to accept a new keyfob.
Once that's done, the car recognizes your keyfob as its owner, and allows you to start the car and drive off.
So the new keyfob can't be paired until after the thief is inside the vehicle.
There're a lot of ways the manufacturer could've made this harder. But I've been arguing for two decades now that there should be a physical jumper or toggle switch on computers which you should have to flip in order to be able to change files in the system folder/partition. With it flipped to the default state, system files should be read-only (write logfiles somewhere else). That hasn't happened yet and systems are still getting rooted left and right, so I really don't think computer folks have much grounds for criticism.
No, this is an insidious loophole I first encountered while playing Everquest. The rules of conduct prohibited targeting an individual for harassment, punishable by banning. Unfortunately, this meant that some asshole who camped at a site (say a dungeon) constantly creating trains which got people killed was OK since he wasn't targeting a specific individual. But anyone trying to stop him from ruining everyone else's gameplay was banned by the GMs for targeting him specifically.
Likewise, if you're gathering information about a specific individual in RL, it's stalking. But if you're gathering information about everyone, you're just collecting data. What needs to be done is to pass a law which requires such personalized data collection to be anonymized, so that it can't specifically be tied back to an individual, like the Census does. But the advertising industry will never let that happen.
I've been arguing this for over two decades. The problem with modern political correctness is that it judges based on whether someone was offended. That's an impossible standard because anything you do or say, there is probably at least one person out there who will be offended by it.
The only standard that works is whether the person making the statement or doing an act intended it to offend. Unfortunately, this is hard to prove since you can't see what's going on in a person's head, and (if we ban acts of hate) it's in the person's self-interest to deny his true motivation. So the intellectually lazy take the logically flawed approach of basing the standard on whether or not anyone was offended.
All that does is create a standard where everyone is guilty all the time. And the people in power (government, the press, etc.) get to pick and choose which persons they want to punish for violating this standard. And it's not free from corruption via self-interest either. People who weren't really offended can claim they were just to silence someone they disagree with.
During the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, stores with "Olympic" in their name were forced to cover up the "Olympic" part. It's a common store name because there's an Olympic Blvd in Los Angeles (ironically renamed after the 1932 Olympics), so a lot of stores on that street incorporate it into their name - Olympic Car Repair, Olympic Printing, etc.). I hear the same thing happened in Atlanta and Salt Lake City, though fewer businesses were affected since AFAIK they don't have an Olympic St/Blvd/Ave.
They do prohibit TV broadcasts. To be able to do TV broadcasts, you have to bid, and the highest bidder in your country gets exclusive TV coverage rights for the country. The Olympics is the Copyright Cartel's wet dream.
The key difference is that any system designed to fool a human is blindingly obvious to any passerby. They will spot the danger, call the cops, and the device will be torn down, and the person behind it arrested if they're hanging around nearby.
A system designed to fool radar or sonar or lidar can be invisible to people, and go unnoticed and undetected even after it's caused an accident. If it's a portable system (like mounted in a van), the perp can simply drive off. meanwhile it takes the cops, NTSB, and vehicle manufacturer weeks or months to pore over the data to figure out that spoofed data caused the autonomous vehicle's computer to get confused and do the wrong thing, by which time the perp is long gone.
Instead of standing straight like the oak and breaking. Don't try to block these calls, deflect them past yourself. i.e. Instead of blocking calls from known-robocall caller ID numbers, everyone just needs to set up a filter which automatically forwards them to the number for your Congressman or Senator.
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The franchise monopolies are based on access rights through public easements. It's unrealistic for a private company to negotiate with every property owner for the right to string up a cable through each property, so the government sets up easements which cut through private property. (From the public's standpoint, it's also more efficient to have a single cable for each service, instead of a dozen different cables belonging to different companies all providing the same thing.) The government then controls who gets access to these easements, and frequently sets conditions on that access. For cable TV, it was usually required coverage in poor (unprofitable) areas in exchange for being the only cable TV company allowed to put wires in the easement.
Phone and Cable TV are considered different services and use different wire (twisted pair and coax). Hence they don't violate these government-granted monopolies. LIkewise, FIOS is fiber optic cable, not copper coax, and is not considered to be violating the coax cable monopoly rights granted to a cable TV company.
Not all municipalities grant monopolies. When I lived in Arlington, MA, it started off with a cable monopoly. But eventually the city got fed up with the poor cable service and altered the rules. They allowed a second cable company to put their wires through the easement (on power poles in Arlington; in some places it's in underground pipes and conduit). The week before the second cable company started offering service, the original cable company cut all its prices by about 15% and began rolling out approx 50% speed increases.
The only reason 90% of users have to look at the function keys to use them is because on 90% of laptops, some idiot accountant or designer decided that spacing the function keys equally was cheaper or looked cleaner than breaking them into groups of 4 like on a real keyboard. The few laptops which split the function keys into groups of 4 (the Thinkpads for one), I can use all day without looking at the keyboard.
For the Macbooks, Pro means for professional use - in this case for graphics artists, photographers, and videographers. The screens are pre-calibrated for the sRGB color space, they add (what used to be) faster PCIe SSDs which helps with video editing (one of the few applications where PCIe's advantage over SATA 3 makes an appreciable difference), and they give you the option for a better GPU (on the 15" model - important for video rendering). These are not people who are generally competent with tech and who will want to add memory or swap out SSDs. They're the type who are usually content with paying extra at the time of purchase to get the specs they'll need (or rather, the specs their techie friend tells them they should get). So I do think they will be appreciative of thinner and lighter, although I agree with you that they'd probably have been happier with longer battery life instead.
Unfortunately (fortunately for Apple), a lot of people who don't need and derive next to no benefit from these features have taken Pro to mean "best", and needlessly shell out the extra money for a Macbook Pro. Some of these folks are the ones who are interested in swapping out the SSD or adding more RAM. They're not the intended target audience.
I would imagine that on the black hat side, there's a price premium if a vulnerability has not yet been disclosed to the platform's vendor. If Exodus is agnostic and allowed Apple to join, that would increase the value of vulnerabilities sold elsewhere instead of to Exodus, meaning they are less likely to show up on Exodus. If Exodus is in it to maximize profit even if it means favoring the black hats, they have a profit incentive to keep Apple (and other vendors) out of their subscription base. Either way, it's unlikely Apple would recoup their subscription fee to Exodus as a cost-cutting measure as you are suggesting.
That's the tricky thing about the market and market pricing. It doesn't just influence the behavior of actors on the demand side as you're assuming. It also influences the behavior of actors on the supply side. The "value" of a vulnerability is basically how much a black hat could steal using it, minus the costs associated with effort and resources to exploit that vulnerability. Apple needs to pay more than that net value to get people to turn their vulnerability over to them instead of to someone else, any way you slice it.
"Organic" in chemistry just means the molecule has carbon atoms. It's not a naturally occurring substance. Well, maybe small amounts in really hot forest fires.
The commercial bottled water plants which use tap water (Pepsis/Aquafina, Coca Cola/Dasani, etc) use reverse osmosis on the tap water before bottling. Reverse osmosis removes all PFASes.
It's actually "natural" spring water in affected areas you have to worry about. They can pick up these substances from the environment.
Being borderline Aspergers/autistic, that's actually how I identify people - by their body shape, the way they move, and the clothes they tend to wear. I was able to identify a friend walking on the opposite side of a soccer stadium simply by the way he walked. I can usually identify people from behind as well. At a winter party, I surprised a my friends when I was able to pick out most of their jackets and coats correctly from the big pile as they were leaving.
In contrast, I have a really tough time identifying celebrities because normally you just mostly see their face. Something as simple as changing their hairstyle or sometimes even putting on lipstick is enough to fool me into not recognizing them anymore. Likewise, if I haven't seen someone in a long time and they've changed their taste in clothes and hairstyle (or if their face has aged), I usually won't recognize them. That is, until they're insulted and start to walk away and I recognize their gait from behind.
With wedding photography. It used to be that you'd hire a wedding photographer, and they'd shoot your wedding for a nominal fee or eve for free. But they'd charge you an arm and a leg for prints of the wedding photos. Reprints were priced similarly, allowing them to be paid multiple times for work that they'd already done.
In the 1990s, as the price of scanners plummeted and photo inkjet printer quality started to approach photographic prints, this business model stopped working. People simply scanned their wedding photos (sometimes even the contact sheet the photographer gave them to select which photos they wanted in prints), and printed off as many copies as they wanted.
Wedding photographers were forced to adapt. And they shifted to their current business model. They charge you an arm and a leg to shoot the wedding, but charge you a nominal fee for the prints or even give you digital copies for free. They still retain copyright, but they've acknowledged the reality that it's no longer cost-effective to try to enforce that copyright. And so their business model has normalized with everything non-IP related - they only get paid once for work that's done once.
So I don't see this having any impact on 3D printing. Once 3D printers become cheap and commonplace, it's going to be impossible to enforce the copyright on things like furniture. If a company does successfully win some court cases for violating the design copyright on their furniture, all they'll be doing is signing their own death warrant. Yeah nobody will copy their furniture, but nobody will buy their furniture either. Everyone will simply print furniture using a different design made by a company or individual who doesn't try to enforce their design copyright. The companies trying to enforce their design copyright will go out of business, while the folks who allow people to freely print their designs will become well-known. And the rich guy who wants custom-crafted instead of 3D printed furniture will hire them to design it instead of the company which used to be a big furniture maker but now nobody knows who they are anymore.
The only thing I'd worry about is some company trying to obtain an overreaching design copyright - like Apple trying to claim ownership of the concept of a flat slate with rounded corners. If some company successfully sues for 3D printed copyright violation of a modern equivalent of a dovetail joint, that could have huge implications for the things you can 3D print for over 100 years.
I used to live in Point Roberts, WA and power was very unreliable. I worked from home half the week, so I bought two UPSes (one for the computer, one for the cable modem and router), and kept a charged car battery in the house with a 12V inverter which would give me by my calculations about 10 hours on my laptop (on top of my laptop's 5 hour battery). I had plans to buy a generator as well.
One day the power went out. The UPS kicked in. Power usually came back within a couple minutes so I kept working. After about 10 min, the UPS began warning it was nearly drained. So I shut down the desktop and switched to my laptop. Unfortunately I hadn't charged it so I got a low battery warning after about an hour. I lugged out the car battery, clamped on the leads for the inverter, plugged the laptop into the inverter, and fired it up. I was back in business again.
Got on the laptop, logged in to work. 30 seconds later the Internet went down. No cable TV as well. The battery keeping the cable company's equipment powered must've died.
You can make all your systems redundant, distributed, and robust. But unless you control all the network lines between you and all the places you need to communicate with, you're not in total control over the reliability of the system. (And if you're curious, I was without power for 3 days. I had to move my refrigerator's contents outside to keep them cool since it was winter, and use a wood stove to keep the house warm and cook my meals. I dropped plans to buy a generator since there was no point if my Internet connection would only last about 90 minutes.)
The software started off innocently enough. Audi developed it in 1999. They were trying to figure out a way to reduce the diesel clatter when you've started the engine cold. The solution they came up with was to make the fuel mixture richer to increase lubrication. But that caused emissions to spike. They figured since this was being doing only during warmup after the engine was cold started, and wasn't how the engine would normally run, it was OK to disable the emissions controls for that period. An exception being if a emissions test was being run - then they'd leave the emissions controls running normally to better reflect how the engine runs outside of this warmup phase.
Gradually over time, they began relying on it more and more. With the 2.0 liter diesel engine, they didn't want to pay Mercedes to license the urea injection system. So they began used the software instead. (On the 3.0 liter engines which have urea injection, it appears to have been used as a crutch so they could get away with putting in a smaller, cheaper catalytic converter and not have to use as much urea.)
Sears.com is what you get when a store decides to sell its brand name as a storefront. The vast majority of items on the sears.com site are sold by third party sellers who are paying Sears a commission to appear on their website. eBay has pretty much become the same thing. Newegg does it as well, though they do provide an easy way for you to restrict your search to only Newegg items.
Most troubling, Amazon is doing this now. You'll notice that sometimes an item on Amazon is listed as "sold by FooBar, fulfilled by Amazon." This is a huge, huge problem. It means FooBar sends their inventory to Amazon who stores it in their warehouse, then Amazon ships it to you when you order it. The problem is, Amazon doesn't keep track of FooBar's inventory - they intermingle it with their regular inventory. If FooBar sends Amazon fake memory cards, that means you can order memory cards from Amazon (not sold by FooBar), and still end up receiving some of FooBar's fake memory cards. It's gotten so bad I've completely stopped buying easily counterfeited items like memory cards from Amazon, and pay a little more to buy them from a local big box store who buys in bulk directly from the manufacturer or a big distributor.
Drove to the local Walmart 5 miles away. I needed to pick up some stuff from Home Depot, so I was going to be in the area anyway.
Walk in. There are no obvious signs saying where to pick up Internet orders. I ask an employee (there are a lot of them near the front). He says I need to go to a counter near the back of the store.
Walk to back of the store and find what looks like the right counter. Nobody is there.
Wait 3 minutes in case the person had just stepped away for a bit. Finally decide there's really nobody there.
Spend 5 min wandering around trying to find a Walmart employee (not so many of them near the back). Finally find one. She says that's not her department, but she'll page the guy who's supposed to be there.
Wait at counter for 5 more minutes. Just as I decide the lady lied to get rid of me, two other Walmart employees walk out a door next to the counter. I ask them for help. They say the guy who works the counter is eating lunch. One of them helpfully says she'll tell him someone is waiting, and goes back in. She walks back out a minute later and says he'll be right out.
Wait 5 more minutes. Just as I'm about to go in search of another employee, the guy comes out still chewing (apparently finishing what he was eating was more important than a waiting customer). I show him my Internet purchase receipt. He walks to the back of the room and starts digging through mounds of haphazardly piled items.
After 5 minutes of searching, he finds my item, brings it to me, has me sign saying I've received it.
I walk out wishing I'd ordered on Amazon so I could have the last half hour of my life back.
I've done ship to local store at a lot of places. Staples, Office Depot, Home Depot, Lowes, Fry's (their prices for small items tend to be better than Amazon's). All of them get it right - in and out in less than 5 minutes. Not so for Walmart. If it's not on their store shelves, or they won't ship it for free or a reasonable cost, I get it elsewhere. I'm never doing a local Walmart pickup again.
iOS actually has a lot more vulnerabilities than Android. Most of the folks in the press are just enamored by Apple, so they downplay stories about flaws in iOS, while publicizing stories about flaws in Android to try to warp reality to fit their biases.
File menus were developed after a decade of research having users try different things to figure out what worked. It evolved into a consistent set of UI paradigms which allows both consistency of experience across applications (e.g. the command to Print is always under the File menu), makes it easier tor new users to learn how to use the app by organizing commands in a clear hierarchical structure, and prevents conflicts by reserving common shortcuts so they're consistent between apps.
By comparison, most of the hamburger menus I've used have been thrown together willy-nilly with no consistent organization, thus requiring you to learn each app's specific commands and settings organization. I could buy your argument that this was about "focusing on the content rather than the icing" if they'd done research similar to CUA and strived to organize hamburger menus for maximum consistency and ease of use. But from what I've seen the prevailing philosophy seems to be ease of programming - the programmer doesn't want to bother learning or adhering to UI guidelines developed for consistency, so they just do whatever the hell they want.
Exactly this. Tech used to have a (relatively) high barrier to entry. You had to be a geek, and know your way around electronics and operating systems in order to be "good" at using a tech device. Nowadays, it's been simplified so much for the masses (iOS and Android) that you can lack the first clue about how the stuff works, but still use it. Smartphones aren't the first place I've seen it happen. Anyone 30+ years old will remember the VCR always flashing 12:00 because the owner how to push record, stop, and play, but didn't know how to set the time.
Same thing happened with cars. You used to have to be a gearhead so you could diagnose problems, make tweaks to refine it's operation, and competently shift manually. Nowadays they're so reliable and automated that you can drive one for years without the faintest clue how they work, just take it to a service station for regular oil changes. Heck, my 25 yo cousin was helping me move stuff, and while we were driving he exclaimed with surprise that the moving van had windows which couldn't open. He'd never seen a car without power windows.
I'm not saying that this is a bad thing. As an engineer, as much as it riles me to see people using stuff without a clue how it works, more widespread use of technology is a good thing. Just that when comparing across generations of people who "use" tech, you're comparing different segments of their respective populations.
Windows 95 sucked as well (numerous lockups - most people's first introduction to blue screens). Everyone just tolerated it because it was the first time Microsoft included a TCP/IP stack in Windows. (Contrary to popular belief, the Internet/Web did not become big when Windows joined. It became big in 1994, when I started seeing URLs being advertised on billboards, trucks, and TV commercials. Gates was convinced the walled garden approach that AOL used was the future. MSN was their version of AOL - it was a pay service initially. User demand dragged him kicking and screaming into adding Internet capability to Windows.)
Microsoft has had a pretty reliable pattern of every other release of Windows sucking.
Windows 3.0 (mid-1990) - sucked
Windows 3.1 (mid-1992) - decent
Windows 95 (mid-1995) - sucked
Windows 98 (mid-1998) - decent
Windows ME (late-2000) - sucked, probably the worst one they've made
Windows XP (late-2001) - decent
Windows Vista (early 2007) - sucked on the hardware of the time
Windows 7 (late-2009) - decent
Windows 8.x (late-2012) - sucked (I don't really count 8.1 as separate since all they really did was tweak the UI)
Windows 10 (mid-2015) - remains to be seen
Oddly, it seems like the longer they have to work on a release, the worse it is. Either they're biting off more than they can chew, or they know it sucks from internal testing and take more time trying to make it better but not really succeeding. (I left out Windows NT and 2000 since those were really enterprise releases, not general use. NT was ok, 2000 was really good and formed the basis of XP.)
You can still play it.
It's not that astonishing. The main speed constraint on a displacement hull like an ocean liner's is the bow wave. As a ship moves forward, the water it pushes aside has its pressure increased slightly, so it bulges upward at the bow. What goes up must come down, so this bulge eventually drops down to sea level, then overshoots and drops below sea level. This is called a bow wave. The key here is that this motion of this wave is dictated purely by the physics of the water (and the water depth, but that effect is small enough it can be ignored in the ocean). And that the front of this induced pressure wave is stuck to the bow of your ship (it's a standing wave when viewed from the ship), hence why it's called a bow wave.
I'll skip the math, but the net effect is that at slow speeds, your ship is moving through multiple waves of its own creation and stays relatively level. But at a certain speed called the hull speed, the wavelength almost exactly matches the length of the ship, and the bulk of the ship's mass sinks down into the trough of its self-induced bow wave. At that point, your ship is basically trying to power itself "uphill" through the water (opposite of surfing), and the energy required to move faster increases dramatically.
There are two ways to bypass this problem.
This is also the rationale for the bulb underneath the bow of large oil tankers and cargo ships. It's location underneath the water slightly forward of the ship makes the water act as if the ship is slightly longer (the bow wave starts earlier), allowing it to eek out a tiny bit more speed at the same amount of wave resistance.
So the new keyfob can't be paired until after the thief is inside the vehicle.
There're a lot of ways the manufacturer could've made this harder. But I've been arguing for two decades now that there should be a physical jumper or toggle switch on computers which you should have to flip in order to be able to change files in the system folder/partition. With it flipped to the default state, system files should be read-only (write logfiles somewhere else). That hasn't happened yet and systems are still getting rooted left and right, so I really don't think computer folks have much grounds for criticism.
No, this is an insidious loophole I first encountered while playing Everquest. The rules of conduct prohibited targeting an individual for harassment, punishable by banning. Unfortunately, this meant that some asshole who camped at a site (say a dungeon) constantly creating trains which got people killed was OK since he wasn't targeting a specific individual. But anyone trying to stop him from ruining everyone else's gameplay was banned by the GMs for targeting him specifically.
Likewise, if you're gathering information about a specific individual in RL, it's stalking. But if you're gathering information about everyone, you're just collecting data. What needs to be done is to pass a law which requires such personalized data collection to be anonymized, so that it can't specifically be tied back to an individual, like the Census does. But the advertising industry will never let that happen.
I've been arguing this for over two decades. The problem with modern political correctness is that it judges based on whether someone was offended. That's an impossible standard because anything you do or say, there is probably at least one person out there who will be offended by it.
The only standard that works is whether the person making the statement or doing an act intended it to offend. Unfortunately, this is hard to prove since you can't see what's going on in a person's head, and (if we ban acts of hate) it's in the person's self-interest to deny his true motivation. So the intellectually lazy take the logically flawed approach of basing the standard on whether or not anyone was offended.
All that does is create a standard where everyone is guilty all the time. And the people in power (government, the press, etc.) get to pick and choose which persons they want to punish for violating this standard. And it's not free from corruption via self-interest either. People who weren't really offended can claim they were just to silence someone they disagree with.
During the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, stores with "Olympic" in their name were forced to cover up the "Olympic" part. It's a common store name because there's an Olympic Blvd in Los Angeles (ironically renamed after the 1932 Olympics), so a lot of stores on that street incorporate it into their name - Olympic Car Repair, Olympic Printing, etc.). I hear the same thing happened in Atlanta and Salt Lake City, though fewer businesses were affected since AFAIK they don't have an Olympic St/Blvd/Ave.
They do prohibit TV broadcasts. To be able to do TV broadcasts, you have to bid, and the highest bidder in your country gets exclusive TV coverage rights for the country. The Olympics is the Copyright Cartel's wet dream.
The key difference is that any system designed to fool a human is blindingly obvious to any passerby. They will spot the danger, call the cops, and the device will be torn down, and the person behind it arrested if they're hanging around nearby.
A system designed to fool radar or sonar or lidar can be invisible to people, and go unnoticed and undetected even after it's caused an accident. If it's a portable system (like mounted in a van), the perp can simply drive off. meanwhile it takes the cops, NTSB, and vehicle manufacturer weeks or months to pore over the data to figure out that spoofed data caused the autonomous vehicle's computer to get confused and do the wrong thing, by which time the perp is long gone.
Instead of standing straight like the oak and breaking. Don't try to block these calls, deflect them past yourself. i.e. Instead of blocking calls from known-robocall caller ID numbers, everyone just needs to set up a filter which automatically forwards them to the number for your Congressman or Senator.