OP is talking about signing up and directing your Google Voice number to someone else's number that you don't own. I.E. the local Pizza Delivery.
I would imagine the same thing that prevents it today, people get pissed because they are getting 'prank' calls, complain, and someone brings down the hammer.
In SSB's case, I would wager a good portion of it was to ensure there was a sufficent online player base for a sufficent length of time after it's release.
In my experience, Nintendo games (Wii or DS) tend have online portions that are worthless half a year after release because either no one plays it any more or because despite knowing that there are cheat engines out there, absolutely no effort is put in to curb hackers in the game and every match is dominated by folk who blatantly hack.
Some things are worth the effort, some things aren't. Some of us are long past the stage in our life where we find breaking our hands or fingers in an attempt to perform some insane maneuver worthwhile. If I can pull it off, great.
If it takes me an hour with my hands cramping up while I still can't quite get it, I'm going to look for another route.
I'm guessing Bullshitavia or the People's Republic of Making Shit Up, the only countries full of people who have the time and internet necessary to browse and comment on Slashdot, actually have jobs, but still managed to have no money to spend for their family's health.
You can't help what you can't help. What can be helped, should be. There is a difference between unwittingly spreading germs and knowing you are infectious and willfully spreading them.
Yes, the excuse of "well my living conditions are so poor that I must fuck everyone else over to live" is a great one. Sadly, it's not a valid excuse you are still fucking over the rest of us.
So forgive me if I'm not particularly interested in how you portray your own selfishiness as more nobel than mine.
NEWSFLASH: Scientists determine that repeatedly stabbing yourself with needles used by individuals infected HIV does not confer any immunity to the HIV virus.
Not everything out there makes you stronger if it doesn't manage to kill you. Influenza is something that fits in that category. Not only that, but due to the way it mutates, any immunity you gain from exposure to this year's strain is mostly useless against next year's strain.
Additionally, I'm not interested in becoming stronger by rolling the dice with a disease that has a chance of killing me even if I'm receiving intense medical assistance. Vaccines are one thing; full fledged infections are a whole different set of things.
That doesn't mean we need to be going out and covering our homes with plastic wrap and duct tape, but it does mean that I have absolutely no respect for people who have the flu and willingly and knowingly go out among others while in an infectious state.
This is ironic, because I'm normally the one troting out the story about how the polio epidemic began when people starting living in sanitary conditions and were thus not being exposed to the disease until after they lost the immunity provided to them by their mothers. But today, the flu is one of those diseases where exposure nothing but make you sick.
I'm sorry but when it comes to the golden rule, my decision is for them to GTFO till they are well. Coming in 'infectious' sick, regardless of the motivation, is irresponsible and selfish and I'm not willing to put my own wellfare on the line for your paycheck.
Being sent home means:
A. You get the rest needed to recover more quickly B1. You aren't at work doing a halfassed job because that's all you can do with the energy you have left. B2. I'm not forced to spend time fixing your halfassed work.
And I'm willing to bet that the amount of work I have to sholder to cover you being out sick would be far less then the amount of work I'd have to sholder to clean up your mess when half assed isn't enough to make it work. Especially since if you are coming in to work sick, you'll probablly be sick longer than if you just took a day off and got over it.
Yes, if you work in a place that does not provide paid sick days, that's unfortunate. But it's worse of a problem if you manage to infect the rest of the office, putting us all in a half dead state.
And I'm hoping, were I the one coming in sick, my coworkers would say the same.
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, but the one most responsive to change." - Charles Darwin
Random selection has the "infinite monkeys" thing going for it, but at the end of the line, it doesn't matter where the changes come from, just that the changes don't impact our ability to meet the challenges we face in the future.
I do not want the telcos in the business of enforcing the law. I do not want the telcos thinking they need to 'evalutate' my use of their service. I do not want the telcos spying on me for the government. I do not want the telcos in any more of a position of power than they already have.
We have someone who is in charge of enforcing the law.
What I want is for those people to step up to the plate more often (and to be allowed to, since more often then not it's a problem with resources on their side that prevents more of this being caught).
IMO however, introducing a cable into the mix really doesn't solve the underlying issue that this purports to be. Now instead of a huge compact piece of equipment, you have a huge sprawling piece of equipment with a spiderweb of cords.
If I were looking at the issues presented by these 'bulky expansions' I would look at a combination of issues that really weren't solvable at the time they came up.
Hotpluging
It might be silly looking to have every exapansion plugged in at once, but consider the fact that you probably had to power down the whole system just to attached/detach an expansion, suddenly you might consider having them all plugged in all the time actually more feasible than booting up and powering down everytime your needs changed.
Equipment itself really is bulky.
This was the era where 'mobile' phones were called bag phones because they still required a briefcase. Expansions, by the pure nature of the beast, were going to be bulky. You can buy an external usb powered floppy drive today that would fit comfortably in your back pocket, that's a result of technology advancing, not of the folk back in the days making mistakes in their designs.
Daisy Chaining sucks.
There is a reason why Ethernet was such a revolution, ring based networks break the moment anything on the network breaks. I've got a computer at home with ~10 USB devices plugged into it (mostly eternal drives, a keyboard and a mouse) and if any of them fail, just that component fails.
But the tech needed to make it possible to eschew daisy chaining (namely the ability to include a controller that ensures all the devices don't talk over each other) wasn't there yet. Hell even Ethernet was still struggling to make a dent at the time we are talking about (or in some of the cases, not around at all).
If I were looking at the examples provided, I'd say that they weren't design failures so much as issues which were presented by the tech at the time and weren't solved until much later.
And to be honest, were those bulky expansions really design mistakes or do they just seem that way now that we have the benefit of a couple of decades of experience and design put into the problems they were meant to address?
I'd have a hard time seeing USB coming out back in the era being described, and not just because every company was doing it's best to lock people into their own platform.
Because of course, a baby could design computer chips, and we routinely drive across bridges designed by 6th graders? Don't know what fucked up reality you live in bub, but we all had to learn our jobs. We don't all get paid over and over again for work we did in the past.
Regardless, as you've missed so many points so far, (such as the reason why I put 'an hour' in 's), I suggest re-reading the whole thread of this conversation rather than starting in the middle with my comment.
Yes master, the hivemind of all of the readers of Slashdot shall meet tonight and decide what all of us will believe in. Oh wait... don't you read Slashdot too?
There's no way you can pay back the people before you? But you expect the people coming after you to pay you? And you call bullshit on me friend?
I think not.
Or once the inevitable happens and your father passes to the next world, are you planning on giving the book away for free? Is that it? You don't think Newton or any of those people in the 'several pages of references' had descendants that should see a buck from their work as well? Or is it only just you are special enough for that reward?
You see my friend that's the point, we give you the right to make money off the part you worked on, as long as you remember that you couldn't have done squat if you hadn't based that part off the much larger volume of work that was already in place due to their efforts. If you think that you should have the right to demand money for your work 'forever' then so should they.
Did I say he should? Mighty nice strawman you've tried to build there friend. It'd be a shame if some flames hit it and burnt it all up. Perhaps you want to go back and read the complete thread before attempting to put words in someone's mouth again.
How many times do you think an average McMansion design is designed? Once. How many times is it used? You do know what a McMansion is, right? Once of those previously ubiquitous generic homes that sub-division developers loved building enmasse prior to the housing bubble collapse. Each one exactly the same as the one next to it, only deviating occasionally in paint color and siding choices.
There are a plethora of items out there in the world which a 'creator' has thought up and been compensated for exactly ONCE and yet the thought keeps being resold over and over again.
Why is it that an a CPU designer is compensated only once when the company can sell millions of chips and yet the author of a book is paid per copy sold, in addition to a nice fat advance prior to even finishing the book? There is no actual IP/Physical distinction. It is simply a matter of expectations. There is nothing mystical about a book, it has no special imbued properties that would make it metaphysically different than a computer chip.
And no, I didn't miss your first sentence, I was responding specifically to it.
The answer to "people are stealing my shit" isn't "you honest folk who aren't stealing my shit need to give up your right to do things" especially when it still doesn't result in people not stealing your shit. Nor is it "Well because some people steal my shit, the public should have to let me control this longer". How does longer control help anything but provide incentive to steal?
There are ways of making buying something more desirable than stealing it, both by creating incentives to buy and disincentives to steal. The problem today is that rather than do either, the argument is made that they simply need to keep control over the work longer and longer. And each time, they'll use the excuse that people are still stealing it, because the point is that they realize that this means they can milk it forever.
Good for you friend, you worked hard you did the deed, and you see the fruits of your labor.
Now tell me, your father, did he invent his own number system? No? Did he invent his own alphabet? No. Were the laws of physics that his branch of engineering is based upon, discovered by him? Did he invent the math system behind it? The algebra, the calculus?
No?
Well hey, at least when you published your book, you probably did so on a machine completely of your own design. Using a printing system you invented. No?
Then maybe it wasn't all your work. Maybe, as I said, you and he are standing on the backs of the people who came before you. How much have you reserved of your profits for them and their families? Nothing?
Then perhaps you need to drink a warm cup of Shhh! and think upon your lessons grasshopper. Cause unless you and your father sprung out of Zeus's forehead fully formed and full of the knowledge of life, you owe a lot of your success to a lot of people that you haven't yet given shit to.
Architects and engineers create physical goods that have high duplication cost. The creators/designers of bridges and buildings have no need to amortize the creation/design cost of those things over the sale of more than one of them, because no one can duplicate them for $0. Whoever paid for those things paid for the entire construction cost AND design cost up-front, for the first (and only) copy of them.
Ever see a McMansion? Was the computer you used to type up your reply signed personally by the EE who designed the circuit boards or the folk who came up with the chip designs?
Slashdot Mirror
OP is talking about signing up and directing your Google Voice number to someone else's number that you don't own. I.E. the local Pizza Delivery.
I would imagine the same thing that prevents it today, people get pissed because they are getting 'prank' calls, complain, and someone brings down the hammer.
In SSB's case, I would wager a good portion of it was to ensure there was a sufficent online player base for a sufficent length of time after it's release.
In my experience, Nintendo games (Wii or DS) tend have online portions that are worthless half a year after release because either no one plays it any more or because despite knowing that there are cheat engines out there, absolutely no effort is put in to curb hackers in the game and every match is dominated by folk who blatantly hack.
Some things are worth the effort, some things aren't. Some of us are long past the stage in our life where we find breaking our hands or fingers in an attempt to perform some insane maneuver worthwhile. If I can pull it off, great.
If it takes me an hour with my hands cramping up while I still can't quite get it, I'm going to look for another route.
It's 'hot off the presses' new, and appearently just a way of selling a particular brand of 'netbooks'.
A bit like how nVidia 'invented' the GPU back when the GeForce first came out by coining a new name for graphics acceleration cards.
I'm guessing Bullshitavia or the People's Republic of Making Shit Up, the only countries full of people who have the time and internet necessary to browse and comment on Slashdot, actually have jobs, but still managed to have no money to spend for their family's health.
You can't help what you can't help. What can be helped, should be. There is a difference between unwittingly spreading germs and knowing you are infectious and willfully spreading them.
If you were sick enough for that to be true, then you were sick enough that you should have been resting regardless.
Yes, the excuse of "well my living conditions are so poor that I must fuck everyone else over to live" is a great one. Sadly, it's not a valid excuse you are still fucking over the rest of us.
So forgive me if I'm not particularly interested in how you portray your own selfishiness as more nobel than mine.
Not everything out there makes you stronger if it doesn't manage to kill you. Influenza is something that fits in that category. Not only that, but due to the way it mutates, any immunity you gain from exposure to this year's strain is mostly useless against next year's strain.
Additionally, I'm not interested in becoming stronger by rolling the dice with a disease that has a chance of killing me even if I'm receiving intense medical assistance. Vaccines are one thing; full fledged infections are a whole different set of things.
That doesn't mean we need to be going out and covering our homes with plastic wrap and duct tape, but it does mean that I have absolutely no respect for people who have the flu and willingly and knowingly go out among others while in an infectious state.
This is ironic, because I'm normally the one troting out the story about how the polio epidemic began when people starting living in sanitary conditions and were thus not being exposed to the disease until after they lost the immunity provided to them by their mothers. But today, the flu is one of those diseases where exposure nothing but make you sick.
I'm sorry but when it comes to the golden rule, my decision is for them to GTFO till they are well. Coming in 'infectious' sick, regardless of the motivation, is irresponsible and selfish and I'm not willing to put my own wellfare on the line for your paycheck.
Being sent home means:
A. You get the rest needed to recover more quickly
B1. You aren't at work doing a halfassed job because that's all you can do with the energy you have left.
B2. I'm not forced to spend time fixing your halfassed work.
And I'm willing to bet that the amount of work I have to sholder to cover you being out sick would be far less then the amount of work I'd have to sholder to clean up your mess when half assed isn't enough to make it work. Especially since if you are coming in to work sick, you'll probablly be sick longer than if you just took a day off and got over it.
Yes, if you work in a place that does not provide paid sick days, that's unfortunate. But it's worse of a problem if you manage to infect the rest of the office, putting us all in a half dead state.
And I'm hoping, were I the one coming in sick, my coworkers would say the same.
Random selection has the "infinite monkeys" thing going for it, but at the end of the line, it doesn't matter where the changes come from, just that the changes don't impact our ability to meet the challenges we face in the future.
I do not want the telcos in the business of enforcing the law.
I do not want the telcos thinking they need to 'evalutate' my use of their service.
I do not want the telcos spying on me for the government.
I do not want the telcos in any more of a position of power than they already have.
We have someone who is in charge of enforcing the law.
What I want is for those people to step up to the plate more often (and to be allowed to, since more often then not it's a problem with resources on their side that prevents more of this being caught).
<onomatopoeia>SNERK</onomatopoeia>!
Say what now?
Yes NVIDIA, yes you do.
IMO however, introducing a cable into the mix really doesn't solve the underlying issue that this purports to be. Now instead of a huge compact piece of equipment, you have a huge sprawling piece of equipment with a spiderweb of cords.
If I were looking at the issues presented by these 'bulky expansions' I would look at a combination of issues that really weren't solvable at the time they came up.
It might be silly looking to have every exapansion plugged in at once, but consider the fact that you probably had to power down the whole system just to attached/detach an expansion, suddenly you might consider having them all plugged in all the time actually more feasible than booting up and powering down everytime your needs changed.
This was the era where 'mobile' phones were called bag phones because they still required a briefcase. Expansions, by the pure nature of the beast, were going to be bulky. You can buy an external usb powered floppy drive today that would fit comfortably in your back pocket, that's a result of technology advancing, not of the folk back in the days making mistakes in their designs.
There is a reason why Ethernet was such a revolution, ring based networks break the moment anything on the network breaks. I've got a computer at home with ~10 USB devices plugged into it (mostly eternal drives, a keyboard and a mouse) and if any of them fail, just that component fails.
But the tech needed to make it possible to eschew daisy chaining (namely the ability to include a controller that ensures all the devices don't talk over each other) wasn't there yet. Hell even Ethernet was still struggling to make a dent at the time we are talking about (or in some of the cases, not around at all).
If I were looking at the examples provided, I'd say that they weren't design failures so much as issues which were presented by the tech at the time and weren't solved until much later.
And to be honest, were those bulky expansions really design mistakes or do they just seem that way now that we have the benefit of a couple of decades of experience and design put into the problems they were meant to address?
I'd have a hard time seeing USB coming out back in the era being described, and not just because every company was doing it's best to lock people into their own platform.
Because of course, a baby could design computer chips, and we routinely drive across bridges designed by 6th graders? Don't know what fucked up reality you live in bub, but we all had to learn our jobs. We don't all get paid over and over again for work we did in the past.
Regardless, as you've missed so many points so far, (such as the reason why I put 'an hour' in 's), I suggest re-reading the whole thread of this conversation rather than starting in the middle with my comment.
Yes master, the hivemind of all of the readers of Slashdot shall meet tonight and decide what all of us will believe in. Oh wait... don't you read Slashdot too?
In contrast, the idea that I said he shouldn't profit is what? Just a colorful attempt to put words in my mouth?
That much, we are in agreement.
There's no way you can pay back the people before you? But you expect the people coming after you to pay you? And you call bullshit on me friend?
I think not.
Or once the inevitable happens and your father passes to the next world, are you planning on giving the book away for free? Is that it? You don't think Newton or any of those people in the 'several pages of references' had descendants that should see a buck from their work as well? Or is it only just you are special enough for that reward?
You see my friend that's the point, we give you the right to make money off the part you worked on, as long as you remember that you couldn't have done squat if you hadn't based that part off the much larger volume of work that was already in place due to their efforts. If you think that you should have the right to demand money for your work 'forever' then so should they.
Did I say he should? Mighty nice strawman you've tried to build there friend. It'd be a shame if some flames hit it and burnt it all up. Perhaps you want to go back and read the complete thread before attempting to put words in someone's mouth again.
How many times do you think an average McMansion design is designed? Once. How many times is it used? You do know what a McMansion is, right? Once of those previously ubiquitous generic homes that sub-division developers loved building enmasse prior to the housing bubble collapse. Each one exactly the same as the one next to it, only deviating occasionally in paint color and siding choices.
There are a plethora of items out there in the world which a 'creator' has thought up and been compensated for exactly ONCE and yet the thought keeps being resold over and over again.
Why is it that an a CPU designer is compensated only once when the company can sell millions of chips and yet the author of a book is paid per copy sold, in addition to a nice fat advance prior to even finishing the book? There is no actual IP/Physical distinction. It is simply a matter of expectations. There is nothing mystical about a book, it has no special imbued properties that would make it metaphysically different than a computer chip.
And no, I didn't miss your first sentence, I was responding specifically to it.
The answer to "people are stealing my shit" isn't "you honest folk who aren't stealing my shit need to give up your right to do things" especially when it still doesn't result in people not stealing your shit. Nor is it "Well because some people steal my shit, the public should have to let me control this longer". How does longer control help anything but provide incentive to steal?
There are ways of making buying something more desirable than stealing it, both by creating incentives to buy and disincentives to steal. The problem today is that rather than do either, the argument is made that they simply need to keep control over the work longer and longer. And each time, they'll use the excuse that people are still stealing it, because the point is that they realize that this means they can milk it forever.
Good for you friend, you worked hard you did the deed, and you see the fruits of your labor.
Now tell me, your father, did he invent his own number system? No?
Did he invent his own alphabet? No.
Were the laws of physics that his branch of engineering is based upon, discovered by him?
Did he invent the math system behind it? The algebra, the calculus?
No?
Well hey, at least when you published your book, you probably did so on a machine completely of your own design. Using a printing system you invented. No?
Then maybe it wasn't all your work. Maybe, as I said, you and he are standing on the backs of the people who came before you. How much have you reserved of your profits for them and their families? Nothing?
Then perhaps you need to drink a warm cup of Shhh! and think upon your lessons grasshopper. Cause unless you and your father sprung out of Zeus's forehead fully formed and full of the knowledge of life, you owe a lot of your success to a lot of people that you haven't yet given shit to.
Ever see a McMansion? Was the computer you used to type up your reply signed personally by the EE who designed the circuit boards or the folk who came up with the chip designs?
Regardless, my answer is the same as it was here