Other then printing an AR-15 lower receiver or magazines what can you do with a 3-D printer that's worth the bother?
I drive a 14 year old car. I am far from poor, I drive it because there hasn't really been another vehicle that has appealed to me since. My driver's side door no longer opens from the outside because a plastic part snapped off inside the door itself. It is actually a common failure on these vehicles. Right now I have to go hunt through junk-yards to find an (aged) replacement part. A 3D printer (and the right 3D cad file) would allow me to print a replacement doohickey and fix my door without worrying about finding an obscure replacement part.
Sure, that's an anecdote, but wanting to replacing small broken plastic parts is not that uncommon, especially when you widen the scope from old cars to everything - houses, bikes, laptops, appliances, etc.
This "problem" already exists. All cell phones have a microphone designed to pick up ambient sound (aka "speakerphone")
That is misleading. The entire point of google glass is to actively point a camera at whatever the wearer is looking at. Until cell phone manufacturers specifically design their products to record ambient sounds, from inside people's pockets and purses, 24x7 the comparison is not meaningful.
Someday if that is even a possibility, then anytime there is a car wreck, or someone stumbles and falls, or even hiccups, attorneys will be subpoena Google digging for media to prove or disprove the case. Google won't store video or audio data for that simple reason alone.
Just like facebook doesn't permanently store everything you delete from your account and google hasn't set up an automated interface for law enforcement to read gmail user's email with practically no human intervention on google's part. Oh wait! They did.
Go ahead and find solace in trying to muddy the details all you want, but what you can't dispute is that last year the spending was DOWN. Not just lowest growth since Eisenhower, but negative growth.
Because it is news for nerds. Note the set is boolean OR not AND, although I'm going to make a case that it "matters" too.
People send texts to the wrong recipients all the time, it is inherent in the technology. Using that technological failure as a sort of comedic performance art is news - at least to me, I haven't seen something like that before.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised to see this show up on the venerable Risks Digest because it has computer-related risk all over it. Fundamentally it is an exploitation of an error for unexpected purposes. It is not unlike those spammers who pretend to "accidentally" email you stock tips. Except this is a prank from people the recipients know, not random strangers.
Government spending under Obama's budgets has increased only 1.4% total and in fiscal 2013 it even went down by 1.3%. If you take inflation into account the effective spending is even less.
Do I need to diagram the sentence for you? That you think there is some sort of "gotcha" in there just says you can't parse even moderately complex grammar. That's quit ironic given your accusations of "poor comprehension skills."
What is particularly bad form on your part is that even if you can't comprehend my words, you should have at least had second thoughts about jumping to stupid-ass conclusions given that you had just written the following two lines:
"the unwashed who think they get the phone for a pittance?"
and this: "I guess people out there that think you can get a $600 phone for $99 if you have a plan, and if you terminate the plan you ought to walk off with the phone for a fraction of its retail value."
In what other business could you act so profoundly antagonistic towards your own customers and expect your business to actually be around to see the next day?
Basically any business which has a monopoly. In this case there are two related monopolies - copyright and distribution. The studios' monopoly on distribution is fading and that's why they are shitting bricks about this. Anything that even remotely speeds up their loss of control over distribution channels is an existential threat to these guys.
If you want personal computers and the internet, child porn is inevitably going to be distributed too. Should we stop trying to control that?!
Yes. Prosecute the creators because they are the ones harming children and the creation of child porn has nothing to do with computers or the internet. But trying to stop copies of what's already been done from propagating is fruitless and wastes resources that would be better spent on stopping the people who actually harm the kids.
Crime in general is the inevitable result of society. That doesn't mean we should give up trying to minimize it.
"Crime" is whatever we say it is. Harm is what we need to be working to minimize, but the harm caused by 3d printing of weapons is small compared to the harm caused by the measures needed to effectively reduce 3d printing of weapons.
You can have either without the other. But no one - And I do mean no one, ever refers to the one without the other outside a courtroom.
Well at least you've got a tenuous grasp on reality. But then you have to face up to the fact that comparing a line of credit to a phone service contract is so utterly random as to be meaningless.
The problem here is without the "it's all due if you cancel service" clause T-Mobile would be leaving themselves open to abuse of the 0% APR financing.
Well then don't do 0% APR.
Or do what the AG made them do - be up front about the balloon payment.
That's a bad analogy: copyright infringement is illegal, building a gun isn't.
Maybe not in the US, but it is in plenty of other countries.
Even so, building certain kinds of guns in the US is illegal. Try building yourself a real machine-gun. It ain't practical to build one, but even if you could, it would be illega.
I really, really, really want to see stats on how many gun murders are associated with drugs. I expect that upward of 95% are. If we would just end the war on drugs, we'd stop nearly half of all gun deaths. The other half being suicide.
But the "right" doesn't want to admit the war on drugs is killing people (and they don't really care since most of them are poor with no one to speak for them) and the "left" doesn't want to admit that ending the war on drugs would substantially reduce gun violence because that would weaken any argument for outlawing guns on their own merits.
No one needs the ability to exercise lethal force, much less the ability to casually produce the tools that do so.
This isn't about "need" this is about being inevitable. 3D-printed weapons are the inevitable result of improving 3D printer technology. No amount of idealism about what should and shouldn't happen will change that.
Everything in life is a trade-off. If we don't want 3D-printed weapons, the only way to effectively stop that is to ban 3D printers. Is that a price you are willing pay? There really is no other choice. You can outlaw 3D printed weapons but as long as the printers exist, people are going to be printing weapons.
Just look at how well the MAFIAA has done trying to stop piracy, it is basically the same set of trade-offs. If you want personal computers and an internet, piracy is going to happen. If you want good 3d printers and an internet, then most forms of physical contraband are going to be 3d printed. Weapons, bongs or whatever. You want 3D printers, that's the price.
Now there are, I guess people out there that think you can get a $600 phone for $99 if you have a plan, and if you terminate the plan you ought to walk off with the phone for a fraction of its retail value.
So who's the idiot here? Me, who gets it, or the unwashed who think they get the phone for a pittance?
You are. This has never been about, "getting the phone for a pittance." NEVER. If you still think that is what we are talking about, go back, reread over and over again until you do understand.
This has ALWAYS been about canceling the installment payment plan in favor of a balloon payment if cell service is canceled.
The fact that you keep going on about not fully paying for the phone suggests you really didn't know what the terms were, that the AG really was correct to charge T-mobile.
This may be an odd perspective, but I see this as a question of which philosophy do you agree with more?
(a) I work to live (b) I live to work
I think that people who believe (a) are going to think that the.amazon TLD should go to some sort of amazon conservatory organization because life is more important than commerce.
While I would expect those who identify with (b) to be in favor of amazon.com owning the.amazon TLD. Because for those people, business is more important than life. Maybe not their life, but life of the general population.
Obviously I think (b) is a very small group. However, as small as it is, I would not be surprised to find that group (b) is largely populated by CxO types.
Uh yeah, the part where they said "no service contract." If ANY part of any contract depends on the service, it is a fucking service contract. By definition.
It takes quite a stretch to call phone service, on a phone, as an "unrelated service". Kudos!
I'm not the one calling it that. Everybody who says it isn't a service contract are the ones saying that they are unrelated. Either it is tied to the service or it is not tied to the service. You can't have it one way for marketing and the opposite way for billing.
Cancel the card, and yes, it most certainly does come due instantly.
WTF? Are you so blinded by terminology that you don't understand that you can't "cancel" a card? You can only cancel the line of credit. There aren't two things here, you cancel the line of credit obviously all credits are due.
Jesus fucking christ you people are idiots. All this confusion about how loans work only proves that the AG was correct to make T-mobile spell it out.
If I were Musk, I'd just ride in a limo and treat the backseat as my mobile office for the variable amount of time spent in traffic. I'm sure the guy spends most of his time in email or on the phone anyway. He's got the money to do all that and full high-def video-conferencing from his car if he wanted to.
Sure, that doesn't help anyone else. But this article is about his personal frustration and what he's done in response.
Except, the phone financing plan (literally, it's just a zero-interest loan on a phone) is *completely separate* from the service plan. You can, if you want, cancel the service plan and keep paying off the loan.
No you can't. You must IMMEDIATELY pay off the loan. Not "keep paying off," pay it in full immediately.
You cancel service it changes the terms of your phone loan. Why is this so hard to understand?
Many consumer product installment payment contracts have similar accelerated payment clauses which can be triggered by loss or damage to the product, changes in borrowers financial status (miss a payment and it all comes due, for example), etc.
What does that have to do with canceling an unrelated service? There is no loss or damage to the phone, there is no change in the phone owner's financial status.
This is a product installment payment contract for a phone you are buying. It is not a cell phone service contract.
A contract that has terms which depend on your use of a service is not a service contract? Doubleplusgood!
If you're thinking this is deceptive, you are mistaken. Period.
That's interesting. Perhaps you can point out where in the ADVERTISING that it said (before the AG pursued this case) that the installment plan would be terminated with the balance immediately due should you cease using t-mobile's phone service.
Slashdot Mirror
Other then printing an AR-15 lower receiver or magazines what can you do with a 3-D printer that's worth the bother?
I drive a 14 year old car. I am far from poor, I drive it because there hasn't really been another vehicle that has appealed to me since. My driver's side door no longer opens from the outside because a plastic part snapped off inside the door itself. It is actually a common failure on these vehicles. Right now I have to go hunt through junk-yards to find an (aged) replacement part. A 3D printer (and the right 3D cad file) would allow me to print a replacement doohickey and fix my door without worrying about finding an obscure replacement part.
Sure, that's an anecdote, but wanting to replacing small broken plastic parts is not that uncommon, especially when you widen the scope from old cars to everything - houses, bikes, laptops, appliances, etc.
This "problem" already exists. All cell phones have a microphone designed to pick up ambient sound (aka "speakerphone")
That is misleading. The entire point of google glass is to actively point a camera at whatever the wearer is looking at. Until cell phone manufacturers specifically design their products to record ambient sounds, from inside people's pockets and purses, 24x7 the comparison is not meaningful.
Someday if that is even a possibility, then anytime there is a car wreck, or someone stumbles and falls, or even hiccups, attorneys will be subpoena Google digging for media to prove or disprove the case. Google won't store video or audio data for that simple reason alone.
Just like facebook doesn't permanently store everything you delete from your account and google hasn't set up an automated interface for law enforcement to read gmail user's email with practically no human intervention on google's part. Oh wait! They did.
Go ahead and find solace in trying to muddy the details all you want, but what you can't dispute is that last year the spending was DOWN. Not just lowest growth since Eisenhower, but negative growth.
News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters.
Because it is news for nerds. Note the set is boolean OR not AND, although I'm going to make a case that it "matters" too.
People send texts to the wrong recipients all the time, it is inherent in the technology. Using that technological failure as a sort of comedic performance art is news - at least to me, I haven't seen something like that before.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised to see this show up on the venerable Risks Digest because it has computer-related risk all over it. Fundamentally it is an exploitation of an error for unexpected purposes. It is not unlike those spammers who pretend to "accidentally" email you stock tips. Except this is a prank from people the recipients know, not random strangers.
Government spending under Obama's budgets has increased only 1.4% total and in fiscal 2013 it even went down by 1.3%. If you take inflation into account the effective spending is even less.
So, no, not "departmental cuts."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/05/24/who-is-the-smallest-government-spender-since-eisenhower-would-you-believe-its-barack-obama/
Do I need to diagram the sentence for you? That you think there is some sort of "gotcha" in there just says you can't parse even moderately complex grammar. That's quit ironic given your accusations of "poor comprehension skills."
What is particularly bad form on your part is that even if you can't comprehend my words, you should have at least had second thoughts about jumping to stupid-ass conclusions given that you had just written the following two lines:
"the unwashed who think they get the phone for a pittance?"
and this:
"I guess people out there that think you can get a $600 phone for $99 if you have a plan, and if you terminate the plan you ought to walk off with the phone for a fraction of its retail value."
In what other business could you act so profoundly antagonistic towards your own customers and expect your business to actually be around to see the next day?
Basically any business which has a monopoly. In this case there are two related monopolies - copyright and distribution. The studios' monopoly on distribution is fading and that's why they are shitting bricks about this. Anything that even remotely speeds up their loss of control over distribution channels is an existential threat to these guys.
Bittorrent breaks the distribution problem, but doesn't help the money problem.
Services like kickstarter fix the money problem. Forget trying to find one rich benefactor, look for a couple of thousand regular benefactors.
If you want personal computers and the internet, child porn is inevitably going to be distributed too. Should we stop trying to control that?!
Yes. Prosecute the creators because they are the ones harming children and the creation of child porn has nothing to do with computers or the internet. But trying to stop copies of what's already been done from propagating is fruitless and wastes resources that would be better spent on stopping the people who actually harm the kids.
Crime in general is the inevitable result of society. That doesn't mean we should give up trying to minimize it.
"Crime" is whatever we say it is. Harm is what we need to be working to minimize, but the harm caused by 3d printing of weapons is small compared to the harm caused by the measures needed to effectively reduce 3d printing of weapons.
When did *i* even state that I got a phone for 'practically nothing'?
Why are you asking me that? I never said you said that. Why would I have said that? What part of my arguments would that have lent any validity to?
Obviously you know that I never said that nor even suggested it. Which leads to...
Your poor comprehension skills are causing you trouble here
And you've now retreated to that last bastion of weak minds who have realized they were wrong all along -- trying to deflect with bullshit strawmen.
You can have either without the other. But no one - And I do mean no one, ever refers to the one without the other outside a courtroom.
Well at least you've got a tenuous grasp on reality. But then you have to face up to the fact that comparing a line of credit to a phone service contract is so utterly random as to be meaningless.
Of course I do. Do I look that stupid to you?
Considering how focused you have been on the red herring of getting a phone for practically nothing, yeah, you really do look that stupid.
The problem here is without the "it's all due if you cancel service" clause T-Mobile would be leaving themselves open to abuse of the 0% APR financing.
Well then don't do 0% APR.
Or do what the AG made them do - be up front about the balloon payment.
That's a bad analogy: copyright infringement is illegal, building a gun isn't.
Maybe not in the US, but it is in plenty of other countries.
Even so, building certain kinds of guns in the US is illegal. Try building yourself a real machine-gun. It ain't practical to build one, but even if you could, it would be illega.
drug-addled petty criminals
I really, really, really want to see stats on how many gun murders are associated with drugs. I expect that upward of 95% are. If we would just end the war on drugs, we'd stop nearly half of all gun deaths. The other half being suicide.
But the "right" doesn't want to admit the war on drugs is killing people (and they don't really care since most of them are poor with no one to speak for them) and the "left" doesn't want to admit that ending the war on drugs would substantially reduce gun violence because that would weaken any argument for outlawing guns on their own merits.
No one needs the ability to exercise lethal force, much less the ability to casually produce the tools that do so.
This isn't about "need" this is about being inevitable. 3D-printed weapons are the inevitable result of improving 3D printer technology. No amount of idealism about what should and shouldn't happen will change that.
Everything in life is a trade-off. If we don't want 3D-printed weapons, the only way to effectively stop that is to ban 3D printers. Is that a price you are willing pay? There really is no other choice. You can outlaw 3D printed weapons but as long as the printers exist, people are going to be printing weapons.
Just look at how well the MAFIAA has done trying to stop piracy, it is basically the same set of trade-offs. If you want personal computers and an internet, piracy is going to happen. If you want good 3d printers and an internet, then most forms of physical contraband are going to be 3d printed. Weapons, bongs or whatever. You want 3D printers, that's the price.
Now there are, I guess people out there that think you can get a $600 phone for $99 if you have a plan, and if you terminate the plan you ought to walk off with the phone for a fraction of its retail value.
So who's the idiot here? Me, who gets it, or the unwashed who think they get the phone for a pittance?
You are. This has never been about, "getting the phone for a pittance." NEVER.
If you still think that is what we are talking about, go back, reread over and over again until you do understand.
This has ALWAYS been about canceling the installment payment plan in favor of a balloon payment if cell service is canceled.
The fact that you keep going on about not fully paying for the phone suggests you really didn't know what the terms were, that the AG really was correct to charge T-mobile.
You keep dancing around the issue.
Do you understand that if you cancel service your loan is immediately due in full?
This may be an odd perspective, but I see this as a question of which philosophy do you agree with more?
(a) I work to live
(b) I live to work
I think that people who believe (a) are going to think that the .amazon TLD should go to some sort of amazon conservatory organization because life is more important than commerce.
While I would expect those who identify with (b) to be in favor of amazon.com owning the .amazon TLD. Because for those people, business is more important than life. Maybe not their life, but life of the general population.
Obviously I think (b) is a very small group. However, as small as it is, I would not be surprised to find that group (b) is largely populated by CxO types.
Uh yeah, the part where they said "no service contract." If ANY part of any contract depends on the service, it is a fucking service contract. By definition.
It takes quite a stretch to call phone service, on a phone, as an "unrelated service". Kudos!
I'm not the one calling it that. Everybody who says it isn't a service contract are the ones saying that they are unrelated. Either it is tied to the service or it is not tied to the service. You can't have it one way for marketing and the opposite way for billing.
Cancel the card, and yes, it most certainly does come due instantly.
WTF? Are you so blinded by terminology that you don't understand that you can't "cancel" a card? You can only cancel the line of credit. There aren't two things here, you cancel the line of credit obviously all credits are due.
Jesus fucking christ you people are idiots. All this confusion about how loans work only proves that the AG was correct to make T-mobile spell it out.
If I were Musk, I'd just ride in a limo and treat the backseat as my mobile office for the variable amount of time spent in traffic. I'm sure the guy spends most of his time in email or on the phone anyway. He's got the money to do all that and full high-def video-conferencing from his car if he wanted to.
Sure, that doesn't help anyone else. But this article is about his personal frustration and what he's done in response.
Except, the phone financing plan (literally, it's just a zero-interest loan on a phone) is *completely separate* from the service plan. You can, if you want, cancel the service plan and keep paying off the loan.
No you can't. You must IMMEDIATELY pay off the loan. Not "keep paying off," pay it in full immediately.
You cancel service it changes the terms of your phone loan. Why is this so hard to understand?
Many consumer product installment payment contracts have similar accelerated payment clauses which can be triggered by loss or damage to the product, changes in borrowers financial status (miss a payment and it all comes due, for example), etc.
What does that have to do with canceling an unrelated service? There is no loss or damage to the phone, there is no change in the phone owner's financial status.
This is a product installment payment contract for a phone you are buying. It is not a cell phone service contract.
A contract that has terms which depend on your use of a service is not a service contract? Doubleplusgood!
If you're thinking this is deceptive, you are mistaken. Period.
That's interesting. Perhaps you can point out where in the ADVERTISING that it said (before the AG pursued this case) that the installment plan would be terminated with the balance immediately due should you cease using t-mobile's phone service.
?