I mean, who likes waking up in the morning next to a half eaten poison pear, or worse yet, a fugly skank monkey?
Genetically... the fugly skank monkey is a good bet. I mean, if the choice is to go home to your tree and masturbate to a crudely etched stick-figure-carving-with-boobies, versus possibly impregnating a skankmonkey... well, I can guess which behavior would be genetically advantageous, unless that fugly skankmonkey is carrying an STD or is likely to let the fruit of my loins starve to death or get eaten by hyenas.
Meh. Decapitations are so last-year. There's really no way to do a decapitation that hasn't been done yet. There's just no shock value there.
I suggest instead that the scripts we all work on involve polyencapitation. That is, surgically attaching an additional head (or heads) to the victims, ideally parasitic EVIL heads, that takes over the victims body, forcing them to commit unspeakably evil acts, while the good head can only watch and silently mouth their screams.
I'm running into a plot problem, though, I need some assistance. See, in order to attach an additional head, the new head must have been decapitated from a body at some point, so we're back at square one with the decapitations. Anyone have any ideas that don't involve robotic heads and/or growing cloned evil heads in a nutrient broth (also cliched)?
for every gallon of Mountain Dew I consume I can drive 1000 miles. What? That is not what is actually fueling the car? Nonsense!
230 Miles per gallon + KWattHour or something would be more accurate... Despite dubious/inaccurate marketing, I still want one really bad. Series Hybrid is my favorite, because I can eat my cake and road-trip it too.
Hand in your geek card. Now.
1 gallon of Dew == 128 oz == 6.4 20 oz bottles. 1000 miles @ 70 mph ~= 14 hours. No true geek could drive for 14 hours on only 6 and change bottles of Dew. The appropriate calculation is: 1 Dew/140 miles (assuming 70 mph and a minimum of 1 Dew/hr) ~= 14 Dews per 1000 miles. However, this neglects the Cheetos impact -- you need to compensate for the saltiness of the Cheetos. This translates to 1 Dew per bag of Cheetos consumed, and we'll take the minimum rate of one bag per 3 hours. This works out to an additional 0.333 Dews per hour of traveling. So at 70 mph, you'll need (1.0 + 0.333)*1000/70 20-oz bottles of Dew, at a bare minimum.
This is roughly equal to 19 20-oz bottles of Dew per 1000 miles, or just shy of 3 gallons.
This assumes, of course, that you're properly equipped for your trip with a urinal tube and a 3+ gallon reservoir in the passenger seat footwell... if you need to stop for bathroom breaks, your mpg of Dew will go down.
PS. You can reapply for your geek card by mailing 2000 Mountain Dew bottle caps to Cowbow Neal.
You are handily forgetting the important fact that movie ticket sales are an ever decreasing source of revenue for the film industry.
Handily forgetting? Despite the fact that I explicitly mention the 30 Bn in home video and rental revenue for 2008? Despite the fact that I actually state that I'm cherrypicking numbers to make a point?
You missed my main point, which is that blockbuster video games gross higher than blockbuster movies, which is why they've caught so much attention.
This is why I love slashdot discussions. It's always possible to find someone who sets up a straw man to argue against, even though their straw man was explicitly pre-empted by the post they are responding to.
Each of the Hollywood studios brought in around $8-12 billion each last year.
World of Warcraft is the most successful MMO to date and it grossed around $1.1 billion last year.
How many movies did each of the Hollywood studios release last year? If you're going to compare game vs. movie, then it's erroneous to look at total revenues for the Hollywood studios.
As for the aggregate for each industry... well... movie ticket sales in 2008 (a record high, btw) was approx 9.8 billion dollars. Videogame software sales were 11 billion dollars (hardware sales were just under 8 billion). See, anyone can pick irrelevant numbers to make their case (notice I left out home video purchases and rentals, around 30 billion IIRC).
What's made so many people take notice is that blockbuster videogames now take in more cash than blockbuster movies, which was the point of the quote that you argue with.
USAA already lets customers deposit checks by scanning them on their computers. Has for years. Very nice feature....if you have a scanner. Now that I'm only using a netbook, I don't have that luxury now.
Take picture with cellphone. Email to yourself. Convert image to required format (jpg? pdf? tif?). Send to USAA.
Not sure if this would satisfy their requirements... But I've been doing this for docs when I'm on the road without access to a scanner for a few years now. It's a little sloppy (hard to get proper perspective, distance, etc, but it's good for quick-n-dirty "scans").
Delay sending the message for a few hours, as they are probably angry and might wish they had not sent the message.
by Capt.DrumkenBum (1173011br> Angry? Or just horny drunken emails sent late at night? C'mon, tell the truth...
And don't just delay the message... require an on-screen sobriety test and positive confirmation that the email is to be sent (with 'no' set as default response).
He should treat it as newsstand sales in stead of subscription sales, then. Newsstand sales figures are what really drive advertising buyers nuts with glee... they are much more predictive of advertising effectiveness than subscription sales.
Her name is spelled with a 'y', not an 'i', and you too can enjoy her favors on your yacht for a mere $100,000 in sparkly trinkets, coke, and/or cash delivered monthly.
Money put into such cures as a result provides little benefit for the dollar since the success rate in much lower and the time to market is much longer. It is more efficient in terms of both profit and helping patients to instead spend the money on maintenance drugs.
That's my point. Exactly my point. There's more cash in keeping people on drugs for along time to manage symptoms than there is to curing illnesses. Sure, there are illnesses to which this does not apply. But when you see the amount of cash spent on developing maintenance treatments for hair loss and erectile dysfunction and anti-wrinkle creams... well... it makes you think twice about the profit incentive in the pharma industry. Yes, there's a place for it, but when we could allocate research dollars to much better purposes... I'm specifically thinking of a 9-figure grant at the College of Pharmacy I attended that specifically was earmarked for research into colloids for cosmetics. The people working on that research could instead have been working on colloidal drug delivery for other purposes... there are only so many top-level researchers with the expertise required for that kind of research, and money talks...
the new coalition Monotoromart is now hunting down and killing any cuddly, lovable, but otherwise adorably indignant animals in an effort to minimize "market confusion".
You missed one of the constituent companies... Toro lawnmowers.
Their methods of hunting down and killing the offending cuties has some people upset, but nonetheless is picking up sponsors for televised "kitty rodeos". Word is that Ford Motor Company has signed on to sponsor one of the mowers in next year's "Kitten Splittin' Cage Match" to be broadcast on pay-per-view.
For differentiable products in a competitive market, typically competitors' reactions to pricing changes preserves the monotonic quality of the demand curve. That is, decreased price will always result in increased demand, so it does not change whether this applies to differentiated products as well as commodity goods.
For items with a high fixed cost, it still holds as well... it's just that prices approach some value above the unit cost. This other value is the unit cost plus adjustments... that adjustment is proportional to the fixed cost but inversely proportional to the production volume. For very high fixed costs, the market leads to monopoly or oligopoly as economies of scale work... but a reduction in unit cost, if it allows pricing flexibility, will tend to a reduction in price.
Here's some additional reading if you've got an economic bent...
Funny thing though... even in non-ideal markets, prices tend to approach cost + some value N dependent on factors X,
Y, and Z.
When there is competition, even in a non-ideal market, reduced unit costs lead to reduced prices. Yes, there are counter-examples, but this is still the case.
Yeah, I'm outta pharma... got into business instead, and am currently in software.
Good to hear that an alternative treatment worked for your wife. Asthma and allergy care is one place where I think the American medical industry has really screwed up, nice to hear a success story outside the "traditional" US system.
The job of the pharmaceutical companies isn't to choose the best treatment plan for patients, that's what doctors are for. Quite often that treatment plan involves things such as lifestyle changes, surgery, therapy and so on that have nothing to do with drugs companies.
The drug companies have a huge amount of sway with doctors, with insurance companies (for approved treatments, etc). In a clinical setting, the pharmacist is often as important to the treatment plans as the doctors are. But it's not really about MD vs PharmD vs RN, it's the entire health care industry. Doctors also have some of the same incentives as the pharma companies to ensure repeat business, and while I think they tend to weight those concerns less, the entire health care industry in the US stinks.
As an aside, please check how much money is spent on R&D by the drug companies on maintenance drugs vs. "cure" drugs. It's not even close in terms of cash. It's very clear where the drug companies interests lie, and it's very clear that over time this impacts the kind of cure/treatments are available.
Taking medicine in the belief that whoever gave it to you wanted you to feel better is very naive.
They want you to feel better. They just don't want you to *be* better. They want you dependent on their drugs, or on doctor visits.
FWIW, many years ago I attended a College of Pharmacy. It wasn't until just over 4 years into the program that I realized I didn't want to work in the industry for ethical reasons. The thing that got me the most... the pharma industry, including the colleges, described "quality of life" to be the biggest issue. Not curing disease, not curing underlying causes... but maintenance treatment of symptoms, and underlying causes of those symptoms.
Pharma companies --> Grants to universities --> universities stress the pharma companies' agendas --> university graduates go to work at the pharma companies and the pharmacies and the clinical settings.
I felt as though they were trying to brainwash me into thinking that aggressive chemical treatment was the best solution for any ailment.
I'm cynical, and somewhat jaded, but I really feel that the pharma industry needs to be ripped apart. For all the well-intentioned individuals within the companies, there is a lot of evil shit going on for the sake of profit.
Did you not read my OP throughly? Redlining did not void the entire warranty, just the powertrain. Radio claims would still be serviced.
I am sick of all the freeloaders abusing services which leads to increased prices for the same services for me. This is the same reason I get pissed at people who cut in line.
Nit: The myelin sheath actually speeds up the transmission of the electrical impulse.
Doh. It's been awhile since I studied that... oops. And the electrical impulse is due to Na+/K+ movement, if my memory is clearing up at all... so it is based on physical movement of atoms, not on pure electron movement... I'll have to check my physiology books when I get home:)
As for your point about developing an artificial brain, good parts and bad -- I think that working to do so could perhaps give us insight into how the brain works. For me, the point of AI research of the type we're all blathering about is as much to learn about the brain as it is to learn about good AI.
what this does do is decrease the value of the product to the consumer by increasing the probability of warranty service denial. it doesn't matter that the engine wasn't actually damaged from redlining because they can use that fact as an excuse to refuse service on unrelated problems.
Sure, it reduces value to the consumer who redlines the vehicle. On the flip side, it reduces cost of the vehicle for Saturn, which correlates with reduced price for *all* consumers.
In short, if you redline your cars, this sucks for you. If you don't, then it's good for you. Seems fair to me -- it helps ensure that I, as a moderate driver, do not share so much of the cost of abusive drivers.
I'm not missing that. All of Apple's marketing and branding has changed the shape of the demand curves for their products. That's a function of their marketing success, and the gullibility of potential buyers. That does not mean that economics does not apply.
"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country." is a sentence that used to be used a lot in typesetting -- it's exactly 70 characters (including the period), the width of one standard line.
Note that the original quote was "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party", it was part of a typing exercise, not sure if it was originally a political quote...
Why yes, I do have recollection of random factoids from elementary school typing class, why do you ask?
It's also not a commodity, which makes a big difference. Direct competition is impossible due to copyright, hardware and software patents, etc.
But even with loose competition, it could make a difference to price, depending on the cost savings, unit price, unit sales, etc.
Consider this example:
A: Cost to produce $WIDGET is $900. Cost of warranty service is $100/unit. Total cost here is $1000.
B: Now reduce cost of warranty service to $25/unit, but increase production cost to $905/unit. Total cost is now $930/unit.
Now, let's make an arbitrary demand curve, with price points at ($1500, 1000) and ($1450, 1100) [axes are price and unit sales).
For A, total profit is $495,000 when selling at $1450, and $500,000 when selling at $1500. So the seller will price at $1500. For B, total profit is $570,000 at price of $1500, but $572,000 at a price of $1450. So the seller will price at $1450.
Note that if the new unit cost is now $950, the seller is still better off selling at $1500... the change in total profit is dependent on the shape of the demand curve (the price-sales relationship), the change in cost, and the price.
I'm making up the figures, of course... but even for a company like Apple, with a very strange demand curve that may be somewhat inelastic wrt price, there are price points where Apple will make more money if they can reduce both their costs and their prices. It's not so simple as I've described, but even for Apple, who has pricing experts on their staff (or as contractors), there are places where reduced unit costs result in greater profitability at a lower price.
As for strategy, minimizing MSRP doesn't always yield maximum prices. All the marketing, branding, advertising, etc, is to change the shape of the demand curve so that Apple will sell more units in addition to the price impact on units sold. Even with all that stuff, if Apple can raise unit profits by lowering prices (without long-term negative impact), they'll do it. Lowering unit costs is one way they can increase profits at lower price points depending on the shape of the demand curve.
State law in the US often directly mandates certain warranty conditions for sold products. There are certain warranties that cannot be signed away, disclaimer or no.
The question is what happens when an open source product is used in a sold product. Is the seller of the end-product solely liable, or is the producer of the open-source (and free) component also liable?
Everyone likes to pass the buck. If I successfully sue Sony because their battery melted my thigh, is the company they contracted to manufacture said battery also liable? Can Sony recoup their fines from the battery manufacturer, if the battery was not delivered to spec? For non-open-source software, they can. But say that Sony used a software controller for the battery that caused the meltdown, and that controller was open-source. Can Sony sue to recoup their costs from the authors of that piece of software, which was provided free-of-charge under an OS license, and was probably not developed specifically for Sony's specifications?
*The reason I use the Sony example is because when they had their battery problems, contributory liability was a subject of discussion here on Slashdot. I don't think the OSS liability issue was raised at all, it's just the best example that popped into my head.
Slashdot Mirror
Genetically... the fugly skank monkey is a good bet. I mean, if the choice is to go home to your tree and masturbate to a crudely etched stick-figure-carving-with-boobies, versus possibly impregnating a skankmonkey... well, I can guess which behavior would be genetically advantageous, unless that fugly skankmonkey is carrying an STD or is likely to let the fruit of my loins starve to death or get eaten by hyenas.
Oh yeah, great idea. Look how it served the Golgafrinchans.
Interestingly... This guy is not so sure that Douglas Adams was wrong.
Meh. Decapitations are so last-year. There's really no way to do a decapitation that hasn't been done yet. There's just no shock value there.
I suggest instead that the scripts we all work on involve polyencapitation. That is, surgically attaching an additional head (or heads) to the victims, ideally parasitic EVIL heads, that takes over the victims body, forcing them to commit unspeakably evil acts, while the good head can only watch and silently mouth their screams.
I'm running into a plot problem, though, I need some assistance. See, in order to attach an additional head, the new head must have been decapitated from a body at some point, so we're back at square one with the decapitations. Anyone have any ideas that don't involve robotic heads and/or growing cloned evil heads in a nutrient broth (also cliched)?
What world do you live in where a linear measurement (circumference) is expressed in square units?
In my world, a pizza of radius z has an area of pi*z*z*a, not a circumference of pizza.
Hand in your geek card. Now.
1 gallon of Dew == 128 oz == 6.4 20 oz bottles.
1000 miles @ 70 mph ~= 14 hours.
No true geek could drive for 14 hours on only 6 and change bottles of Dew. The appropriate calculation is:
1 Dew/140 miles (assuming 70 mph and a minimum of 1 Dew/hr) ~= 14 Dews per 1000 miles. However, this neglects the Cheetos impact -- you need to compensate for the saltiness of the Cheetos. This translates to 1 Dew per bag of Cheetos consumed, and we'll take the minimum rate of one bag per 3 hours. This works out to an additional 0.333 Dews per hour of traveling. So at 70 mph, you'll need (1.0 + 0.333)*1000/70 20-oz bottles of Dew, at a bare minimum.
This is roughly equal to 19 20-oz bottles of Dew per 1000 miles, or just shy of 3 gallons.
This assumes, of course, that you're properly equipped for your trip with a urinal tube and a 3+ gallon reservoir in the passenger seat footwell... if you need to stop for bathroom breaks, your mpg of Dew will go down.
PS. You can reapply for your geek card by mailing 2000 Mountain Dew bottle caps to Cowbow Neal.
Handily forgetting? Despite the fact that I explicitly mention the 30 Bn in home video and rental revenue for 2008? Despite the fact that I actually state that I'm cherrypicking numbers to make a point?
You missed my main point, which is that blockbuster video games gross higher than blockbuster movies, which is why they've caught so much attention.
This is why I love slashdot discussions. It's always possible to find someone who sets up a straw man to argue against, even though their straw man was explicitly pre-empted by the post they are responding to.
How many movies did each of the Hollywood studios release last year? If you're going to compare game vs. movie, then it's erroneous to look at total revenues for the Hollywood studios.
As for the aggregate for each industry... well... movie ticket sales in 2008 (a record high, btw) was approx 9.8 billion dollars. Videogame software sales were 11 billion dollars (hardware sales were just under 8 billion). See, anyone can pick irrelevant numbers to make their case (notice I left out home video purchases and rentals, around 30 billion IIRC).
What's made so many people take notice is that blockbuster videogames now take in more cash than blockbuster movies, which was the point of the quote that you argue with.
Take picture with cellphone.
Email to yourself.
Convert image to required format (jpg? pdf? tif?).
Send to USAA.
Not sure if this would satisfy their requirements... But I've been doing this for docs when I'm on the road without access to a scanner for a few years now. It's a little sloppy (hard to get proper perspective, distance, etc, but it's good for quick-n-dirty "scans").
by Capt.DrumkenBum (1173011br>
Angry? Or just horny drunken emails sent late at night? C'mon, tell the truth...
And don't just delay the message... require an on-screen sobriety test and positive confirmation that the email is to be sent (with 'no' set as default response).
He should treat it as newsstand sales in stead of subscription sales, then. Newsstand sales figures are what really drive advertising buyers nuts with glee... they are much more predictive of advertising effectiveness than subscription sales.
No, he clearly said "fucking Crystal".
Her name is spelled with a 'y', not an 'i', and you too can enjoy her favors on your yacht for a mere $100,000 in sparkly trinkets, coke, and/or cash delivered monthly.
That's my point. Exactly my point. There's more cash in keeping people on drugs for along time to manage symptoms than there is to curing illnesses. Sure, there are illnesses to which this does not apply. But when you see the amount of cash spent on developing maintenance treatments for hair loss and erectile dysfunction and anti-wrinkle creams... well... it makes you think twice about the profit incentive in the pharma industry. Yes, there's a place for it, but when we could allocate research dollars to much better purposes... I'm specifically thinking of a 9-figure grant at the College of Pharmacy I attended that specifically was earmarked for research into colloids for cosmetics. The people working on that research could instead have been working on colloidal drug delivery for other purposes... there are only so many top-level researchers with the expertise required for that kind of research, and money talks...
You missed one of the constituent companies... Toro lawnmowers.
Their methods of hunting down and killing the offending cuties has some people upset, but nonetheless is picking up sponsors for televised "kitty rodeos". Word is that Ford Motor Company has signed on to sponsor one of the mowers in next year's "Kitten Splittin' Cage Match" to be broadcast on pay-per-view.
For differentiable products in a competitive market, typically competitors' reactions to pricing changes preserves the monotonic quality of the demand curve. That is, decreased price will always result in increased demand, so it does not change whether this applies to differentiated products as well as commodity goods.
For items with a high fixed cost, it still holds as well... it's just that prices approach some value above the unit cost. This other value is the unit cost plus adjustments... that adjustment is proportional to the fixed cost but inversely proportional to the production volume. For very high fixed costs, the market leads to monopoly or oligopoly as economies of scale work... but a reduction in unit cost, if it allows pricing flexibility, will tend to a reduction in price.
Here's some additional reading if you've got an economic bent...
http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/ely.dahan/content/unit_cost.pdf
Funny thing though... even in non-ideal markets, prices tend to approach cost + some value N dependent on factors X, Y, and Z.
When there is competition, even in a non-ideal market, reduced unit costs lead to reduced prices. Yes, there are counter-examples, but this is still the case.
Yeah, I'm outta pharma... got into business instead, and am currently in software.
Good to hear that an alternative treatment worked for your wife. Asthma and allergy care is one place where I think the American medical industry has really screwed up, nice to hear a success story outside the "traditional" US system.
The drug companies have a huge amount of sway with doctors, with insurance companies (for approved treatments, etc). In a clinical setting, the pharmacist is often as important to the treatment plans as the doctors are. But it's not really about MD vs PharmD vs RN, it's the entire health care industry. Doctors also have some of the same incentives as the pharma companies to ensure repeat business, and while I think they tend to weight those concerns less, the entire health care industry in the US stinks.
As an aside, please check how much money is spent on R&D by the drug companies on maintenance drugs vs. "cure" drugs. It's not even close in terms of cash. It's very clear where the drug companies interests lie, and it's very clear that over time this impacts the kind of cure/treatments are available.
I'm biased, of course. But that's where I stand.
They want you to feel better. They just don't want you to *be* better. They want you dependent on their drugs, or on doctor visits.
FWIW, many years ago I attended a College of Pharmacy. It wasn't until just over 4 years into the program that I realized I didn't want to work in the industry for ethical reasons. The thing that got me the most... the pharma industry, including the colleges, described "quality of life" to be the biggest issue. Not curing disease, not curing underlying causes... but maintenance treatment of symptoms, and underlying causes of those symptoms.
Pharma companies --> Grants to universities --> universities stress the pharma companies' agendas --> university graduates go to work at the pharma companies and the pharmacies and the clinical settings.
I felt as though they were trying to brainwash me into thinking that aggressive chemical treatment was the best solution for any ailment.
I'm cynical, and somewhat jaded, but I really feel that the pharma industry needs to be ripped apart. For all the well-intentioned individuals within the companies, there is a lot of evil shit going on for the sake of profit.
Did you not read my OP throughly? Redlining did not void the entire warranty, just the powertrain. Radio claims would still be serviced.
I am sick of all the freeloaders abusing services which leads to increased prices for the same services for me. This is the same reason I get pissed at people who cut in line.
Doh. It's been awhile since I studied that... oops. And the electrical impulse is due to Na+/K+ movement, if my memory is clearing up at all... so it is based on physical movement of atoms, not on pure electron movement... I'll have to check my physiology books when I get home :)
As for your point about developing an artificial brain, good parts and bad -- I think that working to do so could perhaps give us insight into how the brain works. For me, the point of AI research of the type we're all blathering about is as much to learn about the brain as it is to learn about good AI.
But that's just me...
Sure, it reduces value to the consumer who redlines the vehicle. On the flip side, it reduces cost of the vehicle for Saturn, which correlates with reduced price for *all* consumers.
In short, if you redline your cars, this sucks for you. If you don't, then it's good for you. Seems fair to me -- it helps ensure that I, as a moderate driver, do not share so much of the cost of abusive drivers.
I'm not missing that. All of Apple's marketing and branding has changed the shape of the demand curves for their products. That's a function of their marketing success, and the gullibility of potential buyers. That does not mean that economics does not apply.
Typo.
s/B/R
"Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country." is a sentence that used to be used a lot in typesetting -- it's exactly 70 characters (including the period), the width of one standard line.
Note that the original quote was "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party", it was part of a typing exercise, not sure if it was originally a political quote...
Why yes, I do have recollection of random factoids from elementary school typing class, why do you ask?
It's also not a commodity, which makes a big difference. Direct competition is impossible due to copyright, hardware and software patents, etc.
But even with loose competition, it could make a difference to price, depending on the cost savings, unit price, unit sales, etc.
Consider this example:
A: Cost to produce $WIDGET is $900. Cost of warranty service is $100/unit. Total cost here is $1000.
B: Now reduce cost of warranty service to $25/unit, but increase production cost to $905/unit. Total cost is now $930/unit.
Now, let's make an arbitrary demand curve, with price points at ($1500, 1000) and ($1450, 1100) [axes are price and unit sales).
For A, total profit is $495,000 when selling at $1450, and $500,000 when selling at $1500. So the seller will price at $1500.
For B, total profit is $570,000 at price of $1500, but $572,000 at a price of $1450. So the seller will price at $1450.
Note that if the new unit cost is now $950, the seller is still better off selling at $1500... the change in total profit is dependent on the shape of the demand curve (the price-sales relationship), the change in cost, and the price.
I'm making up the figures, of course... but even for a company like Apple, with a very strange demand curve that may be somewhat inelastic wrt price, there are price points where Apple will make more money if they can reduce both their costs and their prices. It's not so simple as I've described, but even for Apple, who has pricing experts on their staff (or as contractors), there are places where reduced unit costs result in greater profitability at a lower price.
As for strategy, minimizing MSRP doesn't always yield maximum prices. All the marketing, branding, advertising, etc, is to change the shape of the demand curve so that Apple will sell more units in addition to the price impact on units sold. Even with all that stuff, if Apple can raise unit profits by lowering prices (without long-term negative impact), they'll do it. Lowering unit costs is one way they can increase profits at lower price points depending on the shape of the demand curve.
State law in the US often directly mandates certain warranty conditions for sold products. There are certain warranties that cannot be signed away, disclaimer or no.
The question is what happens when an open source product is used in a sold product. Is the seller of the end-product solely liable, or is the producer of the open-source (and free) component also liable?
Everyone likes to pass the buck. If I successfully sue Sony because their battery melted my thigh, is the company they contracted to manufacture said battery also liable? Can Sony recoup their fines from the battery manufacturer, if the battery was not delivered to spec? For non-open-source software, they can. But say that Sony used a software controller for the battery that caused the meltdown, and that controller was open-source. Can Sony sue to recoup their costs from the authors of that piece of software, which was provided free-of-charge under an OS license, and was probably not developed specifically for Sony's specifications?
*The reason I use the Sony example is because when they had their battery problems, contributory liability was a subject of discussion here on Slashdot. I don't think the OSS liability issue was raised at all, it's just the best example that popped into my head.