The only reason those suits are ridiculous are because the corporations have come to expect that they can get away with screwing all their customers by a little bit. This just makes it so they will always get away with it. Basically, we're fucked.
Let's say that your phone carrier charges you a little extra one time, and pay it not knowing the bill was willfully misrepresented. You call the company and ask for a credit of the $2 you lost, and they say there was no overcharge, or they just say no. What are you going to do? Take them to court? Who will represent you over a matter of $2? What if it comes to light that your phone company did this to every one of their customers, amounting to tens of millions of dollars stolen? Well, now, no one can do anything about it.
Oh wait, you can stop doing business with that company, only you will have to pull out of your contract and deal with a $350 termination fee and a credit hit if you refuse to pay. At least you'll be sticking it to them. Good thing the market will sort these things out.
Except it turns out that there are only a few phone carriers and every other one does the same thing on an occasional basis already, so much so that it's just an industry standard as a way to pad profits before those quarterly reports go out. Too bad, so sad, sucks to be you, you sorry loser.
1) Ever? All it takes is Apple deciding to offer it as available to app developers. Did you notice the patent pending in the summary? This is there so Apple can make a profit off of it.
2) Did you not read the stories about the cops in Michigan? They will get this information from you at a routine traffic stop, no warrant or even suspicion required.
3) iTunes doesn't encrypt backups by default. What percentage do you think turns on encryption?
4) Except following tens of millions of people for their entire lives can get expensive. This makes it exceptionally cheap and easy, and therefore much easier to abuse, and not just on a case by case basis but en masse.
I get why it might want to store where you've been in the last day for features such as that, but two questions remain:
1) Why does it save a full year's worth of this location information? What purpose does that serve? 2) Why does it still collect this information even when you explicitly turn off all location services?
The cops in Michigan can certainly read it (see other/. articles about search procedures by Michigan cops), and backup encryption is disabled by default in iTunes so most people who sync their phones have this file sitting unencrypted on their computer as well. And how can we be sure that this information isn't being uploaded anywhere? If it isn't, then what is the purpose of it anyway?
And they freely share it with the government. There was an outcry about that, but it was ignored when Congress decided to retroactively legalize that sort of thing.
Disabling Location Services does not disable the data collection that everyone is objecting to. It's been tested. Sorry. If only it was actually that easy, then the only problem would be the lack of encryption.
Of the various stages of ethical development I take pride in guessing (not necessarily objectively, mind you) that I may be at stage 6 of ethical development. But take what you know of the typical corporation and they are almost always at stage 2. Only the smaller ones who have a large stake in the communities in which they operate, ie not investor-owned, and tied to a single community, even reach conventional development. I find it interesting that the justifying "philosophies" of libertarianism and objectivism would reject this model, saying that only stage 1 and stage 2 exist, stage 2 obviously being morally superior, and any further stages are still manifestations of stage 1. But our culture as well as our economy do not reward anything beyond stage 2, they disregard it or even punish it.
Basically, honest labor is so passe. Why would anyone choose to do it when you can make so much more money through corruption and fraud, and theft? It's so much easier and more rewarding!
How much does a subscription cost? Multiply that by 100,000, and I bet that NYT won't be anywhere near recouping the costs for their $40 million new paywall for decades.
What do you think an economic depression is? Money spent by you is money earned by someone else. You spend less, someone else necessarily earns less. When they earn less, they have less to spend too. Eventually businesses lay people off or fail, and the economy grinds to a halt, like what's been happening recently. When you tighten your belt, everyone else around you whose income depended on your spending loses. You stop going to Starbucks, Starbucks loses. You cancel your expanded cable service, your cable company loses. You stop paying the kid on the corner to mow your lawn, he loses. When everyone tightens their belts, everyone loses. Government should spend more because nobody else will, because it's in the national interest to prevent that vicious cycle of belt-tightening from getting out of control and ruining everybody, until the private sector recovers.
The economy grows and contracts in a cycle sort of like a sine wave, it's called the business cycle. The growth period is caused when everyone spends a bit more, giving everyone else a bit more money to spend, the contraction period I just described. The contraction period is usually precipitated by some shenanigans caused by some critically-placed actors, such as the banks in the current case.
How can deregulation bring on a great depression? In this case we used to have a regulation that said that banks which borrow and loan money cannot also trade in securities. Why? Because of what happened when we deregulated them and allowed them to do just that. They traded securities and they also bribed the ratings agencies in to overvaluing their securities. When they were caught the values of their securities assets plummeted. These assets are what they used to be able to lend money, and they had to stop lending money. When banks suddenly stop lending money, there is none to borrow, and credit dries up. If the economy is a well-oiled machine, credit is the oil. If businesses can't borrow, they have to lay people off or fail entirely. If people can't borrow, they have to tighten their belts and spend less. See where I'm going? That's how deregulation can bring on a depression. It doesn't necessarily bring on a depression, some deregulation is good, but in this case it was not wise.
He's also politically prevented - by Republicans - from ending the giant Bush tax cuts that are causing so much of our current deficits. The contribution to the deficit of the stimulus is miniscule compared to Bush's tax cuts.
Canon only works for so long. It can't survive several decades. Eventually it collapses under its own weight. But companies can't and won't just retire a property as profitable as Superman or Batman or Spider-Man, they have to come up with some solution to the canon problem. Hence the reason for reboots, like the multiple DC continuity reboots, the multiple Crises and Zero Hours where they periodically delete canon, only you don't know what's been erased and what's been kept.
But Marvel's Ultimate line isn't a reboot, it's a parallel line. All those old Marvel canon books are still going strong just as they always have been. I think it's been a really good idea, because writers get all the benefits of a reboot and none of the drawbacks, they are free to go all the way and you have the experience of what worked and what didn't work before to draw upon. What doesn't work is if you try to do this too many times, or when an Ultimate series starts to get long in the tooth itself, what then? But hey, by then you've sold a hundred issues so you're successful anyway.
So pulling back a bit and looking at the big picture: has there been a significant increase in the number of petty corporate lawsuits or is it just my observational bias, IE reading too much Slashdot?
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason those suits are ridiculous are because the corporations have come to expect that they can get away with screwing all their customers by a little bit. This just makes it so they will always get away with it. Basically, we're fucked.
Let's say that your phone carrier charges you a little extra one time, and pay it not knowing the bill was willfully misrepresented. You call the company and ask for a credit of the $2 you lost, and they say there was no overcharge, or they just say no. What are you going to do? Take them to court? Who will represent you over a matter of $2? What if it comes to light that your phone company did this to every one of their customers, amounting to tens of millions of dollars stolen? Well, now, no one can do anything about it.
Oh wait, you can stop doing business with that company, only you will have to pull out of your contract and deal with a $350 termination fee and a credit hit if you refuse to pay. At least you'll be sticking it to them. Good thing the market will sort these things out.
Except it turns out that there are only a few phone carriers and every other one does the same thing on an occasional basis already, so much so that it's just an industry standard as a way to pad profits before those quarterly reports go out. Too bad, so sad, sucks to be you, you sorry loser.
150 degrees *Celsius* in a sauna?
Am I the only one annoyed that it's obvious from the summary that this device is nothing even remotely like an iPad? How is this even news?
And you call yourself Americano?
And 150 degrees is not that much hotter than a sauna, even if you are a frog in a pot.
1) Ever? All it takes is Apple deciding to offer it as available to app developers. Did you notice the patent pending in the summary? This is there so Apple can make a profit off of it.
2) Did you not read the stories about the cops in Michigan? They will get this information from you at a routine traffic stop, no warrant or even suspicion required.
3) iTunes doesn't encrypt backups by default. What percentage do you think turns on encryption?
4) Except following tens of millions of people for their entire lives can get expensive. This makes it exceptionally cheap and easy, and therefore much easier to abuse, and not just on a case by case basis but en masse.
I'd mod you Inspirational if I could. Thanks.
That's stage 3. I'm afraid I don't understand how you got that from anything explained about stage 6.
I get why it might want to store where you've been in the last day for features such as that, but two questions remain:
1) Why does it save a full year's worth of this location information? What purpose does that serve?
2) Why does it still collect this information even when you explicitly turn off all location services?
The cops in Michigan can certainly read it (see other /. articles about search procedures by Michigan cops), and backup encryption is disabled by default in iTunes so most people who sync their phones have this file sitting unencrypted on their computer as well. And how can we be sure that this information isn't being uploaded anywhere? If it isn't, then what is the purpose of it anyway?
"On iOS I know the cache is not sent to Apple"
How do you know that? And if not, then why is the cache there?
And they freely share it with the government. There was an outcry about that, but it was ignored when Congress decided to retroactively legalize that sort of thing.
Disabling Location Services does not disable the data collection that everyone is objecting to. It's been tested. Sorry. If only it was actually that easy, then the only problem would be the lack of encryption.
Is it even important whether Google does it or not? It's still wrong.
I found this Wikipedia article rather interesting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development
Of the various stages of ethical development I take pride in guessing (not necessarily objectively, mind you) that I may be at stage 6 of ethical development. But take what you know of the typical corporation and they are almost always at stage 2. Only the smaller ones who have a large stake in the communities in which they operate, ie not investor-owned, and tied to a single community, even reach conventional development. I find it interesting that the justifying "philosophies" of libertarianism and objectivism would reject this model, saying that only stage 1 and stage 2 exist, stage 2 obviously being morally superior, and any further stages are still manifestations of stage 1. But our culture as well as our economy do not reward anything beyond stage 2, they disregard it or even punish it.
Basically, honest labor is so passe. Why would anyone choose to do it when you can make so much more money through corruption and fraud, and theft? It's so much easier and more rewarding!
How much does a subscription cost? Multiply that by 100,000, and I bet that NYT won't be anywhere near recouping the costs for their $40 million new paywall for decades.
I sync my phone on a PC. Is there a PC version of the iPhone Tracker tool?
What do you think an economic depression is? Money spent by you is money earned by someone else. You spend less, someone else necessarily earns less. When they earn less, they have less to spend too. Eventually businesses lay people off or fail, and the economy grinds to a halt, like what's been happening recently. When you tighten your belt, everyone else around you whose income depended on your spending loses. You stop going to Starbucks, Starbucks loses. You cancel your expanded cable service, your cable company loses. You stop paying the kid on the corner to mow your lawn, he loses. When everyone tightens their belts, everyone loses. Government should spend more because nobody else will, because it's in the national interest to prevent that vicious cycle of belt-tightening from getting out of control and ruining everybody, until the private sector recovers.
The economy grows and contracts in a cycle sort of like a sine wave, it's called the business cycle. The growth period is caused when everyone spends a bit more, giving everyone else a bit more money to spend, the contraction period I just described. The contraction period is usually precipitated by some shenanigans caused by some critically-placed actors, such as the banks in the current case.
How can deregulation bring on a great depression? In this case we used to have a regulation that said that banks which borrow and loan money cannot also trade in securities. Why? Because of what happened when we deregulated them and allowed them to do just that. They traded securities and they also bribed the ratings agencies in to overvaluing their securities. When they were caught the values of their securities assets plummeted. These assets are what they used to be able to lend money, and they had to stop lending money. When banks suddenly stop lending money, there is none to borrow, and credit dries up. If the economy is a well-oiled machine, credit is the oil. If businesses can't borrow, they have to lay people off or fail entirely. If people can't borrow, they have to tighten their belts and spend less. See where I'm going? That's how deregulation can bring on a depression. It doesn't necessarily bring on a depression, some deregulation is good, but in this case it was not wise.
He's also politically prevented - by Republicans - from ending the giant Bush tax cuts that are causing so much of our current deficits. The contribution to the deficit of the stimulus is miniscule compared to Bush's tax cuts.
Not while you're idly commenting on /. articles, you aren't.
Canon only works for so long. It can't survive several decades. Eventually it collapses under its own weight. But companies can't and won't just retire a property as profitable as Superman or Batman or Spider-Man, they have to come up with some solution to the canon problem. Hence the reason for reboots, like the multiple DC continuity reboots, the multiple Crises and Zero Hours where they periodically delete canon, only you don't know what's been erased and what's been kept.
But Marvel's Ultimate line isn't a reboot, it's a parallel line. All those old Marvel canon books are still going strong just as they always have been. I think it's been a really good idea, because writers get all the benefits of a reboot and none of the drawbacks, they are free to go all the way and you have the experience of what worked and what didn't work before to draw upon. What doesn't work is if you try to do this too many times, or when an Ultimate series starts to get long in the tooth itself, what then? But hey, by then you've sold a hundred issues so you're successful anyway.
This is what identical twins are for.
I don't see YOU working furiously on a cure.
So pulling back a bit and looking at the big picture: has there been a significant increase in the number of petty corporate lawsuits or is it just my observational bias, IE reading too much Slashdot?