I don't get why a company gets bought out, then shortly afterwards gets shut down. Often the one thing that gives the company value is what gets shut down. Are the purchasing companies not aware that their purchase isn't of value after the fact?
What is being purchased in a buyout doesn't have to be what was profitable to the original company. Consider the classic farm example.
A farmer is making a living with a decent $10,000 yearly profit on his 100 acres. He provides the local community with fresh produce, pays his taxes, and is putting away a decent amount into his savings. By all accounts, his business is doing well. He then receives an offer to buy his farm, as-is, for $3,000,000. The farm is sold.
However, the company that purchased the farm lets the equipment rust, the fields go fallow, and the barn collapse. Why would they purchase a profitable farm if all they were going to do is let weeds grow and shut it down. The answer comes later, when 400 future housing plots are identified for sale at $400,000 each. Turns out, while the farm was profitable, the land was worth MUCH more as a housing development. Rather than earn $10,000/year in profit through hard work, the purchasing company turned a $3,000,000 purchase into a $160,000,000 real estate deal.
The farm could have continued, as it was making a profit, but it wasn't making nearly as much of a profit as it could have made. (not that I like farm's beind developed, but I think this is a good example to demonstrate why seemingly profitable enterprises get shut down after a buyout)
If a plane suddenly crashes mid-flight, and I'm due to fly on that same model next week, I'd be concerned. If the crash was due to a fundamental flaw in the fuselage, I'm cancelling my flight. If it turns out the crash was due to the plane flying over rebel-held lands and being shot by a missile, my concern about my flight from Maryland to Vermont is greatly reduced.
I find it shortsighted to believe that an experimental fertilization method that's never born a single child should be allowed without testing.
I'm all about personal liberty, but safety needs to be a concern too. If the doctors can demonstrate that this method is at least as safe as normal IVF (safe for the parents AND potential child) then have at it, but until then, let's temper our excitement
I'd also tread very carefully around what looks and sounds like a potential new form of eugenics.
Until I had my first child, it was quite the experiment. Lots of room for error too. But I suppose it is better to leave things to chance, and hope on that first ultrasound that everything looks to be developing properly.
Competition simply doesn't exist in a market where things are under copyright. As there is no compulsory licensing model for software, it's not like you can purchase your product from a different supplier. If that were the case, I'd be able to play Heroes VI and not have to do business with Ubisoft's Uplay crap. (or Origin for EA games, etc)
Consider that I can buy many year old initially $60 games from steam for like $10. Because the game is still being sold, there's still incentive to fix/patch/expand the game.
Roughly speaking, the results were that new game consumers don't pay any more(the new game is slightly cheaper, on average, by about the same amount as what they'd be able to sell it to gamestop for), used game consumers don't pay more, and the studios get more money vs resellers, increasing their profits and encouraging more/bigger games.
Consider that I wanted to buy a game for my wife, but that game was no longer offered for sale because original company went out of business and was sold. Under the no-resale model, I'm SOL. Unless I happen to get lucky and the company that owns a portion of the sold company (they are never sold 100% to a single party) feels like monetizing some IP, and spends the time to collect all of the other IP fragments, and remarket the game, I don't have the option to buy it anymore.
With the resale model, I could hop down to my local gamestop, or craigslist, or secondhand store and try my luck there.
Imagine you want to rebuild a car with 'original' pieces, but are missing something like the custom lug nuts. You can find someone with the vehicle, take a scan of THEIR lug nuts, and then use that scan to reproduce the small component.
Sure you could just use generic lug nuts, but when you are dealing with high end restorations, people do actually care about the little details like this.
Consider a company like www.hahnandwoodward.com (now Hahn-Vorbach & Associates). They focus on restoration of very rare cars (like the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing). They are starting to use 3-D scanners for a variety of situations.
For example: A client brings in their 1 of 1 roadster or a concept car that needs restoration. There aren't any easily accessible plans or drawings, so you take a 3-D model of the car to convert it into an engineering drawing that you can use to plan your restoration or modification. You could run into a situation where it just isn't possible to replace a broken differential because there was only ever 1 made, or maybe the client wants an upgraded differential. You can use the engineering drawing you built to see if you can fit a part that is currently in production. The current method without 3-D scanning is to take a lot of careful measurements or attempt to see if a part will fit. In the end, it's risky and easy to make a mistake.
Consider another situation where maybe the car comes in with some previous bodywork. Sure, everything lines up NOW, but that is because the previous mechanic just bent some things so they fit together. If you don't know this going in, you could buy the actual correct part (lets say a fender) and discover that the NEW fender doesn't fit because the frame of the car is off-kilter. You could avoid this by taking a 3-D scan of the car in its current condition and using that scan to determine if the existing car matches factory conditions.
In short: Anytime you need to do custom work on an existing product or when the product itself is custom (like an old farmhouse) taking a 3-D scan of the place can be very useful in planning out your work or retrofit plan.
I got a chance to take a look at a facsimile of the Book of Kells, the archive treated the facsimile as it would a costly rare book (because the facsimile was costly to produce). However, I don't think you will ever reach the state where it is impossible to tell a facsimile from the original. You might not be able to tell if something IS a fake if it is of something that was mass produced (like a limited print of a famous work), but there is just too much going on in anything to really come to a point where you can't tell the original from the copy if you have access to both.
Neutron stars basically just cool off/slow down over time due to rather normal mechanisms of radiation. There's some other stuff going on, but very old neutron stars are basically just lumps of cold very old neutrons.
Good point. I really hope that Valve/Steam puts more pressure on publishers to just ditch their DRM options. Steam certainly has the clout to do so.
However, I don't see this being possible w/o Steam being a monopoly. (not a good thing either) Publishers REALLY want a piece of steams action, and if Steam leans on them too hard, they will just take their ball and make their own distribution systems. Till now, the fact that they suck at distribution systems (as they focus on DRM first, and content delivery second) and that they don't cater to third parties is probably the only things saving us from them.
It's also normal for countries to invade other countries, kill their populations and seize their resources. At least, it was normal until we decided that wasn't the way we wanted things to be.
I don't want our nations to live in a perpetual state of quasi-war.
Someone showed the guy a picture (a building) and then he hold a camera and then focus his "energy" into it, and then they took out the negative to develop and the picture that came out was blurry but still you could make out a "shape" of that building.
Paging Mr. Randi, Mr. James Randi you have a phone call on the wooscam line.
When you have a contract, it is not "unordered", it is "failed to fulfill contract"
I think one of the big issues here is that the person receiving the equipment isn't in breach of contract. They aren't the one failing to fulfill a contract, it's the seller that is in that state.
I take it you never had a job that requires you to be available and physically present, but not actively working.
I once spent a week doing nothing because we were installing a monitoring station in the middle of nowhere (literally in the middle of a desert). We needed someone onsite in case something went wrong during testing and getting to and from the site required a helicopter ride. That would get kind of pricy if every 4 hours you had to make 2x 40 minute helicopter flights. Needless to say, I was very thankful for satellite internet access.
Perhaps not for you. I'm currently laid up recovering from a surgery, not allowed out of bed for 2 weeks. The last thing I want to be bothered with is wasting my time trying to figure out how I'm going fix your mistake.
That's not at issue here. Returning the product is the right thing to do. However, threatening legal action to solicite such a return is not the right thing to do.
This was not solicited. Something was solicited, but what was sent was unsolicited. Companies have tried to use techniques like this in the past.
1. Customer orders the base model of a product 2. Company sends the 'deluxe' version of that product 3. Company says you owe us $X more because you got the deluxe version.
Even though the customer ordered a product, the 'deluxe' version was unsolicited.
The game was solicited. The PS Vita was unsolicited.
The line you quoted speaks of reserving the right to keep the merchandise. That right there means that you HAVE the right to keep the merchandise already, and your offer to let them come and pick it up is just a courtesy you are offering to the company.
ie: You don't have to return it, but the FTC is telling you how you might want to go about getting the company to collect it if you wished to return it.
Good thing you returned them. It could have easily been a variant (albeit expensive) of the drop a thumbdrive outside a bank and see if they are dumb enough to plug it in attack.
Slashdot Mirror
Microgravity has an odd side effect of causing astronauts to temporarily lose their sense of smell.
I don't get why a company gets bought out, then shortly afterwards gets shut down. Often the one thing that gives the company value is what gets shut down. Are the purchasing companies not aware that their purchase isn't of value after the fact?
What is being purchased in a buyout doesn't have to be what was profitable to the original company. Consider the classic farm example.
A farmer is making a living with a decent $10,000 yearly profit on his 100 acres. He provides the local community with fresh produce, pays his taxes, and is putting away a decent amount into his savings. By all accounts, his business is doing well. He then receives an offer to buy his farm, as-is, for $3,000,000. The farm is sold.
However, the company that purchased the farm lets the equipment rust, the fields go fallow, and the barn collapse. Why would they purchase a profitable farm if all they were going to do is let weeds grow and shut it down. The answer comes later, when 400 future housing plots are identified for sale at $400,000 each. Turns out, while the farm was profitable, the land was worth MUCH more as a housing development. Rather than earn $10,000/year in profit through hard work, the purchasing company turned a $3,000,000 purchase into a $160,000,000 real estate deal.
The farm could have continued, as it was making a profit, but it wasn't making nearly as much of a profit as it could have made. (not that I like farm's beind developed, but I think this is a good example to demonstrate why seemingly profitable enterprises get shut down after a buyout)
Yes. The 'how' is very important.
If a plane suddenly crashes mid-flight, and I'm due to fly on that same model next week, I'd be concerned. If the crash was due to a fundamental flaw in the fuselage, I'm cancelling my flight. If it turns out the crash was due to the plane flying over rebel-held lands and being shot by a missile, my concern about my flight from Maryland to Vermont is greatly reduced.
I find it shortsighted to believe that an experimental fertilization method that's never born a single child should be allowed without testing.
I'm all about personal liberty, but safety needs to be a concern too. If the doctors can demonstrate that this method is at least as safe as normal IVF (safe for the parents AND potential child) then have at it, but until then, let's temper our excitement
I'd also tread very carefully around what looks and sounds like a potential new form of eugenics.
Until I had my first child, it was quite the experiment. Lots of room for error too. But I suppose it is better to leave things to chance, and hope on that first ultrasound that everything looks to be developing properly.
How can you claim that they price older games at lower than used game prices?
Back in the cartridge years, I was able to pick up games by the BOX load from flea markets or yard sales.
Competition simply doesn't exist in a market where things are under copyright. As there is no compulsory licensing model for software, it's not like you can purchase your product from a different supplier. If that were the case, I'd be able to play Heroes VI and not have to do business with Ubisoft's Uplay crap. (or Origin for EA games, etc)
Consider that I can buy many year old initially $60 games from steam for like $10. Because the game is still being sold, there's still incentive to fix/patch/expand the game.
Roughly speaking, the results were that new game consumers don't pay any more(the new game is slightly cheaper, on average, by about the same amount as what they'd be able to sell it to gamestop for), used game consumers don't pay more, and the studios get more money vs resellers, increasing their profits and encouraging more/bigger games.
Consider that I wanted to buy a game for my wife, but that game was no longer offered for sale because original company went out of business and was sold. Under the no-resale model, I'm SOL. Unless I happen to get lucky and the company that owns a portion of the sold company (they are never sold 100% to a single party) feels like monetizing some IP, and spends the time to collect all of the other IP fragments, and remarket the game, I don't have the option to buy it anymore.
With the resale model, I could hop down to my local gamestop, or craigslist, or secondhand store and try my luck there.
I don't think you can say I hold the purse strings when my taxes are withheld before I even get my paycheck.
What do they have on her?
A husband that makes a fortune through her legislation and owns companies which profit from defense contracts?
They don't need anything on her.
It doesn't have to be large pieces.
Imagine you want to rebuild a car with 'original' pieces, but are missing something like the custom lug nuts. You can find someone with the vehicle, take a scan of THEIR lug nuts, and then use that scan to reproduce the small component.
Sure you could just use generic lug nuts, but when you are dealing with high end restorations, people do actually care about the little details like this.
Consider a company like www.hahnandwoodward.com (now Hahn-Vorbach & Associates). They focus on restoration of very rare cars (like the Mercedes 300SL Gullwing). They are starting to use 3-D scanners for a variety of situations.
For example: A client brings in their 1 of 1 roadster or a concept car that needs restoration. There aren't any easily accessible plans or drawings, so you take a 3-D model of the car to convert it into an engineering drawing that you can use to plan your restoration or modification. You could run into a situation where it just isn't possible to replace a broken differential because there was only ever 1 made, or maybe the client wants an upgraded differential. You can use the engineering drawing you built to see if you can fit a part that is currently in production. The current method without 3-D scanning is to take a lot of careful measurements or attempt to see if a part will fit. In the end, it's risky and easy to make a mistake.
Consider another situation where maybe the car comes in with some previous bodywork. Sure, everything lines up NOW, but that is because the previous mechanic just bent some things so they fit together. If you don't know this going in, you could buy the actual correct part (lets say a fender) and discover that the NEW fender doesn't fit because the frame of the car is off-kilter. You could avoid this by taking a 3-D scan of the car in its current condition and using that scan to determine if the existing car matches factory conditions.
In short: Anytime you need to do custom work on an existing product or when the product itself is custom (like an old farmhouse) taking a 3-D scan of the place can be very useful in planning out your work or retrofit plan.
I got a chance to take a look at a facsimile of the Book of Kells, the archive treated the facsimile as it would a costly rare book (because the facsimile was costly to produce). However, I don't think you will ever reach the state where it is impossible to tell a facsimile from the original. You might not be able to tell if something IS a fake if it is of something that was mass produced (like a limited print of a famous work), but there is just too much going on in anything to really come to a point where you can't tell the original from the copy if you have access to both.
It is really cool, but oh man I'd hate to see what happens if it triggers while 'misaligned'.
Why "must" it decay?
Neutron stars basically just cool off/slow down over time due to rather normal mechanisms of radiation. There's some other stuff going on, but very old neutron stars are basically just lumps of cold very old neutrons.
Good point. I really hope that Valve/Steam puts more pressure on publishers to just ditch their DRM options. Steam certainly has the clout to do so.
However, I don't see this being possible w/o Steam being a monopoly. (not a good thing either) Publishers REALLY want a piece of steams action, and if Steam leans on them too hard, they will just take their ball and make their own distribution systems. Till now, the fact that they suck at distribution systems (as they focus on DRM first, and content delivery second) and that they don't cater to third parties is probably the only things saving us from them.
It's also normal for countries to invade other countries, kill their populations and seize their resources. At least, it was normal until we decided that wasn't the way we wanted things to be.
I don't want our nations to live in a perpetual state of quasi-war.
Ugh, those 'recommendations' sound pretty lucrative... err expensive, don't you think?
Someone showed the guy a picture (a building) and then he hold a camera and then focus his "energy" into it, and then they took out the negative to develop and the picture that came out was blurry but still you could make out a "shape" of that building.
Paging Mr. Randi, Mr. James Randi you have a phone call on the wooscam line.
When you have a contract, it is not "unordered", it is "failed to fulfill contract"
I think one of the big issues here is that the person receiving the equipment isn't in breach of contract. They aren't the one failing to fulfill a contract, it's the seller that is in that state.
I take it you never had a job that requires you to be available and physically present, but not actively working.
I once spent a week doing nothing because we were installing a monitoring station in the middle of nowhere (literally in the middle of a desert). We needed someone onsite in case something went wrong during testing and getting to and from the site required a helicopter ride. That would get kind of pricy if every 4 hours you had to make 2x 40 minute helicopter flights. Needless to say, I was very thankful for satellite internet access.
Perhaps not for you. I'm currently laid up recovering from a surgery, not allowed out of bed for 2 weeks. The last thing I want to be bothered with is wasting my time trying to figure out how I'm going fix your mistake.
That's not at issue here. Returning the product is the right thing to do. However, threatening legal action to solicite such a return is not the right thing to do.
This was not solicited. Something was solicited, but what was sent was unsolicited. Companies have tried to use techniques like this in the past.
1. Customer orders the base model of a product
2. Company sends the 'deluxe' version of that product
3. Company says you owe us $X more because you got the deluxe version.
Even though the customer ordered a product, the 'deluxe' version was unsolicited.
The game was solicited. The PS Vita was unsolicited.
The line you quoted speaks of reserving the right to keep the merchandise. That right there means that you HAVE the right to keep the merchandise already, and your offer to let them come and pick it up is just a courtesy you are offering to the company.
ie: You don't have to return it, but the FTC is telling you how you might want to go about getting the company to collect it if you wished to return it.
Good thing you returned them. It could have easily been a variant (albeit expensive) of the drop a thumbdrive outside a bank and see if they are dumb enough to plug it in attack.