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Demon-Haunted World

locusmag.com

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Re: Demon-Haunted World

#91

Post by zeroxfe »

Opossum wrote: post #90

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Tesla in this context. Not only do they make it almost impossible to get a Tesla car repaired anywhere but their service centers, but they also collect a ton of data [1]. [1] https://www.tesla.com/about/legal

Pretty much any new high-end vehicle is unserviceable outside of their service centers due to requiring custom diagnostic and programming equipment.

However, body and other simpler mechanical work can be done outside service centers (for Teslas too.)

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#92

Post by sliken »

Zanni wrote: post #84
russdill wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 95% of cartridges with 20ml of ink will only allow 18ml to be consumed, is the 20ml an honest figure? Related to the above, and possibly specifically because of the above, I've noticed that HP doesn't document ink quantity in cartridges, only approximate cartridge yield in pages. Oh, and the other thing that drives me batty. Their XL high yield cartridges are sold with "Get up to 2x the pages", but from page count…

This is one of those ideas that seems obvious at first glance ... and then problematic with more thought. Have you ever gotten 100% of the peanut butter out of a jar? I haven't. Is that fraud? There's a distinction to be made between jars of peanut butter and ink cartridges, but it wouldn't be easy to draw that line. (For an even better example, see Merchant of Venice, Act 4, Scene 1 ...)

Sort of, imagine if when you were 90% through a jar of peanut butter it auto-closed the lid and you couldn't even open it.

What's worse would be if peanut butter was widely acknowledged to be safe to eat for 12 months, but the jar wouldn't open after 6 months.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#93

Post by layble »

captaincrowbar wrote: post #14

Doctorow mentions the cases where a printer company has made their software lie about how much ink was left in a cartridge to make consumers replace them more often. I always wondered why a manufacturer would want to do that. I mean, I understand the motive of making consumers buy ink more often, but from the manufacturer's point of view, why would they want to throw perfectly good ink away? Colour ink isn't as expen…

I know of a large printer company who approached a large media company with a deal that would have had the large media company change the color of the text on their printer friendly pages to something near black but requiring the color cartridge instead of true black. As I recall they were willing to pay seven figures annually. The media company did not take them up on their offer.

The underhandedness/cleverness of the printer companies is not to be underestimated.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#94

Post by sliken »

SolarNet wrote: post #57
nradov wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a consumer I don't care how much ink is left or wasted. All that matters is the price per page. You can find those prices in any good printer review. https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373165,00.asp

Of course such a situation could be detected...

Right, and it has been. It's hard enough to find that most buyers of printers won't realize it until after you buy the printer. The normal situation was to switch to 3rd party ink, which is now disabled.

HP is clearly abusing their position and printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids you can buy, even more than exotic $10k a bottle wine or perfume by volume.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#95

Post by mahyarm »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #44
zaroth wrote: post #17

Why do our phones, which certainly felt damn snappy the day we bought them, inevitablely seem to slow down to the point of unusability after a couple dozen months? Even after a factory reset and installing no apps at all... I know it didn't take that long to open/close the built in apps when I bought that iPhone 4, 5, 5s... The only thing I can think of is the flash drive is slowing down as it wears. Or, the CPU cloc…

I've experienced and noticed a different problem. I've had the same phone for almost 5 years (have a hard time replacing something that still works well and is in good condition), and I've found it's not the speed that has worsened and I can live with not having certain features to run some new apps; it's the storage. My phone's storage is not large by today's standards, I have 16 GB. I run fewer apps than I did when…

I'm guessing you have an iPhone?

Apps are getting larger due to more and more code accumulating as time goes on and apple's toolkit / compilers causing binaries to become larger.

Swift itself creates incredibly bloated binaries compared to objective-c. More people are using more 3rd party libraries than 5 years ago, where you just used apple's built in libraries for the most part. If you just used the shared system libraries, then that didn't count against your binary size.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#96

Post by sliken »

brians wrote: post #74
captaincrowbar wrote: post #14

Doctorow mentions the cases where a printer company has made their software lie about how much ink was left in a cartridge to make consumers replace them more often. I always wondered why a manufacturer would want to do that. I mean, I understand the motive of making consumers buy ink more often, but from the manufacturer's point of view, why would they want to throw perfectly good ink away? Colour ink isn't as expen…

Sensors are expensive. Counters are cheap. Put in ink by weight. Assume pages at 60th percentile use of each color. Set counter. At zero, whine for more ink.

Whining would be fine. The evil part is completely disabling a cartridge because of a color you aren't using is low, or that the cartridge is arbitrarily too old.

If you pay for ink you should be able to use it.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#97

Post by sliken »

keville wrote: post #89
anyfoo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor nitpick: Speakers and microphones are moving parts. The speaker has even been used to expel water.

Not a minor nitpick at all. Physical buttons are also moving parts.

Not to mention headphone ports, usb ports, and charging ports. Also most phones have a vibrate function which uses an electric motor.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#98

Post by mahyarm »

zaroth wrote: post #17

Why do our phones, which certainly felt damn snappy the day we bought them, inevitablely seem to slow down to the point of unusability after a couple dozen months? Even after a factory reset and installing no apps at all... I know it didn't take that long to open/close the built in apps when I bought that iPhone 4, 5, 5s... The only thing I can think of is the flash drive is slowing down as it wears. Or, the CPU cloc…

Are you comparing identical OS versions and an identical amount of apps installed? Newer versions often make everything slower. I remember when the iOS 6 -> iOS 7 update happened, the exact same code run on the same device with different OS versions ran %20 slower.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#99

Post by javajosh »

luckyt wrote: post #49
ehsankia wrote: post #11

I'm curious about the WannaCry situation. If the killswitch was truly to detect being in a VM, could they still not have bought the domain and just left unresponsive, or even better, just generate a random new domain every single time. I guess they just didn't foresee someone buying the domain.

Yea, this part was confusing to me as well. How would a VM "simulate" the internet? Does it return a dummy page? I don't understand what mental model of VM behavior that the virus creators had in mind when they designed this killswitch.

The part about how to simulate a site isn't confusing, the part about why you'd want to do that is the confusing part. If I was researching malware in a VM I'd want to take a very passive approach, and allow it to talk to the real internet, and inspect the traffic.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#100

Post by SubiculumCode »

freehunter wrote: post #78
SubiculumCode wrote: post #10

This is what I think about at the pump. More and more I see gas pumps ask if you want a receipt BEFORE the gas is dispensed. This seems risky. If you decline the receipt and then dispense gas, the pump could cheat on the amount of gas dispensed with less risk, as a papered record of the purchase amount and price is not produced. If on the other hand, the pump waits to ask if you desire a receipt until after the gasol…

The hard part with that is, see the sticker on the outside of the pump? That certifies that this pump meets your state's regulations and that someone has inspected it recently. In order to have a coverup like that, you'd need the government to be in on it too.

http://articles.latimes.com/1998/oct/09/business/fi-30669

See link for a scam using an altered microchip and scheme to protect itself from discovery by weights and measures.

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