141–150 of 289 posts
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…
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Well, either the trigger is legally enforceable, or it is not. If it's legally enforceable, then a legislature gets to decide. If it's not, then either the manufacturer decides, or it doesn't happen.
> If it's legally enforceable, then a legislature gets to decide. Which in practice, at least in the US, means that unelected bureaucrats get to write the detailed regulations that actually decide, based on extremely vague and broad laws written by the legislature. Which in turn means that people with wealth and power can manipulate the system to get regulations passed that benefit them but are a net loss to society…
you make it sound as though this not desirable. To seem it seems likely that career professionals have higher chances of being effective and unbiased than elected officials whose campaigns need to be funded and poses no other qualification/ experience than being adult citizen .
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Next time I get a new phone, I'm going to put together a performance testing plan and record a video of it on the new phone. Then any time I wonder about this, I can run through the plan again and compare with the recording. So, ask me again in a few years.
Might need an identical control device that does not receive software updates.
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I don't know about Apple, but Sony is an excellent example. They removed the ability to use Linux on the PS3. This is probably one reason they have been consistently targeted by hackers.
The reason hackers get Sony is because they installed rootkits in everyone of their window's consumers. Then they apologized, released a "fix" that only hid the rootkit. Besides, it must be fun to keep hacking the same company and seeing that they haven't changed anything in their IT.
> "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Source: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/11/sonys_drm_roo...
I'm pretty happy to have not bought a single Sony product since 2005. I think that people should boycott brands that spit in their soup, but Doctorow makes a better point: these companies should be killed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_(web_browser)#Communi...
Plus, people tend to act more morally when they think they might be watched, whether they actually are watched or not.
Whenever someone refuses to show source code I always think, "what are you hiding in there?" There's usually something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it's legally enforceable, then a legislature gets to decide. Which in practice, at least in the US, means that unelected bureaucrats get to write the detailed regulations that actually decide, based on extremely vague and broad laws written by the legislature. Which in turn means that people with wealth and power can manipulate the system to get regulations passed that benefit them but are a net loss to society…
> unelected bureaucrats you make it sound as though this not desirable. To seem it seems likely that career professionals have higher chances of being effective and unbiased than elected officials whose campaigns need to be funded and poses no other qualification/ experience than being adult citizen .
This sounds nice in theory. In practice the unelected bureaucrats will not be "career professionals" with the proper professional ethics and willingness to be unbiased. Look up "regulatory capture".
We aren't enforcing the laws we have and our grandfathers and mothers had. (Three guesses why.) Not on monopolies, contracts, patent misuse... nothing.
Just this week I and Hearthstone came to a stop - Blizzard's new policy insists on a credit card and that I owe them for purchases made if they leak the card no! I can't sign in to play "my" cards 'till I agree this is totally cool. Sure, the old policy said they could revise it as they liked, but the law says otherwise and always has. They don't care - it'll be years before the law is enforced against them, as it was with Steam and refunds.
No cops - so to speak - on the beat, and Trump vowing to fire more regulators, that's what's changed. The number of potential demons is more of a constant.
There is so much "Stallman was right" in all of these examples... non-free software always manages to eventually sneak in malicious anti-user features, where the user has no recourse. At least with free software there's always the fundamental freedom to fork. You think systemd is a Red Hat plot to destroy Linux, then go use Devuan. You don't trust what Google could be doing with Chrome, take your pick of alternatives…
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…
Having the device lie based on the age of the cartridge makes for a more predictable sales volume in the future. See also, inkjets that "clean" the heads by running ink through them on every power cycle.
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 t…