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Demon-Haunted World

locusmag.com

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Re: Demon-Haunted World

#151

Post by lobster_johnson »

layble wrote: post #93
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 t…

Wouldn't such a move benefit all printer manufacturers?

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#152

Post by Tsagadai »

zackmorris wrote: post #52

Startup idea: Form a company that explores new markets in legal liabilities. It could bring lawsuits with little risk where the payoff could be billions of dollars. Off the top of my head: * Research whether channels were engineered into smartphones to allow water to leak in (since they have no moving parts and should self-evidently be watertight). * Find the planned-obsolescence parts in things like car doors that w…

Watertight is a hard engineering problem to solve. If it isn't a vacuum or loaded with some other gas then you will get water coming in because of temperature cycles causing the device to act like a pump, which in a phone are a problem because you will have temperature fluctuations caused by charging, usage and environment.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#153

Post by ryanx435 »

Nomentatus wrote: post #147

This isn't a new demon-haunted world, this is the old, demon-haunted world before nineteenth-century progressive politics, back when "milk" that wasn't half chalk still might have a fish in it (see famous Thoreau quote on evidence.) 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 ca…

Why are you blaming Trump when you yourself admit that this has been going on since the 1800s?

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#154

Post by 52-6F-62 »

mahyarm wrote: post #95
52-6F-62 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

You guessed right.

I figured that aging of the tech vs package size would be an issue, including the growing size of the OS... but do you think this is a problem even in long-life applications? I mean, surely AAC and MP3 files haven't bloated so significantly in the past 5 - 10 years.

I haven't worked much yet in Swift and wasn't aware of those differences vs Objective-C, though. That's interesting.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#156

Post by Nomentatus »

ryanx435 wrote: post #153
Nomentatus wrote: post #147

This isn't a new demon-haunted world, this is the old, demon-haunted world before nineteenth-century progressive politics, back when "milk" that wasn't half chalk still might have a fish in it (see famous Thoreau quote on evidence.) 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 ca…

Why are you blaming Trump when you yourself admit that this has been going on since the 1800s?

1980's more like, this time 'round. Trump's just the last to pile on, I agree.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#157

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mirimir wrote: post #129

> There must be anti-trust enforcement with the death penalty – corporate dissolution – for companies that are caught cheating. This was the norm in the US until the late 1800s. Indeed, corporations had to act in the public interest. And if they didn't, they were dissolved. But then, the railroad corporations got wealthy enough that they were able to buy favorable Supreme Court rulings. Basically, they got human righ…

> This was the norm in the US until the late 1800

Source? Let's say a company owning a factory was thusly dissolved. What would you do? Parcel bricks out to shareholders?

We got rid of this for a good reason. It nukes long-term investment by laying the road for expropriation.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#158

Post by mirimir »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #157
mirimir wrote: post #129

> There must be anti-trust enforcement with the death penalty – corporate dissolution – for companies that are caught cheating. This was the norm in the US until the late 1800s. Indeed, corporations had to act in the public interest. And if they didn't, they were dissolved. But then, the railroad corporations got wealthy enough that they were able to buy favorable Supreme Court rulings. Basically, they got human righ…

> This was the norm in the US until the late 1800 Source? Let's say a company owning a factory was thusly dissolved. What would you do? Parcel bricks out to shareholders? We got rid of this for a good reason. It nukes long-term investment by laying the road for expropriation.

See http://reclaimdemocracy.org/corporate-accountability-history...

The American Revolution was just as much against Crown Corporations as against British rule.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#159

Post by pmiller2 »

Invictus0 wrote: post #103
layble wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow, that's incredible. Even more surprising is that the media company didn't write a story about this.

There may have been NDAs involved.

Re: Demon-Haunted World

#160

Post by thinkling »

eridius wrote: post #108

> like the iTunes and Kindle ‘‘updates’’ that have removed features the products were sold with Anyone know what iTunes update he's talking about? I don't remember anything that fits this description.

Don't know about iTunes, but much along these lines Sonos removed support for Windows DRM and ticked off customers who had their music stored in that format. Amusingly, the link I found about it is also a post by Cory Doctorow.

https://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/sonos-removes-windows-drm-...

I suspect the Kindle feature he's talking about is the text-to-speech feature, which the publishers hated because it threatened audiobook sales. Or maybe he's talking about Amazon deleting books from customers' Kindles?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/07/amazon-sold-pirated-...

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