Well, for many things, I'm sure outsmarting me probably isn't rocket surgery.

The problem is we're a low-volume printing household -- so when the time comes to start looking for a new toner cartridge, we go online and determine we can buy a whole new printer for considerably less than the replacement cartridge.

Even accounting for the partially filled cartridge, it's still cheaper. I think we've literally seen printer+cartridge for 1/2 the price of the cartridge if you get the right sale.

What sane person who could afford it, wouldn't pay $5k, once, for a chauffeur?

Well, that's kind of the issue .. the people who have $5k will, and everybody else won't. I sure as fuck wouldn't pay $5k for it.

V2V stands to be fucked up for a multiplicity of reasons: shitty engineering, corporations trying to monetize it, and privacy issues are the ones which immediately come to mind.

I maintain that all technologies which are touted as "so awesome we can't say no", but which are predicated on consumers paying for, are usually doomed to fail. Precisely because they require everybody else pays for your vision of the awesome future.

Because the people saying "so awesome we can't so no" are either the people selling us the technology, in which case they've got a vested interest .. or it's by naive futurists who don't think about such pesky details as who pays for it.

And when the technology morphs from "the car ahead will turn left soon" into "Bob Smith is turning left in 50 yards and his GPS is taking him to the liquor sore", people will realize what a cesspool this kind of technology is. No thanks.

So, you can buy it. You can be a cheerleader for it. You can even drive in a car with it.

And some of us will continue to see it as just more crap being sold to us, and which has both financial and privacy considerations beyond simply "well, who wouldn't want that?".

Just like all technologies which seem to be predicated on the world shelling out huge sums of money to bring in the shiny new future, but which will mostly benefit the wealthy, the government, and corporations.

In fact, over the last 20 years my signpost has been "how much does this technology require everybody else to pony up to make it work?".

The more reliance on everybody else footing the bill to benefit a small percentage of people, the less likely it is to be adopted.

We have a couple of Brother laser printers in the house .. one's just a printer, the other is the same laser printer base with a scanner/fax/photocopier thing on the top. The both use the same cartridge.

The problem is that a new toner cartridge costs as much as a new printer, which comes with a toner cartridge. It's almost not cost effective to replace the cartridge.

Every time we need a new cartridge my wife wants to recycle the printer and buy a new one.

The idea of that makes me cringe, but I can't defend that it costs less to buy the toner cartridge attached to a printer.

I don't know what to tell you to do. If the choice is jump through ridiculous hoops, pay extra, or say to hell with it and bin the cartridges ... I'm afraid chucking them in the garbage is the easiest choice.

If they're going to make it impossible to recycle the toner cartridges, people might give up on trying.

Somewhat off-topic ... I wonder how long before someone builds something which is VrV-50 -- 50% of all watchers of your VR will Vomit?

Stereoscopic vision is something which has a huge potential to screw with people's heads.

And, more importantly ... if you think the GPL is "viral" and will "contaminate" your code ... piss off and don't use the GPL code. You don't have a "right" to the code.

This isn't a real problem in that the GPL sneaks in and alters other code licenses when nobody is looking.

This is a problem in that people want to use the GPL code in a way which is incompatible with the GPL, and then they become whiny idiots about how unfair the GPL is to them.

You are perfectly free to not use GPL code. Just because you want to ignore the license doesn't mean a damned thing.

But if your business model is to take GPL code and then pretend you don't have to abide by the terms, that's your damned problem.

When this happens, as you say, this is someone choosing to use the GPL code and then wining about how unfair it is to have to adhere to the license.

The problem is people think the GPL code is some free code they can steal and do anything they want with it. And that is very far from reality.

It's "viral" because it takes over other licenses and spreads like a virus.

Consider this example: You modify some GPL'ed software with a bit of your own code that integrates with a BSD'ed library.

You wrote some GPL'ed code in a GPL'ed program. No biggie, you should've known what you were getting into when you did it.

Well, that's not a problem with the license.

It's the problem of people who are mixing and matching licenses and ignoring what they say.

This is a contrived example of someone doing a shitty job of combining licences. It's not an example of a failure of the license.

If you're grabbing stuff under incompatible licenses, throwing them together, and then complaining the licences are incompatible means you're doing it wrong, and that's your damned problem.

If you don't want this problem, don't be stupid and assume you're allowed to use code which mixes multiple licenses and then claim it's someone else's fault.

You're bitching about a problem which is self inflicted as a result of being too lazy to actually follow the licences. You don't have a magic right to use stuff of differing licences and pretend like it's someone else's responsibility to make them work together, and it's stupid to blame it on the GPL.

Don't like the GPL? Go steal someone else's code. But stop acting like you're entitled to it and that it's a problem for you.

Well, then the real thing here is that despite everybody claiming IPv6 is awesome and super, there's crappy and inconsistent support for it.

So why should any small company or individual be doing anything about IPv6 when the big players aren't, and most of the existing products are apparently doing a terrible job of it?

IPv6 has been coming "Real Soon Now" for what feels like an eternity. People aren't going to spend money to change when they still need to figure out how to work with the legacy stuff.

You describe both the epic failure of IPv6 to gain widespread adoption, and the reasons why people are staying the hell away from it.

Not counting paid partner's data towards datacaps? This is net neutrality in name only IMO.

Yeah, no shit.

This basically allows people to set up a competitor to something like NetFlix, and then say "well, when you use NetFlix, you pay for data, when you use our service it's free" -- which is precisely what companies have been doing.

So, with this, they can either extort money from NetFlix, or make customers pay more to use NetFlix than their own service.

It's easy to undercut the competition when you can get an uneven playing field. All this talk about free markets would be meaningful if there were any.

Did I say freedom of speech?

I will say it is not defamatory to make the factual statement you hired someone and got bad service, no batter what the business thinks.

In this particular case, the business owner believes

Bullshit. Do you have facts to support this? Or are you just asserting it?

Me, I'm as likely to think this is a bullshit SLAPP lawsuit designed to intimidate people from making negative reviews.

If those people actually did hire this company, and if they are giving actual negative reviews, this lawsuit is nothing but intimidation tactics by assholes.

If you think CS grads only marketable skill is programming - than you have a far more serious problem.

Honestly, if CS grads can't program, WTF is the use of them?

Yes, CS encompasses a broad range of stuff, but if you haven't learned the fundamental skill of programming ... you're someone who has no practical skills, insufficient industry experience to be useful, and generally bring nothing to the table. So why would anybody hire them?

Look up systems analyst.

So some kid straight out of school with no actual experience and has a purely theoretical understanding of CS is someone you'd hire as a System Analyst?

Really? Because to me that sounds like hiring someone to fly an airplane who rad a book about it once.

Some snot nosed kid who has never coded or built anything is not who you want doing much of anything.

If CS grads are coming out without the actual skill of programming, that seems kind of pointless.

Once it was deemed to interfere with commercial activity it got trumped.

Somewhere along the line it became illegal to say "I hired this company and they gave shitty service".

It's all about mens rea- or an intent to do evil , so isn't' using the court or police or prosecutor's office to induce people of good faith to achieve an evil result itself the much more serious crime?

LOL ... OK, so obviously I'm no lawyer ...

But isn't the defense against that simply that the plaintiff is a self-confessed, shamelessly self-entitled douchebag who was acting in good faith as a clueless idiot who believed his huge ego entitled him to the domain?

Now, I'm not saying the plaintiff is, or is not, any of these things. Merely that you can step around mens rea by not so much an intent to do evil, as a legitimate belief that, as a self-entitled douchebag there was no specific malice.

Because it's exactly the say way the Copyright assholes^Wclaimants who assert they own copyright of something via the DMCA they don't can simply say "oops, we thought we did".

Honestly, that was why Apple Corps wanted Apple Computers to stay the hell out of the music industry.

When one entity starts to bleed into what another does, then it gets much more into lawyers and all sorts of stuff.

You'll notice that the resolution of this was Apple Computers bought Apple Corps and then licensed back the trademark.

Most entities don't have the luxury of splashing out $500 million to fix that kind of situation.

But my concrete and balloon animals example still holds.

Well, here's the problem with that:

Trade Marks and Service Marks are only meaningful in the area of business. It is not exclusive across all possible kinds of business. That's not how they work.

You can't simply look up a domain name and check it against trademarks and decide who owns it. You and I can Trademark the same thing, and as long as you're making concrete and I'm making balloon animals, we can both keep it, because we're doing different things which won't reasonably be confused.

So, unless the original registrant is in the same kind of business as the assholes^Wplaintiff in this case, it simply doesn't matter.

I'm of the opinion the people suing don't have a leg to stand on. This guy had registered this domain a long time ago, and renewed it before this Service Mark was applied for.

Which means unless they're in the same area of business and the Service Mark/Trade Mark then trumps prior ownership ... the assholes^Wplaintiff hasn't for a leg to stand on.

I sincerely hope the court basically tosses this and says "you can't cybersquat if you do it 15 years before the whiny plaintiff".

Stupid lawyers.