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Comment Re:Hot Glue Guns (Score 1) 175

a consumer needing one copy of a few trinkets may not pay $1,000 for a printer to produce 30 or 40 goods he could buy for a grand total of $200. If the great many available 3D templates appear which are useful to consumers and cheaper to fabricate than purchase, a 3D printer with low enough cost will appeal to consumers and become a consumer-grade good.

And if it's anything like a paper printer, does it have plastic jams the way we have paper jams? Clogged nozzles? Low "ink" or whatever the consumable is? Driver problems? Compatibility problems between template any my printer? To be fair purchasing is not without its problems either, but mass produced trinkets are usually done better by somebody else. And the odds of cost being lower is close to none, just like it costs way more idea to print your own book on your average home printer than buying it in the store.

The way I see it there's three potential winners: 1) Customization, some form of take your own measurements and adapt a template. 2) Availability, being able to print a part that's out of production. I guess you can add any restricted goods to this category. 3) Speed, I hear they're not speed demons but overnight "delivery" is still pretty fast. And while I might print "anything" on a printer a consumer 3D printer isn't working with metal, wood, leather or textiles it's just plastic trinkets. That's a very limited subset of the items I own.

Comment Re:Seeing this information so widely disseminated (Score 1) 81

That's how they catch people, if they're winning well... So they took down Silk Road 2.0, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating the drug industry. They take down The Pirate Bay, it's still a piss in the ocean to beating copyright infringement. From big to small, they can catch a shoplifter but shoplifting doesn't go away, they can bust a crime syndicate but organized crime doesn't go away either. And more often than not they're the mop-up crew, sure it's nice that murderers go to jail but the victim is still dead so it's a limited win. It's far from a lawless country but it's still way off from a lawful country, at least in some areas we can make an educated guess on how many criminals they don't catch because there's a victim and a crime scene but in others it's just guesswork. Particularly the kind that wears suits.

Comment Re:Shocking! (Score 1) 176

Well, if you made a list of fields TV portrays accurately it'd fit on a very small business card. We shake our heads at the use of computers and technology, doctors shake their heads at medicine and I bet cops and lawyers shake their heads at the depiction of police work and the law too. For that matter I bet drug dealers and the mafia shake their heads at Weeds and Sopranos too. I'm not saying that you're wrong but it's in the nature of television to wildly misrepresent reality for dramatic effect, even in the shows that have a superficial resemblance to actual professions. Asking for that to change is to try making water not wet, it's entertainment and it needs to be entertaining while reality is full of dreary, boring routine. It should never be confused with reality unless you're watching a documentary.

Comment Re:What's the Motivation? (Score 1) 179

An electronics retailer in Europe held a contest, setting a cordon that people had to stay behind, more than 10 feet away from two televisions, and were asked which was the 4k tv and which was the 1080p. 98% of people correctly guessed which was which. Maybe people asked others who cheated, but it suggests that "most people can't tell" is bullshit.

This electronics retailer wouldn't happen to be in the business of selling people expensive new 4k TV sets by any chance? There's a lot of ways you could configure a 4K and 1080p TV to get that result like contrast, color and Netflix 4K probably got as many compression artifacts as an upscaled BluRay. I have a UHD monitor for gaming and such but TVs are way ahead of the content, I've no idea why 4K TVs are actually selling.

Comment Re:Can't see the difference: WRONG (Score 1) 179

Well, one shortcoming of that chart is that it assumes 20/20 vision, that's the threshold for "normal" sight that doesn't need glasses but many people have better than that - 20/16 at least is not unusual - or can see better than that once they wear glasses/contact lenses. I think the most extreme cases are something like 20/8, meaning they can see from 20 feet what a normal person would have to be at 8 feet to see. I think it depends on source material and compression though, I've got a 28" UHD monitor (3840x2160) and done comparisons with a very high resolution, sharp image scaled down to UHD and 1080p respectively. It's noticable. It's not a huge difference, it's not like I think of 1080p as blurry. But when I watch the full resolution imagine it's more like wow, there's even more detail.

Comment Re:Over to you, SCOTUS (Score 1) 379

Sadly I think the SCOTUS applied the law correctly, which is not to say it's a good law. The ruling is quite clear that the test is not whether it's required by your employer, it's whether it is integral and indispensable to the performance of your work.

That view is fully consistent with an Opinion Letter the Department issued in 1951. The letter found noncompensable a preshift security search of employees in a rocket-powder plant " 'for matches, spark producing devices such as cigarette lighters, and other items which have a direct bearing on the safety of the employees,'" as well as a postshift security search of the employees done "'for the purpose of preventing theft.'"

If you need to wear protective gear for work then putting it on - but not waiting in line to put it on - is compensatable time because wearing it is integral to safe and efficient job performance, undergoing a security screening to make sure you're not carrying anything dangerous is apparently not. That's an odd place to draw the line, it's not a convenience and it's not something you can skip out of. But as it stands the employer can force you to jump through as many compulsory hoops as they want without compensation, as long as it doesn't directly relate to your job performance. Personally I'd call it bullshit, any compulsory checkpoints of whether you're ready to enter or leave work is clearly integral to your job activity but there's 60+ years of precedent that says otherwise.

Comment Re:PRIVATE encryption of everything just became... (Score 1) 379

This needs to be modded up.

Encryption doesn't need to be "perfect"

It just has to be convenient and ubiquitous enough to make the government do actual work to get your stuff, forcing agencies to spend money from their budgets. It's assymetrical enough to drain those budgets given enough strength.

--
BMO

Comment Re:Not really ... (Score 2) 73

Unless you're using encryption, it doesn't matter, since there are many points of 'interest" between the sender and receiver.

Yeah, for external mail no doubt. But for internal mail you probably wouldn't bother, then it's a pretty huge juicy target for sensitive information. Even when you're not passing the juiciest details by email like blueprints and source code there'll be tons of business information in attached presentations and so on.

Comment Re:Not sure who to cheer for (Score 1) 190

The majority of "content producers" on the web have little to no cost and produce little to no original content, let alone worthwhile content. Even for the subset of content I personally enjoy, I recognize that it is worthless - I would not pay a single cent to access it. If it were paywalled I would simply go without it. Serving ads alongside content makes me enjoy the content less, so I block those ads. If you fight against this, your content becomes less enjoyable.

Except time. Sure work provides me with a desk, computer, power and lights but 99% of what they pay for is my time. Most of /. would be living on the streets if we couldn't put a price tag on that. Even if you're self-employed and don't cut yourself a paycheck doesn't mean anyone else has the right to demand you give it away for free. How are most blogs not original content? This diatribe is original content, I mean I don't expect to get paid for it but if I wanted to I could put it up on a blog and see if people would suffer some ads to read it. It's not like you have a right to read it for free just because I wrote it for free.

When I go shopping I think paying is a real downer, it would be so much more enjoyable if I could just go into the store and grab whatever I want to. Life's tough that way sometimes, strangely it doesn't revolve around me and what I'd like the most. I don't buy into the "not watching the ads is stealing" tripe, but arguing that turning an ad-based service into an ad-free service is reasonable simply because you enjoy it more is basically pulling a Darth Vader, "I'm altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further." without any moral justification for why you should be entitled to their content for free. Ad money is real money and you're actively avoiding rewarding their work.

Let's for argument's sake say the site turns to obnoxious ads and anti-blocking measures. You either stop reading or stop fighting the ads. If they lose you as a reader they lose you as a freeloader so what exactly have they lost, the privilege of you reading their blog? Talk about hubris. Or you end up watching ads and become a customer, they make money. You talk as if they they're the ones losing by pissing you off, but how could they lose anything when they got nothing from you in the first place? Aren't you just crying for yourself and when they shove you out the door you pout like a child crying "I didn't want to visit your stupid site anyway!"

Comment Re:cut off one head (Score 1) 251

And the most common way to avoid that has been third party file lockers, which is why they're going after Megaupload and such. Basically one person uploads the file via some safe, anonymous method and publishes the link for others to download. The site offers slow/limited/captcha/ad-supported download for free users and fast download for paying users, which is how they make their money. Since they aren't the ones uploading it and respond to DMCA takedowns they're mostly getting away with it, but it's certainly under attack. Personally I'm wondering when, if ever, anyone's going to be able to make Freenet style downloads usable to most people where there is no seed as such, you just cut a file into a million little encrypted pieces that are distributed among the entire network. It pretty much does away with the concept of a seed altogether.

Comment Re:Not sure who to cheer for (Score 5, Insightful) 190

>If you don't like advertising on you favorite site. Then you better find them a business model where they can keep running (as it isn't free for them) and feed their family's.
>Otherwise just suck it up as the cost of having free access to their data.

Oh hay look, the old "if you don't like ads and block them you're stealing from the mouths of the children" argument.

It would be fine if I could trust the ad networks to not serve up malware, but even my own favorite sites have hosted malware from their ad networks from time to time.

Blocking ads is a much more of a security issue more than a convenience issue.

--
BMO

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