"The cost savings is great, but isn't the biggest driver for me, it's mainly the principle that I don't own the device I paid for, and I'm really tired of having cat litter everything in my home."

So exercise your rights as a consumer to research beforehand and not buy it. Or return it. Or modify it, as you have. Or, for god sakes, ask your vet or friends with cats or reddit for advice on having cat litter everywhere (I believe the most common solution is a covered box with fairly high side.) You can also teach your cat to pee/crap in the toilet, believe it or not. There are little "litter box" inserts that reportedly make it pretty easy; the cat goes "oh, another litter box" and uses it for a week or two, and then you remove the insert, and if the cat notices, they go *shrug* and still use it. No more litter, no more stink.

But for god sakes....I was around on Slashdot when the fist inkjet printer companies started chipping their cartridges. I also learned about Gillette in...either middle school or high school. That was a century ago, if not more. The "handle is free, the blades are disposable and we have a very healthy profit margin on them" model is quite, quite old. Why are people surprised? Especially if you read Slashdot, why didn't you do research on it?

Your robotic, do-everything catbox would've cost substantially more if the company were not figuring on a continuing revenue stream. In fact, it might have cost so much that nobody would've bought it.

It's so hard to keep those C64s running these days!

I found rebuilding Viacom's websites in Groovy to be a real pleasure.

Working with .net, not so much...

In this case, the MPAA and the state attorneys have been persecuting Google.

Statement from Attorney General Jim Hood/a>

Mr. Hood's letter is so cynical I just can't get my head around it. He has been caught red handed accepting bribes from the MPAA and what does he conclude?

"The Sony emails themselves document that long before the hack many attorneys general were working to make our states safer for our children. It would be a discredit to the public interest not to question Google's actions and consider the consequences."

Think of the children. It's all about the children! That is what Mr. Hood would have us believe. That is just so disingenuous that he loses any shred of credibility.

In fact, his entire statement follows in this vein. He only makes a single reference to intellectual property in passing, and the entire blog is focused on blaming Google for promoting all the ills of our society for their own enrichment.

To paraphrase Mr. Hood, It would be a discredit to the public interest not to question MPAA's actions and consider the consequences.

In fact, the Sony emails document a collusion of the MPAA with the state attorneys to subvert the laws of the nation. All these areas are governed by federal law. The state attorneys should simply pass their concerns on to Congress, and get back to dealing with issues that fall squarely within their jurisdiction.

Mr. Hood dismisses the MPAA's corrupting the agenda of the state attorneys is just a "a salacious Hollywood tale"? No, this is very real, and a very serious issue. Don't those state attorneys have more important things to deal with than the MPAA's agenda? The CID the state attorney launched was according to a plan hatched by the MPAA, and not about the children at all. Just a shakedown in attempt to force Google to do the MPAA's bidding.

"some of its more excitable people have sued trying to stop the State of Mississippi for daring to ask some questions."

What in the heck is that supposed to mean - "some of its more excitable people"? There was nothing in that sentence to even match the pronoun (some of its) . Talk about excited people, Mr. Hood is so excited that he is spouting gibberish. The state attorneys collusion with the MPAA has been exposed and "excitable people" have sued? This is a very serious issue. Google is reacting to mafia-like shakedown in a very calm and rational way. If this happened to me I would go berserk. "daring to ask some questions" These weren't just some questions. They were a shocking overreach, open-ended questions that were unanswerable because they didn't even make any sense.

.

"I am calling a time out, so that cooler heads may prevail."

What an astonishing thing to say. What is Mr. Hood trying to imply with this statement? That Google's lawyers are hot-heads for filling for an injunction against this shakedown? Mr. Hood is calling a time out because he has been exposed. Well clearly he needs one. He needs time to consult with his MPAA friends to plan a strategy as to how to shape this in the press. He certainly isn't handling it very well so far.

"I will reach out to legal counsel Google's board of directors to negotiate a peaceful resolution to the issues affecting consumers that we attorneys general have pointed out in a series of eight letters to Google."

A peaceful resolution: Is he saying he is going to back off and apologize? I certainly hope so.

jscript is some hacked implementation of javascript, by Microsoft. Thanks for making my point for me.

Ok ok. I always thought Angular was dependent on node because I always saw them together. I apologize for that one singular inaccuracy. The rest is true.

The point remains. To pick up .NET now, you are marring yourself to an out-of-date tech stack.

I've been a cross-platform coder for about a decade now. I liked the ideas of Java and .NET when they came out, but they were lacking in execution. If you look at everything powering technology today: Big Data, Node.js, Android/iOS, cloud remember (Hotmail was bought by MS, originally on BSD servers) Microsoft hasn't done squat. Meanwhile MS has delivered a lot of failed tech: WinForms, Zune, Windows Phone. (I've only ever seen two people with a Windows Phone) Only the Xbox and .NET have succeeded. I would be very concerned hitching my trailer to MS. They don't do innovation anymore, they don't even do copying (embrace and extend) well.

A big .NET friend of mine has recently taken to web development. He develops on OSX, deploys to Linux (AWS). He loves how he can take one thing and just run it on another. He doesn't have to worry about putting IIS on Linux, Node works everywhere. The code he develops isn't tied to any specific OS platform. Angular is node dependent, but Knockout isn't.

And there in I think the real danger is realized. If you use .NET you are locked into MS stagnant mono-culture, and their failing culture of innovation. If you want bleeding edge, OS agnosticism, MS isn't going to deliver it. Their goal will always be to lock you into their vertical to protect their verticals.

With the very good developments in Linux and the Apple premium is gone, only organizations with legacy applications need consider any Microsoft technology.

PS. I use Qt for everything on Mobile and desktop, Node for server and Knockout/Angular for web client. There is a slight possibility that Qt's QML will work on the web. Python for anything else. This is crossplatform, and not one drop of MS. It is my speculation that MS is a wounded animal, realizing they are like Cadillac. Cadillac realized the average age of their customers were getting older, and over 60 and that market would be no longer driving in a few years. There's an exodus from MS platforms. Their new focus aims to fix this. Buyer beware. Where is the money in it for them?

We put a stop to the advertising machine that implores us to be endlessly wasteful consumers, get rid of the private property rules that allow a few to own everything while the multitude suffer deprivation, and start sharing the rewards of our technological progress freely.

When the costs of goods has been reduced to practically nothing, making sure everyone is well taken care of is worth the peace and stability that it brings.

More like $20, and that's for people who don't look up how much they were actually charged.

And cash, not a voucher. I'm a former T-Mobile customer, and they looked up my new contact information and got in touch to let me know that this was available (how to ask them to research my actual charges, vs how to accept the default amount).

A lot of these settlements are BS, but you might do a bit of homework for claiming that this is just more of the same.

How about I just declare my decision to oppose you at every turn for the rest of my life, and when you escalate, re-escalate in response, for the rest of my life, and we just leave it at that?

Secrets coming out all over these days... good luck, you'll need it.

Evolution doesn't kill anything. Sometimes the environment kills things, sometimes they reach the full expression of their complexity without being killed. Evolution is when the environment kills and diversity is reduced, and the herd now again consists of those whose nature is capable of full expression in the environment.

Ever heard of Gnosticism? They preached that this world was inherently evil, and that when humanity went extinct, we'd all be resurrected in a much nicer world, and therefore, breeding was an evil act.

Not too many Gnostics around. See how that works?

Who is to say that we'd even be able to conceive these "robots" as anything but another form of life? They'd have to tell us that they were manufactured, and given the required self-sufficiency of space travel, said "manufacture" would probably be rather akin to what we call "reproduction." All of these lines are blurred when talking about sufficiently advanced technology and science.

It's not *completely* wrong.
In fact back then when it was discovered, it was experimentally proven to work within the parameters which were tested.

The reason it was used then and is still used now is that within this range of parameters, it still works. For everyday use, what newtonian predicts is within what is observed. That's a precise enough model.

What happened is that scientists started to consider much more extreme paramters range (higher energy, faster speed). At that point, newtonian physics breaks down. Does it mean that all the past results were wrong ? No it simply means that it's a model which is only works within a certain range of parameter (it's good for everyday use - you car) if you need to consider parameters outside this range (space ships, planets) you need a better model (general relativity, etc.)

Note:
- with Newtonian physics we speak about a physicis model. About a model that's used to approximate real-world events. This kind of things only get experimental proof (prediction fits the measured data or not). And will eventually get superseded by a better model which works better including for some corner cases or at higher range, smaller scales, etc. (String theory and such were born as a tentative at a better model than the dichotomy between relativity and quantum mechanics).

- with TFA: it's a bout a *mathematical proof* that 2 different models are really actually the same stuff just expressed in different ways. Take one model, tweak the equations, and you should obtain the other model. It doesn't speak about the quality of the models themselves, just the mathematical links between them.
(I fact, the quantum mechanics model has its limitation - what you call "wrong" and what I call "use it only within the range of value where it works the best.
QM works best at predict very small scale phenomena (particles, waves, etc.). QM completely sucks at being useful for anything at the other end of the scale: QM is a piece of shit for astronomy. And vice versa: relativity is good when you consider stars, useless when you consider particles. 2 models, each best at a different scale. And strings being a possible future model that could simultaneously work at both scales.). ...but usually, when you have a newer model, that is better experimentally, you usually also need to find a mathematical "link" between the two, an explanation why the old model used to work and only got contradicted in your experiment.
e.g.: take the relativity equations, and use them to compute the motion of your car - the level of energy and speed are so small, that all the "weird parts" of relativity can be approximated and rounded to 0, what remains ends up looking exactly like newtonian physics. Newtonions physicics are the same, simply with the relativity parts neglected, because they don't play any significant role at that scale.

Newtonian physics looks "kind of logic" because it's a model designed and tested and proven to predict a range of events (reasonable speed, low energy, human-size scale instead of particles, etc.) which happens to match what our monkey-brain have evolved to cope with.
(our ancestrors never had to think about nuclear bombs, supernovae, tunnel effect in electronics, etc.)
That's also why it got discovered first (we didn't first invent relativistic physics and the newtonian as handy simplified formula for some type of problems), because that's what was easiest for our monkey-brain to think about.

At least with mythology, if it's wrong enough, it kills its adherents, so it's subject to evolutionary pressure.

This may as well have been pulled out of a cereal box.