"Produces nothing"? YAAFM. Providing a highly sought after service is not producing nothing.

Careful with throwing around those "FM" tags - Because yes actually, providing a service very much does not mean they "produce" anything. Getty stands in the middle of real work, between producing photos and producing creatives, adding nothing but fees as their value-add proposition.

In the case of Getty, they provide a service in many ways inferior to GIS or BIS, which kinda counts as the whole reason we have this topic in the first place - MS's cute little slideshow widget worked better than Getty, thereby completely shutting Getty out of the picture.

Free hint - Grandma ain't gonna license your stupid stock photo anyway, she'll just use the watermarked sample. Same goes for that class of Marketing 101 students. Anyone actually interested in paying for stock photos, OTOH, already understands the difference between freely available vs licensed content, and damned well won't risk their job "accidentally" ripping off random photographers.

This has nothing to do with copyrights, and everything to do with buggy whips.

Too many companies continue to take their product, fiddle / fuck with it for the sake of change (keeping UI designers in a job I suspect) and then antagonise their users. Google maps is a prime example, the new google maps is AWFUL compared to the existing one, lacking several key features. Please, stop fiddling and changing things.

I agree with you completely (in particular about the new god-awful Google Maps interface, hell, it makes Beta almost look like a role-model of useability by comparison), but I think you, and the FP, and TFA, and countless others complaining about this issue may have missed the glaringly obvious solution...

"There's an app for that". Goes by the name of "any modern browser", just enable its version of click-to-play (or for slightly older browsers - Lookin' at you, no-Chrome-before-Honeycomb, just run your favorite version of noscript/flashblock/etc.)

You don't need to give every website you visit its own little chunk of your phone just because it asks for one. "Have you tried our app yet?" - No. No, I haven't, and won't until your marketing department stops treating my phone as just one more way to track me (ie, never).

and thus you are not guilty of a crime!

...Which will really make your next of kin feel better about the whole situation.

No mistake, I agree with you, but they call what you describe "suicide by cop", and legal vs illegal won't really much matter when they squeegee your remains off the pavement.

no, thats a question for ICP, in 2009...

Thus making it...

(puts on sunglasses)

... A "Moot" question!

YEEEAAAAAHHHHH!

Maybe people should just sleep 8 hours a night like they're supposed to.

We don't naturally sleep 8 hours a night. We naturally sleep for two blocks of 3-4 hours per day, which the lifestyle requirements of the modern world have forced to occur in a more-or-less continuous 7-8 hour block.

Pre-industrially, those two blocks would have an hour or two of waking time between them; modern research (mostly military) has found that splitting them apart further allows people to go with as little as 4-5 hours of sleep per 24 hour period with only minimal impact on performance.

It's my pet theory that this is the mechanism by which we get so many libertarians.

Strange, you just keep tossing out random completely off-topic straw-man attacks against Libertarians... And in a context where they would agree with you completely.

Libertarians hate big-government, and in general consider the patriot act nothing short of an abomination. Bringing up your personal demons at every opportunity really doesn't look any better than the morons who blame Obama for everything.

With a bit of luck, the person running Steam AU will see time in court.

Congrats, that $10 down the drain plus a few hours of time spend arguing just turned into a day of lost work to testify. You really showed them! Attaboy!


If you don't like the law of the land, fuck off back to America.

In principle, I agree with you. Honestly, I fucking hate corporations thinking they can get away with anything, and I hate even more that they usually do simply because of the cost of fighting them even when in the right. But you have a practical issue to consider here as well - Do you want to play Day Z? Hawken? Starbound? Zero Gear? Shattered Horizon? Anything on this list? Then you need to use Steam. And at the risk of commiting a 3rd party tu quoque, do you consider Sony any better? Microsoft? Ubisoft?

If you want what the devil has, you get to deal with the devil, like it or not.

That fucker on the island almost wiped out DC. The most terrifying moment in human history was the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I have to presume you meant "almost wiped out civilization", because the erasure of DC could only serve to improve both the effectiveness of the US government, and the human gene pool as a whole. ;)

I mean, how'd you feel if Russia took over Mexico?

About the same way we'd feel when they tried to put nukes in Cuba?

But at least that one went well...

The 'impossible' is just something that hasn't been done yet.

Quoting a work of fiction doesn't make your point unless your point applies only within that world.

Unless, of course, you think we can solve global warming by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow (or perhaps Gandalf can just not let any IR photons pass, if you prefer fantasy solutions over scifi ones).

So what stops me from just picking up one of these "burner" phones and (presumably prepaid) credit cards to actually use for legitimate purposes?

Hell, even if they just send me a bottom-of-the-barrel tracphone, hey, free $30 flip-phone to keep in the car for emergencies (911 will work on any activated US cell phone, regardless of its in-service status)!

When you participate in a pyramid scheme

Funny how you dumb fucks never get tired of showing off your ignorance regarding that term every time Bitcoin comes up.

You'd think after having your betters correct you a few hundred times over the past three years, you might have learned a bit.

Then again, that presumes an AC actually means to stand behind their post rather than just see who bites. Oh well.

/ Pull the hook out of his mouth.

Seriously, this is no joke. As an asset you will be expected to declare a gain or loss on the coins you used to purchase that cup of coffee. The gain or loss with respect to the change of value between the day you received those coins and the day you used them in the purchase.

Very true, no joke at all! That ruling makes Bitcoins far better from a tax standpoint than than USD, although slightly less convenient. Instead of paying your normal income tax rate on BTC, you pay your capital gains rate. Hold them for more than a year, and you have capped your tax rate at half-or-less of your normal income tax rate - 20% max, 15% for all but the 1%, and a whopping 0% for anyone making under $82k. Woo hoo, can I start getting paid in BTC today???

However, in their typical dickish fashion, the IRS has decide to only allow gains, not losses. So if their value goes down, TFB.

That said, you can expect that to change if ever more than a laughably small number of people start filing 400+ page schedule D1s. Make no mistake, the rules for gains on foreign currency (treated specially as something other than assets) exist more for the IRS's convenience than for yours.

I believe X.org versus Wayland would be another pair bridging the old and new Linux world.

The very fact that you would equate the battle over a display server with the battle over the granddaddy of all running processes puts you so far into the "new Linux" camp that you can't even see the border. I don't mean that insultingly, just a statement of fact.

CLI FTW.

The premise behind Coin is attractive: consolidate credit cards onto a single card-sized gadget

First, calling this thing "credit card sized" amounts to nothing short of a lie - More like a PCMCIA-card sized, or about four credit cards thick. It wouldn't fit in my current wallet, which doesn't even like holding the older embossed-number style cards because of the extra thickness.

Second, my credit/debit/gift cards already come on credit card-sized devices. And they don't need batteries.

Third, how many cards do people have that they need this? One credit card, one ATM card, and on the rare occasion I get a gift card for something, I use it ASAP to avoid some crazy terms of service eating the balance away. As the only possible audience I see for this, the sort of crazy coupon ladies who have two dozen store-specific cards just so they can play games with juggling discounts and no-payments-for-x-months - And even in that case, Coin only holds eight cards total, making it still useless.

And finally, NFC has made the entire concept pointless. Coin has built dedicated hardware to do something that every smartphone (except the iPhone, because fuck you that's why) on the planet can do much, much better.

So someone explain to me what I've missed here... What killer use have I failed to consider for the Coin?