the fancy ones are $8,000 instead of $80 is because IP laws protect monopolies. in an open ecosystem where everything is free as in libre, any person designing medical devices could interoperate with everyone else designing medical devices. ever call to every piece of hardware would be workable by anyone who wanted to. every program even one privately funded, would then be opened to the community so their competitors could learn what you did and how and be able to build on what you did.

and if that smells like lost profit to you, maybe it is, but it's better for everyone. there is no vendor lock in forcing you to use inferior or vulnerable platforms. there is no 'upgrade cycle' that hardware vendors crave, the free market is always releasing inferior hardware to generate new upgrade cycles.

the government is supposed to be fixing things which corporations do wrong and they just don't care it seems. planned obsolescence.... do i need to rant more here?

if you think of sick people only in dollars and cents then you are in need of some morality. if you think we need to reinvent every medical tool every 20-30 years to 'fund' the proprietary developers of hardware and software then think of all the things that could have been done with those people not doing BS work, in a civilization where people are more than the dollars they have in their wallets.

Obligatory old joke:

One day, at a U2 concert in (insert traditional butt of jokes for your area, I'll say Newfoundland,) Bono stops the music and starts clapping his hands, slowly, rhythmically.

As he gazes out over the crowd, still clapping slowly, he intones 'Every time *clap* I clap *clap* my hands, *clap* a child *clap* in Africa *clap* dies *clap* of starvation. *clap*'

From the audience comes up the outraged cry of 'Then stop fucking clapping, you idiot!'

Picture, instead of Clippy, we could have Microsoft Creeper.

How apt....

Sure, it's not the most efficient codebase, but on a modern machine with power to spare, it's rather fine. Now, I have run it on a rather high end Core2Duo. That's less fun.

It should be the car that is disabled (or your license taken away)

Exactly - as they do already in the UK: get caught driving while using a mobile phone, you get 3 penalty points. That puts your insurance premiums up in itself, and if you reach a total of 12 points, no more driving for a few years. The penalty may be increased to 6 - in which case, get caught driving on the phone twice, you're in the passenger seat for several years. If someone's been caught driving on the phone (whether texting, talking or reading Slashdot), why let them continue driving at all? Will disabling the phone stop them driving while fiddling with the radio, eating, shaving etc? Of course not - so get them away from the wheel and let them text all they like as passengers.

It is against the law pretty much everywhere. However that law is enforced pretty much nowhere. It is just simply too difficult to enforce it, as a police officer has to catch the person in the act to even write a ticket. And then the ticket is so laughably small in terms of the monetary penalty as to be pointless to even write.

Here in the UK, the penalty is that you get one-quarter of the way to no longer driving (3 penalty points, where 12 means a driving ban); the government announced earlier this year they were considering doubling that to halfway, i.e. get caught doing it twice (within 3 years) and you won't be driving again. However small the risk, I suspect that's a big enough deterrent to scare many - particularly since it would often mean losing their job too. You don't have to be caught red-handed, either, just suspected enough for the police to investigate, then they check the network usage logs and confirm you were using the handset at the time in question. (Or get seen on a traffic camera, of which there are many.)

The idea in the article is just silly, though.

Crazy, isn't it?

Evidently, there is some unwritten law that states that Geolocation by IP address shall override any and all set preferences by the user on their device, and ignore any possibility that barring or redirecting the user makes no sense.

I get a version of this periodically on Spotify, where I'm informed that the particular album or single I'm looking at can't be played because it isn't licensed to my region. And of course there's the small matter of my being IP-blocked from Pandora Radio for the same reason.

I ran into a particularly nasty geolocation issue back in late 2012, when I was informed that I couldn't access my National Lottery account because they no longer believed that I was accessing it from the UK. Went back and forth between them and my ISP (VirginMedia), with each blaming the other for the problem.

I've also heard of situations where people have found the books on their Kindles vanishing because they're holidaying in an area where said books aren't licensed.

(b) it's an easy mental barrier between people venting at you, and, well, you (because they're not yelling at me, they're yelling at "Antonio".)

When your introductory training includes psychological coping mechanisms, rethink your decision to be there. :-)

> "The world economy and middle-class lifestyle are built on theft, slavery, extortion and murder."

They have those things in many countries, yet they remain shitholes compared to America. There's more to the success of America than just criminality.

Putting forth such a blanket statement only makes you look absurd.

lets look here, cnn the ptb lap dog they are have a 'salary' calculator that caps at $400,000 a year. http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/ yet america has 1565 billionaires according to forbes.com. http://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2014/03/03/forbes-billionaires-full-list-of-the-richest-americans/ so to correct you, the blanket statement that the middle class lifestyle is unsustainable or the cause of the problem is absurd. clearly a system that supports 1,500 billionaires yet no one can apparently get a salary over $400,000 is definitely a gamed system. it is the top 1% who are the problem and the middle class only supports a dream of the poor to not be poor, while doing so for little rewards while whole nations are bankrupted so an investment banker can get 50% growth of income for billionaires, and the 304,118 millionaires can keep growing their wealth http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2014/02/14/where-the-304118-u-s-millionaire-earners-live/
one in one hundred people are millionaires. and the civilization that caused this is not going to sustain it forever. if the romans couldn't do it we sure as hell can't.

Most teenagers I know wouldn't touch old computers.

These days you can easily find Core2Duo and AMD64 class machines in dumpters, and from what I see, nobody wants them. I used to refurbish them for those who wanted and I ended up with a huge pile of decent machines looking for a good home. No takers. I trashed them all.