Those are local emergencies, those are immediate emergencies. If you can't get the terminology for emergency events correct why should anyone take your advice on what is the ideal tool for reporting emergencies?

I didn't intend to put forth a grand unified theory of disaster-situation communication. I merely suggested someone ditch their land line for a cell phone, if they have adequate cell coverage at home. That said, thank you for correcting my terminology. Perhaps next time I attempt to make a similar point, the thread won't get derailed by pedants arguing about how many neighboring towns/states/continents have to get wiped out by the asteroid before I stop caring about making phone calls while physically at home. ;)

And who said anything about reporting it? In the event of an actual disaster, I don't particularly care about who gets to the smoking crater first. I just want the ability to make normal phone calls from the hotel I end up living in for a few weeks, without paying Hilton $3.50/minute for the luxury.

why spend the money on my own printer when i have a plethora of printers at my disposal at work. I consider it part of my salary

Y'know, joking or not, this actually kinda annoyed me in the poll options (thus picking "combination rudely ignored" - It may technically count as "someone else's laser", but I specifically use it at work). The question and choices seem to go out of their way to avoid the glaringly obvious option - I, like many Slashdotters, work in an office environment. For the whopping four pages of personal printing I do a month, I don't hesitate in the least to queue it up just before I leave work for the day.

Now, if I wanted to publish my Next Great American Novel, I wouldn't do it at work. But does anyone in the modern world really actually think twice before printing out a personal page or two at work? I don't view it as a "right" or as some passive-aggressive part of my salary; just reasonable use of something available to me at work.

I work there 6 consecutive years. In that time I increase revenue by 300%, stock price doubles, everyones happy, and I even got a boost to 1.9M 18 months ago. I've now established that I'm not only good at what I do

Now let's look at reality. The last CEO got caught tapping the mayor's wife (take that as you will) and the company had to write down a $20M golden parachute to get rid of him. The payoff almost zeroed out revenue for the year, and the scandal dropped the company's stock price by half.

You came on as a hired gun to make some nasty changes and take the heat off the "real" next CEO. You outsource the only employment within 100 miles of a small town in Nebraska, to Bangalore. Over the next five years, the stock price and revenue recover back to normal. In the sixth year, you announce plans to destroy another small town, and step down when the PR backlash gets too intense. The company officially denounces you, but you have your choice of three positions already lined up to do the exact same thing.

Sorry, but no CEO can boost revenue by 300% through anything even remotely creditable as "skill". A really good CEO might sustain 10% "real" growth on average, in a good economy. When you see BS numbers like that, it just screams "bookkeeping games".


/ Bernie Madoff reported near-legendary gains of a mere 11% per year for an equally amazing decade and a half. He should have just hired you for six months, eh?

At under a buck for a book it will be the writers who will starve in a gutter unless their work sells millions.

Ever seen people buy from a used bookstore, where they can get physical books for a buck or two? They walk out of those places with crates full of books.

Yes, at a buck a book, writers will need to sell more. But they will sell more, as people load their Kindles with cheaply purchased books rather than a dump of Project Gutenberg and one or two best sellers.

Of course, the real issue here involves the continuing use of obsolete middle-men. A self (or minimally-managed) published ebook only needs to sell a few tens of thousands of copies at a buck each for the author to make a living. When you have authors taking the same crappy terms that traditionally included not only editing and marketing, but most importantly, access to a printing and distribution network - Do we really wonder why someone can sell 50k copies of a $20 book and still need to take a day job to pay their bills?


You'd have about a whole dozen profitable writers under your plan.

For every Tom Clancy or JK Rowling, you have a thousand "serious" writers who already can't make a living on the $200/year royalty checks they get.

Frankly if authors made more as a % (thus more absolute dollars), we might see more people go into this field of work.

If the authors made more as a percent, a lot more people (including myself) would feel willing to pay more for their work. When the lion's share goes to an obsolete publishing and distribution industry that has zero relevance to digital works? No thanks, but can you direct me to the author's online tip jar?


Crazy, it seems Amazon, Google, Apple are having no trouble finding customers.

Because they offer albums and episodes under the magical $10 price point. Since you obviously didn't read it, TFA involves Amazon trying to enforce artificial scarcity (specifically on the resale market, which the producers would vastly prefer to obliterate entirely by using licensing terms to illegally deprive us of our right of first sale) on a digital market for the purpose of driving prices up.


Starve in the gutter? Too bad most people aren't malcontents / sociopaths like yourself.

Fortunately, they do, however, grasp the concept of hyperbole.

Specific dollar values (and sociopathic tendencies) aside, most people would rather pay what they consider a "fair" price for what they want. But if they can't get what they want for what they consider a fair price, the internet has demonstrated that people feel little hesitation about setting their own terms for obtaining non-physical goods.

Psst - Dear merchants and content providers...

You will sell countless millions of your products at under a buck each. At >$10 each, a significant number of people will pirate it. And if you don't even offer it for sale (or play tricks to have a limited number of copies available), you guarantee everyone who wants it will just pirate it.

Don't like it? Starve in the gutter. We don't care. Give us what we want or vanish, simple as that.

Why bother letting them know that you're listening to and giving consideration to their threats? Why bother making a paper trail of any kind?

You mean, as opposed to asking Slashdot and making it to the FP?

Yeah, sure, no one at Piriform reads Slashdot. Whatever response the asker comes up with will no doubt totally surprise them. And anyway, they probably send out a hundred such requests to remove compatibility features daily, right?

At this point, I think they have their answer, and already need to decide whether to up the stakes and lawyer up, or forget about it completely.

This is plus 5 Insightful? More like plus 5 Sad. Or are most people here Americans with scientifically proven zero empathy.

"Empathy" means the ability to understand and share the feelings of a fellow human. Mitt's assertions to the contrary aside, "businesses are [not] people too". So empathy has nothing to do with it.

A business exists solely for the exchange of goods and/or services for money (or other goods and/or services). If a business can't provide me with the goods and/or services I want, they have no reason to continue to exist for all it matters to me. I would only even give them that few days I mentioned to restore service, as a matter of convenience to me - If I could realistically switch ISPs, for example, 15 seconds after discovering my internet had gone down again, Verizon could kiss my hairy white ass goodbye.

Now if you want to talk about loyalty - I have loyalty to my friends. I have loyalty to my family. I have loyalty to people that have given me a reason to care about them. The company that, despite my opting out of everything possible on their privacy policy still has their "partners" send me life insurance offers once a month? Yeah, not so much loyalty there - More like "simmering resentment" that such complete bastards manage to have the best game in town.

ISTM that you're an unreasonable little snot, since the speed of the resolution of the problem is completely dependent upon the cause of the problem. What is reasonable, though, is timely customer feedback.

Sorry, but 100% wrong. Yeah, timely feedback (including the magic phrase "prorated refund for downtime") will buy you a few days (at most). But if I actually pay for your service, I don't give two shits if your only datacenter just got hit by a Tsunami - Get your service back up now, or by next week your competition will provide it for me.

If I get something for free, then obviously not an issue. File a bug report, and if they don't fix it before you lose interest, move on, but you can't really complain too much about it.

If I pay for a service, then my willingness to put up with outages depends entirely on their willingness to not charge me during downtimes.

Now, if I need the service in question, they only get a few days before I find someone else to provide it, regardless of free or not.

Note that this assumes having no real contract in place specifying an SLA. If you have that, then you have the acceptable downtimes and repercussions for exceeding them all nice and neatly spelled out.

That is patently false. Landlines have been proven to be far more resilient to local emergencies than cell phones dozens of times.

By "local", I mean "house on fire", "gas main explosion on my block", that sort of thing. Local.

Hurricane Sandy did not count as "local". Earthquakes don't count as local. A three million acre wildfire does not count as local. Yes, in widespread emergencies, landlines hold up better - But as I already said, they don't do you much good from your car, two states away.

That said, really, do what you want. Go ahead and pay $50 a month for crappy home phone service. Every little "necessity" in the minds of the old and stupid adds to what we consider a living wage in this country, which makes my disposable income all the higher by not caring in the least about having a physical copper wire running through the wall and to my phone. ;)

In the style of Bruce Schneier's movie-plot threat scenarios, what's the most nefarious use you can anticipate such remote outlet control being used for?

Turn off the fridge after the victim goes to work for the day, and turn it back on about an hour before they get home.

Repeat until they die... of Botulism! <Cue evil laugh>

Aww, I only want to make my bathroom nice and toasty by remote control before I get out of bed, you cretin! :)

But yeah, seriously. Great tool for lights or remotely cycling power to a home server. Dumb dumb dumb idea to connect anything intended to make large amounts of heat (coffee pot) or dangerous motions (table saw).

Oddly, I thought UL/CE wouldn't approve products like this specifically for that reason - That we simply can't trust most people to have the common sense not to try to remote-start their electric self-propelled lawnmower. Nice to see networked outlets finally exist, but I fully expect we'll hear about plenty of Darwin awards as a result of plain ol' misuse, no need to require malware in that equation.

I've arrived at the point where I hate my land line. I'd drop it in a second but my wife thinks it's important.

Grow a pair and cancel it. Duh.

"Sorry honey, but we waste way too much money on a useless, obsolete service that no one but fraudsters ever uses. In a local emergency, our cell phones have a better chance of working than the land line; and in a wide-scale emergency, you can't use the land-line from the car as we flee the coming Tsunami."

So the government botched a sting operation called Fast and Furious and you're going to frame them as if it's standard operating procedure?

Only the "botched" part. The rest suggests that our government had more of a clue than normal.


/ Still waiting on that 1998 budget...
// No, they did not - In 2009, they passed an "omnibus spending bill". Spending approval does not equal a budget, not by a long shot.