I had a family member that was a guest of the Georgia Corrections Dept recently. It cost me 50 cents to send an email (.25 for the email and .25 to prepay so he could reply) plus 25 cents per attachment if I included photos.
I love it when the trolls expose their ignorance. Like 10 servants could ever handle the Masnick Mansion. That place requires a staff of 20, minimum. ;)
"But no one wants to talk about that because it's more fun to attack."
As soon as somebody figures out to build a trillion-dollar company build on decentralized data and giving end users all the control we will start talking about it, a lot. Which goes back to the point made in comment 1 about greed.
My wife has used Medtronic insulin pumps for about 25 years. Every generation the quality gets worse. She is on her 4th 672g, which is the current state of the art. She has had 3 pumps fail under warranty - two were software issues IIRC. Also, they advertise them as waterproof but there are hundreds if not thousands of cases of people having the pumps fail immediately upon getting wet. They also just had a recall related to the buttons sticking due to air pressure changes in flight.
In short, the security issues just join a rather long list of problems with something that people rely on to stay alive.
My wife's insulin is $400 a vial. It was $40 a vial 10 years ago. Nothing has changed, other than the price. She knows a few people that fly to Canada and stock up on 2 months of supply insulin then fly back home.
One thing I don't think the traditional content providers have come to grips with yet is the almost zero switching cost. Cancel account online, sign up with Sling or whoever, add app to Roku, and you are back with a new streaming TV provider in about 5 minutes.
I've been wondering if see something say something has anything to do with how often racist white people call to report walking while black, or riding a bike while black or other such offenses. I mean, it's basic racism and it's always been there, but I wonder if the constant barrage of messaging from the government, along with a racist in the white house, emboldens these people to act.
What ESPN + really did was take all the obscure stuff you got for free online with ESPN 3( if you had ESPN via cable) and add a $5 per month charge for anybody to get what a lot of people were getting as part of cable, while taking it away from the people that had it at no extra cost. So yes they got a lot of new subscribers, but I'll be a lot of them are pissed off subscribers that are now paying $5 a month extra for something that didn't cost them extra previously.
Last year I started trying to make the city newspaper my primary source of news - not the website, but the digital representation of the print version.
I don't think I'm any less well informed, but I'm certainly less agitated by the news.
So what I'm saying is I see the TD approach as a feature, not a bug.
I was reading a history of the Shootout at the OK Corral recently and a crooked Wells Fargo stagecoach employee plays a central role in the events leading to the gunfight. So basically, nothing has changed.
it's very bizarre to see supposedly "free speech / free market" Republicans suddenly arguing for heavy regulation of both speech and industry
Bizarre? That is SOP for elected Republicans. They talk about the debt however it consistently goes up when they are in charge. They talk about State's rights then tell States they can't have more liberal abortion laws or enforce net neutrality, or whatever.
There is almost no correlation between what the current Republican party claims to stand for, and what they actually do in office.
To be fair, the Democrats are only marginally better in this regard. See Obama's most transparent administration in history as one example.
"Even better profit initiative: have an end of life for the device inside a person's body. Require a full priced replacement every X number of years. "
You may have been kidding but this is exactly how insulin pumps work, although they are not internal. Yet. As soon as it's out of warranty (4 years for the new Medtronic pumps) it gets replaced with a new $10,000 model. And in the case of the current generation, a new $10K model that doesn't work as well. Being diabetic with a pump costs about $2000 a month at retail, not counting the pump itself.
On the post: Prison Telecom Monopolies Bring Their 'Innovation' To Prison Ebooks
25 cents per email
I had a family member that was a guest of the Georgia Corrections Dept recently. It cost me 50 cents to send an email (.25 for the email and .25 to prepay so he could reply) plus 25 cents per attachment if I included photos.
On the post: Freelance Columnist Suggests Workaround To California's AB5: Submit One Giant, Regularly Edited, Column
10 servants?
I love it when the trolls expose their ignorance. Like 10 servants could ever handle the Masnick Mansion. That place requires a staff of 20, minimum. ;)
On the post: The Great Hack Wasn't A Hack And Big Tech's Problems Aren't Really About Big Tech
Also, Cambridge Analytica used Facebook's data exactly as intended - to better target messaging at Facebook users.
On the post: The Great Hack Wasn't A Hack And Big Tech's Problems Aren't Really About Big Tech
"But no one wants to talk about that because it's more fun to attack."
As soon as somebody figures out to build a trillion-dollar company build on decentralized data and giving end users all the control we will start talking about it, a lot. Which goes back to the point made in comment 1 about greed.
On the post: Researchers Build App That Kills To Highlight Insulin Pump Exploit
My wife has used Medtronic insulin pumps for about 25 years. Every generation the quality gets worse. She is on her 4th 672g, which is the current state of the art. She has had 3 pumps fail under warranty - two were software issues IIRC. Also, they advertise them as waterproof but there are hundreds if not thousands of cases of people having the pumps fail immediately upon getting wet. They also just had a recall related to the buttons sticking due to air pressure changes in flight.
In short, the security issues just join a rather long list of problems with something that people rely on to stay alive.
On the post: Drug Prices Are So Insane That The NY Times Is Recommending The US Gov't Just 'Seize The Patents'
See Insulin...
My wife's insulin is $400 a vial. It was $40 a vial 10 years ago. Nothing has changed, other than the price. She knows a few people that fly to Canada and stock up on 2 months of supply insulin then fly back home.
On the post: Techdirt Sues ICE After It Insists It Has No Records Of The 1 Million Domains It Claims To Have Seized
3 months from now they'll give you a list of 1 million Geocities sites :)
On the post: Study Shows That No, Netflix Isn't Killing Movie Theaters
That's crazy talk.
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On the post: 'See Something Say Something' Sends Philly Counter-Terrorism Unit After A Local Journalist Over A Harmless Facebook Post
On the post: ESPN Has Finally Realized This Whole Streaming Thing Has Legs
On the post: In Defense Of Slow News
I don't think I'm any less well informed, but I'm certainly less agitated by the news.
So what I'm saying is I see the TD approach as a feature, not a bug.
On the post: Bad Ads We Won't Bombard You With And Other Ways To Support Techdirt
On the post: Wells Fargo Admits 'Computer Glitch' May Have Contributed to 400 Foreclosures
On the post: Wells Fargo Admits 'Computer Glitch' May Have Contributed to 400 Foreclosures
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Bad Reporting, Grandstanding Congressmen, Tweeting President Combine For Clusterfuck About Twitter
it's very bizarre to see supposedly "free speech / free market" Republicans suddenly arguing for heavy regulation of both speech and industry
Bizarre? That is SOP for elected Republicans. They talk about the debt however it consistently goes up when they are in charge. They talk about State's rights then tell States they can't have more liberal abortion laws or enforce net neutrality, or whatever.
There is almost no correlation between what the current Republican party claims to stand for, and what they actually do in office.
To be fair, the Democrats are only marginally better in this regard. See Obama's most transparent administration in history as one example.
On the post: TSA Has Been Compiling A Shitlist Of Travelers It Just Doesn't Like
On the post: How Twitter Suspended The Account Of One Of Our Commenters... For Offending Himself?
On the post: Goldman Sachs Analyst Asks Whether Curing Patients Is A Sustainable Business Model
You may have been kidding but this is exactly how insulin pumps work, although they are not internal. Yet. As soon as it's out of warranty (4 years for the new Medtronic pumps) it gets replaced with a new $10,000 model. And in the case of the current generation, a new $10K model that doesn't work as well. Being diabetic with a pump costs about $2000 a month at retail, not counting the pump itself.
On the post: It You Can't Beat Purveyors Of Unauthorized Copies, Join Them -- With Style
But they will still sue.
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