>the USPS faced financial difficulties, posting losses of $6.5 billion in fiscal 2023 and $8 billion in fiscal 2024, leading to a request for $14 billion in government assistance.
It would appear that the USPS operates at a loss at these prices
In the same sense that public roads "operate at a loss", sure. Neither toll-free roads or the USPS were originally intended to somehow break-even. They're infrastructure services provided by the government towards a functioning society.
>The paper carries a telling Latin motto: "Scire ubi aliquid invenire possis ea demum maxima pars eruditionis est" – "To know where you can find something is, after all, the greatest part of learning."
In the modern era it is acknowledged that people will use online search engines to find the answers but hopefully we all learn something on the way
Search "YouTube Revanced" on Android. It's a bit of a pain to install, but it lets you customise your YouTube app and add or remove as many features as you want.
These kinds of customisations should be standard for apps people use every day.
You -> Gear icon -> Revanced Settings -> General -> Navigation Buttons -> Hide Shorts.
You need to also hide them from the feed and a few other places. You are not stupid; Revanced has too many options and the settings and large and confusing. It's easier to search "shorts" and toggle everything.
Thank you. I already had that setting enabled, but your comment inspired me to review all the settings again and I have been successful in hiding Shorts from view (for now, until Google changes something again no doubt).
The author didn't explain what the actual impact was on them. They stopped at "security implications" because the only reasonable outcome that would obviate this "Warning to All Users" would be to provide the latest version for free. No, it doesn't make sense to provide an insecure version. No, it doesn't make sense to patch such an old version. The other reasonable outcome is the actual outcome - that FileZilla doesn't let them download it, but if for some reason they backed it up (which is cool) and want to use it (which is odd), they can still use it.
Because what you paid for is the software on physical media. Why would any publisher just hand out things for free that they otherwise charge for because you claim you lost the item. Back in the days of physical software, it used to be common to buy and sell used software. The difference between "I lost it, send me a new one" and "I sold it, send me a new one" is a simple lie, that more people than you think would be happy to tell a faceless corpo. Would it be nice if they issued a new copy that worked with the old key? Yes, but there is no moral argument for requiring it.
If I lose a book, I wouldn't expect the publisher to send me a new one. If I buy a physical copy of a Nintendo game and lose the cartridge, there is no reason to expect Nintendo to send me a new one. Why would MS word be different?
The comment that started the thread was : I have installation media for MS Office 2010 in my desk drawer. If I lose the disc, I wouldn't expect Microsoft to replace it for me.
We are talking about physical media to compare and contrast the differing expectations around responsibility for backing up a digital download (what the linked complaint was about), and physical install media (what this thread is about).
> I'm pretty sure the business was very clear that I'm only buying the license though.
Microsoft in 2010 was very clear that your were buying physical install media for Office 2010 along with your license. They did this by making the physical install media part of the license purchase transaction.
>Yes, but there is no moral argument for requiring it.
Are you sure you didn't butcher a word here? Yes, Firezilla might be in the clear legally if they told the OP to pound sand, but that's not the same thing as having no "moral argument". In most common law jurisdictions, it's perfectly legal to walk past a drowning child and refuse to save him, even if you'll incur marginal cost (eg. 10 min of your time). However that's not you wouldn't say "there's no moral argument for requiring it"
Similar logic applies here, which is that it costs next to nothing for them to provide downloads to existing owners, because they presumably have the digital distribution infrastructure for new sales. It doesn't make sense for a book publisher to send you new copies after your dog ate your book because postage, ink and paper costs money, and if for whatever reason they have a e-book version, it'll be a pain to authenticate that they actually bought the physical book. None of those excuses work for digital downloads.
Comparing a company that refuses to support a purchase with an expired support term to refusing to save the life of a child? I would argue that refusing to stop the death of a child is not in any way comparable to refusing to go above and beyond on a $13 sale from years ago.
> Similar logic applies here, which is that it costs next to nothing for them to provide downloads to existing owners, because they presumably have the digital distribution infrastructure for new sales.
In any case, hosting archival versions is not free, it incurs a cost, just like printing, mailing, and postage does for a hard copy of a book. The cost is possibly less, but not 0.
If you think there is a threshold for when a company should cover the costs of negligent loss versus not covering those costs, what is it? Why is the cost of shipping a replacement cost of a physical media above that cost, and the cost of hosting a server in perpetuity below that cost?
New sales are for different versions than what he purchased. Filezilla sells a perpetual license with updates for a year. They just keep the most up to date version on the download server and cut off your access after a year.
In order to implement what you are suggesting they would have to build an entire application that knows when your support ended and serve the specific build that you are licensed for, or provide that ability to their CS team. The reality is that the cost of developing and maintaining that minimal functionality are far from free, probably not too dissimilar from the cost of replacing physical copies of books at a unit level, tbh.
While, yes, it would be generous for Filezilla to provide perpetual support and downloads, that is not what was offered or purchased. They provided software, they supported it for a year, they even allow him to use their customer support resources outside of that time.
Under what moral system is there an imperative to do something that is beyond what you originally agreed to in an anonymous purchase?
At the end of the day, all this spilled ink is about a ~$13 license. Sorry, but a years old $13 purchase carries precisely no implied moral imperative for perpetual availability.
>If you think there is a threshold for when a company should cover the costs of negligent loss versus not covering those costs, what is it? Why is the cost of shipping a replacement cost of a physical media above that cost, and the cost of hosting a server in perpetuity below that cost?
To paraphrase your words, "I would argue that refusing to offer 0.09 cents[1] (that's right, less than 1 cent) worth of bandwidth for legacy downloads not in any way comparable to spending $5 (at least) of postage to mail a book"
[1] 9 cents/GB charged by AWS for egress. Actual cost is likely far lower.
Maintaining a perpetual archive for the convenience of those that don't do backups is not part of a typical licensing agreement. It is a nice thing to do, but unless a perpetually accessible hosted file service is what you bought, it is reasonable for the company to stop hosting copies of software that they no longer sell.
Some people might believe differently, and some companies might do it out of the goodness of their hearts (or because they signed up for a permanent liability for hosting)
I absolutely conceded that it is not legally required.
I just don't want to do business with people who think that's an ethical way to do things. The hosting excuse is pathetic. Learn to do your job and it isn't something you need to think about more than once every half decade.
I had to maintain a full build artifact history of my old app. It "just worked" for years and years without thinking twice, and cost a handful of dollars a month for a few TB of build artifacts.
For most apps that aren't continual delivery, it's way fewer artifacts to handle so way less data...a couple dollars a month at most.
Really, what excuse do you have for that other than screwing people who previously trusted you enough to do business with you?
> Really, what excuse do you have for that other than screwing people who previously trusted you enough to do business with you?
The license itself is ~$13 for a perpetual license and a year of support and updates. What expectation should I have that because I spent $13 years ago that the company will support me after my one year support window expires? Presumably, everyone on here knows supporting software isn't free. As you pointed out yourself, the hosting costs aren't free. At a certain point, paying a few dollars per month to host a decade old version of a $13 product that gets downloaded once a year actually is a problem.
Just out of curiosity, what is your plan to host the old versions of your app until 2060, say? Will you setup all that infrastructure again if your current provider goes down? Or is there a time limit that is reasonable to no longer offer downloads for, maybe...
Who exactly is getting screwed by being charged $13 to replace an old version of software with a new version because the client failed to do a backup before nuking an HD for an OS install.
No one is being screwed. This is just one party thinking that they are entitled to perpetual support for a perpetual license, and the other party saying that the license is perpetual and the support ends at 1 year.
> At a certain point, paying a few dollars per month to host a decade old version of a $13 product that gets downloaded once a year actually is a problem.
The few dollars was talking about total cost, not per-version cost.
If we're talking about a single version of filezilla that rarely gets downloaded, the hosting cost is somewhere below a penny per month, possibly actual zero. And they might need to store 25 archival versions total? It's nothing.
> the expectation is that the link keeps working if the company is in business.
It is hard to keep things running when you're changing and experimenting. It's why Google shutters businesses it finds are not growing - they're a maintenance burden and suck up resources, dragging down other efforts. And that's for a company with near-infinite resources. Imagine sole proprietorships.
Someone has to care and devote time and attention to keep it there. At the expense of other opportunities.
Just because Tim Berners-Lee said "cool URIs don't change" doesn't mean it's practical. Almost everything is temporary and dies. It's okay. Not much in life has permanence.
Unreasonable and unrealistic expectation. You pay for a copy, you get a copy. Deal is over unless you have problem with the product in that it doesn't work as advertised or malfunctions.
I was listening to an old edition of the Fraser Cain weekly question/answer podcast earlier where he described this exact thing. I think he said that someone has run the numbers in the context of human survivable travel to nearby stars and on how long we should wait and the conclusion was that we should wait about 600 years.
Any craft for human transport to a nearby star system that we launch within the next 600 years will probably be overtaken before arrival at the target star system by ships launched after them.
I guess there's a paradox in that we'd only make the progress needed to overtake if we are still launching throughout those 600 years and iteratively improving and getting feedback along the way.
Because the alternative is everyone waiting on one big 600-year government project. Hard to imagine that going well. (And it has to be government, because no private company could raise funds with its potential payback centuries after the investors die. For that matter, I can't see a democratic government selling that to taxpayers for 150 straight election cycles either.)
Yes, my understanding is that the 600 year figure was arrived at assuming that there is iterative progress in propulsion technology throughout the intervening years. But at the end of the day, it is just some number that some dude on YouTube said one time (although Fraser Cain is in fact not just some dude, he's a reliable space journalist (and you can take that from me, some dude on the Internet))
I'm fascinated at the number of people on an ostensibly techincal website who don't learn how their equipment works. You've summed up in a few sentences exactly how mine works, but there are dozens of commenters in this thread who appear to be unaware of the basic funcationality of their dishwasher.
All I would add to what you've said is that when my Bosch does include a pre-wash in a cycle, it checks how dirty the water is and only drains the pre-wash water if is dirty. If the dishes haven't caused the water to become dirty, it keeps the same water for the main wash cycle.
Also, I want to expand upon my first paragraph a little: I'm not having a dig at anyone who doesn't understand their dishwasher. I am just venting/observing that the world is filled with all kinds of different people and reminding myself that I shouldn't make assumptions about people as often as I do.
I've had this realisation many times, but it doesn't hurt to have it again. Communicating with people is lot quicker and easier when I remember that.
Yeah, I think there's some interesting related trends involved to. I still feel inclined with every new appliance to read the full manual, but I know not everyone has that kind of time or attention, especially if "I can just watch a YouTube video of it" is an option.
On the other side, you see appliance companies responding to that and shrinking their manuals of useful content because they assume you might just go watch YouTube videos instead. Some of the better ones might even include a QR code or 3 to officially produced YouTube videos, though so far that still seems rare.
Even in this video is the surprise reveal that something that used to be very common in manuals, full cycle timing diagrams, was "hidden" on a data sheet attached inside the door itself. Admittedly, it's great in that case to know that should that model be taken to repair that a repair shop might find that data sheet easily without having to search manufacturers' websites, but on the other hand some of those diagrams would be quite useful to me if I was the user of that machine.
sometimes even the company that made equipment doesn't know how it works.
my dishwasher after few months suddenly instead of filling water and starting wash cycle initiated some kind of fill & drain cycle that went for a while without going into wash mode.
i called in service. they replaced pump, solenoid. talked with manufacturer directly, swapped a couple of main boards. it made dishwasher snap out of it.
few months later it started again. this time i allowed it to do whatever it was doing. after 15 minutes it started to wash.
over the time i noticed that dishwasher does this water cycling every few months and adds extra time to estimated program duration.
about once a year after asking a few questions if sprayer hands/filters/etc are clean, it will add 2 hours to wash cycle.
none of it described in manual, manufacturer service personal and "Factory support" that service talk to know about it (maybe they do by now. they didn't few years ago)
Samsung has both heat pump (the one talked about above) and vented (similar to normal dryers) versions. LG doesn’t have a vented version yet. Condensers are slower than heat pumps, if you don’t have a vent and/or a 240V outlet, heat pump is the way to go. I personally chose a vented one because it was replacing existing machines. In NYC, heat pumps are more popular since a lot of apartments don’t come with vents or 240V (and definitely in the UK where they put the washer/dryer in the kitchen, you also see these all over Japan, all heat pump versions).
It was implicit, at least to my eye, that other explanation which was being offered a counterpoint was the grandfather comment.
For clarity, I will include both here:
The two explanations for increased adult fragility are:
forgotoldacc> Parents shelter their children too much and have created adults that have additional allergies as a result of lack of childhood exposure
rocqua> Increased sheltering of children has allowed more of the fragile ones to survive to adulthood, increasing the number of fragile adults we observe today.
What’s this increase in fragile adults you’re talking about? Are you sure it’s a real thing? Are you aware how staggeringly high rates of institutionalisation were in most western countries in the early to mid 20th century? And then there were the adults who were considered ‘sickly’. Like, _fainting_ wasn’t considered dramatically abnormal behaviour until quite recently.
A lot of people who today would be considered to have a condition which is entirely treatable by doing (a), taking (b), not doing/avoiding (c), etc, would, a century ago, have just been kind of deemed broken. Coeliac disease is a particularly obvious example; it was known that there was _something_ wrong with coeliacs, but they were generally just filed under the 'sickly' label, lived badly and died young.
(And it generally just gets worse the further you go back; in many parts of the world vitamin deficiency diseases were just _normal_ til the 20th century, say).
>the USPS faced financial difficulties, posting losses of $6.5 billion in fiscal 2023 and $8 billion in fiscal 2024, leading to a request for $14 billion in government assistance.
It would appear that the USPS operates at a loss at these prices
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