That might force them into providing better warranty support: if my fridge isn't working any more, I'm going to stop paying them money. Obviously subscription-free becomes another tier of status, but if by paying a monthly fee I get 24 hour maintenance support for fear of losing my sub revenue, well...
There's already parallels around this to an extent. I pay Apple money every month for storage, ad-free TV, music and games, confident my data is my data. As a result, they might have a customer for life, because the alternatives are awful in comparison even if I pay less per month or overall for them.
I have very good experience of Samsung’s warranty support for a washing machine, actually.
The thing that makes corporations give better warranty support is not more money. Giving them more money does not incentivize them to suddenly give better service or make higher quality goods. The thing is consumer protection laws. In the EU, consumer goods have a minimum two-year warranty period. This incentivizes higher quality manufacturing.
That’s one way cables are often routed next to railroad tracks. A concrete trench with concrete covering slabs. I’m sure it’s more expensive than just digging, though it serves to make the cables serviceable.
Terrorists-attacking-elevator is something that comes up multiple times in Gundam 00. Probably as an allusion to 9/11 (resistance to a growing superpower), but the in-universe explanations are pretty interesting too.
The elevators were developed for cheap space travel but unsurprisingly centralized the world's economic development around the owner countries. ie the other countries became increasingly reliant on them and the world segmented into (three) blocs. But the owner countries became increasingly protective / paranoid, leading to cold-war era developments where each of them secretly researched fancy space weapons and stockpiled more and more military assets around the elevators.
So some of the attacks were by poorer countries lashing out. Some attacks were to expose the military assets being hidden in the elevator (outlawed by intl treaty). Though most were probably just excuses to show things like giant robots vs death star.
That's odd. The first episode was the only one I watched and I don't remember that bit. It might have grabbed me.
A terrorist attack on a space elevator is a pivotal plot point in Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, which IMHO is a better work in basically every way than Asimov's magnum opus.
> That's odd. The first episode was the only one I watched and I don't remember that bit. It might have grabbed me.
I think it's the first episode of season 2 or 3, not the first season. I remember someone else mentioning it, but I've only seen season 1 and don't recall that either.
If it was never patented then whoever produced it clearly didn't care about preventing competition. And Behringer products all have a Behringer logo clearly printed on them, so there is no attempt to deceive anybody.
I like Behringer products, but the story of the Centaur clone is a joke. By all means they attempt to deceive: no "Behringer" clearly visible, the centaur drawing is almost a copy, the colour, the knobs and switch distribution...
And half their pedals look exactly like Boss gear.
The version without a prominent Behringer logo is no longer sold (possibly there was legal action; I don't know the details). I agree that the old version was potentially misleading. The current version has a prominent Behringer logo. Knob and switch distribution is a functional part of the user interface.
AFAIK, Behringer received some threats, and they redesigned the case. But if you order the new redesign "Centara" they will mix your order somehow and send you the first almost exact copy they made.
The functional distribution of knobs are the one that use Boss pedals and others: common case size, knobs at top, switch under a big cover. The wide format with a naked switch offset that the Centaurs have (both original Klon and Behringer clone) is functionally pointless.
Criminals can’t count on #1 if they hold the keys on them when they get arrested.
>were previously stored in unhosted cryptocurrency wallets whose private keys the defendant had in his possession. Those funds (the Defendant Cryptocurrency) are presently in the custody of the U.S. government.
The UK may not have been enabling this guy in particular, but he's not exactly the only one who has been stashing ill-gotten gains in London real estate. Apparently crooks still think it's a great deal despite some of them getting it seized once in a while.
