Sam's Club Photo Rant

Actually, I have had all of Tom's issues before with various machines.

The worst was when they first rolled out the machines at the local Home Depot. They laid off all of the human robots except the one who is supposed to watch the self checkout line. So, there was no choice other than the self checkout. The process of weighing items to verify that they are in the bag was not well thought out, but I discovered a work around: step on the scale as you toss the item in the bag; it is looking for a change in weight, but it isn't too discriminating about how much weight. They may have changed the programming more recently, so I don't know if this still works.

 

Funny. I realized about halfway through the first page that I wanted to comment on something and was planning on apologizing for going slightly off-topic. By this point in the thread, I can see that no apology is necessary (the self-service scanners love me, BTW).

Anyway, I'm in the process of preparing to get married and I have been amused by the fact that wedding photographers charge both for their services, but then charge an extra fee for the copyright release (and the ability to make reprints). I realized at one point that it was possible to pay a lot of money to have someone come out and take photographs, but then for these photographs never to see the light of day unless I paid them more money. It seems to me that this is the only business model that allows something this silly. It's like you take your car in to get some problem fixed and the mechanic fixes the problem, you pay them for fixing the problem, but they won't release the car back to you unless you pay them an additional fee.

 

But in the cases you mentioned, I'm allowed to use the program you wrote, right? And the store owner was allowed to keep the window in his store? I understand that IP laws are wacky (and probably need to be fixed), but in a weird way, it actually makes sense to me that I wouldn't be able to resell the program you wrote (even if I paid for it) or that the store owner shouldn't be able to use the artist's work on his letterhead. I'm not saying that it has to be this way or that this is the best way to do it, but just that it sort of makes sense. In my view, the proper parallel situation for the photography would be if you didn't even let me use the program you wrote (i.e. I hired you to write the program, you wrote it, but then I had not right to use it) or if the artist painted the window, but then didn't allow the store owner to put the window in his store.

In the case of hiring a photographer for the wedding, the thing that's remarkable to me is that I don't automatically have the right to have pictures of the wedding even for my own use. It just seems funny that the right to reprint the images for one's own use isn't something that's a basic part of all packages.

 

Ok, I'll try some. If I immediately spit it back out, I'll just blame you for it

 

On the topic of spitting:

My oldest cat, BooBoo (My aunt calls him ZooZoo), has odd tastes. His favorite cat food is the canned Friskies Salmon Pate. He refuses to eat anything else.

However, there is one component of the Salmon he also refuses to eat. So when I'm feeding him, every once in awhile he'll pause, turn his head to one side, and PTOO. Then he resumes eating

It's uncanny how this reminds me of a cowboy movie where the cowboy aims at a spitoon and hawks one up