I was sitting here, as usual, trying to figure out digital photography, when it occurred to me that it might be possible to manufacture electronic devises with a self-destruct feature. The chips could be programed so that the devise would work fine up to a certain point and then go kaflooy.
It could be based on time, such as a year and a day, or amount of use, such as 1001 on-off cycles.
That way, it could konk out after the warrenty was out and you would have to buy a new one. It's sort of like the planned obsolesence that used to be built into cars, except in the computer age, failure could be more controlled. It used to be that car parts like generators, carburators, starters, voltage regulators, etc. would begin messing up at about 50,000 miles so that by the time you got to 70,000 or so, you were spending so much on them, it was cheaper to trade it in on a new car. Then the Japanese came along and messed up the playhouse by showing that cars could last 200,000 miles without much trouble at all. Why not electronic stuff? I seem to remember my video camera going haywire soon after the warrenty ran out, my metal dectector did the same, and now my digital camera seems to be doing the it too. I have gotten almost no use out of the ***@@@!!!~~~ thing, and now with fresh batteries and the power supply hooked up, it turns it's self off. The computer can't find it and the one set of pictures that I got into the computer, months ago, won't transfer to a web site or email. I think the auto-destruct switch has gone off. I'm thinking film.
Howard