Ale vs Lager only refers to the type of yeast and the temperature at which it was fermented. It has nothing to do with the color/opacity. While most ales the typical beer drinker encounters are darker than lagers, there are plenty of examples of lager styles that are very dark (e.g. doppelbock). Also, color does not always tell you how much flavor the beer has. It is just an indicator of which flavors you are likely to have more of, and even then, there are ways of making a really dark, yet relatively flavorless beer. For example, a beer that used a lot of "black patent malt" but is otherwise light on barley malt and hops would be as black as a Guinness but as flavorful as a Keystone Light.
Facebook clearly does not know much about the pharmaceutical industry or the current debates going on in the industry about the role social media plays. I do consulting work for the pharmaceutical industry and have done a lot of work specifically with manufacturer sponsored web portals, use of social media, and drug safety in general. I can't say one way or another whether any of these companies should take down their pages, but there is very real risks involved with keeping them open. This has nothing to do with conspiracies about silencing bad publicity or any of the other crackpot theories out there. This has everything to do with the FDA and not getting fined or sued into oblivion. Here are some of the issues facing the pharma industry and social media:
Adverse Events: This is the official title for "when bad shit happens while taking our drug." This could be anything from a runny nose to death. Mostly only the more serious stuff even gets reported, but regardless, if something negative happens while taking a drug, the manufacturer wants to know about it. Not only that, but the FDA requires regular reporting on this. However, there are certain qualifications for an Adverse Event to be official. You need a drug, a patient, an event, and an indication (what you were taking it for). Without all 4, you don't have a reportable adverse event. The issue here is that the pharma company is worried about AE's reported over the internet in chatrooms and forums and what their responsibility is around this. The FDA has not yet made this crystal clear, but everyone seems to agree that you need to follow-up on any events posted to your own sites. For independent sites, you should be doing monitoring, but you don't need to report to the FDA unless the event is reportable (meets the 4 criteria). Due to the anonymity of online posts, this is usually impossible.
Off Label Use of Drugs: Off label use means the drug is being used for an indication that the FDA has not approved the drug for. This is very common with cancer treatments or any other areas where treatments are often experimental in nature. The drug may be approved by the FDA for treatment of diabetes, but a doctor may find that it is effective against a certain cancer. The FDA may approve this use in the future, but until that time, the manufacturer is not allowed to promote this type of use (Pfizer has been fined billions for violating this in the past few years). If people promote off label on 3rd party sites, then that's fine, but it cannot appear on a manufacturer owned site. Even though it's Facebook, it still counts as the manufacturers site.
Fair Balance: You know when you watch a commercial for a drug and after telling you all about the wonderful things a really fast voice tells you about all of the side effects and what not that might not be so great? That's called fair balance and it is required by the FDA. You see it on all of their web sites too. Anytime a promotional claim is made about a drug, fair balance must be provided. This has made twitter use very tricky since fair balance statements usually go way beyond 140 characters. If someone posts on the manufacturer's facebook page that the drug did something wonderful for them, then there needs to be fair balance attached. That can be tricky if you you're the manufacturer, since not only do you have to provide fair balance for your statements, but also for everyone else's.
The FDA has yet to provide guidance on social media: This is the biggest thing of all and it is why each of the points I made above are an issue. The rules of the FDA were not created when social media existed and they still have not been interpreted into social media by the FDA themselves. I'm sure there are some reasonable exceptions or changes that could be made given the current use of the medium overall, but we just don't know for sure yet. Most companies are cautiously making their own best guesses on what they feel is reasonable and still keeps them covered, but these
Memory leaks and not enough memory is the main reason. Instability and bugs are another (Mine crashed and rebooted itself this morning and then froze when it came back up. 2 battery pulls later and its finally working again). Every time you install or update an app you need to reboot as well (I have an update ready, but am putting it off until I know i won't be needing my phone - a.k.a. Bedtime) But the worst part about reboots is how long they take. From the time you pull the battery to the time it is usable can take TEN FUCKING MINUTES! That's unacceptable on a desktop OS, why would it ever be acceptable on phone!?!? If I only had to reboot once in a blue moon, maybe I wouldn't care as much, but as stated above, rebooting is a way of life with this thing.
Yes, Blackberries are VERY good for business. I currently use one and it's the reason I first got a Blackberry three years ago. I stayed with Blackberry because my eventual employer was a Blackberry only company and issued a free Blackberry to all employees, including covering all service costs (voice, text, data w/ tethering). I am up for an upgrade this month and for the first time in the history of my company, I have the option to choose something other than a Blackberry. I never thought this would happen since my company is so obsessed with security. I plan on picking Android, but I also have the options for an iPhone. Why? Because people don't just use smartphones for business anymore. There are only 3 functions that I use on my Blackberry that are truly business only: E-mail, Calendar, Contacts. The rest are both personal and business. I have a demand for both business and personal use of a smartphone and I don't want to carry around two devices to do it. My job is very mobile with loosely defined hours. I can't just arrive at work with my business phone and leave work with my personal phone. Practically, it would seem stupid to carry two smartphones for business and personal, yet up until my company began offering non-Blackberries, many people did. I would ask them why. Their response, "I have a need for a good smartphone in my personal life and the Blackberry I was issued just doesn't cut it." I have always made due, maximizing the personal functions more than anyone else I knew with a Blackberry, but the use cases for a smartphone are becoming increasingly focused on personal and not business. My business uses have remained flat. I want more out of my phone and RIM is not providing more. They haven't even released anything new for my carrier since my last upgrade, which was to a phone that had already been out for a year.
Businesses are listening more and more to their users and less to their IT department about smartphones. Users want to use iPhones and Androids. The IT departments are finding ways to make that work. My company uses the Good for Enterprise client on the Androids and iPhones. It essentially sandboxes all of the business functions from the rest of the phone. While colleagues have said that the client doesn't really live up to its name, they are much happier with their non-blackberries. The article is right, RIM just doesn't get it. There is no separation between Business and Consumer. They should be making the great consumer phones that are also great business phones. iPhones and Androids are great consumer phones but they are not ideal business phones. That means there is opportunity for RIM. But unless, they come out with a something like this soon, they will continue to lose existing customers to those who make great consumer phones.
Agreed. I bought a 2003 Porsche Boxster with only 10k miles on it for $20k. Expensive to maintain, though. It is also my daily driver, and an extremely enjoyable daily driver at that. However, I likely couldn't daily drive a Ferrari or Lamborghini.
Cell phones seemed to be standardizing, so why not laptops? Most phones now have standardized on mini or micro usb for charging where in the past, every phone that came out, even ones by the same manufacturer, all seemed to be different. Maybe that's because most cellphones don't last much more than a year and the power supply outlives the phone?
And as one poster has already stated above, Dell has been pretty consistent with their power supplies for a while now. I've actually amassed quite the collection across multiple models of Dell laptop I've had since 2004. All are interchangeable. Although I should note that the voltage has gone up in the newer power supplies, but the lower voltage ones will still charge your battery, just a little slower. While the manufacturers may miss being able to charge you a huge margin on replacements, they may like the reduction in costs from outsourcing the power supplies to generic manufacturers. I'm sure they already do outsource, but those generic manufacturers can offer the things at much lower prices since the number of different models they need to produce will be much lower.
You read my mind. This is what ASCAP and BMI are for. Yes YouTube could probably pay a license fee to cover all videos uploaded, but you could also put responsibility on the user to pay the fees. By ASCAP's current enforcement methods, it would involve reaching out to the performer or venue and requesting the necessary fees. If they decline, lawyers get involved. As far as I know, this is a civil issue, not a criminal one. Why are we making more laws when we already have a system in place?
When I was in school at Villanova University (2002 - 2006), when we finally got wireless on campus, we had to install special software in order to authenticate on the wireless network. Once you connect to the wireless, you are prompted for your campus network user id and password. If you were hard wired, authentication was a non-issue. I ran my first Linux box in my dorm room alongside my school issued Windows laptop and never had any issues connecting via ethernet. Just moved into my dorm, plugged in, powered up. However, at the time, WiFi was not ubiquitous and the vast majority of students were running Windows (Business school and engineering school were issued Windows laptops, liberal arts, science, nursing, communications, etc. fended for themselves). Nowadays, Macs are much more popular and we have smartphones, so the demand for more diverse device support has probably required the school to move to a new solution. Hopefully something more like a hotspot login or just go with WPA2.
Every time this issue comes up, I see several posters make the claim that they are using the same amount of data whether they are using just their phone or tethering to your laptop. Then I sit there dumbfounded as this crap gets modded insightful and repeated over and over again. From personal experience using a Blackberry Storm and tethering for work purposes when necessary, the argument is complete crap.
While using just my phone, most of the websites I pull up are mobile versions that are a fraction of the size of the full versions. Other apps I use that go out to the internet pull the information in a mobile friendly format as well. The only real data hog on the phone would be Google Maps. I don't know what the data size difference between the mobile app and the normal site are, so lets just call those equal.
While tethering my laptop, not only am I downloading the full websites, but I may have multiple tabs open at once. I am connected to my corporate VPN, which has it's own data overhead, my e-mail client is open (Lotus Notes -- and yes my life sucks as a result) which given the aforementioned suckiness of Notes likes to synchronize massive amounts of data just so I can read my e-mail and calendar. My e-mails are also much more data heavy. While I receive the same e-mails on my phone, the giant attachments are rarely downloaded on the phone. These of course get downloaded regularly while tethered. I am much more likely to watch YouTube videos or Netflix while tethered (as long as the signal is good). YouTube is only occasional on the phone (for when I really want to watch now) and non-existent on the phone, and not just because there is no Netflix app for BB, but because I don't have much desire to watch a full length feature film on my tiny phone, especially if I could just whip out my laptop. And then there's the other random huge data downloads I might attempt on my laptop but would never do on my phone such as large software downloads (say an operating system). And while my laptop is doing all of this, my phone is still using it's own data in background.
Furthermore, it's not just the tethering the telecoms are worried about, it's the Wi-Fi hotspot features. Can you honestly say that having up to five devices connected to your phone uses the same amount of data as just your phone?
While eventually, we may get to point where all of the laptop exclusive functions I will happily do on my phone, we just aren't there yet. Don't get me wrong though, I would love for Verizon to include tethering as part of my data plan. The only reason I use tethering is because my company pays for it. And I'm not saying this advocacy group doesn't have a sound argument. All I'm saying is that this "it's the same data" argument is complete crap, and if you want to be taken seriously in this debate, you need to find a better argument.
This analogy really made my head hurt. If you put the internet together as a single country, then you would have to subtract what you attributed to the internet from the CO2 emissions of each country. This then begs a couple questions. First, how have they defined the internet? Is it just the major backbone pieces run by the telecoms? Or does it also include every web server? But if you include every web server, what is your definition of web server, since all computers with an internet connection are part of the internet. Which then brings us to the next big questions: What percent of CO2 emissions in any given country is accounted for by "the internet"? If the percentage is quite large, then if you subtract it out and lump it together with every other country, then of course it will be the "biggest country". It's such a bazaar analogy that is is almost completely useless.
By "management consultants" I presume we're talking about recruitment agencies
You're definition of "management consultants" is pretty narrow. In this case, it may be a recruitment agency, but more likely, these are consultants who work for a management consulting company (e.g. Deloitte, Accenture, PwC to name the big boys, but there are plenty of boutiques) who have been contracted by the poster's company for a relatively short term project or need. I should know, I am one. They are also not necessarily "The Bobs" from Office Space who are just there to clean house. While I have been on projects where we are looking to improve efficiency, laying off people is not our decision, nor is it even our goal. Even if having someone leave was in the best interests of the client, the issue is way too sensitive for the consultants to even hint at with that individual. My guess is that the poster has become chummy with the consultants and they were simply offering some free career advice. If they were actually hinting that this guy should leave because it would be good for their client/project, then a certainly hope they don't work for the same consultancy that I do.
Given that, you are right that management consultants would say this, because in the world of consulting, it is generally better to switch companies than to move up internally. This, however, does not necessarily hold true for non-consultants. The reason this is in consulting, is because the work is all project based. You work on one project for anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple years and then you move on to the next project. The next project may be with an entirely different team in an entirely different subject area. So what's the difference if your next project is with your current employer or a new employer? Sure there are a lot of benefits to staying where you are, but often, moving to another company nets you a big pay increase. Plus, since this is common practice, you might even be working with some of your old colleagues at the new company. Consulting companies have always had an incestuous relationship with one another. In fact, most consulting companies have an open door policy, where if you leave, you are welcome to come back any time. I have colleagues who have left the company for a competitor and then come back a few years later, netting 20% pay increases and promotions each time.
So yes, in consulting, moving to a new company is often the best way to go, but that is due to the general nature of the consulting industry and may not be a good indicator for someone outside of consulting.
If they are trying to pass this state by state, they won't get much headway. While MS may be big, they are not the most influential corp in most states. Do you think most other big corporations would like this law? Almost every big corp in the US has some manufacturing in China, therefore, almost every big corp in the US could be sued by Microsoft. So do we really think that Michigan, home of GM, Ford and Chrysler will want this to pass? Who do you think has more pull in Michigan, the auto companies or MS? Sure MS might have pretty good pull in the state of Washington, and probably some good connections in California, but beyond that, there are companies in every state that have much more influence in the state government than MS that would be negatively affected by the law.
I don't think anyone disagrees about what exactly Microsoft has been doing, but you seem to think that this is a legitimate practice. To rephrase your post, Microsoft is collecting data on what people search for and what they click (if they have opted in) for search engines other than their own (in this case Google). They then take this information to improve their own results. This probably isn't illegal (IANAL), but it just seems a little skeevy. It says to me that MS does not have enough confidence in its own search algorithms to let it do it's thing and provide users with better results than the competition. It says that if I want the most relevant search results, I should go to Google, because MS trusts those results better than their own.
The thing is, I don't get it. This tactic is not a very good long term strategy, as all they can do is play catch-up to Google, but can never equal or surpass them. In fact, if they truly had a better algorithm than Google, this would only degrade their results. If MS really wants to surpass Google, they need a better algorithm. The funny thing is, they have been focusing their efforts on getting people to adopt despite the algorithm. The people who use bing are most likely using it because IE defaults to it (in multiple ways). Verizon FiOS and Comcast use Bing for their 404 redirects (I'm sure there a plenty of others). Verizon has locked Bing as the default search on all Blackberries and on the Samsung Fascinate (these defaults, by the way, can not be changed without rooting). Even with all of these forced defaults, people still choose Google when they have a choice. And it's not just us nerds here on Slashdot. My wife, a non-techy, was pissed when everything on her brand new Samsung Facsinate (Running the Android OS) had Bing search defaulted and integrated into everything. I hear other friends with varying degrees of tech saviness complain about the shittiness of Bing and ask me how to change the default search on their browser. I would even say MS is making it worse for themselves (PR wise) because of the way people feel they are having Bing forced upon them. If there is anything MS should steal from Google, it is their methods for success. Google got where it is because it provided the most relevant results. No advertising, just word of mouth.
The things that courts will be interested in are not necessarily the the profile information or the friend list as a whole. They will be more interested in your activity. Whose wall do you post on frequently? Who have you been chatting with, and what about? If you use any location based services with a tie in to facebook, they can tell where you were or weren't at a given time. While you may be able to create some misleading information by having fake conversations and have other people use your account from your house while you're out robbing a bank, this would show a much higher level of sophistication. In fact, I would guess that any criminal sophisticated enough to go through the trouble of staging their facebook account would be sophisticated enough to not use facebook at all for fear that their profile could be used against them in court.
I recently watched "The Facebook Obsession" on CNBC and they talked about how police departments are increasingly using Facebook to locate and bring in suspects. It has proven to be very effective, and that is without the need for a subpoena. This is all information that is publicly available. Again, any fugitive worth their salt would cut off all communication, change behavior patterns, and get out of Dodge; thus, negating any benefit to checking their facebook profile.
I imagine it also has to do with how terrible the web browser is on most Blackberries. I haven't used the new Blackberry OS 6 browser that uses WebKit, but every BB running OS 5 and later has a slow clunky browser that often fails to render pages correctly. When I receive an e-mail on my BB that requires immediate action be taken on a website, sometimes I might try on the phone itself, but half the time I do, the page has issues loading or login doesn't work or some other javascript error keeps things from working the way they are suppose to. Knowing this, I usually don't even bother attempting this on the phone. When browsing, I generally try to stick to mobile sites for this same reason. Another point too, is that it seems there is still a slim majority of BB users that have the Curve 83XX model, which is pretty outdated by modern smartphone standards. Users of these devices rarely use the web browsers or use any of the other "smart" features of the phone other than e-mail, SMS and maybe BBM.
You're example of a phone call vs. YouTube download is irrelevant in a net neutrality discussion. One of the biggest problems in the net neutrality debate is people not understanding exactly what net neutrality is. In your example, you are comparing types of data (voice data vs. streaming video). If this was the debate, then I would agree with you. Voice is more important that video streaming, and the data should be prioritized as such so that the quality of a phone call is not affected by someone else's YouTube activity. Unfortunately, that is not what the argument is about. This is about Verizon prioritizing VCast downloads over YouTube downloads unless YouTube pays more money, thus creating a two-tiered internet, where having more money gives you an advantage over the smaller players. This is can be very anti-competitive, as a start-up could be throttled into oblivion.
There are much more likely reasons why YouTube HD is not working well for you. First, how old is your computer? Of the 3 computers I have, the newest has no problem with streaming HD, while the older ones don't fare as well. This comes down to CPU and/or GPU. Second, are you using wireless? b, g or n? How's your signal strength? If you are using b, then you are maxed at 11Mb/s, while your FiOS connection could be as high as 25Mb/s down (at least that's what I have) and that doesn't even take into account that fact that rarely will you ever actually download something at those maximum connection speeds. These all lie with you the user and your equipment. Not Verizon's. Now if none of the above apply, then yes, it might be Verizon throttling, but if you think about it, Verizon has way to much competition in the high speed internet market to be intentionally slowing down the most popular video streaming site in the world. If all you do is watch YouTube, then in your point of view, FiOS is not as fast as they claim, and you would be switching to cable pretty fast.
I think this is getting at the root of the problem. What is considered "computing" and what is just everyday life that just so happens to be computer aided. The boring basics like word processing and spreadsheets are essential tools in our modern society, but it's basic to almost every subject these days. English papers are all typed on a computer. I'm sure most math classes can find a way to incorporate spreadsheets regularly. I would not be surprised if kids are using PowerPoint during class presentations. If you don't know how to use the tools offered in an office suite, then you need to learn fast. My freshmen year of college, everyone in the business school was required to take "Intro to MIS". MIS standing for Management Information Systems. As an MIS major, the naming of the class was a bit insulting given that it was really Excel and Access for dummies (of course, in this crowd, just saying I was an MIS major is enough to be ostracized). Nevertheless, that course was ridiculously important. If you did not know how to put together a remotely complex spreadsheet, you would not be able to keep up in the rest of your business or math classes.
All of the above should be distinctly different from what I would consider a modern "Computing" class. A Computing class could cover any number of area, whether it was programming, networking/data comm, current tech trends, hardware, and much more. But the basics are the basics, and without them, you don't have a good foundation to learn new stuff. For me, all of the basics were required courses at some point throughout my formal education. Here are few solutions:
a) Make the basics part of required courses, the earlier the better, but market it right. Basically, you don't call it a "computer" course. Then you can offer real computer courses as electives that have much more interesting course material.
b) The basics are integrated into the your normal courses (math, English, science, etc.). You may still want to teach typing as a dedicated course, but not sure if that's really necessary anymore now that kids are using computers so much from very early ages. Computer courses that are offered as electives, now look much more appealing, because kids don't associate them with the boring basics.
Mid 20's here. It was drilled into my head up through high school that you always put 2 spaces after periods. The cited source of all of these rules was the MLA formatting guide (there are multiple guides, each with different rules, but my district used MLA). So I decided to go back to the source to see exactly what they say. Seems they have changed their mind on this one since I was in school, but are still pretty non-committal either way. This makes me think back to the dreaded "Senior Paper" everyone had to write during our Senior English class. This was supposed to be the culmination of everything we learned in English since elementary school, including proper formatting. MLA formatting was being enforced and counted towards your grade. The teacher would literally bust out a ruler to check spacings, margins, tabs, everything. I had to plead to my English teacher that MS Word was automatically putting in a page break at the end of one of my pages due to a new paragraph starting on the 2nd to last line and no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to stop. She let it pass only because my paper was already well within the page number requirements, and the extra line breaks were not a way for me to cheat.
Regardless of the official rule, it would be very hard for me to not put in two spaces after a period, just because I am so conditioned to do it.
If you want drama and cash, then I say NASA should do a reality TV show. And no, I don't mean just start filming and interviewing the actual astronauts. No one wants to watch those boring nerds. I mean take your classic reality TV personalities, put them in a rocket and send them to space. Think "The Real World" or "Survivor" but IN SPACE! I figure you can put in one or two nerdy types who are really excited about the opportunity to be in space and are interested in the workings of a space station (make it one guy one girl, who the (nerd) audience hope will get together) and mix in some unintelligent, yet good looking whack-jobs who are in it for the prize money and the camera time. Watch as they piss off the space geeks by getting in the way of experiments and hooking up in the cargo bay. While everyone is rooting for the two geeks to hook up, the guy geek really wants to bang one of the hot whack-jobs, who are obviously not interested and already are hooking up with the other hot whack-jobs. You don't have to be a space fan to want to watch this. I generally hate reality TV, but I'd totally watch just for the great space station footage (and who are we kidding, the drama too).
Did anyone else read the title and think that the latest Superman comic involves Superman battling a bank executive who is trying to foreclose on someone's home? I was sitting here thinking, great, now comic books have to pander to the economic crisis, and what a boring story. Preventing foreclosure does not require super human abilities. I'm picturing Superman in a library studying mortgage law. Think of the suspense! Then I read the summary and feel like an idiot. I still think my version is more amusing.
...but every Mac I've ever bought has had install discs for the OS and any additional applications in the box. They are rarely needed, since Time Machine does a fantastic job of providing a backup that I can restore to, but they are there.
That in itself might be worth the so-called "Apple Tax".
Every Dell I have ever bought has had install discs for the OS and any additional applications in the box. How do you like them "Apple Taxes"?
Incorrect. If the buyer legitimately is not aware that he/she is buying a counterfeit product, both the buyer AND the manufacturer lose. In this scenario, the buyer has decided that he/she want's the manufacturer's product and is willing to pay the full retail price for said good. At this point, we have an agreement between the buyer and the manufacturer (with possible retailers and wholesalers in between) that the buyer will walk away with the product and the manufacturer will receive compensation for that product. However, the products in stock at the retailer, are counterfeit. The retailer bought them on the cheap from someone else (i.e. Not the manufacturer or any other parties within the manufactuerer's supply chain. The buyer is given a counterfeit product (which is of lower quality than the real thing) and the manufacturer receives nothing. Money that was intended by the buyer to find it's way to the manufacturer has been re-routed to the shady retailer and counterfeit supplier.
Many are making this argument, but it is not necessarily this cut and dry. The counterfeiting industry is not just the people buying fake watches and knock-off hand bags from the guy on the street. It also includes slipping counterfeit product into the same supply chain as the real products. In this case, people think they are buying the real thing are really getting a fake, AND paying the premium price. As an example, imagine a retailer receives a shipment of hand bags. The retailer ordered real Coach hand bags from the wholesaler, but what arrived are actually fakes. If the retailers are astute enough to spot that they are fakes, then the retailer can take it up with the wholesaler. But what if they don't spot the fakes, and sell it to the customer, who also wasn't astute enough to spot the fake (and if they are buying from a legitimate retailer, why should they suspect?). Yes, the retailer still made their money, and the wholesaler still made their money, but the manufacturer (or anyone upstream of the wholesaler) has lost money. Furthermore, if the customer never realizes it's a fake and the fake product does not live up to the quality of the real thing, then the customer's perception of that brand has been diluted. The customer is thinking, "Coach bags are supposed to be high quality, but the stitching on mine fell apart after a month. I'm not longer going to believe the hype and look for something that really is high quality." As a result, next time that customer buys a hand bag, they go to Louis Vuitton instead.
My example above is just normal consumer products, but pharmaceuticals is a whole different ball of wax. Once again, the consumer thinks they are getting legitimate product. Maybe they bought it from an online pharmacy that sounded legit, but wasn't. Or worse, like above, the counterfeit product infiltrated the legitimate supply chain, and now retail pharmacies are unknowingly distributing counterfeit product to customers. This becomes dangerous and possibly life threatening. The counterfeit could have less of the active ingredient (or none) and could contain other substances that are dangerous by themselves or have a bad reaction to concurrent medications. This is not simply branded vs. generic.
Now, I don't dismiss the parent's example. Clearly, he knew it was counterfeit going into the deal, and he was OK with that. That's fine, and probably doesn't hurt the economy much. Like he said, he wouldn't have paid the $4k for the real thing anyway, but to think that that is all that counterfeiting is, is not an accurate picture.
The thing is, a lot of the way we preserve other things is simply because we couldn't do any better given the age of the artifact or the practicality. Some artifacts are too fragile to actually experience. Go to Thomas Edison's workshop and they will show you the early prototypes for sound recording/playback, but they will not record something and play it back on those devices (at least not the very earliest ones). They will, however, playback a digital copy of what is considered the very first recorded audio (Edison's "Mary had a little lamb") so you get an idea of the quality. But think about what more you could learn by physically handling the equipment, going through the process of recording something and playing it back. You would have a greater understanding of how far we have come given the issues inherent with those first prototypes. These are things you would not get from a simple look and listen demo.
We can do a better job at preserving things if we start before they become antiques. Find a good working example of the tech now while it is still common and begin preserving it so that in the future, the only example we have is a half broken console discovered in someone's attic. Cars are a great example of what can be done. I was flipping through the channels the other day and Discovery had a show on about a guy who restores cars. He had done a restoration of an 1960's (I think) Chevy Impala and was taking the customer out for the first drive. The woman commented as they drove along that she felt like she was being transported back to her teenage years, when everyone would cruise around (a la American Graffiti). It's not just the visual, it's the full immersion. The feel of the car for both the driver and the passenger. The smell of the interior and the emissions. The sound of the engine. The best way to teach someone about the history of something is to fully immerse them in it.
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Ale vs Lager only refers to the type of yeast and the temperature at which it was fermented. It has nothing to do with the color/opacity. While most ales the typical beer drinker encounters are darker than lagers, there are plenty of examples of lager styles that are very dark (e.g. doppelbock). Also, color does not always tell you how much flavor the beer has. It is just an indicator of which flavors you are likely to have more of, and even then, there are ways of making a really dark, yet relatively flavorless beer. For example, a beer that used a lot of "black patent malt" but is otherwise light on barley malt and hops would be as black as a Guinness but as flavorful as a Keystone Light.
Facebook clearly does not know much about the pharmaceutical industry or the current debates going on in the industry about the role social media plays. I do consulting work for the pharmaceutical industry and have done a lot of work specifically with manufacturer sponsored web portals, use of social media, and drug safety in general. I can't say one way or another whether any of these companies should take down their pages, but there is very real risks involved with keeping them open. This has nothing to do with conspiracies about silencing bad publicity or any of the other crackpot theories out there. This has everything to do with the FDA and not getting fined or sued into oblivion. Here are some of the issues facing the pharma industry and social media:
Adverse Events: This is the official title for "when bad shit happens while taking our drug." This could be anything from a runny nose to death. Mostly only the more serious stuff even gets reported, but regardless, if something negative happens while taking a drug, the manufacturer wants to know about it. Not only that, but the FDA requires regular reporting on this. However, there are certain qualifications for an Adverse Event to be official. You need a drug, a patient, an event, and an indication (what you were taking it for). Without all 4, you don't have a reportable adverse event. The issue here is that the pharma company is worried about AE's reported over the internet in chatrooms and forums and what their responsibility is around this. The FDA has not yet made this crystal clear, but everyone seems to agree that you need to follow-up on any events posted to your own sites. For independent sites, you should be doing monitoring, but you don't need to report to the FDA unless the event is reportable (meets the 4 criteria). Due to the anonymity of online posts, this is usually impossible.
Off Label Use of Drugs: Off label use means the drug is being used for an indication that the FDA has not approved the drug for. This is very common with cancer treatments or any other areas where treatments are often experimental in nature. The drug may be approved by the FDA for treatment of diabetes, but a doctor may find that it is effective against a certain cancer. The FDA may approve this use in the future, but until that time, the manufacturer is not allowed to promote this type of use (Pfizer has been fined billions for violating this in the past few years). If people promote off label on 3rd party sites, then that's fine, but it cannot appear on a manufacturer owned site. Even though it's Facebook, it still counts as the manufacturers site.
Fair Balance: You know when you watch a commercial for a drug and after telling you all about the wonderful things a really fast voice tells you about all of the side effects and what not that might not be so great? That's called fair balance and it is required by the FDA. You see it on all of their web sites too. Anytime a promotional claim is made about a drug, fair balance must be provided. This has made twitter use very tricky since fair balance statements usually go way beyond 140 characters. If someone posts on the manufacturer's facebook page that the drug did something wonderful for them, then there needs to be fair balance attached. That can be tricky if you you're the manufacturer, since not only do you have to provide fair balance for your statements, but also for everyone else's.
The FDA has yet to provide guidance on social media: This is the biggest thing of all and it is why each of the points I made above are an issue. The rules of the FDA were not created when social media existed and they still have not been interpreted into social media by the FDA themselves. I'm sure there are some reasonable exceptions or changes that could be made given the current use of the medium overall, but we just don't know for sure yet. Most companies are cautiously making their own best guesses on what they feel is reasonable and still keeps them covered, but these
Memory leaks and not enough memory is the main reason. Instability and bugs are another (Mine crashed and rebooted itself this morning and then froze when it came back up. 2 battery pulls later and its finally working again). Every time you install or update an app you need to reboot as well (I have an update ready, but am putting it off until I know i won't be needing my phone - a.k.a. Bedtime) But the worst part about reboots is how long they take. From the time you pull the battery to the time it is usable can take TEN FUCKING MINUTES! That's unacceptable on a desktop OS, why would it ever be acceptable on phone!?!? If I only had to reboot once in a blue moon, maybe I wouldn't care as much, but as stated above, rebooting is a way of life with this thing.
Yes, Blackberries are VERY good for business. I currently use one and it's the reason I first got a Blackberry three years ago. I stayed with Blackberry because my eventual employer was a Blackberry only company and issued a free Blackberry to all employees, including covering all service costs (voice, text, data w/ tethering). I am up for an upgrade this month and for the first time in the history of my company, I have the option to choose something other than a Blackberry. I never thought this would happen since my company is so obsessed with security. I plan on picking Android, but I also have the options for an iPhone. Why? Because people don't just use smartphones for business anymore. There are only 3 functions that I use on my Blackberry that are truly business only: E-mail, Calendar, Contacts. The rest are both personal and business. I have a demand for both business and personal use of a smartphone and I don't want to carry around two devices to do it. My job is very mobile with loosely defined hours. I can't just arrive at work with my business phone and leave work with my personal phone. Practically, it would seem stupid to carry two smartphones for business and personal, yet up until my company began offering non-Blackberries, many people did. I would ask them why. Their response, "I have a need for a good smartphone in my personal life and the Blackberry I was issued just doesn't cut it." I have always made due, maximizing the personal functions more than anyone else I knew with a Blackberry, but the use cases for a smartphone are becoming increasingly focused on personal and not business. My business uses have remained flat. I want more out of my phone and RIM is not providing more. They haven't even released anything new for my carrier since my last upgrade, which was to a phone that had already been out for a year.
Businesses are listening more and more to their users and less to their IT department about smartphones. Users want to use iPhones and Androids. The IT departments are finding ways to make that work. My company uses the Good for Enterprise client on the Androids and iPhones. It essentially sandboxes all of the business functions from the rest of the phone. While colleagues have said that the client doesn't really live up to its name, they are much happier with their non-blackberries. The article is right, RIM just doesn't get it. There is no separation between Business and Consumer. They should be making the great consumer phones that are also great business phones. iPhones and Androids are great consumer phones but they are not ideal business phones. That means there is opportunity for RIM. But unless, they come out with a something like this soon, they will continue to lose existing customers to those who make great consumer phones.
Agreed. I bought a 2003 Porsche Boxster with only 10k miles on it for $20k. Expensive to maintain, though. It is also my daily driver, and an extremely enjoyable daily driver at that. However, I likely couldn't daily drive a Ferrari or Lamborghini.
Cell phones seemed to be standardizing, so why not laptops? Most phones now have standardized on mini or micro usb for charging where in the past, every phone that came out, even ones by the same manufacturer, all seemed to be different. Maybe that's because most cellphones don't last much more than a year and the power supply outlives the phone?
And as one poster has already stated above, Dell has been pretty consistent with their power supplies for a while now. I've actually amassed quite the collection across multiple models of Dell laptop I've had since 2004. All are interchangeable. Although I should note that the voltage has gone up in the newer power supplies, but the lower voltage ones will still charge your battery, just a little slower. While the manufacturers may miss being able to charge you a huge margin on replacements, they may like the reduction in costs from outsourcing the power supplies to generic manufacturers. I'm sure they already do outsource, but those generic manufacturers can offer the things at much lower prices since the number of different models they need to produce will be much lower.
You read my mind. This is what ASCAP and BMI are for. Yes YouTube could probably pay a license fee to cover all videos uploaded, but you could also put responsibility on the user to pay the fees. By ASCAP's current enforcement methods, it would involve reaching out to the performer or venue and requesting the necessary fees. If they decline, lawyers get involved. As far as I know, this is a civil issue, not a criminal one. Why are we making more laws when we already have a system in place?
When I was in school at Villanova University (2002 - 2006), when we finally got wireless on campus, we had to install special software in order to authenticate on the wireless network. Once you connect to the wireless, you are prompted for your campus network user id and password. If you were hard wired, authentication was a non-issue. I ran my first Linux box in my dorm room alongside my school issued Windows laptop and never had any issues connecting via ethernet. Just moved into my dorm, plugged in, powered up. However, at the time, WiFi was not ubiquitous and the vast majority of students were running Windows (Business school and engineering school were issued Windows laptops, liberal arts, science, nursing, communications, etc. fended for themselves). Nowadays, Macs are much more popular and we have smartphones, so the demand for more diverse device support has probably required the school to move to a new solution. Hopefully something more like a hotspot login or just go with WPA2.
Mod the parent up.
Every time this issue comes up, I see several posters make the claim that they are using the same amount of data whether they are using just their phone or tethering to your laptop. Then I sit there dumbfounded as this crap gets modded insightful and repeated over and over again. From personal experience using a Blackberry Storm and tethering for work purposes when necessary, the argument is complete crap.
While using just my phone, most of the websites I pull up are mobile versions that are a fraction of the size of the full versions. Other apps I use that go out to the internet pull the information in a mobile friendly format as well. The only real data hog on the phone would be Google Maps. I don't know what the data size difference between the mobile app and the normal site are, so lets just call those equal.
While tethering my laptop, not only am I downloading the full websites, but I may have multiple tabs open at once. I am connected to my corporate VPN, which has it's own data overhead, my e-mail client is open (Lotus Notes -- and yes my life sucks as a result) which given the aforementioned suckiness of Notes likes to synchronize massive amounts of data just so I can read my e-mail and calendar. My e-mails are also much more data heavy. While I receive the same e-mails on my phone, the giant attachments are rarely downloaded on the phone. These of course get downloaded regularly while tethered. I am much more likely to watch YouTube videos or Netflix while tethered (as long as the signal is good). YouTube is only occasional on the phone (for when I really want to watch now) and non-existent on the phone, and not just because there is no Netflix app for BB, but because I don't have much desire to watch a full length feature film on my tiny phone, especially if I could just whip out my laptop. And then there's the other random huge data downloads I might attempt on my laptop but would never do on my phone such as large software downloads (say an operating system). And while my laptop is doing all of this, my phone is still using it's own data in background.
Furthermore, it's not just the tethering the telecoms are worried about, it's the Wi-Fi hotspot features. Can you honestly say that having up to five devices connected to your phone uses the same amount of data as just your phone?
While eventually, we may get to point where all of the laptop exclusive functions I will happily do on my phone, we just aren't there yet. Don't get me wrong though, I would love for Verizon to include tethering as part of my data plan. The only reason I use tethering is because my company pays for it. And I'm not saying this advocacy group doesn't have a sound argument. All I'm saying is that this "it's the same data" argument is complete crap, and if you want to be taken seriously in this debate, you need to find a better argument.
This analogy really made my head hurt. If you put the internet together as a single country, then you would have to subtract what you attributed to the internet from the CO2 emissions of each country. This then begs a couple questions. First, how have they defined the internet? Is it just the major backbone pieces run by the telecoms? Or does it also include every web server? But if you include every web server, what is your definition of web server, since all computers with an internet connection are part of the internet. Which then brings us to the next big questions: What percent of CO2 emissions in any given country is accounted for by "the internet"? If the percentage is quite large, then if you subtract it out and lump it together with every other country, then of course it will be the "biggest country". It's such a bazaar analogy that is is almost completely useless.
You're definition of "management consultants" is pretty narrow. In this case, it may be a recruitment agency, but more likely, these are consultants who work for a management consulting company (e.g. Deloitte, Accenture, PwC to name the big boys, but there are plenty of boutiques) who have been contracted by the poster's company for a relatively short term project or need. I should know, I am one. They are also not necessarily "The Bobs" from Office Space who are just there to clean house. While I have been on projects where we are looking to improve efficiency, laying off people is not our decision, nor is it even our goal. Even if having someone leave was in the best interests of the client, the issue is way too sensitive for the consultants to even hint at with that individual. My guess is that the poster has become chummy with the consultants and they were simply offering some free career advice. If they were actually hinting that this guy should leave because it would be good for their client/project, then a certainly hope they don't work for the same consultancy that I do.
Given that, you are right that management consultants would say this, because in the world of consulting, it is generally better to switch companies than to move up internally. This, however, does not necessarily hold true for non-consultants. The reason this is in consulting, is because the work is all project based. You work on one project for anywhere from a couple weeks to a couple years and then you move on to the next project. The next project may be with an entirely different team in an entirely different subject area. So what's the difference if your next project is with your current employer or a new employer? Sure there are a lot of benefits to staying where you are, but often, moving to another company nets you a big pay increase. Plus, since this is common practice, you might even be working with some of your old colleagues at the new company. Consulting companies have always had an incestuous relationship with one another. In fact, most consulting companies have an open door policy, where if you leave, you are welcome to come back any time. I have colleagues who have left the company for a competitor and then come back a few years later, netting 20% pay increases and promotions each time.
So yes, in consulting, moving to a new company is often the best way to go, but that is due to the general nature of the consulting industry and may not be a good indicator for someone outside of consulting.
If they are trying to pass this state by state, they won't get much headway. While MS may be big, they are not the most influential corp in most states. Do you think most other big corporations would like this law? Almost every big corp in the US has some manufacturing in China, therefore, almost every big corp in the US could be sued by Microsoft. So do we really think that Michigan, home of GM, Ford and Chrysler will want this to pass? Who do you think has more pull in Michigan, the auto companies or MS? Sure MS might have pretty good pull in the state of Washington, and probably some good connections in California, but beyond that, there are companies in every state that have much more influence in the state government than MS that would be negatively affected by the law.
I don't think anyone disagrees about what exactly Microsoft has been doing, but you seem to think that this is a legitimate practice. To rephrase your post, Microsoft is collecting data on what people search for and what they click (if they have opted in) for search engines other than their own (in this case Google). They then take this information to improve their own results. This probably isn't illegal (IANAL), but it just seems a little skeevy. It says to me that MS does not have enough confidence in its own search algorithms to let it do it's thing and provide users with better results than the competition. It says that if I want the most relevant search results, I should go to Google, because MS trusts those results better than their own. The thing is, I don't get it. This tactic is not a very good long term strategy, as all they can do is play catch-up to Google, but can never equal or surpass them. In fact, if they truly had a better algorithm than Google, this would only degrade their results. If MS really wants to surpass Google, they need a better algorithm. The funny thing is, they have been focusing their efforts on getting people to adopt despite the algorithm. The people who use bing are most likely using it because IE defaults to it (in multiple ways). Verizon FiOS and Comcast use Bing for their 404 redirects (I'm sure there a plenty of others). Verizon has locked Bing as the default search on all Blackberries and on the Samsung Fascinate (these defaults, by the way, can not be changed without rooting). Even with all of these forced defaults, people still choose Google when they have a choice. And it's not just us nerds here on Slashdot. My wife, a non-techy, was pissed when everything on her brand new Samsung Facsinate (Running the Android OS) had Bing search defaulted and integrated into everything. I hear other friends with varying degrees of tech saviness complain about the shittiness of Bing and ask me how to change the default search on their browser. I would even say MS is making it worse for themselves (PR wise) because of the way people feel they are having Bing forced upon them. If there is anything MS should steal from Google, it is their methods for success. Google got where it is because it provided the most relevant results. No advertising, just word of mouth.
The things that courts will be interested in are not necessarily the the profile information or the friend list as a whole. They will be more interested in your activity. Whose wall do you post on frequently? Who have you been chatting with, and what about? If you use any location based services with a tie in to facebook, they can tell where you were or weren't at a given time. While you may be able to create some misleading information by having fake conversations and have other people use your account from your house while you're out robbing a bank, this would show a much higher level of sophistication. In fact, I would guess that any criminal sophisticated enough to go through the trouble of staging their facebook account would be sophisticated enough to not use facebook at all for fear that their profile could be used against them in court. I recently watched "The Facebook Obsession" on CNBC and they talked about how police departments are increasingly using Facebook to locate and bring in suspects. It has proven to be very effective, and that is without the need for a subpoena. This is all information that is publicly available. Again, any fugitive worth their salt would cut off all communication, change behavior patterns, and get out of Dodge; thus, negating any benefit to checking their facebook profile.
I imagine it also has to do with how terrible the web browser is on most Blackberries. I haven't used the new Blackberry OS 6 browser that uses WebKit, but every BB running OS 5 and later has a slow clunky browser that often fails to render pages correctly. When I receive an e-mail on my BB that requires immediate action be taken on a website, sometimes I might try on the phone itself, but half the time I do, the page has issues loading or login doesn't work or some other javascript error keeps things from working the way they are suppose to. Knowing this, I usually don't even bother attempting this on the phone. When browsing, I generally try to stick to mobile sites for this same reason. Another point too, is that it seems there is still a slim majority of BB users that have the Curve 83XX model, which is pretty outdated by modern smartphone standards. Users of these devices rarely use the web browsers or use any of the other "smart" features of the phone other than e-mail, SMS and maybe BBM.
You're example of a phone call vs. YouTube download is irrelevant in a net neutrality discussion. One of the biggest problems in the net neutrality debate is people not understanding exactly what net neutrality is. In your example, you are comparing types of data (voice data vs. streaming video). If this was the debate, then I would agree with you. Voice is more important that video streaming, and the data should be prioritized as such so that the quality of a phone call is not affected by someone else's YouTube activity. Unfortunately, that is not what the argument is about. This is about Verizon prioritizing VCast downloads over YouTube downloads unless YouTube pays more money, thus creating a two-tiered internet, where having more money gives you an advantage over the smaller players. This is can be very anti-competitive, as a start-up could be throttled into oblivion.
There are much more likely reasons why YouTube HD is not working well for you. First, how old is your computer? Of the 3 computers I have, the newest has no problem with streaming HD, while the older ones don't fare as well. This comes down to CPU and/or GPU. Second, are you using wireless? b, g or n? How's your signal strength? If you are using b, then you are maxed at 11Mb/s, while your FiOS connection could be as high as 25Mb/s down (at least that's what I have) and that doesn't even take into account that fact that rarely will you ever actually download something at those maximum connection speeds. These all lie with you the user and your equipment. Not Verizon's. Now if none of the above apply, then yes, it might be Verizon throttling, but if you think about it, Verizon has way to much competition in the high speed internet market to be intentionally slowing down the most popular video streaming site in the world. If all you do is watch YouTube, then in your point of view, FiOS is not as fast as they claim, and you would be switching to cable pretty fast.
I think this is getting at the root of the problem. What is considered "computing" and what is just everyday life that just so happens to be computer aided. The boring basics like word processing and spreadsheets are essential tools in our modern society, but it's basic to almost every subject these days. English papers are all typed on a computer. I'm sure most math classes can find a way to incorporate spreadsheets regularly. I would not be surprised if kids are using PowerPoint during class presentations. If you don't know how to use the tools offered in an office suite, then you need to learn fast. My freshmen year of college, everyone in the business school was required to take "Intro to MIS". MIS standing for Management Information Systems. As an MIS major, the naming of the class was a bit insulting given that it was really Excel and Access for dummies (of course, in this crowd, just saying I was an MIS major is enough to be ostracized). Nevertheless, that course was ridiculously important. If you did not know how to put together a remotely complex spreadsheet, you would not be able to keep up in the rest of your business or math classes.
All of the above should be distinctly different from what I would consider a modern "Computing" class. A Computing class could cover any number of area, whether it was programming, networking/data comm, current tech trends, hardware, and much more. But the basics are the basics, and without them, you don't have a good foundation to learn new stuff. For me, all of the basics were required courses at some point throughout my formal education. Here are few solutions:
a) Make the basics part of required courses, the earlier the better, but market it right. Basically, you don't call it a "computer" course. Then you can offer real computer courses as electives that have much more interesting course material.
b) The basics are integrated into the your normal courses (math, English, science, etc.). You may still want to teach typing as a dedicated course, but not sure if that's really necessary anymore now that kids are using computers so much from very early ages. Computer courses that are offered as electives, now look much more appealing, because kids don't associate them with the boring basics.
Mid 20's here. It was drilled into my head up through high school that you always put 2 spaces after periods. The cited source of all of these rules was the MLA formatting guide (there are multiple guides, each with different rules, but my district used MLA). So I decided to go back to the source to see exactly what they say. Seems they have changed their mind on this one since I was in school, but are still pretty non-committal either way. This makes me think back to the dreaded "Senior Paper" everyone had to write during our Senior English class. This was supposed to be the culmination of everything we learned in English since elementary school, including proper formatting. MLA formatting was being enforced and counted towards your grade. The teacher would literally bust out a ruler to check spacings, margins, tabs, everything. I had to plead to my English teacher that MS Word was automatically putting in a page break at the end of one of my pages due to a new paragraph starting on the 2nd to last line and no matter what I did, I couldn't get it to stop. She let it pass only because my paper was already well within the page number requirements, and the extra line breaks were not a way for me to cheat.
Regardless of the official rule, it would be very hard for me to not put in two spaces after a period, just because I am so conditioned to do it.
If you want drama and cash, then I say NASA should do a reality TV show. And no, I don't mean just start filming and interviewing the actual astronauts. No one wants to watch those boring nerds. I mean take your classic reality TV personalities, put them in a rocket and send them to space. Think "The Real World" or "Survivor" but IN SPACE! I figure you can put in one or two nerdy types who are really excited about the opportunity to be in space and are interested in the workings of a space station (make it one guy one girl, who the (nerd) audience hope will get together) and mix in some unintelligent, yet good looking whack-jobs who are in it for the prize money and the camera time. Watch as they piss off the space geeks by getting in the way of experiments and hooking up in the cargo bay. While everyone is rooting for the two geeks to hook up, the guy geek really wants to bang one of the hot whack-jobs, who are obviously not interested and already are hooking up with the other hot whack-jobs. You don't have to be a space fan to want to watch this. I generally hate reality TV, but I'd totally watch just for the great space station footage (and who are we kidding, the drama too).
Did anyone else read the title and think that the latest Superman comic involves Superman battling a bank executive who is trying to foreclose on someone's home? I was sitting here thinking, great, now comic books have to pander to the economic crisis, and what a boring story. Preventing foreclosure does not require super human abilities. I'm picturing Superman in a library studying mortgage law. Think of the suspense! Then I read the summary and feel like an idiot. I still think my version is more amusing.
...but every Mac I've ever bought has had install discs for the OS and any additional applications in the box. They are rarely needed, since Time Machine does a fantastic job of providing a backup that I can restore to, but they are there. That in itself might be worth the so-called "Apple Tax".
Every Dell I have ever bought has had install discs for the OS and any additional applications in the box. How do you like them "Apple Taxes"?
Incorrect. If the buyer legitimately is not aware that he/she is buying a counterfeit product, both the buyer AND the manufacturer lose. In this scenario, the buyer has decided that he/she want's the manufacturer's product and is willing to pay the full retail price for said good. At this point, we have an agreement between the buyer and the manufacturer (with possible retailers and wholesalers in between) that the buyer will walk away with the product and the manufacturer will receive compensation for that product. However, the products in stock at the retailer, are counterfeit. The retailer bought them on the cheap from someone else (i.e. Not the manufacturer or any other parties within the manufactuerer's supply chain. The buyer is given a counterfeit product (which is of lower quality than the real thing) and the manufacturer receives nothing. Money that was intended by the buyer to find it's way to the manufacturer has been re-routed to the shady retailer and counterfeit supplier.
Many are making this argument, but it is not necessarily this cut and dry. The counterfeiting industry is not just the people buying fake watches and knock-off hand bags from the guy on the street. It also includes slipping counterfeit product into the same supply chain as the real products. In this case, people think they are buying the real thing are really getting a fake, AND paying the premium price. As an example, imagine a retailer receives a shipment of hand bags. The retailer ordered real Coach hand bags from the wholesaler, but what arrived are actually fakes. If the retailers are astute enough to spot that they are fakes, then the retailer can take it up with the wholesaler. But what if they don't spot the fakes, and sell it to the customer, who also wasn't astute enough to spot the fake (and if they are buying from a legitimate retailer, why should they suspect?). Yes, the retailer still made their money, and the wholesaler still made their money, but the manufacturer (or anyone upstream of the wholesaler) has lost money. Furthermore, if the customer never realizes it's a fake and the fake product does not live up to the quality of the real thing, then the customer's perception of that brand has been diluted. The customer is thinking, "Coach bags are supposed to be high quality, but the stitching on mine fell apart after a month. I'm not longer going to believe the hype and look for something that really is high quality." As a result, next time that customer buys a hand bag, they go to Louis Vuitton instead.
My example above is just normal consumer products, but pharmaceuticals is a whole different ball of wax. Once again, the consumer thinks they are getting legitimate product. Maybe they bought it from an online pharmacy that sounded legit, but wasn't. Or worse, like above, the counterfeit product infiltrated the legitimate supply chain, and now retail pharmacies are unknowingly distributing counterfeit product to customers. This becomes dangerous and possibly life threatening. The counterfeit could have less of the active ingredient (or none) and could contain other substances that are dangerous by themselves or have a bad reaction to concurrent medications. This is not simply branded vs. generic.
Now, I don't dismiss the parent's example. Clearly, he knew it was counterfeit going into the deal, and he was OK with that. That's fine, and probably doesn't hurt the economy much. Like he said, he wouldn't have paid the $4k for the real thing anyway, but to think that that is all that counterfeiting is, is not an accurate picture.
The thing is, a lot of the way we preserve other things is simply because we couldn't do any better given the age of the artifact or the practicality. Some artifacts are too fragile to actually experience. Go to Thomas Edison's workshop and they will show you the early prototypes for sound recording/playback, but they will not record something and play it back on those devices (at least not the very earliest ones). They will, however, playback a digital copy of what is considered the very first recorded audio (Edison's "Mary had a little lamb") so you get an idea of the quality. But think about what more you could learn by physically handling the equipment, going through the process of recording something and playing it back. You would have a greater understanding of how far we have come given the issues inherent with those first prototypes. These are things you would not get from a simple look and listen demo.
We can do a better job at preserving things if we start before they become antiques. Find a good working example of the tech now while it is still common and begin preserving it so that in the future, the only example we have is a half broken console discovered in someone's attic. Cars are a great example of what can be done. I was flipping through the channels the other day and Discovery had a show on about a guy who restores cars. He had done a restoration of an 1960's (I think) Chevy Impala and was taking the customer out for the first drive. The woman commented as they drove along that she felt like she was being transported back to her teenage years, when everyone would cruise around (a la American Graffiti). It's not just the visual, it's the full immersion. The feel of the car for both the driver and the passenger. The smell of the interior and the emissions. The sound of the engine. The best way to teach someone about the history of something is to fully immerse them in it.