I strongly suspect that the US cc helps a great deal.
It isn't this way across the board(obviously, for 'free'/ad-supported services your credit card won't save you at all, and some retailers enforce geographic shipping restrictions); but it is often possible to purchase as an American, so long as you have a US issued cc, even if your IP at that moment suggests that you are abroad. Unless it absolutely can't be avoided(because of some regional licensing deal or something), why would a merchant who sells to Americans want to piss off American business travellers or Americans with the means to travel for pleasure? Both are likely to be better-than-average customers.
What youre talking about there is corruption, not socialism. Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal are corrupt to the core; states like Germany, UK etc are not. Hence the 'PIGS' states cant control their economies, since half of it is black market. It's got nothing to do with socialism, and everything to do with common sense. All european states have the same consumer protections and they dont all have their hands in the till.
It is rather ironic that the places that more or less invented political science as a discipline in the west(Greece) and reasonably competent large-scale administration(Rome) are now so feckless about it; but they are.
If it were a 'socialism' thing, you'd really expect much of northwestern europe to be living in corrupt, dystopian hellholes and bribing one another with bags of dried herring passed under the table. Apparently, that hasn't panned out...
The trouble is that the properties that make a DRM system actually useful(ie. some degree of robustness, enough information about their environment to 'rights manage' in some granular way, and so on) require fairly extraordinary powers over the client system.
The 'Encrypted Media Extension' itself doesn't; because it defines almost nothing(one 'baseline' encryption mechanism that is little more than a toy obfuscation system, along with standardization of some interfaces for asking the non-joke DRM module questions); but it is designed to plug into DRM systems that do, which is the only reason that it has any support at all.
Unless it is 'sufficiently secure that there would be the possibility of legal action in the event of bypassing it.', no go.
Unless it 'securely identifies a type of device', no go(browser UA is explicitly noted as not being good enough)
Unless it allows 'identification of the context in which the content appears', no go.
And 'The ability to pass further restrictions to the graphics rendering path if available'.
A set of requirements like that is both a fairly stock summary of what a DRM system should be capable of to be worthy of the name and a set of demands that certainly aren't going to be met in any non-tivoized OSS implementation, and wouldn't even be particularly easy to meet on something that isn't a closed box.
Essentially, once the pointless little baseline case is immediately ignored by anybody who would ever actually use the system(since, if you don't want DRM, you won't want the hassle, and if you do, the baseline is far to pitiful to be worth anything), EME is a 'standard' for 'how to use javascript to talk to an entire black-box video rendering mechanism, upon which there will be enough demands that it will almost certainly be platform specific'. Pretty much exactly the same situation as having the video player stuck in a blob of Silverlight or Flash, except that (because this is HTML5, man) the wicked 'browser plugin' has been renamed a 'content decryption module'(which, as the spec notes, 'CDM implementations may return decrypted frames or render them directly, and 'CDM may use or defer to platform capabilities'). In all but name, it's the definition of a few javascript APIs for interacting with a black-box video path more or less identical(if not worse, given the more robust support for invoking the hardware-protected 'platform capabilities' now present on a lot of consumer gear, which something like Flash was always too dubiously competent to do in any serious way) to the plugin-based video player arrangements of the past.
As long as there is no mention of space marines they should do fine.
One does have to wonder if the folks at Games Workshop just hang out with their legal department for a bit whenever they need to release some new flavor material for the Ordo Hereticus...
Even if you can't justify a full rocking-it-old-school-with-our-own-private-leased-lines-from-everywhere-to-everywhere, you'd still hope that(given the truly deplorable state of the various devices in important places), you could spring for a logically isolated network running on top of your cheap internet connection.
VPNs and such add additional complexity, and aren't invulnerable by any means; but there is a middle ground between 'physically private network' and 'on the internet', which at least allows you to reduce the number of externally visible devices(and make it so that the externally visible devices are dedicated network security gear, ideally built by people who know about network security, rather than dedicated industrial control devices built by people who know about industrial controls and...less... about security).
'G-shock', eh? Concerned about the effects of explosive overpressure on your timepieces are we? Now, how about you come with me and we'll have a little talk about why that might be...
What I like is that they are fighting over something that is purely a creation of ICANN: there is nothing magic about DNS that makes domain names globally authoritative(and, unlike with fiat currency, it isn't even legally troublesome to make your own, if you can get anybody to accept them), ICANN just runs the nameservers that people give a damn about.
If they wanted to take this out to the marketplace and settle it like men, they could just each provide an IP and let their respective supporters modify their hosts files or local DNS records according to their preferences, as consumers, about which ronpaul.com offered a superior ronpaul.com product and/or service.
It's like watching two gold-bugs fighting over a $100 'federal reserve note'...
This is nothing but a $250,000 shakedown by his alleged "supporters".
"Back in 2007 we put our lives on hold for you, Ron, and we invested close to 10,000 hours of tears, sweat and hard work into this site at great personal sacrifice."(emphasis mine).
They are actually quite honest: they invested in him(after all, altruism would have been unethical), and now they want their ROI. This isn't a 'friendship' thing, this is a 'VCs fighting with their start-up's CEO over stock options' thing.
Being a libertarian is like being a Highlander. There Can Be Only One.
In the case of a trademark dispute, the disputants are brought to the 'marketplace of ideas' where they compete until only one is left alive, at which point he absorbs the market share of the others.
Everyone(except the courageous souls at VHEMT) wants to defy birth trends:
Across more or less the whole of the first world, birth rates are at or below replacement levels. Even in some of the less fucked 'developing' nations it turns out that 'not breeding like animals until you die' is a fairly popular lifestyle choice among people who have sufficient autonomy and access to medical resources to be able to make it. Shocking, I know.
However, the world isn't exactly overflowing with economic plans for downsizing gracefully. Whether it's an ad-hoc social arrangement(children caring for elderly parents because it's their Filial Duty) or a state administered program(Medicare), most plans for keeping old people from being ground up for soylent green involve having young workers around, ideally in larger numbers than the old people.
Since domestic birth rates make that...problematic... this leads to a certain amount of pressure to keep the working population up by other means.
If we want to go with your (arguably somewhat crass and reductionistic) characterization, it goes like this:
1. Democrats favor immigration because immigrants skew more democratic than wrinkly reactionary old people do.
2. Retiring boomers don't have a whole lot of choice; because their parents fucked like bunnies; but they didn't, so if they want to keep the death panels away, they either need to really squeeze their children, or find a substitute for the ones that they didn't have. They don't have to like it(and many don't); but them's the breaks.
I have some...potentially startling... news for you about the efficiency and thoroughness of immigration enforcement procedures worldwide.
This hardly means that the US is at the top of the class; but the only mechanism with a genuinely notable success rate is to be so squalid and miserable at home that nobody even tries to jump the fence...
It's more akin to saying that anybody can write if they want to(subject only to some limits on broadcast power); but that getting published is your own problem.
With wifi systems, there are really two different problems, because of the two major choke-points:
1. The speeds that available technology let you wring out of the slices of RF spectrum you are allowed.
2. The speed of whatever internet connection(s) you've purchased to connect the thing to.
Problem 1 is the really fundamentally nasty one. Physics gives you some hard limits, silicon vendors give you some rather tighter soft limits(but at least they raise them every few years) and whiny TV broadcasters and cellular telcos keep you from expanding your slices of spectrum.
Problem 2, unless you are really in the sticks, is much more amenable to pricing-based solutions: it isn't horribly difficult to throttle bandwidth per-device, or do captive-portal authentication, so you can make fairly granular decisions about how much of your cake you want to have, and how much you want to eat. Have you determined that some amount of 'free' internet access is good for local business/a human right/a public convenience that local taxpayers want, just like having the grass mowed at the local park/whatever? Ok, provide unauthenticated access to that amount of bandwidth per device. Do you find that some users of your free service would prefer to use it much more heavily(to the exclusion of a home ISP, say, rather than just at the coffee shop or in the park)? Sounds like you need an authenticated non-free tier that charges more in order to buy more bandwidth to provide to paying customers.
If you are over-subscribed at the RF level, you are pretty much doomed, at least until better silicon or more spectrum become available; but over-subscription at the ISP pipe level is much more fundamentally solvable.
I suspect that they don't know that and are, instead, approaching the problem through some sort of horrible caricature of naive Bayesian induction:
"The whole system is a magical black box that I don't understand. However, I have connected to 'the wifi' at home, work, starbucks, and the airport, on numerous occasions and in numerous locations. Almost every time I connect to 'the wifi', I obtain internet access. Therefore, 'the wifi' must provide internet access, and an FCC proposal to 'expand the wifi' must be a proposal to provide internet access!"
The same reasoning could also be used to demonstrate that you can obtain free potable water just by connecting a pipe to a sink and then shoving it into the ground(but, conveniently, also obtain access to a sewage line by connecting a pipe to a toilet and shoving it into the ground. How do they not get mixed up? Magic!); but so it goes...
Used to live in a city with "free wifi". It was horrendously slow because everybody used it and most still paid a normal provider.
Given that use of the relevant ISM bands is minimally restricted, and not charged for or sold exclusively, in most of the US(sorry, suckers), every city has 'free wifi' in the sense that the FCC is actually proposing to expand... It's just that a few of them also decided to put up APs and then connect them to something.
I suppose we nerds need to step up and take some of the blame:
We've been so industrious about our networking duties that when the noobs see an ethernet jack or an SSID they just go and assume that it will lead them to the bounteous lolcats and porn of the internet...
All jokes(but not all jokers, alas) aside, WTF is wrong with these 'journalists'? Reporting 'FCC proposes additional wifi spectrum' as 'FCC proposes free internets for the masses!' is about as conceptually confused as reporting 'Staples offers 2-for-the-price-of-1 sale on copier paper' as 'Staples, Amazon, New York Times take sides over plan to slash print media prices by half!'.
Seriously, I'm not expecting these guys to not fuck up something actually tricky, just to make the basic conceptual distinction between the price and availability of a transmission channel and the price and availability of what is transmitted over the channel...
This is tangential to your overall point; but Amazon's strategy seems to be not no advertising; but rather advertising a new way to buy Amazon stuff to existing Amazon customers. You see some chatter about the e-ink models(though less now, since they aren't trying to sell an entire product category to the non-techies); but the tablets are largely invisible unless you go to amazon.com, at which point you'll see references to the things all over the place.
Given the reports about Amazon's negligible margins on the hardware, and their aggressive re-skinning and integration with their own store of stock Android, it seems likely that they mostly care about taking existing Amazon customers and turning them into better Amazon customers, while the other players are more interested in moving units across the board.
The question is whether or not it's a marketing strategy. Was someone at Microsoft wise enough to say "Hey, Apple and Nintendo made headlines by limiting supply..."?
It could also be an OEM-relationship thing: The PC OEMs are largely at MS' mercy; but if MS makes it clear that they are cutting everyone else out of the Windows-on-tablets action entirely, that would presumably inspire the OEMs to do everything in their power to bring their A game to Android for tablets, along with bread-and-butter traditional desktop and notebook PCs(not that this would be their preferred strategy; but if MS wanted to muscle them out of tablets, they wouldn't have too much choice).
If Microsoft wants to avoid that, they must ensure that there is still room for the OEMs to move enough product that cooperation is more rewarding than defection(for desktop/notebook win32 cases, MS has nearly unlimited leverage, are they going to ship ReactOS or something?; but Android vs. 'Metro'-on-tablet is much less clear). If they are trying to make room for their frenemies, it makes sense for them to ship a polished device agressively(to scare them into getting off their asses and building decent products); but not necessarily in huge quantity(so that the OEMs can move their stock as well and, if they don't fuck it up, take over more of the market when Intel does their next silicon revision).
I stopped wearing a watch outside of work recently, for the same reason. However, no one is allowed to bring cell phones, 2-way pager, cameras, or anything that can transmit or connect to a computer. So I wear a simple Casio watch to work and typically take it off when I get home. I'd love to go to a smart watch like Pebble that can connect to my phone, display alerts, play music, etc however I couldn't wear it to work.
Oh, I don't dispute the general point, Linux is a bit of a pig by embedded standards(albeit a very convenient pig, since it can remain so familiar even on fairly tiny systems or very large ones); but any slowness in the Playbook's boot is likely to be the fault of whatever RIM has heaped on top of QNX, since it's actually a very punchy machine by RIM's historical standards(and substantially more powerful than the Pi: higher clocks, twice the cores and RAM, ARMv7 vs. v6, etc).
Surely if it's been shrinking all this time then you could have the same story every day: "ozone hole smallest size since $date". Has it grown occasionally for some reason?
For reasons that are sufficiently messy that I certainly couldn't do them justice(and there really isn't any point in copy/pasting a pretend understanding from wikipedia and just wasting space) ozone levels vary considerably over time, both because of natural seasonal weather patterns and because of changes in the presence of various ozone-depleting synthetic compounds.
My understanding is that trends on atmospheric concentration of more or less all of the really nasty ozone-depleting compounds have been positive since regulation went into effect; but that the size and shape of the ozone hole has been a great deal more chaotic from season to season(shape counts, for our purposes, because ozone thinning over the antarctic is a bad sign; but the number of epidemiologists who care about penguin melanoma is limited, while ozone thinning over Australia is directly troublesome).
Some companies will be surprisingly helpful(so long as it's kept to discussion, not actual parts shipped) about your older gear if the notes in their file on you suggest that the reason you have older gear from them is because you buy a boatload of their stuff every year and this particular item is from the boat 4-5 years ago.
Others will be less surprisingly helpful for a per-incident fee for taking your call at all.
(There is also an edge case, that I've only seen once or twice: If you bought the cheapo warranty; but the product is new enough that their high rolling customers still have it under the Serious Classy Gold Enterprise Warranty, and you can convince them that you've found a real problem, rather than just fucked up, you are suddenly a valuable guinea pig who might save them some trouble with people they still have obligations to, rather than just a panhandling nuisance.)
The one detail(unsurprising; but not...exactly...made obvious in Brookstone's documentation or in their "Only @ Brookstone" branding) is that this little toy comes from our friends on the Pacific Rim at Guangzhou Fantasia Creation Toys Co. Ltd.
Slashdot Mirror
I strongly suspect that the US cc helps a great deal.
It isn't this way across the board(obviously, for 'free'/ad-supported services your credit card won't save you at all, and some retailers enforce geographic shipping restrictions); but it is often possible to purchase as an American, so long as you have a US issued cc, even if your IP at that moment suggests that you are abroad. Unless it absolutely can't be avoided(because of some regional licensing deal or something), why would a merchant who sells to Americans want to piss off American business travellers or Americans with the means to travel for pleasure? Both are likely to be better-than-average customers.
What youre talking about there is corruption, not socialism. Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal are corrupt to the core; states like Germany, UK etc are not. Hence the 'PIGS' states cant control their economies, since half of it is black market.
It's got nothing to do with socialism, and everything to do with common sense. All european states have the same consumer protections and they dont all have their hands in the till.
It is rather ironic that the places that more or less invented political science as a discipline in the west(Greece) and reasonably competent large-scale administration(Rome) are now so feckless about it; but they are.
If it were a 'socialism' thing, you'd really expect much of northwestern europe to be living in corrupt, dystopian hellholes and bribing one another with bags of dried herring passed under the table. Apparently, that hasn't panned out...
The trouble is that the properties that make a DRM system actually useful(ie. some degree of robustness, enough information about their environment to 'rights manage' in some granular way, and so on) require fairly extraordinary powers over the client system.
The 'Encrypted Media Extension' itself doesn't; because it defines almost nothing(one 'baseline' encryption mechanism that is little more than a toy obfuscation system, along with standardization of some interfaces for asking the non-joke DRM module questions); but it is designed to plug into DRM systems that do, which is the only reason that it has any support at all.
Consider, for example, the BBC's little request list:
Unless it is 'sufficiently secure that there would be the possibility of legal action in the event of bypassing it.', no go.
Unless it 'securely identifies a type of device', no go(browser UA is explicitly noted as not being good enough)
Unless it allows 'identification of the context in which the content appears', no go.
And 'The ability to pass further restrictions to the graphics rendering path if available'.
A set of requirements like that is both a fairly stock summary of what a DRM system should be capable of to be worthy of the name and a set of demands that certainly aren't going to be met in any non-tivoized OSS implementation, and wouldn't even be particularly easy to meet on something that isn't a closed box.
Essentially, once the pointless little baseline case is immediately ignored by anybody who would ever actually use the system(since, if you don't want DRM, you won't want the hassle, and if you do, the baseline is far to pitiful to be worth anything), EME is a 'standard' for 'how to use javascript to talk to an entire black-box video rendering mechanism, upon which there will be enough demands that it will almost certainly be platform specific'. Pretty much exactly the same situation as having the video player stuck in a blob of Silverlight or Flash, except that (because this is HTML5, man) the wicked 'browser plugin' has been renamed a 'content decryption module'(which, as the spec notes, 'CDM implementations may return decrypted frames or render them directly, and 'CDM may use or defer to platform capabilities'). In all but name, it's the definition of a few javascript APIs for interacting with a black-box video path more or less identical(if not worse, given the more robust support for invoking the hardware-protected 'platform capabilities' now present on a lot of consumer gear, which something like Flash was always too dubiously competent to do in any serious way) to the plugin-based video player arrangements of the past.
As long as there is no mention of space marines they should do fine.
One does have to wonder if the folks at Games Workshop just hang out with their legal department for a bit whenever they need to release some new flavor material for the Ordo Hereticus...
Are you sure that silver bullets don't work against management? They work on most meat-based targets, as well as werewolves...
Even if you can't justify a full rocking-it-old-school-with-our-own-private-leased-lines-from-everywhere-to-everywhere, you'd still hope that(given the truly deplorable state of the various devices in important places), you could spring for a logically isolated network running on top of your cheap internet connection.
VPNs and such add additional complexity, and aren't invulnerable by any means; but there is a middle ground between 'physically private network' and 'on the internet', which at least allows you to reduce the number of externally visible devices(and make it so that the externally visible devices are dedicated network security gear, ideally built by people who know about network security, rather than dedicated industrial control devices built by people who know about industrial controls and...less... about security).
'G-shock', eh? Concerned about the effects of explosive overpressure on your timepieces are we? Now, how about you come with me and we'll have a little talk about why that might be...
What I like is that they are fighting over something that is purely a creation of ICANN: there is nothing magic about DNS that makes domain names globally authoritative(and, unlike with fiat currency, it isn't even legally troublesome to make your own, if you can get anybody to accept them), ICANN just runs the nameservers that people give a damn about.
If they wanted to take this out to the marketplace and settle it like men, they could just each provide an IP and let their respective supporters modify their hosts files or local DNS records according to their preferences, as consumers, about which ronpaul.com offered a superior ronpaul.com product and/or service.
It's like watching two gold-bugs fighting over a $100 'federal reserve note'...
With friends like that who needs enemies.
This is nothing but a $250,000 shakedown by his alleged "supporters".
"Back in 2007 we put our lives on hold for you, Ron, and we invested close to 10,000 hours of tears, sweat and hard work into this site at great personal sacrifice."(emphasis mine).
They are actually quite honest: they invested in him(after all, altruism would have been unethical), and now they want their ROI. This isn't a 'friendship' thing, this is a 'VCs fighting with their start-up's CEO over stock options' thing.
Being a libertarian is like being a Highlander. There Can Be Only One.
In the case of a trademark dispute, the disputants are brought to the 'marketplace of ideas' where they compete until only one is left alive, at which point he absorbs the market share of the others.
It's pretty fucking epic, actually.
Everyone(except the courageous souls at VHEMT) wants to defy birth trends:
Across more or less the whole of the first world, birth rates are at or below replacement levels. Even in some of the less fucked 'developing' nations it turns out that 'not breeding like animals until you die' is a fairly popular lifestyle choice among people who have sufficient autonomy and access to medical resources to be able to make it. Shocking, I know.
However, the world isn't exactly overflowing with economic plans for downsizing gracefully. Whether it's an ad-hoc social arrangement(children caring for elderly parents because it's their Filial Duty) or a state administered program(Medicare), most plans for keeping old people from being ground up for soylent green involve having young workers around, ideally in larger numbers than the old people.
Since domestic birth rates make that...problematic... this leads to a certain amount of pressure to keep the working population up by other means.
If we want to go with your (arguably somewhat crass and reductionistic) characterization, it goes like this:
1. Democrats favor immigration because immigrants skew more democratic than wrinkly reactionary old people do.
2. Retiring boomers don't have a whole lot of choice; because their parents fucked like bunnies; but they didn't, so if they want to keep the death panels away, they either need to really squeeze their children, or find a substitute for the ones that they didn't have. They don't have to like it(and many don't); but them's the breaks.
Didn't you get the memo? Only a godless America-hating communist would allow market forces to drive wages up when there is an alternative.
There are no uncompetitive salaries, only lazy workers.
I have some...potentially startling... news for you about the efficiency and thoroughness of immigration enforcement procedures worldwide.
This hardly means that the US is at the top of the class; but the only mechanism with a genuinely notable success rate is to be so squalid and miserable at home that nobody even tries to jump the fence...
It's more akin to saying that anybody can write if they want to(subject only to some limits on broadcast power); but that getting published is your own problem.
With wifi systems, there are really two different problems, because of the two major choke-points:
1. The speeds that available technology let you wring out of the slices of RF spectrum you are allowed.
2. The speed of whatever internet connection(s) you've purchased to connect the thing to.
Problem 1 is the really fundamentally nasty one. Physics gives you some hard limits, silicon vendors give you some rather tighter soft limits(but at least they raise them every few years) and whiny TV broadcasters and cellular telcos keep you from expanding your slices of spectrum.
Problem 2, unless you are really in the sticks, is much more amenable to pricing-based solutions: it isn't horribly difficult to throttle bandwidth per-device, or do captive-portal authentication, so you can make fairly granular decisions about how much of your cake you want to have, and how much you want to eat. Have you determined that some amount of 'free' internet access is good for local business/a human right/a public convenience that local taxpayers want, just like having the grass mowed at the local park/whatever? Ok, provide unauthenticated access to that amount of bandwidth per device. Do you find that some users of your free service would prefer to use it much more heavily(to the exclusion of a home ISP, say, rather than just at the coffee shop or in the park)? Sounds like you need an authenticated non-free tier that charges more in order to buy more bandwidth to provide to paying customers.
If you are over-subscribed at the RF level, you are pretty much doomed, at least until better silicon or more spectrum become available; but over-subscription at the ISP pipe level is much more fundamentally solvable.
I suspect that they don't know that and are, instead, approaching the problem through some sort of horrible caricature of naive Bayesian induction:
"The whole system is a magical black box that I don't understand. However, I have connected to 'the wifi' at home, work, starbucks, and the airport, on numerous occasions and in numerous locations. Almost every time I connect to 'the wifi', I obtain internet access. Therefore, 'the wifi' must provide internet access, and an FCC proposal to 'expand the wifi' must be a proposal to provide internet access!"
The same reasoning could also be used to demonstrate that you can obtain free potable water just by connecting a pipe to a sink and then shoving it into the ground(but, conveniently, also obtain access to a sewage line by connecting a pipe to a toilet and shoving it into the ground. How do they not get mixed up? Magic!); but so it goes...
Used to live in a city with "free wifi". It was horrendously slow because everybody used it and most still paid a normal provider.
Given that use of the relevant ISM bands is minimally restricted, and not charged for or sold exclusively, in most of the US(sorry, suckers), every city has 'free wifi' in the sense that the FCC is actually proposing to expand... It's just that a few of them also decided to put up APs and then connect them to something.
I suppose we nerds need to step up and take some of the blame:
We've been so industrious about our networking duties that when the noobs see an ethernet jack or an SSID they just go and assume that it will lead them to the bounteous lolcats and porn of the internet...
All jokes(but not all jokers, alas) aside, WTF is wrong with these 'journalists'? Reporting 'FCC proposes additional wifi spectrum' as 'FCC proposes free internets for the masses!' is about as conceptually confused as reporting 'Staples offers 2-for-the-price-of-1 sale on copier paper' as 'Staples, Amazon, New York Times take sides over plan to slash print media prices by half!'.
Seriously, I'm not expecting these guys to not fuck up something actually tricky, just to make the basic conceptual distinction between the price and availability of a transmission channel and the price and availability of what is transmitted over the channel...
This is tangential to your overall point; but Amazon's strategy seems to be not no advertising; but rather advertising a new way to buy Amazon stuff to existing Amazon customers. You see some chatter about the e-ink models(though less now, since they aren't trying to sell an entire product category to the non-techies); but the tablets are largely invisible unless you go to amazon.com, at which point you'll see references to the things all over the place.
Given the reports about Amazon's negligible margins on the hardware, and their aggressive re-skinning and integration with their own store of stock Android, it seems likely that they mostly care about taking existing Amazon customers and turning them into better Amazon customers, while the other players are more interested in moving units across the board.
The question is whether or not it's a marketing strategy. Was someone at Microsoft wise enough to say "Hey, Apple and Nintendo made headlines by limiting supply..."?
It could also be an OEM-relationship thing: The PC OEMs are largely at MS' mercy; but if MS makes it clear that they are cutting everyone else out of the Windows-on-tablets action entirely, that would presumably inspire the OEMs to do everything in their power to bring their A game to Android for tablets, along with bread-and-butter traditional desktop and notebook PCs(not that this would be their preferred strategy; but if MS wanted to muscle them out of tablets, they wouldn't have too much choice).
If Microsoft wants to avoid that, they must ensure that there is still room for the OEMs to move enough product that cooperation is more rewarding than defection(for desktop/notebook win32 cases, MS has nearly unlimited leverage, are they going to ship ReactOS or something?; but Android vs. 'Metro'-on-tablet is much less clear). If they are trying to make room for their frenemies, it makes sense for them to ship a polished device agressively(to scare them into getting off their asses and building decent products); but not necessarily in huge quantity(so that the OEMs can move their stock as well and, if they don't fuck it up, take over more of the market when Intel does their next silicon revision).
The MS/OEM situation is a little... delicate.
I stopped wearing a watch outside of work recently, for the same reason. However, no one is allowed to bring cell phones, 2-way pager, cameras, or anything that can transmit or connect to a computer. So I wear a simple Casio watch to work and typically take it off when I get home. I'd love to go to a smart watch like Pebble that can connect to my phone, display alerts, play music, etc however I couldn't wear it to work.
They let someone wearing a simple Casio watch into a high-security environment?
Oh, I don't dispute the general point, Linux is a bit of a pig by embedded standards(albeit a very convenient pig, since it can remain so familiar even on fairly tiny systems or very large ones); but any slowness in the Playbook's boot is likely to be the fault of whatever RIM has heaped on top of QNX, since it's actually a very punchy machine by RIM's historical standards(and substantially more powerful than the Pi: higher clocks, twice the cores and RAM, ARMv7 vs. v6, etc).
Surely if it's been shrinking all this time then you could have the same story every day: "ozone hole smallest size since $date". Has it grown occasionally for some reason?
For reasons that are sufficiently messy that I certainly couldn't do them justice(and there really isn't any point in copy/pasting a pretend understanding from wikipedia and just wasting space) ozone levels vary considerably over time, both because of natural seasonal weather patterns and because of changes in the presence of various ozone-depleting synthetic compounds.
My understanding is that trends on atmospheric concentration of more or less all of the really nasty ozone-depleting compounds have been positive since regulation went into effect; but that the size and shape of the ozone hole has been a great deal more chaotic from season to season(shape counts, for our purposes, because ozone thinning over the antarctic is a bad sign; but the number of epidemiologists who care about penguin melanoma is limited, while ozone thinning over Australia is directly troublesome).
Some companies will be surprisingly helpful(so long as it's kept to discussion, not actual parts shipped) about your older gear if the notes in their file on you suggest that the reason you have older gear from them is because you buy a boatload of their stuff every year and this particular item is from the boat 4-5 years ago.
Others will be less surprisingly helpful for a per-incident fee for taking your call at all.
(There is also an edge case, that I've only seen once or twice: If you bought the cheapo warranty; but the product is new enough that their high rolling customers still have it under the Serious Classy Gold Enterprise Warranty, and you can convince them that you've found a real problem, rather than just fucked up, you are suddenly a valuable guinea pig who might save them some trouble with people they still have obligations to, rather than just a panhandling nuisance.)
The one detail(unsurprising; but not...exactly...made obvious in Brookstone's documentation or in their "Only @ Brookstone" branding) is that this little toy comes from our friends on the Pacific Rim at Guangzhou Fantasia Creation Toys Co. Ltd.