Your argument(and SMBC's) on offensiveness is correct in a narrowly specific way; but much less so in a contextually useful one:
Obviously, what different people take offense at varies; but, at a population level, you can categorize and quantify to a reasonably useful extent. At that point, you can, in fact, come up with an "offensiveness" metric relative to a given assumed audience for something. If your assumed audience is sufficiently broad, you can omit specific mention of the assumed audience and let context carry the load for you. There is certainly room for rhetorical chicanery, as with many ambiguous areas of natural language; but that doesn't equate to meaninglessness.
Saying "thing X is offensive" is somewhat analogous to saying "humans are bipedal". In strict point of fact, there are counterexamples. People exist with zero, one, very occasionally more than two, legs and there are a few specimens who walk on all fours. Implicitly, we are treating those as anomalies outside the universe of discourse when we say that. Similarly, there are almost certainly who find gunning down alien-rape victims as they plead inoffensive. However, the reviewer(correctly or not) is implicitly arguing that they are an anomaly among the audience of the review. Now, as noted, "offensiveness" leaves room for chicanery, and you can also make "thing X is offensive" statements that implicitly argue for a highly unrealistic audience sample; but that just makes you wrong or dishonest, rather than "offensiveness" as a metric meaningless.
While things like "humor" and achieving the correct position between "hilariously vulgar" and "just plain WTF??" are tricky, it is particularly damning that they managed to make a game that both looks thoroughly mediocre and runs poorly on a console that has been out long enough to be fairly well understood.
With licensable engines from people who know what they are doing(the Unreal engine, whatever ID is calling theirs these days, maybe lithtech, if they are still around), I could understand if they just licensed one of those, shovelled some half-assed art assets and crude humor into it and called it a day; but at least that would have run properly. Somehow, in 13 years of development, they managed to make a game that is neither aesthetically nor technically competent. That puts them in the hallowed ranks of games like Xtreme Paintbrawl, which is a problem since the MSRP is $60 not $5.
I wouldn't be so certain: While patent infringement lawsuits tend to drag on and on and on, often with little visible result other than fattening the lawyers and the eventual cross-licencing deal, that doesn't change the fact that the penalties for being on the losing end of one can be... dramatic.
While Nokia has taken a hammering because they can't seem to get a smartphone out the door, they do have a lot of 'basic research' patents on assorted cellular technologies, and I'm just guessing that Apple's balance sheet and shareholders would be a mite peeved if Nokia managed to secure a USITC injunction against the import of Apple's cell-capable products into the US...
If Nokia has even a shred of a case, and it is quite likely that they do, given the amount of GSM/etc. R&D they've done, paying them off is almost certainly the logical path. The fact that life looks grim for Nokia in the long term doesn't change the fact that they could potentially deliver a world of hurt in the short term.
We found that, for reasons we just can't wrap our heads around, the phrase "Gilded Benthamite labyrinth from which there is no waking" just didn't resonate with the focus groups... After that setback, we had to go with "social". Only losers with no friends can be against "social".
In the words that the great Tom Lehrer put into von Braun's mouth in the song about his...er... awkwardly sudden transition from Nazi rocket scientist to true blue American Innovator: "Once rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department."
According to the webpage of the vendor "all text is available in both flash and HTML formats" so that search engines can find it. Spoofing your browser ID to the googlebot might get you something of greater use.
Also, according to the sourcecode of the page, it does a check for mobile browsers and just drops the PDF directly on them, without trying flash(because, after all, dubiously-reflowable PDFs are far superior to HTML on tiny little screens. Spoofing a mobile browser ID should net you the PDF without the flash, in any case.
Apparently they went with "Fluidbook", which appears to be a French clone of Scribd, only uglier and even more pointless. As we all know, the best way to read text on screen is by using your mouse to manipulate a 3D rendering of a book... Just like the best interface for an audio player application is a painstakingly bitmap-rendered and non-resizable facsimile of a 1970s stereo.
At least they didn't disable the PDF download button, though that is a pitiful consolation.
If you could accurately target the eyes, I suspect that things could get a good deal more practical. Lasers of disturbingly low power can leave you with permanent blind spots, and ones lower still can leave you with dazzling after-images for quite some time...
I think that it was manager-safe enough. There were a few diagrams that you should be careful to skip over(a few had percentage numbers that weren't finance related!); but the rest had numbers with dollar signs in front of them safely ensconced next to a variety of recognizable corporate logos with a generic-but-high-tech photo of some server racks in the background.
A few good buzzphrases as well. I'm definitely going to ask my department about why they aren't being more proactive and action-oriented about getting our network "on the Moore's law path". We'll never be ready for exascale cloud-centric computing if they don't...
I imagine that you would have a very difficult time getting defensively-useful power levels... Except for the eyes(which are, naturally, rather light sensitive and rather ill-cooled) lasers of modest power aren't all that dangerous. Even the ones powerful enough to damage bulk tissue have the disadvantage of neatly cauterizing the place, rather than leaving room for exsanguination or sticking in the wound and retarding movement.
Chemical lasers can do it; but the chemistry of those things is a halogen horrorshow dubiously compatible with the life of the host organism. Anything else would require ATP movement to the laser sight at rates unprecedented among known organisms...
I suspect that there is a large intermediate population, of which I certainly am one:
I'm pretty enthusiastic about science, and wouldn't hesitate to look at the actual paper(and, given that the web has these crazy things called "hyperlinks" and "essentially infinite available print space", I'm pretty peeved about how rarely pop-science articles link back to the paper in question); but I can't deny that I do a fair bit of skimming when it comes to the details of the paper. The parts that are accessible to somebody with good general reading comprehension and and some undergrad-level knowledge of biology, chemistry, mathematics, and apparatus are doable enough; but I'm nowhere near sufficiently grounded in the field to grok the really technical bits...
I'm not enough of a photonics guy to tell you exactly where the cut-off between "light coming from florescent materials that have been made stimulated by sufficiently energetic light to re-emit at their wavelength of choice(which is usually what people playing with GFP are observing)" and "a dye laser, having been pumped by an outside light source, successfully lasing(which is apparently what is happening here)"; but ruling out bioluminescence should be pretty simple: GFP is, while conveniently florescent in a very distinctive color, not luminescent. It only glows when energized by sufficiently energetic outside light sources(blue or UV typically). The cellular chemistry behind bioluminescence involves a whole different set of chemicals, and one assumes that the scientists wouldn't have started with a bacterial species that possesses those.
Even if they did, since the dye chamber had to be externally pumped to lase, one could simply observe it in the dark in order to establish a baseline of any native luminescence before observing it while it is being pumped.
From what I can gather of TFA, the cell isn't really a laser per se, as much as it is a cell that, genetically engineered to express GFP, can survive and be observed while be used as part of the lasing medium in a GFP-based organic dye laser(which is stimulated by blue light from outside the tube in which the cell(s) and the GFP dye fluid are placed).
That is pretty cool, and I suspect that there will be some very elegant live-cell imaging that comes out of applications of this technique; but it leaves me wondering how small a complete biological laser could be: ie. something that both expresses the proteins needed to make up the lasing medium and uses some flavor of bioluminescence to pump its own lasing medium...
Yes and no. Obviously, you don't want video feeds of your house going over the public internet in the clear; but(since part of the service does involve accessing them over the internet from an offsite location), Comcast already has to have a secure-over-public internet approach sorted out(presumably just TLS). Also, since Comcast is the one running the setup, it is presumably the case that the route taken over the public internet would just be a hop from you directly to them anyway(since Comcast is both the ISP, and thus the closest thing on the network, and the one operating the server side of this service). Unless they really were to fuck it up, which would likely imperil the storage, or login page, or video streaming capabilities, you wouldn't get usefully greater security.
Since the two logical links(Comcast qua ISP, and whatever in-house Comcast services you are subscribed to) travel over the same line and assorted hardware, reliability is unlikely to be better over one than over the other, and having Comcast able to carve out swaths of untouchable bandwidth for its own services really just makes product bundling and squelching internet-based competitors easier and more tempting.
For non-technical users, the partition probably does have the virtue of providing a crude form of QoS; but the overall market effect of it is hard to be optimistic about.
If this is anything like their quasi-VOIP offering a while back, they'll specifically run all their blessed-and-packaged stuff over a separate logical link(and no, the existence of that link on the same physical line in no way implies that we could remove it and offer better upstream bandwidth. Shut up, consumer, and watch some pay-per-view.) and call it a feature.
Aside from the purely recreational hacking value, the real upside to getting Android applications running on the Touch would be expanding its capabilities for handling the subset of activities that are largely text-based, or tolerant of greyscale graphics; but lie beyond ebooks specifically:
Email, light web browsing(Hello Wikipedia...), grabbing a map and directions, that sort of thing.
Anything that depends on capacitive precision, 30FPS screen refresh, or color is going to be a waste of time, in practice; but there are a number of activities that could usefully be performed with reading-focused hardware that are not supported by the stock firmware.
As long as they aren't losing money on the Nooks, and as long as some publishing bigwig doesn't get an irrational bug up his ass about "zOMGF hackers=Piracy!"(which would hardly be a shock, given the predilections of the content industries; but would be stupid, given the ease with which downloaded ebooks are currently cracked on PCs without touching device firmware), I suspect that B&N is happy to shift as many units as they can.
In their ideal world, every unit shifted would be to some hardcore reader with a killer attach rate; but they started second after Amazon, and are still polishing the storefront side of their offering(arguably, their hardware is presently more interesting). They don't really get to be choosy, and they seem to know that.
While I find the farce surrouding the opposing forces of Palin's cult of personality and those who simply cannot stomach her and will dig through anything to justify that to be tedious and misguided, we should not let that distract us from the potential real issues at play here.
Alaska is, perhaps uniquely among American states in the present day(with the possible exception of the poorer; but much more overtly corrupt Appalacian coal belt), a state with an immensely lucrative extraction-economy, and not too much else going on. This means that there is considerable money to be made in controlling pipeline contracts and routes, security assorted extraction licenses, controlling obscure planning offices, and other tedious activity in sparsely settled areas. Although much more scenic than most, and often less violent, this does leave it open to many of the same dysfunctional political dynamics enjoyed by the poor nations who have large mineral reserves and weak governance.
We shouldn't forget that. It doesn't matter what the contents of Palin's Office Yahoo Account tell us about who popped out out a baby when. Sordid trailer-park drama? probably, but who cares? However, it is generally the case that, behind every folksy politician who is bored by the details, lurks a small army of value-rational and detail-oriented hatchetmen quietly cleaning up the spoils. Sometimes, if the local cult of personality is strong enough, they are in thrall of that politician. In other cases, the politician is their frontman. In either case, though, their activities are the stuff that desperately needs as much sunlight(and cell space) as the public can devote to it. Don't let the personality drama get in the way.
I just have to wonder why there would be "lots of pissed off nerds". Is there really still a supply of complete morons who think that dabbling in ForEx is risk free, much less highly-speculative quasi-currencies? Seriously?
But what if it was the Maries(Virgin and Magdalene, respectively) performing a sapphic poledance on the cross for an appreciative crowd of early american revolutionary notables? Surely that would give even the hollowest of hyperinflated fiat currencies some value?
I suspect that if you really want to eat your cake and shed it as well, your best bet might be looking into the 'smoking cessation' market. Regular breathing of the products of incomplete combustion of organic materials is just a bad idea(even in non tobacco cases: 3rd world indoor wood/charcoal cooking causes a fuckload of pulmonary morbidity and mortality every year, for instance); but nicotine is available in all kinds of convenient delivery packages, and (while highly addictive) seems not to be particularly unhealthy by itself...
I suspect that (particularly for a carrier like Verizon, which does a lot of selling on the strength of its network) the rules vary depending on the class of device.
For very high profile devices, yes, they definitely have to cater to consumer demand(snagging iDevices as soon as AT&T lost their contractual grip, for instance, was barely optional, and building up the 'Droid' brand before they had iPhones to sell was similarly necessary); but the lower-profile you go, I suspect the greater Verizon's interest in what phones they wish to sell comes to dominate the question of what phones the customer wishes to buy(if they even have an opinion, you don't find too many fanatical partisans in the generic clamshell market...)
For devices that have their own, independent, mindshare, Verizon has to suck it up and stock them if they want to move subscriptions(particularly data plans). For the customers who are buying based on coverage needs, family plans, etc. I suspect that it comes down much more to stocking whatever phones have the most compliant OEMs behind them. Look at what they did to the "Kin" because they were pissed off at Microsoft...
I suspect that the other question is whether carriers really want it to succeed.
From the perspective of carrier control, strong platforms controlled by 3rd parties are not really a good thing. The cat is out of the bag with Apple at this point, so they just have to suck that up and hope for an exclusive; but Android is already there as a reasonably compelling second option, and under licensing terms that allow Google to exercise some control over their blessed flagship devices; but which don't preclude carriers from making the second tier their playground, complete with shitty pre-installs, proprietary app-stores, etc.
WP7 is more broadly available than iOS, because it is licensed to multiple hardware OEMs; but it is rather more closely held than android, and much less open to being carrierized. Now that Verizon, for instance, has the ability to sell iPhones, along with their own pet line of android devices under the 'Droid' trademark, they don't necessarily want WP7 to succeed. What's in it for them?
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Is it OK to outsource my burning of Christians to members of rival abrahamic monotheist sects and subsects?
I don't want to risk the wrath of St. Darwin; but it seems like such a pain in the ass to burn them myself when they will burn one another for free...
Your argument(and SMBC's) on offensiveness is correct in a narrowly specific way; but much less so in a contextually useful one:
Obviously, what different people take offense at varies; but, at a population level, you can categorize and quantify to a reasonably useful extent. At that point, you can, in fact, come up with an "offensiveness" metric relative to a given assumed audience for something. If your assumed audience is sufficiently broad, you can omit specific mention of the assumed audience and let context carry the load for you. There is certainly room for rhetorical chicanery, as with many ambiguous areas of natural language; but that doesn't equate to meaninglessness.
Saying "thing X is offensive" is somewhat analogous to saying "humans are bipedal". In strict point of fact, there are counterexamples. People exist with zero, one, very occasionally more than two, legs and there are a few specimens who walk on all fours. Implicitly, we are treating those as anomalies outside the universe of discourse when we say that. Similarly, there are almost certainly who find gunning down alien-rape victims as they plead inoffensive. However, the reviewer(correctly or not) is implicitly arguing that they are an anomaly among the audience of the review. Now, as noted, "offensiveness" leaves room for chicanery, and you can also make "thing X is offensive" statements that implicitly argue for a highly unrealistic audience sample; but that just makes you wrong or dishonest, rather than "offensiveness" as a metric meaningless.
While things like "humor" and achieving the correct position between "hilariously vulgar" and "just plain WTF??" are tricky, it is particularly damning that they managed to make a game that both looks thoroughly mediocre and runs poorly on a console that has been out long enough to be fairly well understood.
With licensable engines from people who know what they are doing(the Unreal engine, whatever ID is calling theirs these days, maybe lithtech, if they are still around), I could understand if they just licensed one of those, shovelled some half-assed art assets and crude humor into it and called it a day; but at least that would have run properly. Somehow, in 13 years of development, they managed to make a game that is neither aesthetically nor technically competent. That puts them in the hallowed ranks of games like Xtreme Paintbrawl, which is a problem since the MSRP is $60 not $5.
I wouldn't be so certain: While patent infringement lawsuits tend to drag on and on and on, often with little visible result other than fattening the lawyers and the eventual cross-licencing deal, that doesn't change the fact that the penalties for being on the losing end of one can be... dramatic.
While Nokia has taken a hammering because they can't seem to get a smartphone out the door, they do have a lot of 'basic research' patents on assorted cellular technologies, and I'm just guessing that Apple's balance sheet and shareholders would be a mite peeved if Nokia managed to secure a USITC injunction against the import of Apple's cell-capable products into the US...
If Nokia has even a shred of a case, and it is quite likely that they do, given the amount of GSM/etc. R&D they've done, paying them off is almost certainly the logical path. The fact that life looks grim for Nokia in the long term doesn't change the fact that they could potentially deliver a world of hurt in the short term.
We found that, for reasons we just can't wrap our heads around, the phrase "Gilded Benthamite labyrinth from which there is no waking" just didn't resonate with the focus groups... After that setback, we had to go with "social". Only losers with no friends can be against "social".
In the words that the great Tom Lehrer put into von Braun's mouth in the song about his...er... awkwardly sudden transition from Nazi rocket scientist to true blue American Innovator: "Once rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department."
According to the webpage of the vendor "all text is available in both flash and HTML formats" so that search engines can find it. Spoofing your browser ID to the googlebot might get you something of greater use.
Also, according to the sourcecode of the page, it does a check for mobile browsers and just drops the PDF directly on them, without trying flash(because, after all, dubiously-reflowable PDFs are far superior to HTML on tiny little screens. Spoofing a mobile browser ID should net you the PDF without the flash, in any case.
Apparently they went with "Fluidbook", which appears to be a French clone of Scribd, only uglier and even more pointless. As we all know, the best way to read text on screen is by using your mouse to manipulate a 3D rendering of a book... Just like the best interface for an audio player application is a painstakingly bitmap-rendered and non-resizable facsimile of a 1970s stereo.
At least they didn't disable the PDF download button, though that is a pitiful consolation.
If you could accurately target the eyes, I suspect that things could get a good deal more practical. Lasers of disturbingly low power can leave you with permanent blind spots, and ones lower still can leave you with dazzling after-images for quite some time...
I think that it was manager-safe enough. There were a few diagrams that you should be careful to skip over(a few had percentage numbers that weren't finance related!); but the rest had numbers with dollar signs in front of them safely ensconced next to a variety of recognizable corporate logos with a generic-but-high-tech photo of some server racks in the background.
A few good buzzphrases as well. I'm definitely going to ask my department about why they aren't being more proactive and action-oriented about getting our network "on the Moore's law path". We'll never be ready for exascale cloud-centric computing if they don't...
There already some intriguing early results in optical networking with living brains...
I imagine that you would have a very difficult time getting defensively-useful power levels... Except for the eyes(which are, naturally, rather light sensitive and rather ill-cooled) lasers of modest power aren't all that dangerous. Even the ones powerful enough to damage bulk tissue have the disadvantage of neatly cauterizing the place, rather than leaving room for exsanguination or sticking in the wound and retarding movement.
Chemical lasers can do it; but the chemistry of those things is a halogen horrorshow dubiously compatible with the life of the host organism. Anything else would require ATP movement to the laser sight at rates unprecedented among known organisms...
I suspect that there is a large intermediate population, of which I certainly am one:
I'm pretty enthusiastic about science, and wouldn't hesitate to look at the actual paper(and, given that the web has these crazy things called "hyperlinks" and "essentially infinite available print space", I'm pretty peeved about how rarely pop-science articles link back to the paper in question); but I can't deny that I do a fair bit of skimming when it comes to the details of the paper. The parts that are accessible to somebody with good general reading comprehension and and some undergrad-level knowledge of biology, chemistry, mathematics, and apparatus are doable enough; but I'm nowhere near sufficiently grounded in the field to grok the really technical bits...
I'm not enough of a photonics guy to tell you exactly where the cut-off between "light coming from florescent materials that have been made stimulated by sufficiently energetic light to re-emit at their wavelength of choice(which is usually what people playing with GFP are observing)" and "a dye laser, having been pumped by an outside light source, successfully lasing(which is apparently what is happening here)"; but ruling out bioluminescence should be pretty simple: GFP is, while conveniently florescent in a very distinctive color, not luminescent. It only glows when energized by sufficiently energetic outside light sources(blue or UV typically). The cellular chemistry behind bioluminescence involves a whole different set of chemicals, and one assumes that the scientists wouldn't have started with a bacterial species that possesses those.
Even if they did, since the dye chamber had to be externally pumped to lase, one could simply observe it in the dark in order to establish a baseline of any native luminescence before observing it while it is being pumped.
From what I can gather of TFA, the cell isn't really a laser per se, as much as it is a cell that, genetically engineered to express GFP, can survive and be observed while be used as part of the lasing medium in a GFP-based organic dye laser(which is stimulated by blue light from outside the tube in which the cell(s) and the GFP dye fluid are placed).
That is pretty cool, and I suspect that there will be some very elegant live-cell imaging that comes out of applications of this technique; but it leaves me wondering how small a complete biological laser could be: ie. something that both expresses the proteins needed to make up the lasing medium and uses some flavor of bioluminescence to pump its own lasing medium...
Yes and no. Obviously, you don't want video feeds of your house going over the public internet in the clear; but(since part of the service does involve accessing them over the internet from an offsite location), Comcast already has to have a secure-over-public internet approach sorted out(presumably just TLS). Also, since Comcast is the one running the setup, it is presumably the case that the route taken over the public internet would just be a hop from you directly to them anyway(since Comcast is both the ISP, and thus the closest thing on the network, and the one operating the server side of this service). Unless they really were to fuck it up, which would likely imperil the storage, or login page, or video streaming capabilities, you wouldn't get usefully greater security.
Since the two logical links(Comcast qua ISP, and whatever in-house Comcast services you are subscribed to) travel over the same line and assorted hardware, reliability is unlikely to be better over one than over the other, and having Comcast able to carve out swaths of untouchable bandwidth for its own services really just makes product bundling and squelching internet-based competitors easier and more tempting.
For non-technical users, the partition probably does have the virtue of providing a crude form of QoS; but the overall market effect of it is hard to be optimistic about.
If this is anything like their quasi-VOIP offering a while back, they'll specifically run all their blessed-and-packaged stuff over a separate logical link(and no, the existence of that link on the same physical line in no way implies that we could remove it and offer better upstream bandwidth. Shut up, consumer, and watch some pay-per-view.) and call it a feature.
Aside from the purely recreational hacking value, the real upside to getting Android applications running on the Touch would be expanding its capabilities for handling the subset of activities that are largely text-based, or tolerant of greyscale graphics; but lie beyond ebooks specifically:
Email, light web browsing(Hello Wikipedia...), grabbing a map and directions, that sort of thing.
Anything that depends on capacitive precision, 30FPS screen refresh, or color is going to be a waste of time, in practice; but there are a number of activities that could usefully be performed with reading-focused hardware that are not supported by the stock firmware.
As long as they aren't losing money on the Nooks, and as long as some publishing bigwig doesn't get an irrational bug up his ass about "zOMGF hackers=Piracy!"(which would hardly be a shock, given the predilections of the content industries; but would be stupid, given the ease with which downloaded ebooks are currently cracked on PCs without touching device firmware), I suspect that B&N is happy to shift as many units as they can.
In their ideal world, every unit shifted would be to some hardcore reader with a killer attach rate; but they started second after Amazon, and are still polishing the storefront side of their offering(arguably, their hardware is presently more interesting). They don't really get to be choosy, and they seem to know that.
While I find the farce surrouding the opposing forces of Palin's cult of personality and those who simply cannot stomach her and will dig through anything to justify that to be tedious and misguided, we should not let that distract us from the potential real issues at play here.
Alaska is, perhaps uniquely among American states in the present day(with the possible exception of the poorer; but much more overtly corrupt Appalacian coal belt), a state with an immensely lucrative extraction-economy, and not too much else going on. This means that there is considerable money to be made in controlling pipeline contracts and routes, security assorted extraction licenses, controlling obscure planning offices, and other tedious activity in sparsely settled areas. Although much more scenic than most, and often less violent, this does leave it open to many of the same dysfunctional political dynamics enjoyed by the poor nations who have large mineral reserves and weak governance.
We shouldn't forget that. It doesn't matter what the contents of Palin's Office Yahoo Account tell us about who popped out out a baby when. Sordid trailer-park drama? probably, but who cares? However, it is generally the case that, behind every folksy politician who is bored by the details, lurks a small army of value-rational and detail-oriented hatchetmen quietly cleaning up the spoils. Sometimes, if the local cult of personality is strong enough, they are in thrall of that politician. In other cases, the politician is their frontman. In either case, though, their activities are the stuff that desperately needs as much sunlight(and cell space) as the public can devote to it. Don't let the personality drama get in the way.
I just have to wonder why there would be "lots of pissed off nerds". Is there really still a supply of complete morons who think that dabbling in ForEx is risk free, much less highly-speculative quasi-currencies? Seriously?
But what if it was the Maries(Virgin and Magdalene, respectively) performing a sapphic poledance on the cross for an appreciative crowd of early american revolutionary notables? Surely that would give even the hollowest of hyperinflated fiat currencies some value?
I suspect that if you really want to eat your cake and shed it as well, your best bet might be looking into the 'smoking cessation' market. Regular breathing of the products of incomplete combustion of organic materials is just a bad idea(even in non tobacco cases: 3rd world indoor wood/charcoal cooking causes a fuckload of pulmonary morbidity and mortality every year, for instance); but nicotine is available in all kinds of convenient delivery packages, and (while highly addictive) seems not to be particularly unhealthy by itself...
I suspect that (particularly for a carrier like Verizon, which does a lot of selling on the strength of its network) the rules vary depending on the class of device.
For very high profile devices, yes, they definitely have to cater to consumer demand(snagging iDevices as soon as AT&T lost their contractual grip, for instance, was barely optional, and building up the 'Droid' brand before they had iPhones to sell was similarly necessary); but the lower-profile you go, I suspect the greater Verizon's interest in what phones they wish to sell comes to dominate the question of what phones the customer wishes to buy(if they even have an opinion, you don't find too many fanatical partisans in the generic clamshell market...)
For devices that have their own, independent, mindshare, Verizon has to suck it up and stock them if they want to move subscriptions(particularly data plans). For the customers who are buying based on coverage needs, family plans, etc. I suspect that it comes down much more to stocking whatever phones have the most compliant OEMs behind them. Look at what they did to the "Kin" because they were pissed off at Microsoft...
I suspect that the other question is whether carriers really want it to succeed.
From the perspective of carrier control, strong platforms controlled by 3rd parties are not really a good thing. The cat is out of the bag with Apple at this point, so they just have to suck that up and hope for an exclusive; but Android is already there as a reasonably compelling second option, and under licensing terms that allow Google to exercise some control over their blessed flagship devices; but which don't preclude carriers from making the second tier their playground, complete with shitty pre-installs, proprietary app-stores, etc.
WP7 is more broadly available than iOS, because it is licensed to multiple hardware OEMs; but it is rather more closely held than android, and much less open to being carrierized. Now that Verizon, for instance, has the ability to sell iPhones, along with their own pet line of android devices under the 'Droid' trademark, they don't necessarily want WP7 to succeed. What's in it for them?