I wasn't saying that your company did anything wrong, just that many companies do things differently. I can totally see a company providing little except a backend server for admin functions and an Internet/network connection. There would be many advantages, cost not least, and assuming you trust your users, few disadvantages. I've worked for small tech companies where that was essentially what we had. Most larger companies, either out of a need for more organization, a desire for more control, or pure paranoia, don't go that way though. Which means that most of us (who work for those companies) don't really have an option to protect our own privacy like you do. Similarly, unless you stay with your current company forever, or get really lucky in the job lottery, you will likely not always have that option either.
It's times like that in which a law like this would be nice. Not that I think my company has really infringed on my privacy, or that I really do anything wrong... just that it's nice to know that if you do get a lunatic boss who wants to read your personal e-mail there's some sort of protection.
But realistically I think people like you are probably less than 1% of the market. I'm not trying to offend you or anything, but the number of people who:
a) Use Linux as their primary OS. b) Use a computer for games extensively. c) Are not willing to dual boot or have a separate "game box". d) Are willing to pay for the games they play (instead of just playing Tux Racer or Majong)
is pretty small. Most people who use Linux exclusively are willing to compromise on games (and many would not want to use "non-Free" games even if they were available). Most people who really want games are willing to compromise on OS (Either not using Linux as a primary system, dual booting, or having a "game box").
How much would it cost to port Steam and any reasonable number of the games on Steam, and would gaining you and the people who agree with you make them more money than that? Steam seems to think not.
Well for one,/. has a very "free market is God" audience for some reason. It tends to make it hard to "take a pulse of the nation" on this site. For another, I was specifically referring to the types of monitoring listed above (bathrooms, changing rooms and the like) which are not able to legally monitored in this country (at least not anywhere that I know of, stuff like this tends to be covered by state and local laws, not federal), and you'd probably be pretty hard pressed to find anyone who thinks they should be. Certainly Americans (in general) are less privacy aware than Europeans (in general), but not to the level displayed in the post above.
The problem is you're still paying peanuts. So every time you civilize a monkey it thinks: "Hey, that other company pays in *bananas* and I now have the fecal avoidance mechanisms to qualify." Time to find a new monkey, and start the whole process over again.
Actually it's not a US vs Europe thing. You've just found an edge case. Few in the US would agree with him either. All of those things are illegal in ever jurisdiction I'm aware of here in the US.
You have surprisingly tolerant work place. At larger companies with strong IT security policies such things are often blocked. I'm not allowed to bring a personal machine in to work here. I recently got a small hand slap for having Dropbox on my work machine. I didn't get in *trouble* per se, but I was asked to uninstall it and not install anything similar in the future. They don't block SSH here (we have several users that have to connect to remote sites for business purposes and no one has gotten the motivation yet to set up white list access for only the "right" sites and users), but at other places I've worked it has been. Many companies are quite paranoid about company secrets or customer data getting out.
I'm thinking in that case you'd have a separate account for the business relevant use of FB which would be monitor-able. My personal account might be "John Smith", but at work I am "Customer Service - The Company" or "The-Comp - John Smith". Back when Instant Messaging was the big thing lots of companies did this. Probably better than using a personal account anyway, for lots of reasons. It clearly denotes the affiliation of the person someone is "talking" to, It provides segregation in the mind of the employee, and it helps prevent people wandering off with your client list when they quit and take their personal FB account with them.
I once watched Glenn Beck argue, in all seriousness (I was in an airport and could neither change the channel nor leave) that national health care was a slippery slope to Fascism. Not, mind you, because of some convoluted arguments involving nanny state politics and people being weaned of off saying "no" to government policies. That might almost have made sense in some kind of twisted way. No, his argument was that national health care was socialistic, and the Nazi party had "socialist" in its name. He spent like twenty minutes on this point. Essentially repeating, in about 10 different ways that health care is socialist and Nazi's were "National Socialist" and so it was clear that the jackboots would be coming out within a couple years of the bill's passage.
I'll admit that the Sharrod thing was extremely reasonable. I don't know how it happened to be honest. The guy is normally a master of taking things out of context to make them sound as awful as possible, but in this one case he chose to consider context and change his tune. I'm glad he did it, but he'd have to do it a lot more before I took him seriously day to day.
A problem that I often run into on the "customer" side of this equation though is that often these "quick fixes" provide exactly that. "Reboot your cable modem" can often "fix" a problem that is merely a symptom of a larger issue. Example: My cable Internet was acting up. I rebooted the modem and it fixed the problem for a while, then it happened again. After the second or third time it happened in the period of a weekend I called tech support. The guy wanted me to reboot the modem. I tried to explain to him I'd done that several times and it was a short term fix. We should troubleshoot without rebooting the modem in order to discover the root cause. He was utterly unable to understand. His script said "Have customer reboot the modem, if this works get customer off the phone." I wouldn't reboot the modem. Life was HARD...
I think there are essentially four problems with the way tech support is done:
1) Techs are often clueless morons with minimal training. Now always, but often enough that it creates and sustains a prejudice among skilled, and even modestly skilled users that tech support people are idiots who can't be trusted.
2) Users are often clueless morons with no training at all. Sometime they even think they know what they're doing despite being a moron with no training. Not always, but often enough that it creates and sustains a prejudice among the more highly skilled tech support that users are the cause of many if not most of their own problems. Since the moron they work with often unconsciously try to imitate these more skilled people, this problem filters down.
3) Skilled users, expecting to deal with a mouth breathing moron as first level support, never want to do the simple stuff. The fact that nearly all of us have, no matter how awesome we think we are, overlooked something obvious ought to keep us from doing this, but it doesn't. Because for every time that we get caught having missed something obvious, there's been ten times or twenty times, or a hundred times that we've had to go through a 20 bloody minute checklist of things we already looked at to prove that we already looked at them. We tend to remember the wasted time and forget the once or twice that we went "Fuck, you're right, it ISN'T plugged in".
4) Techs, because so many users really are morons, tend to treat every problem as PEBKAC until it's proven otherwise. Which often makes them unwilling to deal with more skilled users on a higher level until they've exhausted all other possibilities. Which makes skilled users think all techs are morons...
That's what has got me seriously confused about this lawsuit. Oracle is violating the cardinal rule of the software patent house of cards: "Don't sue someone who can sue you back." Google has patents too. They could quite easily look into their bag and find a few to use against Oracle I'm sure. Every medium to large software company has, at this point, at least one or two patents on something that could be considered a fundamental of software development. None of the big boys is safe from the the other big boys, which (in theory) is why they're all safe.
Unless this is some weird, deliberate attempt by Oracle to show that the Emperor has no clothes, it seems like a dangerous game to play. It could bring the whole system down.
The irony being that patents are anti-capitalistic (from a pure definition of capitalism). The problem here isn't regulations or deregulation per se, it's that large companies favor whichever favors them. If the government wants to regulate the labor market, every large company on the planet starts screaming bloody murder about unregulated markets and capitalism, and the evils of government interference. This is because an unregulated labor market favors large corporations that can easily replace cog workers with other cog workers. Start talking about patent reform and the same large corporations that just cried about the value of open markets will drag out the one small inventor who actually managed to make money on the patent system in the last five years and point to him as the reason that government regulation is GREAT in the patent arena.
The reason being, of course, that all of these corporations have a vested interest in the patent system continuing as is. They've spent a fortune on patents portfolios and they can afford lawyers to enforce even the most ridiculous of them. Even companies that clearly could do well (or perhaps even better than they currently are) in an environment without software patents don't want them to go away now, because there's so much institutional investment in the portfolio.
So yeah, pure capitalism is GREAT unless the regulation supports the industry in question... then capitalism is bad (or redefined to include regulation in just that one area).
That they stole off their competitors. OSX = BSD + Mach kernal.
How precisely is it "stealing" when the producers essentially said "Here it is! Do what you want with it!" That is rather the point of the BSD license I thought? Also OSX = BSD + Mach Kernel + a UI and userspace tools that leave most of what's available on BSD or Linux derivatives in the Dust + hardware tuned to the OS . You're missing the selling points. I could install Darwin on any old piece of junk lap top and get a product no one wants. That isn't OSX.
iPod = mp3 players before it.
Again, iPod = mp3 players before it + the wheel interface that everyone agreed was awesome.
iPhone = touch screen Palm devices that have been around since the late 90's.
But with gestures, capacitive screen, a much more usable web browser, etc..
You're deliberately ignoring the value that Apple added to each of these products. There are two possible reasons for this:
A) You don't see these things as valuable. Which a fair enough, but surely you can see where other people do see value here. It's more than pretty packaging, it's pretty packaging that works well and allows normal people to make greater use of the devices power.
B) You're deliberately ignoring these things in order to make it seem like all Apple products are just pretty junk, and the people who buy them mindless fanboys.
But if Microsoft is the IBM of now, than its attempts to make the PC of now are flailing blindly. I think you're comparing Apples to oranges here. (Yes, that was terrible, thank you) PC's of 20 years ago were expensive items and IBM (and especially the clones) were able to position themselves as the "Maybe not as good, but cheaper" option. When you were talking $1.5-2K vs 2.5-3K that was a huge deal (especially in 1980's money). You could save a lot of money and go with a very respected brand, practically synonymous with "computer".
By comparison, tablets are fairly cheap. ~$500 for a good one. Apple's gotten a big early lead and the competition is releasing inferior competitive products that save you what? $100 bucks? $50 bucks? The competition is also releasing roughly equivalent competitive products... but for roughly the same price, and much cheaper, but clearly MUCH inferior products for larger savings.
This isn't to say that I think Apple is going to rule the tablet PC market forever and always, amen. More that I don't think they'll crash and burn spectacularly like they did in the 80s. This isn't the same market, and the room to differentiate is there. When the difference between the "best of the best" (and most expensive of the expensive) and the cheapest or the cheap is only a few hundred dollars, people are willing to splurge for the "best", whatever that means to them.
As to your point about the iPod... I don't see it. Sony and Microsoft both have (or have had in the past) much more money than Apple. Acting like Apple somehow used it's vast warchest and influence to "cheat" in the MP3 player battles is patently silly. Their opponents had the same resources they did, if not more.
I hear this, yet I use a 3GS with IOS4 and it doesn't run like shit at all. The 3G, yes, that runs like shit with iOS4, but the 3GS is fine. The 3G is also a few years old now, so it's not surprising that the newest software is a bit crippled on it.
They failed. I can get his cookbook in Alabama. I've known several people who, upon making first trips into New York, made a point of visiting his place. Anyone, anyone who think that making real world establishment into a major fixture on an immensely popular TV show will hurt its business has to be smoking something.
Because it says so in Grammar and Language Arts textbooks, which are the closest things to official that language has. To say that language develops over time is fine, but at this point the language has not developed; it's still taught this way in schools. The fact that it's understandable doesn't make it right. Of course you'll say that I'm just quoting a rule someone made up. How you expect to communicate without following some sort of "rules someone made up" I don't know. It's also worth pointing out that no one is per se complaining about this in a random Internet post or other venue where perfection is neither expected nor reasonable, but in a sign that pretty much every grocery store everywhere uses.
You also raise a valid point. I guess I'm trying to look at it from the point of view of a guy who clearly finds this important. Personally I think it was kind of nuts to put the time and effort he obviously has into building a site like this in the first place, but having done so I must assume the guy thinks it's worth something.
You'd really be amazed at what can be accomplished by getting on the phone and continuing to ask to talk to a more important person. I'm not as good at it as my mother (she once got her medical insurance to cover an experimental plastic surgery procedure for my brother after his face got messed up by a dog. By the end she was on the phone with a senior executive VP, who reported directly to the CEO), but even with my lack of fu, I've gotten a surprising number of charges reversed, problems resolved, etc. It's not always successful, but there's really a fairly number of reasonable people at all levels of management for these various companies. It's just that they are so rarely faced with the reality of how process and procedure affect other actual human beings, that they are insulated from doing much about it.
Worse case scenario, he spends a few hours on the phone and wasted his time. It's not like he hasn't already spent hours and hours building this site. Best case he resolves the issue and moves on with life. In either case be prepared to buckle under before the deadline, if that's how you're planning to play it.
It does seem to me that before going the "Fold like a Newspaper" route the guy might at least like, try to talk to management at the Discovery Channel. According to the article, he's had some correspondence with the lawyer, but that's like trying to talk sense to hammer. The lawyer's job is to act tough and push the line he's been given. It may very well be that he'll get a unified gray wall all the way up the chain of command, but often if you annoy someone important enough (especially someone with some sense, which believe or not often manages to happen) you can get stuff like this fixed. Or at least compromised on. Start with the producers of the show (who have a vested interest in not pissing off a large fan community) and work from there.
Hmm. It seems I am confusing "Right to Work" laws with "At-will Employment" laws. The two are apparently often conflated in "Right-to-Work States" which I have spent most of my working life in. Mea Culpa and I have learned something new. I think the "Troll" moderation was a bit harsh though Mr. moderator person.
See my above post about what happened to Rubbermaid when they tried to do the same thing. Snapper could get away with it because mechanical devices have a more obvious quality factor that other things. Most industries aren't as lucky.
Not to denigrate your point (which is valid), but the other problem that a lot of people in poorer areas of the country face is lack of choice. A few years ago I went to visit my wife's grandparents in fairly rural Illinois for Thanksgiving. On Black Friday my wife's grandmother (grandmother-in-law?) wanted to do the traditional Black Friday shopping trip. Now frankly, myself, my wife, my MIL and my FIL all felt that we'd just as soon stick our Thanksgiving forks in our eyes as go shopping in rural Illinois on Black Friday, but family is family so we all crawled out of bed bright and early and were on the road by 7:00 or so.
The bright side of rural areas is that there's no 24 hour stores, or opening at some godawful time of the morning. The downside turned out to be that we could go shopping at Walmart. And only Walmart. We drove 15 minutes into town, and town turned out to be a couple of restaurants, a few gas stations, a grocery store, a few pawn shops, and Walmart. I imagine the pawn shops look a lot like a Walmart "dinged and dented" section. It wasn't even a big Walmart. Quite possibly the smallest I'd ever been in, though it was packed check by jowl with stuff.
Realistically if they wanted to buy stuff from anywhere other than Walmart, the people in this town would first have to travel ~2 hours to St. Louis. GFIL(?) had actually purchased a computer and learned to make reasonable use of the Internet for purchases of more substantial goods, but he was both unusually wealthy for the area and usually tech savvy for his age (doubly so for his age and the area).
It's good to see there are still industries that can sell quality to the point where they can get away with it. Rubbermaid tried to do the same thing, but sadly plastic buckets and storage containers aren't a quality competitive market. Walmart sold other people's buckets and containers instead, and sold them in such volume that Rubbermaid eventually had little option but to buckle under. Now Walmart sells Rubbermaid, at Walmart prices, and Rubbermaid is: a) a much weaker company (I think I read they sold themselves recently, but I could be wrong there) and b) trying to move as many jobs as possible overseas to reduce costs.
Snapper got away with it because people are still willing to pay more for well built mechanical devices that will last longer. Good for them, and it's very nice to see, but sadly not many industries are in that position.
There's an irony in your statement. Why would you have three children that you cannot afford to support unless you were "financially retarded"? I'm not knocking your friend per se, just pointing out that consumerism is only one way that people can make poor financial decisions. Is it stupid to buy a car that costs more than your annual income? Of course, but our culture tells us that we need to have that car. Some people buy the party line on the matter and buy things they shouldn't buy, despite their own best interest. Is it stupid to have children you cannot afford? Of course, but our culture tells us that children make us happy and fulfilled. Some people buy the party line and have children they shouldn't, despite their own (or for that matter, the child's) best interest.
Of course if you see the light on consumerism, it's pretty easy to stop buying so much stuff. If you see the light on children, you're pretty much stuck with the ones you have.
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I wasn't saying that your company did anything wrong, just that many companies do things differently. I can totally see a company providing little except a backend server for admin functions and an Internet/network connection. There would be many advantages, cost not least, and assuming you trust your users, few disadvantages. I've worked for small tech companies where that was essentially what we had. Most larger companies, either out of a need for more organization, a desire for more control, or pure paranoia, don't go that way though. Which means that most of us (who work for those companies) don't really have an option to protect our own privacy like you do. Similarly, unless you stay with your current company forever, or get really lucky in the job lottery, you will likely not always have that option either.
It's times like that in which a law like this would be nice. Not that I think my company has really infringed on my privacy, or that I really do anything wrong... just that it's nice to know that if you do get a lunatic boss who wants to read your personal e-mail there's some sort of protection.
But realistically I think people like you are probably less than 1% of the market. I'm not trying to offend you or anything, but the number of people who:
a) Use Linux as their primary OS.
b) Use a computer for games extensively.
c) Are not willing to dual boot or have a separate "game box".
d) Are willing to pay for the games they play (instead of just playing Tux Racer or Majong)
is pretty small. Most people who use Linux exclusively are willing to compromise on games (and many would not want to use "non-Free" games even if they were available). Most people who really want games are willing to compromise on OS (Either not using Linux as a primary system, dual booting, or having a "game box").
How much would it cost to port Steam and any reasonable number of the games on Steam, and would gaining you and the people who agree with you make them more money than that? Steam seems to think not.
Becasue TV's make terrible monitors. Sure it's big, but that's not everything is it?
Well for one, /. has a very "free market is God" audience for some reason. It tends to make it hard to "take a pulse of the nation" on this site. For another, I was specifically referring to the types of monitoring listed above (bathrooms, changing rooms and the like) which are not able to legally monitored in this country (at least not anywhere that I know of, stuff like this tends to be covered by state and local laws, not federal), and you'd probably be pretty hard pressed to find anyone who thinks they should be. Certainly Americans (in general) are less privacy aware than Europeans (in general), but not to the level displayed in the post above.
The problem is you're still paying peanuts. So every time you civilize a monkey it thinks: "Hey, that other company pays in *bananas* and I now have the fecal avoidance mechanisms to qualify." Time to find a new monkey, and start the whole process over again.
Actually it's not a US vs Europe thing. You've just found an edge case. Few in the US would agree with him either. All of those things are illegal in ever jurisdiction I'm aware of here in the US.
You have surprisingly tolerant work place. At larger companies with strong IT security policies such things are often blocked. I'm not allowed to bring a personal machine in to work here. I recently got a small hand slap for having Dropbox on my work machine. I didn't get in *trouble* per se, but I was asked to uninstall it and not install anything similar in the future. They don't block SSH here (we have several users that have to connect to remote sites for business purposes and no one has gotten the motivation yet to set up white list access for only the "right" sites and users), but at other places I've worked it has been. Many companies are quite paranoid about company secrets or customer data getting out.
I'm thinking in that case you'd have a separate account for the business relevant use of FB which would be monitor-able. My personal account might be "John Smith", but at work I am "Customer Service - The Company" or "The-Comp - John Smith". Back when Instant Messaging was the big thing lots of companies did this. Probably better than using a personal account anyway, for lots of reasons. It clearly denotes the affiliation of the person someone is "talking" to, It provides segregation in the mind of the employee, and it helps prevent people wandering off with your client list when they quit and take their personal FB account with them.
I once watched Glenn Beck argue, in all seriousness (I was in an airport and could neither change the channel nor leave) that national health care was a slippery slope to Fascism. Not, mind you, because of some convoluted arguments involving nanny state politics and people being weaned of off saying "no" to government policies. That might almost have made sense in some kind of twisted way. No, his argument was that national health care was socialistic, and the Nazi party had "socialist" in its name. He spent like twenty minutes on this point. Essentially repeating, in about 10 different ways that health care is socialist and Nazi's were "National Socialist" and so it was clear that the jackboots would be coming out within a couple years of the bill's passage.
I'll admit that the Sharrod thing was extremely reasonable. I don't know how it happened to be honest. The guy is normally a master of taking things out of context to make them sound as awful as possible, but in this one case he chose to consider context and change his tune. I'm glad he did it, but he'd have to do it a lot more before I took him seriously day to day.
A problem that I often run into on the "customer" side of this equation though is that often these "quick fixes" provide exactly that. "Reboot your cable modem" can often "fix" a problem that is merely a symptom of a larger issue. Example: My cable Internet was acting up. I rebooted the modem and it fixed the problem for a while, then it happened again. After the second or third time it happened in the period of a weekend I called tech support. The guy wanted me to reboot the modem. I tried to explain to him I'd done that several times and it was a short term fix. We should troubleshoot without rebooting the modem in order to discover the root cause. He was utterly unable to understand. His script said "Have customer reboot the modem, if this works get customer off the phone." I wouldn't reboot the modem. Life was HARD...
I think there are essentially four problems with the way tech support is done:
1) Techs are often clueless morons with minimal training. Now always, but often enough that it creates and sustains a prejudice among skilled, and even modestly skilled users that tech support people are idiots who can't be trusted.
2) Users are often clueless morons with no training at all. Sometime they even think they know what they're doing despite being a moron with no training. Not always, but often enough that it creates and sustains a prejudice among the more highly skilled tech support that users are the cause of many if not most of their own problems. Since the moron they work with often unconsciously try to imitate these more skilled people, this problem filters down.
3) Skilled users, expecting to deal with a mouth breathing moron as first level support, never want to do the simple stuff. The fact that nearly all of us have, no matter how awesome we think we are, overlooked something obvious ought to keep us from doing this, but it doesn't. Because for every time that we get caught having missed something obvious, there's been ten times or twenty times, or a hundred times that we've had to go through a 20 bloody minute checklist of things we already looked at to prove that we already looked at them. We tend to remember the wasted time and forget the once or twice that we went "Fuck, you're right, it ISN'T plugged in".
4) Techs, because so many users really are morons, tend to treat every problem as PEBKAC until it's proven otherwise. Which often makes them unwilling to deal with more skilled users on a higher level until they've exhausted all other possibilities. Which makes skilled users think all techs are morons...
You see where we're going here?
That's what has got me seriously confused about this lawsuit. Oracle is violating the cardinal rule of the software patent house of cards: "Don't sue someone who can sue you back." Google has patents too. They could quite easily look into their bag and find a few to use against Oracle I'm sure. Every medium to large software company has, at this point, at least one or two patents on something that could be considered a fundamental of software development. None of the big boys is safe from the the other big boys, which (in theory) is why they're all safe.
Unless this is some weird, deliberate attempt by Oracle to show that the Emperor has no clothes, it seems like a dangerous game to play. It could bring the whole system down.
The irony being that patents are anti-capitalistic (from a pure definition of capitalism). The problem here isn't regulations or deregulation per se, it's that large companies favor whichever favors them. If the government wants to regulate the labor market, every large company on the planet starts screaming bloody murder about unregulated markets and capitalism, and the evils of government interference. This is because an unregulated labor market favors large corporations that can easily replace cog workers with other cog workers. Start talking about patent reform and the same large corporations that just cried about the value of open markets will drag out the one small inventor who actually managed to make money on the patent system in the last five years and point to him as the reason that government regulation is GREAT in the patent arena.
The reason being, of course, that all of these corporations have a vested interest in the patent system continuing as is. They've spent a fortune on patents portfolios and they can afford lawyers to enforce even the most ridiculous of them. Even companies that clearly could do well (or perhaps even better than they currently are) in an environment without software patents don't want them to go away now, because there's so much institutional investment in the portfolio.
So yeah, pure capitalism is GREAT unless the regulation supports the industry in question... then capitalism is bad (or redefined to include regulation in just that one area).
That they stole off their competitors. OSX = BSD + Mach kernal.
How precisely is it "stealing" when the producers essentially said "Here it is! Do what you want with it!" That is rather the point of the BSD license I thought? Also OSX = BSD + Mach Kernel + a UI and userspace tools that leave most of what's available on BSD or Linux derivatives in the Dust + hardware tuned to the OS . You're missing the selling points. I could install Darwin on any old piece of junk lap top and get a product no one wants. That isn't OSX.
iPod = mp3 players before it.
Again, iPod = mp3 players before it + the wheel interface that everyone agreed was awesome.
iPhone = touch screen Palm devices that have been around since the late 90's.
But with gestures, capacitive screen, a much more usable web browser, etc..
You're deliberately ignoring the value that Apple added to each of these products. There are two possible reasons for this:
A) You don't see these things as valuable. Which a fair enough, but surely you can see where other people do see value here. It's more than pretty packaging, it's pretty packaging that works well and allows normal people to make greater use of the devices power.
B) You're deliberately ignoring these things in order to make it seem like all Apple products are just pretty junk, and the people who buy them mindless fanboys.
But if Microsoft is the IBM of now, than its attempts to make the PC of now are flailing blindly. I think you're comparing Apples to oranges here. (Yes, that was terrible, thank you) PC's of 20 years ago were expensive items and IBM (and especially the clones) were able to position themselves as the "Maybe not as good, but cheaper" option. When you were talking $1.5-2K vs 2.5-3K that was a huge deal (especially in 1980's money). You could save a lot of money and go with a very respected brand, practically synonymous with "computer".
By comparison, tablets are fairly cheap. ~$500 for a good one. Apple's gotten a big early lead and the competition is releasing inferior competitive products that save you what? $100 bucks? $50 bucks? The competition is also releasing roughly equivalent competitive products... but for roughly the same price, and much cheaper, but clearly MUCH inferior products for larger savings.
This isn't to say that I think Apple is going to rule the tablet PC market forever and always, amen. More that I don't think they'll crash and burn spectacularly like they did in the 80s. This isn't the same market, and the room to differentiate is there. When the difference between the "best of the best" (and most expensive of the expensive) and the cheapest or the cheap is only a few hundred dollars, people are willing to splurge for the "best", whatever that means to them.
As to your point about the iPod... I don't see it. Sony and Microsoft both have (or have had in the past) much more money than Apple. Acting like Apple somehow used it's vast warchest and influence to "cheat" in the MP3 player battles is patently silly. Their opponents had the same resources they did, if not more.
I hear this, yet I use a 3GS with IOS4 and it doesn't run like shit at all. The 3G, yes, that runs like shit with iOS4, but the 3GS is fine. The 3G is also a few years old now, so it's not surprising that the newest software is a bit crippled on it.
They failed. I can get his cookbook in Alabama. I've known several people who, upon making first trips into New York, made a point of visiting his place. Anyone, anyone who think that making real world establishment into a major fixture on an immensely popular TV show will hurt its business has to be smoking something.
Because it says so in Grammar and Language Arts textbooks, which are the closest things to official that language has. To say that language develops over time is fine, but at this point the language has not developed; it's still taught this way in schools. The fact that it's understandable doesn't make it right. Of course you'll say that I'm just quoting a rule someone made up. How you expect to communicate without following some sort of "rules someone made up" I don't know. It's also worth pointing out that no one is per se complaining about this in a random Internet post or other venue where perfection is neither expected nor reasonable, but in a sign that pretty much every grocery store everywhere uses.
You also raise a valid point. I guess I'm trying to look at it from the point of view of a guy who clearly finds this important. Personally I think it was kind of nuts to put the time and effort he obviously has into building a site like this in the first place, but having done so I must assume the guy thinks it's worth something.
You'd really be amazed at what can be accomplished by getting on the phone and continuing to ask to talk to a more important person. I'm not as good at it as my mother (she once got her medical insurance to cover an experimental plastic surgery procedure for my brother after his face got messed up by a dog. By the end she was on the phone with a senior executive VP, who reported directly to the CEO), but even with my lack of fu, I've gotten a surprising number of charges reversed, problems resolved, etc. It's not always successful, but there's really a fairly number of reasonable people at all levels of management for these various companies. It's just that they are so rarely faced with the reality of how process and procedure affect other actual human beings, that they are insulated from doing much about it.
Worse case scenario, he spends a few hours on the phone and wasted his time. It's not like he hasn't already spent hours and hours building this site. Best case he resolves the issue and moves on with life. In either case be prepared to buckle under before the deadline, if that's how you're planning to play it.
It does seem to me that before going the "Fold like a Newspaper" route the guy might at least like, try to talk to management at the Discovery Channel. According to the article, he's had some correspondence with the lawyer, but that's like trying to talk sense to hammer. The lawyer's job is to act tough and push the line he's been given. It may very well be that he'll get a unified gray wall all the way up the chain of command, but often if you annoy someone important enough (especially someone with some sense, which believe or not often manages to happen) you can get stuff like this fixed. Or at least compromised on. Start with the producers of the show (who have a vested interest in not pissing off a large fan community) and work from there.
Hmm. It seems I am confusing "Right to Work" laws with "At-will Employment" laws. The two are apparently often conflated in "Right-to-Work States" which I have spent most of my working life in. Mea Culpa and I have learned something new. I think the "Troll" moderation was a bit harsh though Mr. moderator person.
See my above post about what happened to Rubbermaid when they tried to do the same thing. Snapper could get away with it because mechanical devices have a more obvious quality factor that other things. Most industries aren't as lucky.
Not to denigrate your point (which is valid), but the other problem that a lot of people in poorer areas of the country face is lack of choice. A few years ago I went to visit my wife's grandparents in fairly rural Illinois for Thanksgiving. On Black Friday my wife's grandmother (grandmother-in-law?) wanted to do the traditional Black Friday shopping trip. Now frankly, myself, my wife, my MIL and my FIL all felt that we'd just as soon stick our Thanksgiving forks in our eyes as go shopping in rural Illinois on Black Friday, but family is family so we all crawled out of bed bright and early and were on the road by 7:00 or so.
The bright side of rural areas is that there's no 24 hour stores, or opening at some godawful time of the morning. The downside turned out to be that we could go shopping at Walmart. And only Walmart. We drove 15 minutes into town, and town turned out to be a couple of restaurants, a few gas stations, a grocery store, a few pawn shops, and Walmart. I imagine the pawn shops look a lot like a Walmart "dinged and dented" section. It wasn't even a big Walmart. Quite possibly the smallest I'd ever been in, though it was packed check by jowl with stuff.
Realistically if they wanted to buy stuff from anywhere other than Walmart, the people in this town would first have to travel ~2 hours to St. Louis. GFIL(?) had actually purchased a computer and learned to make reasonable use of the Internet for purchases of more substantial goods, but he was both unusually wealthy for the area and usually tech savvy for his age (doubly so for his age and the area).
It's good to see there are still industries that can sell quality to the point where they can get away with it. Rubbermaid tried to do the same thing, but sadly plastic buckets and storage containers aren't a quality competitive market. Walmart sold other people's buckets and containers instead, and sold them in such volume that Rubbermaid eventually had little option but to buckle under. Now Walmart sells Rubbermaid, at Walmart prices, and Rubbermaid is: a) a much weaker company (I think I read they sold themselves recently, but I could be wrong there) and b) trying to move as many jobs as possible overseas to reduce costs.
Snapper got away with it because people are still willing to pay more for well built mechanical devices that will last longer. Good for them, and it's very nice to see, but sadly not many industries are in that position.
There's an irony in your statement. Why would you have three children that you cannot afford to support unless you were "financially retarded"? I'm not knocking your friend per se, just pointing out that consumerism is only one way that people can make poor financial decisions. Is it stupid to buy a car that costs more than your annual income? Of course, but our culture tells us that we need to have that car. Some people buy the party line on the matter and buy things they shouldn't buy, despite their own best interest. Is it stupid to have children you cannot afford? Of course, but our culture tells us that children make us happy and fulfilled. Some people buy the party line and have children they shouldn't, despite their own (or for that matter, the child's) best interest.
Of course if you see the light on consumerism, it's pretty easy to stop buying so much stuff. If you see the light on children, you're pretty much stuck with the ones you have.