Sure, but the mindshare it buys, even in small amounts, is pretty good for Apple and keeps them from being seen solely as a consumer electronics business.
What I find interesting about the iPhone in particular is how good a job Apple has done supporting corporate/MS standards. My past experience (~20 years of Mac exposure, use & support) with Apple's attitude towards cross-platform compatibility was "tough shit, they should have bought a Mac".
I would have expected the same for the iPhone but I find it as good/better than a WinMo phone for ActiveSync. About the only shortcoming is that it doesn't support more than one ActiveSync account.
I think Apple is back dooring the corporate market via the iPhone. I've run into a couple of companies lately that are all Microsoft, all the time on the desktop but have made the iPhone as their corporate standard.
And in some cases, Macs are still hanging in there in marketing/publishing roles within businesses even though the "need" for a Mac in that role has long passed (IMHO).
I guy I used to work for who smoked told me that he started smoking because it got him out of work.
He was working at a machine shop and found that if he took a break with the smokers, his foreman made him go back to to work while the smokers got to keep on smoking. Apparently not working but smoking was "doing something" and not working without smoking was "standing around." He basically started smoking to keep from working.
I'm guessing its like that in the military, too. A guy smoking is on a smoke break, a guy not smoking is just standing around.
Smoking in the movies of the 40s and 50s is pretty appealing, I'll have to admit. There's two kinds of smoking, though.
The first kind is the continuous, repetitive chain smoking where everybody seems to have a cigarette going.
Then there's the kind of social smoking where you wonder what smoking was really like. I can remember a movie where neither character seemed to chain smoke, but instead after a meal the characters retired to the living room for drinks and they each enjoyed a (singular) cigarette taken from a wooden box on the coffee table.
I'm kind of wondering how common this kind of smoking was and whether it was actual addictiveness or marketing that turned it from an occasional pleasure to a full-time habit.
I'm guessing that a half-dozen cigarettes a week probably isn't near the health risk that a pack and a half a day is.
If we really wanted to reduce crime, we'd legalize the personal use of drugs by adults, release all of the non-violent drug offenders, and use the (tremendous amount of) extra jail space for violent criminals.
You're absolutely right. Even if it was just marijuana it would have a huge effect. The amount of manpower and money wasted chasing drug crimes is staggering.
I would go one step further and increase the manpower and resources devoted to solving/protecting against property crime as well. The benefits go beyond not just having your car stolen; if people get their stuff back or a break-in is prevented, I think it fosters a more tangible belief that the police are directly providing a service versus simply "out there" ready to hassle you or providing some abstract service.
I think too often property crimes are treated by the police as merely an opportunity to increase the case number counter, so that your insurance company can reimburse you. The mindset that "it's only stuff" tends to diminish not only the value people put on what was stolen but it also devalues the work people did to obtain their property which has a demoralizing effect on people's work ethic -- why bother to work hard or obtain goals if people can steal from you and the "system" doesn't do anything about it?
I don't see how these systems actually result in less crime unless the reduction is a product of the PR effect; ie, people being less willing to commit crime because they believe the system will catch them.
A shot "located" by one of these systems is accurate to, what, maybe a quarter of a block range on a good day? In a high density city with a lot of mobility, you locate the shooter how? Do you actually deploy investigative officers and expect to find someone standing around with a gun in their hands?
Or is it just a question of statistical enforcement? Squads are deployed to roll through areas with shot locations to deter further shooting (ie, reactive policing) or its used to change squad patrol frequency/density to areas with higher shot counts over time? Basically the NYPD CompStat system deployed with another data input.
All in all, it seems like a triumph of technology over strategy. I would expect that money would be better spent with more patrol officers spending more time tackling the kind of festering low-level crime (theft, graffiti, loitering, etc) that seems to enable more serious crime.
Around here, we have a law that says the state (as in US state) sets the speed limits on all roads unless a waiver is given to a locality (city or county) to override the speed limit that would ordinarily apply to a given road.
I'm sure the purpose is both uniformity (so everyone "knows" how fast to drive on unfamiliar or unposted roads) and to prevent municipalities from changing speed limits arbitrarily (speed traps, etc).
The side effect to this in the larger urban areas is that in response to heavy traffic, people seek out residential through streets as means around the major arterial streets, which are clogged. The people living on those streets hate the traffic and the speeding that goes with it, so the residents are able to petition the council to get speedbumps installed on their streets.
IMHO these suck. One, they don't really slow or divert that much traffic. Usually you see people driving the speed limit and then braking hard at the speed bumps and then accelerating hard to get back to their speed limits. While I sympathize with the people living on those streets, they ARE through streets that belong to everyone who pays taxes, not private roads for the benefit of the residents -- you only ever see speedbumps in upscale residential areas.
I also think they are illegal usurpation of the state speed limits -- you can't drive the legal speed limit on the street without damage to your vehicle and/or creating a dangerous situation flying off the bumps.
Two years is probably more like it because that's the contract limitation of AT&T before you can get a new, subsidized phone (and another two year signup with AT&T).
My wife has a 3G, which is two years old this year and while its noticeably slower than my 3GS, its not really obsolete. Non-3G iPhones are 3 years old this year and are probably slower and can't use some of the features in 3.0 that 3G phones can, so those might be borderline obsolete even if they can fit some definition of "usable".
Apple may not EOL or intentionally make unusable a 3+ year old phone but it may get to be like PPC Macs that can't move onto higher OS levels.
The basis of the modern government's power is the monopoly on the use of force. In order to maintain and enforce this monopoly, the government must have a source of funding. Without that funding, the government maintains the legal monopoly but no longer can enforce a practical monopoly on the use of force.
Since those in government wish to maintain their power and their positions in government, they accept funding from private entities. In exchange for funding the government, private parties are granted exclusivity arrangements which enable monopoly control over sectors of the economy which are enforced by the government's ability to exercise use of force.
Were this a US corporation I'm sure the legal action taken would have been drastically different.
Except that it generally hasn't, even when there have been prosecutions they've been very narrowly focused on individuals, not looking at the larger ecosystem which supports the behavior.
A few high profile individuals get long jail sentences, but larger organizations don't get prosecuted well if at all. In many cases its a fine that is largely built into their cost structure or executive compensation packages.
We need these organizations prosecuted under RICO laws, treating them as what they are: organized crime. Not only will this result in severe punishment, we can drag into the prosecution these otherwise "legal" entities supplying services and operational credibility to an organized crime entity.
Once these entities have a few executives doing a minimum Federal 20 and their organizations' names dragged through the mud, the rest of them will think twice about getting involved with the dark side. It's a lot harder to run an online scam entity when you are forced to only accept cash payments and have a hard time buying decent hosting services.
It's almost like FBI/DOJ doesn't see this as a crime or are so ignorant that they don't bother.
But how much? I have a pretty inexpensive table saw with "only" a 1.5 HP motor, yet I don't see chain mail (at least any kind that would still make handling wood at the saw comfortable/safe) gloves as being able to realistically stop the blade at speed.
For guys using bigger saws with, say, 3 HP motors, it seems like there'd be no use in wearing them.
Sony is fading in the TV dept.
on
I Want My GTV
·
· Score: 1
Sony is also fading in the TV department. Disc players and LCD TVs of good are available from a lot of cheaper vendors and choosing Sony no longer makes as much sense as it might have even 5 years ago.
Sony has to start doing something to remain relevant.
Although with or without Sony's involvement you can bet that this isn't some open system box you can just remote into and download unencrypted video from.
Somehow the data thief stringing along a half-dozen heroin addicts for used laptops sounds like a great plot vehicle for a movie but pretty unlikely in real life. Drug addicts, gang members, et al are who they are because they are unreliable, dishonest and only concerned with very short term outcomes -- like how am I gonna get high in the next hour.
It sounds like a clever idea to use them as secret shoppers to steal laptops, but what happens when they steal the wrong ones? It's like Frankenstein sending his assistant out for a brain, but much worse.
I don't doubt that there are industrial/political espionage types out looking to steal laptops for their data, but my guess is that its a much smaller problem than what amounts of half of all laptop thefts in the UK.
...without strong countermeasures to prevent the data from being exploited?
I guess I don't understand why, if some chunk of data is critically important, that the organization would allow it to be dragged out of the office on a laptop. The data should be required to stay in the office with access from outside the office only on a business-critical basis and with strong security requirements (ie, VPN-only accessable terminal server, all using RSA tokens).
And if it MUST go out of the office on a laptop, why aren't very strong encryption measures being taken into consideration, including whole-disk encryption with failed-access data wiping?
I see so many people with laptops who don't really need portability. Most of the time they have a laptop because it's a token of their importance to the organization or some kind of freebie (they have a desktop, too, but the laptop is so they can "work from home" but is really just a free home computer).
The other thing weird about this is that 61% of the lost laptops resulted in a security breach! Most of the people I've dealt with who had laptops were by and large wankers with company data of interest to almost no one; at worst you might be able to reverse a cached password or raid the browser passwords for something trivial.
And who is stealing laptops? In the US, a lot of that theft is just petty theft for quick cash -- drug addicts, gang members, losers looking for something they can pawn or turn on the street for $200. It's really not info security experts.
We had 300 baud and we WORSHIPED the acoustic coupler that provided it. 1200 baud dialup lines were "admin only". There was no 2400 baud dialup.
But 300 kept you off the TTY 43s (which were always out of paper) and out of the peanut oil stench in the dorm "computer lab" and BEAT THE LIVING SHIT out of hauling ass across the frozen tundra to the "main computer lab" and the fascists lab admins who reserved the "good" VT100s for their buddies, forcing you onto Z19s or the same TTY 43s you ran from at the dorms.
Anyway, quit bitching about your 2400 baud modems, and GET OFF MY LAWN.
Why not teach him how to properly handle a gun instead of running and hiding? Always treat the barrel of the gun as if the gun could fire at any moment without cause. Let him hold the gun just make sure he always points it away from people preferably at the ground, since pointing it in the air could result in injuring someone else far away. Basically if the barrel of the gun is ever pointed in the direction of a person consider them shot.
He's five. I plan to when he's old enough to show that kind of responsibility. Children do not have the mental capacity to be responsible enough to handle firearms safely, especially at age five. It's hard enough getting him to not wipe his face on his sleeve. At five, running away and telling an adult (NOT hiding) is the responsible and safe thing to do, and is the base of the NRA children's gun safety curriculum.
I know it takes a lot of energy, but it can be done anywhere you have the windmills and a source of water. You don't need abandoned mines, the right geology, to drill into the earth and bore out storage underground (how is that considered environmental, anyway?). And what happens when the ground ruptures and you have an atomic bomb's worth of pressurized air?
The hydrogen can be used as a fuel source for more than just electric generation, it is portable and can be moved around (perhaps concentrating the small amounts generated everywhere to make a useful larger amount), and we gain the expertise in handling, converting and creating it. It's environmentally friendly and we already know how to burn it. You can even create it in locations where you can't realistically transmit the power you can generate (I wonder if Iceland couldn't get out of their financial jam by using geothermal to create hydrogen from sea water and then sell it as a fuel...although there's probably more money in siting aluminum smelters.)
I wonder if someone had just decided that hydrogen creation was a good idea and started doing in 10 years ago when large scale wind farms had been developed how much hydrogen could have been generated up this point.
Let's get this out of our systems: The parents were horribly irresponsible and deserve to be charged with some kind of crime. In most states (including mine) it is a felony to leave a weapon where a minor can gain access to it.
That being said, as a responsible gun owner, I don't like my son to have guns as toys. Toy guns are safe. Toy guns never hurt anybody. Toy guns teach every bad habit that gun safety teaches you not to do. Kids literally think guns are toys and can be handled cavalierly.
From the time he could talk I have drilled my son that when he sees a gun, what does he do? "Run away and tell a grown up." What if your friend wants to pick it up? "Run away and tell a grown up." What if your friend has it first and wants to show you? "Run away and tell a grown up."
Kaczinski was right, but the cognitive dissonance of his realization drove him to a conclusion that would not solve the problem.
At some point you have to wonder how possible it is to even reject the corporate-influenced life, especially if you grow up in the city as I did. Before you're even aware of the trap of corporate control, you're so far into it that once you are aware extraction from it often requires complete rejection of your entire life, including economic support, friends, family, location and lifestyle.
A few hardy souls can make this work, but for a lot of people the end result is at best a kind of grinding rural poverty, and at worst misery and alienation.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but the mindshare it buys, even in small amounts, is pretty good for Apple and keeps them from being seen solely as a consumer electronics business.
What I find interesting about the iPhone in particular is how good a job Apple has done supporting corporate/MS standards. My past experience (~20 years of Mac exposure, use & support) with Apple's attitude towards cross-platform compatibility was "tough shit, they should have bought a Mac".
I would have expected the same for the iPhone but I find it as good/better than a WinMo phone for ActiveSync. About the only shortcoming is that it doesn't support more than one ActiveSync account.
I think Apple is back dooring the corporate market via the iPhone. I've run into a couple of companies lately that are all Microsoft, all the time on the desktop but have made the iPhone as their corporate standard.
And in some cases, Macs are still hanging in there in marketing/publishing roles within businesses even though the "need" for a Mac in that role has long passed (IMHO).
I guy I used to work for who smoked told me that he started smoking because it got him out of work.
He was working at a machine shop and found that if he took a break with the smokers, his foreman made him go back to to work while the smokers got to keep on smoking. Apparently not working but smoking was "doing something" and not working without smoking was "standing around." He basically started smoking to keep from working.
I'm guessing its like that in the military, too. A guy smoking is on a smoke break, a guy not smoking is just standing around.
Smoking in the movies of the 40s and 50s is pretty appealing, I'll have to admit. There's two kinds of smoking, though.
The first kind is the continuous, repetitive chain smoking where everybody seems to have a cigarette going.
Then there's the kind of social smoking where you wonder what smoking was really like. I can remember a movie where neither character seemed to chain smoke, but instead after a meal the characters retired to the living room for drinks and they each enjoyed a (singular) cigarette taken from a wooden box on the coffee table.
I'm kind of wondering how common this kind of smoking was and whether it was actual addictiveness or marketing that turned it from an occasional pleasure to a full-time habit.
I'm guessing that a half-dozen cigarettes a week probably isn't near the health risk that a pack and a half a day is.
If we really wanted to reduce crime, we'd legalize the personal use of drugs by adults, release all of the non-violent drug offenders, and use the (tremendous amount of) extra jail space for violent criminals.
You're absolutely right. Even if it was just marijuana it would have a huge effect. The amount of manpower and money wasted chasing drug crimes is staggering.
I would go one step further and increase the manpower and resources devoted to solving/protecting against property crime as well. The benefits go beyond not just having your car stolen; if people get their stuff back or a break-in is prevented, I think it fosters a more tangible belief that the police are directly providing a service versus simply "out there" ready to hassle you or providing some abstract service.
I think too often property crimes are treated by the police as merely an opportunity to increase the case number counter, so that your insurance company can reimburse you. The mindset that "it's only stuff" tends to diminish not only the value people put on what was stolen but it also devalues the work people did to obtain their property which has a demoralizing effect on people's work ethic -- why bother to work hard or obtain goals if people can steal from you and the "system" doesn't do anything about it?
I don't see how these systems actually result in less crime unless the reduction is a product of the PR effect; ie, people being less willing to commit crime because they believe the system will catch them.
A shot "located" by one of these systems is accurate to, what, maybe a quarter of a block range on a good day? In a high density city with a lot of mobility, you locate the shooter how? Do you actually deploy investigative officers and expect to find someone standing around with a gun in their hands?
Or is it just a question of statistical enforcement? Squads are deployed to roll through areas with shot locations to deter further shooting (ie, reactive policing) or its used to change squad patrol frequency/density to areas with higher shot counts over time? Basically the NYPD CompStat system deployed with another data input.
All in all, it seems like a triumph of technology over strategy. I would expect that money would be better spent with more patrol officers spending more time tackling the kind of festering low-level crime (theft, graffiti, loitering, etc) that seems to enable more serious crime.
Around here, we have a law that says the state (as in US state) sets the speed limits on all roads unless a waiver is given to a locality (city or county) to override the speed limit that would ordinarily apply to a given road.
I'm sure the purpose is both uniformity (so everyone "knows" how fast to drive on unfamiliar or unposted roads) and to prevent municipalities from changing speed limits arbitrarily (speed traps, etc).
The side effect to this in the larger urban areas is that in response to heavy traffic, people seek out residential through streets as means around the major arterial streets, which are clogged. The people living on those streets hate the traffic and the speeding that goes with it, so the residents are able to petition the council to get speedbumps installed on their streets.
IMHO these suck. One, they don't really slow or divert that much traffic. Usually you see people driving the speed limit and then braking hard at the speed bumps and then accelerating hard to get back to their speed limits. While I sympathize with the people living on those streets, they ARE through streets that belong to everyone who pays taxes, not private roads for the benefit of the residents -- you only ever see speedbumps in upscale residential areas.
I also think they are illegal usurpation of the state speed limits -- you can't drive the legal speed limit on the street without damage to your vehicle and/or creating a dangerous situation flying off the bumps.
Two years is probably more like it because that's the contract limitation of AT&T before you can get a new, subsidized phone (and another two year signup with AT&T).
My wife has a 3G, which is two years old this year and while its noticeably slower than my 3GS, its not really obsolete. Non-3G iPhones are 3 years old this year and are probably slower and can't use some of the features in 3.0 that 3G phones can, so those might be borderline obsolete even if they can fit some definition of "usable".
Apple may not EOL or intentionally make unusable a 3+ year old phone but it may get to be like PPC Macs that can't move onto higher OS levels.
China is doing a decent job demonstrating that it can work, at least in the near term.
I'm not sure any system is good enough over the really long haul, even the Romans couldn't make it persistent.
It's the other way around.
The basis of the modern government's power is the monopoly on the use of force. In order to maintain and enforce this monopoly, the government must have a source of funding. Without that funding, the government maintains the legal monopoly but no longer can enforce a practical monopoly on the use of force.
Since those in government wish to maintain their power and their positions in government, they accept funding from private entities. In exchange for funding the government, private parties are granted exclusivity arrangements which enable monopoly control over sectors of the economy which are enforced by the government's ability to exercise use of force.
Were this a US corporation I'm sure the legal action taken would have been drastically different.
Except that it generally hasn't, even when there have been prosecutions they've been very narrowly focused on individuals, not looking at the larger ecosystem which supports the behavior.
I'm so sick of these slaps on the hand.
A few high profile individuals get long jail sentences, but larger organizations don't get prosecuted well if at all. In many cases its a fine that is largely built into their cost structure or executive compensation packages.
We need these organizations prosecuted under RICO laws, treating them as what they are: organized crime. Not only will this result in severe punishment, we can drag into the prosecution these otherwise "legal" entities supplying services and operational credibility to an organized crime entity.
Once these entities have a few executives doing a minimum Federal 20 and their organizations' names dragged through the mud, the rest of them will think twice about getting involved with the dark side. It's a lot harder to run an online scam entity when you are forced to only accept cash payments and have a hard time buying decent hosting services.
It's almost like FBI/DOJ doesn't see this as a crime or are so ignorant that they don't bother.
But how much? I have a pretty inexpensive table saw with "only" a 1.5 HP motor, yet I don't see chain mail (at least any kind that would still make handling wood at the saw comfortable/safe) gloves as being able to realistically stop the blade at speed.
For guys using bigger saws with, say, 3 HP motors, it seems like there'd be no use in wearing them.
Sony is also fading in the TV department. Disc players and LCD TVs of good are available from a lot of cheaper vendors and choosing Sony no longer makes as much sense as it might have even 5 years ago.
Sony has to start doing something to remain relevant.
Although with or without Sony's involvement you can bet that this isn't some open system box you can just remote into and download unencrypted video from.
Somehow the data thief stringing along a half-dozen heroin addicts for used laptops sounds like a great plot vehicle for a movie but pretty unlikely in real life. Drug addicts, gang members, et al are who they are because they are unreliable, dishonest and only concerned with very short term outcomes -- like how am I gonna get high in the next hour.
It sounds like a clever idea to use them as secret shoppers to steal laptops, but what happens when they steal the wrong ones? It's like Frankenstein sending his assistant out for a brain, but much worse.
I don't doubt that there are industrial/political espionage types out looking to steal laptops for their data, but my guess is that its a much smaller problem than what amounts of half of all laptop thefts in the UK.
...without strong countermeasures to prevent the data from being exploited?
I guess I don't understand why, if some chunk of data is critically important, that the organization would allow it to be dragged out of the office on a laptop. The data should be required to stay in the office with access from outside the office only on a business-critical basis and with strong security requirements (ie, VPN-only accessable terminal server, all using RSA tokens).
And if it MUST go out of the office on a laptop, why aren't very strong encryption measures being taken into consideration, including whole-disk encryption with failed-access data wiping?
I see so many people with laptops who don't really need portability. Most of the time they have a laptop because it's a token of their importance to the organization or some kind of freebie (they have a desktop, too, but the laptop is so they can "work from home" but is really just a free home computer).
The other thing weird about this is that 61% of the lost laptops resulted in a security breach! Most of the people I've dealt with who had laptops were by and large wankers with company data of interest to almost no one; at worst you might be able to reverse a cached password or raid the browser passwords for something trivial.
And who is stealing laptops? In the US, a lot of that theft is just petty theft for quick cash -- drug addicts, gang members, losers looking for something they can pawn or turn on the street for $200. It's really not info security experts.
My guess is they could triple the price and still sell a lot. People want to hear.
The price is probably at some maximum level that insurance companies will pay and people can actually scrape the money together for.
We had 300 baud and we WORSHIPED the acoustic coupler that provided it. 1200 baud dialup lines were "admin only". There was no 2400 baud dialup.
But 300 kept you off the TTY 43s (which were always out of paper) and out of the peanut oil stench in the dorm "computer lab" and BEAT THE LIVING SHIT out of hauling ass across the frozen tundra to the "main computer lab" and the fascists lab admins who reserved the "good" VT100s for their buddies, forcing you onto Z19s or the same TTY 43s you ran from at the dorms.
Anyway, quit bitching about your 2400 baud modems, and GET OFF MY LAWN.
Would be extremely useful.
I can see in a car where you'd have an in-dash touchscreen (the 5" or whatever the screens are) and a "port" for your iPhone.
Once docked in the port, your iPhone display is on the in-dash display, and integrated with the stereo, the handsfree controls for phoning, etc.
That would be pretty nice.
Why not teach him how to properly handle a gun instead of running and hiding? Always treat the barrel of the gun as if the gun could fire at any moment without cause. Let him hold the gun just make sure he always points it away from people preferably at the ground, since pointing it in the air could result in injuring someone else far away. Basically if the barrel of the gun is ever pointed in the direction of a person consider them shot.
He's five. I plan to when he's old enough to show that kind of responsibility. Children do not have the mental capacity to be responsible enough to handle firearms safely, especially at age five. It's hard enough getting him to not wipe his face on his sleeve. At five, running away and telling an adult (NOT hiding) is the responsible and safe thing to do, and is the base of the NRA children's gun safety curriculum.
I know it takes a lot of energy, but it can be done anywhere you have the windmills and a source of water. You don't need abandoned mines, the right geology, to drill into the earth and bore out storage underground (how is that considered environmental, anyway?). And what happens when the ground ruptures and you have an atomic bomb's worth of pressurized air?
The hydrogen can be used as a fuel source for more than just electric generation, it is portable and can be moved around (perhaps concentrating the small amounts generated everywhere to make a useful larger amount), and we gain the expertise in handling, converting and creating it. It's environmentally friendly and we already know how to burn it. You can even create it in locations where you can't realistically transmit the power you can generate (I wonder if Iceland couldn't get out of their financial jam by using geothermal to create hydrogen from sea water and then sell it as a fuel...although there's probably more money in siting aluminum smelters.)
I wonder if someone had just decided that hydrogen creation was a good idea and started doing in 10 years ago when large scale wind farms had been developed how much hydrogen could have been generated up this point.
Maybe when you're 20. When you're 45? That seal isn't enough to pressurize anything.
Let's get this out of our systems: The parents were horribly irresponsible and deserve to be charged with some kind of crime. In most states (including mine) it is a felony to leave a weapon where a minor can gain access to it.
That being said, as a responsible gun owner, I don't like my son to have guns as toys. Toy guns are safe. Toy guns never hurt anybody. Toy guns teach every bad habit that gun safety teaches you not to do. Kids literally think guns are toys and can be handled cavalierly.
From the time he could talk I have drilled my son that when he sees a gun, what does he do? "Run away and tell a grown up." What if your friend wants to pick it up? "Run away and tell a grown up." What if your friend has it first and wants to show you? "Run away and tell a grown up."
Kaczinski was right, but the cognitive dissonance of his realization drove him to a conclusion that would not solve the problem.
At some point you have to wonder how possible it is to even reject the corporate-influenced life, especially if you grow up in the city as I did. Before you're even aware of the trap of corporate control, you're so far into it that once you are aware extraction from it often requires complete rejection of your entire life, including economic support, friends, family, location and lifestyle.
A few hardy souls can make this work, but for a lot of people the end result is at best a kind of grinding rural poverty, and at worst misery and alienation.
I get why Intel doesn't want to *retail* them, but what's the point of a wholesaler when you have a retail distributor as huge as Newegg?
And the same is true of other products sold via other retailers.
It almost seems like "we/they" put up with a needless set of middlemen who only mark stuff up.