12-step fellowships categorically do not tell you "only god" can help you. What they say is as individuals we of our own resources lack the solution to the problem and we need help, therefore we need something else.
By definition, if you can solve the problem on your own, it is no longer a problem, therefore any such individuals are not addicts. Addicts are people that have literally tried everything within their own power and resources to stop and have been unable to do so. "Just stopping" isn't possible for a real addict. I know it sounds bizarre, but consider this: it is a well known fact that consumption of various toxins over an extended period of time will change your bodies' chemistry, brain chemistry, even damage or alter your DNA sequence. Given that, is it not possible that addicts may face a different challenge than someone who has just been playing too much WoW or maybe drinking a bit too much for a relatively short period of time?
Some 12-step members seek a "God" as commonly associated with the world's religions. Go figure, most of the people in the world are religious. Is it such a great stretch to think that demographic might stretch into a support organization? Many others, like myself, simply choose the help of other people to be that outside power. Some choose Yoda, doorknobs, apple pie, etc. Nobody is ever ostracized for believing in a non-god, in fact many texts of many 12-step fellowships clearly spell out that an individual's choice in seeking an outside "power" is completely at their own discretion.
And yes, the "G" word is printed a lot in 12-step literature. It is a euphemism not an instruction, and this nuance is printed repeatedly in the literature of many other 12-step fellowships. For me and the people I hang with, we consider it an acronym for "Group Of Dope fiends".
Just like your psychologist friend, I have some good pot shots to take at AA myself, which is why I don't go there. They actually promise things they cannot deliver. Things which other 12-step fellowships have wisely chosen not to promise. I will leave you and your friend with this, and this is the only thing I will quote from AA literature. It was not written by one of their members, BTW:
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation" --Herbert Spencer
I've acted dogmatic by stating I am an agnostic and a member of a 12-step fellowship? LOOOOOOOOOL What part of my post have I laid down as "incontrovertably true"?
Here are the 12-steps of AA. I am not a member of AA, and I am not disclosing which fellowship I am a member of as our traditions suggest I do not represent my fellowship in front of a wide audience.
Yeah that's OK. There's another guy around here that has patented the process of passing of slashdot-time wasting as work. I think you owe him some royalties. Not to mention the royalties you owe me for the use of my patented letters E and e.
I don't exactly agree. Yes, if I actually want to see a particular movie I will go to the theater because I get to see it sooner, and before anyone can spoil it for me around the water cooler. So that much I agree with. But the real issue is the cases where I say to myself "I'll wait for the disc". In those cases it is pretty much because the movie looks like it might be another predictable watered-down non-story and I really don't want to risk paying the theater premium to check it out. It wouldn't matter to me if it were 4 days, 4 weeks or 40 weeks before it came to disc, I still wouldn't shell out for the theater in these cases.
So I have to go with the OP and say they are looking at it from the wrong angle. The time between theater and DVD release doesn't really harm the theaters. The true culprit is all the crap content the studios are producing these days. That and the fact that there simply are too many theaters, at least in L.A. that is the case. The only time I remember going to a full theater in the past 10 years was for Munich on a Saturday Night.
I don't think you were truly addicted to EQ if it simply "wore off". Perhaps a bit obsessed with it, yes. Unless of course, you've substituted something else in place of EQ that similarly destroys your life.
I really have a lot to say to Southpaw018 above. I totally call bullshit. Any "traditional addiction program" will include attendance of a 12-step fellowship as part of their program, so I believe he's never actually experienced a "traditional addiction program". Or perhaps the clinicians at the program diagnosed him as a non-addict, gave him something else they called "treatment" and took his parents money anyway.
Pseudoreligious is a misnomer. I am an agnostic member of a 12-step fellowship. My belief can be characterized as "there is some force in the universe that I don't entirely understand that creates particles, planets, biology, stars, etc.", not religious at all. In my 10+ years of clean time in this particular fellowship, I have shared my belief with others freely and I have never once had anyone even remotely suggest it was incorrect. If anyone did, I would simply tell them to go fuck themselves. As a result I conclude that 12-step fellowships lack dogma which is an essential ingredient of any religion or pseudo-religiion.
I'm not a member of AA, so I can't speak to the studies cited below. I can say however that generalizations a few sentences long taken without considering the entire context in which they were presented are somewhat suspect. I know hundreds of people that were previously addicted to a variety of chemicals who have been clean for many years now, some, like myself, have been clean the entire time without using drugs or alcohol ever again. Not every one who tries to get clean succeeds, that is true. While I cannot speak to any studies on AA, I can say anecdotally those broad sweeping statements listed in Wikipedia do not apply in all situations nor to all people.
12-step programs do not claim to "get anyone clean", or have the "cure all". Indeed, they all require an individual to possess "a desire to get clean" in order to call themselves a member. In my observation, many (but not all) of those that do not make it lack that basic desire, i.e., they're trying to save their marriage, house, job, comply with court orders, etc., and aren't there because they truly want to change. They're there because they think they can save their "stuff". The reason for this sole requirement for membership is that recovery is not possible without first admitting there is a problem, and possessing the desire to do something about it, because it takes a lot of work and a lot of willingness to change.
Nice FUD there. The reason you don't see that in the first 3 steps is because those processes of identifying problems, taking responsibility form them and making amends for them are embodied in steps 4 through 9. Anyone who is in a 12-step program, who is serious about staying clean, knows full well they have many wrongs to try to set right if they want to stay clean. You should know better than to take Wikipedia as an absolute quotable source.
Yeah, my AC buddy above there is correct. Parenting is definitely part of the problem with kids like this. Forget about talking to people that raise kids like that, they've obviously go no sense of boundaries or effective means of discipline. You'd be lucky to walk away from such a talk without facing assault charges yourself.
Giving the principal enough rope to hang himself, then applying this approach is a good long-term solution. The one kid won't be bugging her any more, and the rest of the kids will know what's up: that girl will break your nose AND she'll get away with it too.
Lumpy, you did the right thing. And I gotta hand it to your daughter for following through. I would definitely want to hire her in her future professional life.
Unfortunately, my niece needs someone like your daughter to come along and break her nose to set her straight. That is a much harder problem to try and address. Particularly for an uncle.
This is proof that TV Execs are complete idiots. Or perhaps the people purchasing advertising. Every store I walk into that has telescreens I observe most if not all people doing something to avert their attention away from the screen. It's a colossal waste of money and I don't see how it is of any benefit to the advertisers.
Congratulations! You have likely invested the work necessary in selecting a good match as your mate and all the subsequent work in keeping the relationship healthy. One day I may be so lucky...until then I'm in this never ending cycle of dating various women, many of whom could have been a quickie character on Seinfeld.
But don't delude yourself, your utopia is not the norm. I'll keep it real short and simple. When I met my accountant to help me out of some tax problems some years back, he had a little talk to me about marriage and divorce. He said marriage can be about a lot of things, true love, insecurity, combining efforts, companionship, social status, etc. but he made it clear on no uncertain terms that divorce was always about money. He probably has the right position in our society to make the observation, being an accountant and all. I think he's right.
One of my old bosses worked at JPL. He was in charge of navigating Voyager for one of it's planetary encounters. I think it was Saturn. Aside from some other challenges with the planet being in Earth's equatorial plane during the encounter (which greatly complicated telemetry collection), they were running all their calculations on an IBM 360 in Pasadena in the middle of August. Anyone who's been around here knows it's about 90-100F outside during August, and maybe gets down to around 80-85 at night. The 360 couldn't even plot a complete series of data before it would overheat and crash. His first task was to double the RAM, and write an kernel extension that would periodically copy the running set over to the extra RAM, then dump that out to paper tape. With the most recent tape, and a custom boot loader, they could power the machine down to let it cool, then resume the series later. They had to get the shit right, on the ground, then send the instructions to the spacecraft and pray.
Now we've got these new whippersnappers complaining about a 12 minute delay and having an advanced computer in their spacecraft that can actually control the burn. Not to mention their well cooled supercomputers that crunch all their telemetry and process hundreds of possible maneuvers in a few minutes. I never thought I'd get to be like my grandfather, but I have to say these new kids sure seem a bit soft.
A hot tub with a weatherproof 30" Cinema HD Display and a waterproof keyboard and mouse sitting on top of a little mini-desk, that works, so I can sit in my hot tub and hack out some code.
Well, it was quite a while ago. 15 new vanilla box PCs installed at a client site, with P-III 500s and 4GB Hard Drives. About 10 of them had Samsung drives, and the rest were Fujitsu, I think. So, within about 6 months, 10 of the machines failed. Want to guess which component it was?
Even a longer while ago before that, I was working at a small company that resold an intelligent serial communication cards with dual port RAM on them. Suddenly, the boards started dropping like flies. We wrote test software and found that about 80% of the cards were failing right out of production. So, we had the engineers up from the serial card vendor to show them what we had. We demonstrated that during the failures caught by our test suite, the data in RAM read as 0xFF, all 1s, meaning the bus wasn't being driven by the circuits. I hadn't previously noticed, but as we were shuffling good and bad cards in and out of the testbed, I observed a visual consistency with all the failing cards. It was the Samsung logo on all the RAM chips. So I started swapping out the Samsung chips on the failing cards and replaced them with a different brand, and guess what? The cards started magically working. Turns out the purchasing dept. at the vendor substituted an "equivalent" part, the Samsung RAM, without running the specs by Engineering first. Turns out they were not quite equivalent, the setup time after the address strobe before the chips would drop the data was a few or a couple dozen microseconds longer, causing the failure.
Both stories are true. When I hear the Samsung name, I cringe and bolt far away. I will never never ever purchase another Samsung product.
It's not about Google delivering the services I want in the way I want them right now. I'd like to welcome you to the computer industry, where every day hundreds of opportunities are lost. Google has had plenty of time, and their aborted launch of their video service is an indication that even they think it's been too long without any significant new products. Not to mention the rumblings from the street as well as recent losses in their stock price are a clear indication that the investors think it has been too long as well.
And I don't know for sure who works hard up there or not. All I have to judge by is their increasing number of employees and their number of offerings that is increasing at a snail's pace. And mostly those increases are through acquisitions, not innovations. The other thing I have to go on is how much the Google workosphere mirrors all the dotcoms that burst with the rest of the bubble. If it quacks like a duck...
I agree with them holding the boundaries laid out in their prospectus, but I have to wonder how many stockholders actually read the prospectus before buying. I'd bet many of the large institutional investors did, but I'll bet many individuals just joined the frenzy and said "buy me some GOOG", without reading first, and now they are surprised to have a company that doesn't behave like the rest.
What I see happening here is a crash in Google's stock because they stand their ground, causing one or more big investors to sell. If they don't stand their ground, then IMO, they are just another bubble stock, because the only reason they would kowtow to Wall Street would be because they really are just a paper tiger. It seems kind of interesting to me that Google lately is trying to demonstrate it is going new places (Google Video, Gmail for Domains, GDrive), but isn't really cutting the mustard. Google Video was a complete farce, and CBS' early withdrawal is a major blow to them, and the fact that the only major network they could sign being CBS is another major blow.
I hate to say it but I think this is a lose/lose for Google, one of my favorite companies. They're screwed if they play ball, and they're screwed if they don't. The Wall Street guys have thought this through, and they believe the short term investor loss from Google crashing is worth the gain of making Google into an example that nobody else will ever contemplate following in the future. I also think perhaps the employees there have been indulging a bit too much in the salmon lunches, doing laundry, free massages, etc. and not enough busting their asses and making results. Anyone in a successful enterprise, no matter what size, will tell you hard work is an essential component of success.
Unless you can fill an entire trailer, the "moving company" is just a fancy front end for a freight company. Your stuff will be unloaded at various depots, split up, reloaded, etc. unless like I said you fill the whole trailer. Can be a real pain in the back say if your bed arrives late.
Which one of your specified solutions is battery powered with a subwoofer, AND encased in resin so the subwoofer doesn't rattle the case? Exactly none.
Yes, they can create accessories if they want. But not without receiving the wrath of Apple haters seeking to spread some FUD. The only reason they did the iPod HiFi is because it fills a vacuum in the current offerings.
And a $99 iPod case? LOOOOL I'm sure the iPod case guys are shitting their pants now. OMG Nobody will want to buy our $35 case now. I actually interpret the pricing as a deliberate attempt by Apple to not offend or harm the case vendors, while still providing a solution for the oddball nut that insists on a 100%-Apple solutino.
It was the Altair 8800 or the Altair MITS, and was not by "Bill Gates". Bill wrote a BASIC Interpreter that ran on the Altair. Get yer history straight whippersnapper.
Slashdot Mirror
12-step fellowships categorically do not tell you "only god" can help you. What they say is as individuals we of our own resources lack the solution to the problem and we need help, therefore we need something else.
By definition, if you can solve the problem on your own, it is no longer a problem, therefore any such individuals are not addicts. Addicts are people that have literally tried everything within their own power and resources to stop and have been unable to do so. "Just stopping" isn't possible for a real addict. I know it sounds bizarre, but consider this: it is a well known fact that consumption of various toxins over an extended period of time will change your bodies' chemistry, brain chemistry, even damage or alter your DNA sequence. Given that, is it not possible that addicts may face a different challenge than someone who has just been playing too much WoW or maybe drinking a bit too much for a relatively short period of time?
Some 12-step members seek a "God" as commonly associated with the world's religions. Go figure, most of the people in the world are religious. Is it such a great stretch to think that demographic might stretch into a support organization? Many others, like myself, simply choose the help of other people to be that outside power. Some choose Yoda, doorknobs, apple pie, etc. Nobody is ever ostracized for believing in a non-god, in fact many texts of many 12-step fellowships clearly spell out that an individual's choice in seeking an outside "power" is completely at their own discretion.
And yes, the "G" word is printed a lot in 12-step literature. It is a euphemism not an instruction, and this nuance is printed repeatedly in the literature of many other 12-step fellowships. For me and the people I hang with, we consider it an acronym for "Group Of Dope fiends".
Just like your psychologist friend, I have some good pot shots to take at AA myself, which is why I don't go there. They actually promise things they cannot deliver. Things which other 12-step fellowships have wisely chosen not to promise. I will leave you and your friend with this, and this is the only thing I will quote from AA literature. It was not written by one of their members, BTW:
"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation" --Herbert Spencer
I've acted dogmatic by stating I am an agnostic and a member of a 12-step fellowship? LOOOOOOOOOL What part of my post have I laid down as "incontrovertably true"?
e ps.php?nav=mb
Here are the 12-steps of AA. I am not a member of AA, and I am not disclosing which fellowship I am a member of as our traditions suggest I do not represent my fellowship in front of a wide audience.
http://www.aa.org.au/factfile/fact_file_twelve_st
Yeah that's OK. There's another guy around here that has patented the process of passing of slashdot-time wasting as work. I think you owe him some royalties. Not to mention the royalties you owe me for the use of my patented letters E and e.
One day I hope to be accused to taking a shit on MS
I don't exactly agree. Yes, if I actually want to see a particular movie I will go to the theater because I get to see it sooner, and before anyone can spoil it for me around the water cooler. So that much I agree with. But the real issue is the cases where I say to myself "I'll wait for the disc". In those cases it is pretty much because the movie looks like it might be another predictable watered-down non-story and I really don't want to risk paying the theater premium to check it out. It wouldn't matter to me if it were 4 days, 4 weeks or 40 weeks before it came to disc, I still wouldn't shell out for the theater in these cases.
So I have to go with the OP and say they are looking at it from the wrong angle. The time between theater and DVD release doesn't really harm the theaters. The true culprit is all the crap content the studios are producing these days. That and the fact that there simply are too many theaters, at least in L.A. that is the case. The only time I remember going to a full theater in the past 10 years was for Munich on a Saturday Night.
I don't think you were truly addicted to EQ if it simply "wore off". Perhaps a bit obsessed with it, yes. Unless of course, you've substituted something else in place of EQ that similarly destroys your life.
I really have a lot to say to Southpaw018 above. I totally call bullshit. Any "traditional addiction program" will include attendance of a 12-step fellowship as part of their program, so I believe he's never actually experienced a "traditional addiction program". Or perhaps the clinicians at the program diagnosed him as a non-addict, gave him something else they called "treatment" and took his parents money anyway.
Pseudoreligious is a misnomer. I am an agnostic member of a 12-step fellowship. My belief can be characterized as "there is some force in the universe that I don't entirely understand that creates particles, planets, biology, stars, etc.", not religious at all. In my 10+ years of clean time in this particular fellowship, I have shared my belief with others freely and I have never once had anyone even remotely suggest it was incorrect. If anyone did, I would simply tell them to go fuck themselves. As a result I conclude that 12-step fellowships lack dogma which is an essential ingredient of any religion or pseudo-religiion.
I'm not a member of AA, so I can't speak to the studies cited below. I can say however that generalizations a few sentences long taken without considering the entire context in which they were presented are somewhat suspect. I know hundreds of people that were previously addicted to a variety of chemicals who have been clean for many years now, some, like myself, have been clean the entire time without using drugs or alcohol ever again. Not every one who tries to get clean succeeds, that is true. While I cannot speak to any studies on AA, I can say anecdotally those broad sweeping statements listed in Wikipedia do not apply in all situations nor to all people.
12-step programs do not claim to "get anyone clean", or have the "cure all". Indeed, they all require an individual to possess "a desire to get clean" in order to call themselves a member. In my observation, many (but not all) of those that do not make it lack that basic desire, i.e., they're trying to save their marriage, house, job, comply with court orders, etc., and aren't there because they truly want to change. They're there because they think they can save their "stuff". The reason for this sole requirement for membership is that recovery is not possible without first admitting there is a problem, and possessing the desire to do something about it, because it takes a lot of work and a lot of willingness to change.
Nice FUD there. The reason you don't see that in the first 3 steps is because those processes of identifying problems, taking responsibility form them and making amends for them are embodied in steps 4 through 9. Anyone who is in a 12-step program, who is serious about staying clean, knows full well they have many wrongs to try to set right if they want to stay clean. You should know better than to take Wikipedia as an absolute quotable source.
Yeah, my AC buddy above there is correct. Parenting is definitely part of the problem with kids like this. Forget about talking to people that raise kids like that, they've obviously go no sense of boundaries or effective means of discipline. You'd be lucky to walk away from such a talk without facing assault charges yourself.
Giving the principal enough rope to hang himself, then applying this approach is a good long-term solution. The one kid won't be bugging her any more, and the rest of the kids will know what's up: that girl will break your nose AND she'll get away with it too.
Lumpy, you did the right thing. And I gotta hand it to your daughter for following through. I would definitely want to hire her in her future professional life.
Unfortunately, my niece needs someone like your daughter to come along and break her nose to set her straight. That is a much harder problem to try and address. Particularly for an uncle.
I'm a bit confused. Would a mace qualify as a projectile weapon?
this is probably going to harm my karma, but after seeing your nick, i just have to
speed kills fast cars cheap thrills
I agree.
This is proof that TV Execs are complete idiots. Or perhaps the people purchasing advertising. Every store I walk into that has telescreens I observe most if not all people doing something to avert their attention away from the screen. It's a colossal waste of money and I don't see how it is of any benefit to the advertisers.
Congratulations! You have likely invested the work necessary in selecting a good match as your mate and all the subsequent work in keeping the relationship healthy. One day I may be so lucky...until then I'm in this never ending cycle of dating various women, many of whom could have been a quickie character on Seinfeld.
But don't delude yourself, your utopia is not the norm. I'll keep it real short and simple. When I met my accountant to help me out of some tax problems some years back, he had a little talk to me about marriage and divorce. He said marriage can be about a lot of things, true love, insecurity, combining efforts, companionship, social status, etc. but he made it clear on no uncertain terms that divorce was always about money. He probably has the right position in our society to make the observation, being an accountant and all. I think he's right.
One of my old bosses worked at JPL. He was in charge of navigating Voyager for one of it's planetary encounters. I think it was Saturn. Aside from some other challenges with the planet being in Earth's equatorial plane during the encounter (which greatly complicated telemetry collection), they were running all their calculations on an IBM 360 in Pasadena in the middle of August. Anyone who's been around here knows it's about 90-100F outside during August, and maybe gets down to around 80-85 at night. The 360 couldn't even plot a complete series of data before it would overheat and crash. His first task was to double the RAM, and write an kernel extension that would periodically copy the running set over to the extra RAM, then dump that out to paper tape. With the most recent tape, and a custom boot loader, they could power the machine down to let it cool, then resume the series later. They had to get the shit right, on the ground, then send the instructions to the spacecraft and pray.
Now we've got these new whippersnappers complaining about a 12 minute delay and having an advanced computer in their spacecraft that can actually control the burn. Not to mention their well cooled supercomputers that crunch all their telemetry and process hundreds of possible maneuvers in a few minutes. I never thought I'd get to be like my grandfather, but I have to say these new kids sure seem a bit soft.
A hot tub with a weatherproof 30" Cinema HD Display and a waterproof keyboard and mouse sitting on top of a little mini-desk, that works, so I can sit in my hot tub and hack out some code.
Well, it was quite a while ago. 15 new vanilla box PCs installed at a client site, with P-III 500s and 4GB Hard Drives. About 10 of them had Samsung drives, and the rest were Fujitsu, I think. So, within about 6 months, 10 of the machines failed. Want to guess which component it was?
Even a longer while ago before that, I was working at a small company that resold an intelligent serial communication cards with dual port RAM on them. Suddenly, the boards started dropping like flies. We wrote test software and found that about 80% of the cards were failing right out of production. So, we had the engineers up from the serial card vendor to show them what we had. We demonstrated that during the failures caught by our test suite, the data in RAM read as 0xFF, all 1s, meaning the bus wasn't being driven by the circuits. I hadn't previously noticed, but as we were shuffling good and bad cards in and out of the testbed, I observed a visual consistency with all the failing cards. It was the Samsung logo on all the RAM chips. So I started swapping out the Samsung chips on the failing cards and replaced them with a different brand, and guess what? The cards started magically working. Turns out the purchasing dept. at the vendor substituted an "equivalent" part, the Samsung RAM, without running the specs by Engineering first. Turns out they were not quite equivalent, the setup time after the address strobe before the chips would drop the data was a few or a couple dozen microseconds longer, causing the failure.
Both stories are true. When I hear the Samsung name, I cringe and bolt far away. I will never never ever purchase another Samsung product.
I think posting that link is an offense worthy of the proverbial "Bitchslap" of Slashdot-lore.
It's not about Google delivering the services I want in the way I want them right now. I'd like to welcome you to the computer industry, where every day hundreds of opportunities are lost. Google has had plenty of time, and their aborted launch of their video service is an indication that even they think it's been too long without any significant new products. Not to mention the rumblings from the street as well as recent losses in their stock price are a clear indication that the investors think it has been too long as well.
And I don't know for sure who works hard up there or not. All I have to judge by is their increasing number of employees and their number of offerings that is increasing at a snail's pace. And mostly those increases are through acquisitions, not innovations. The other thing I have to go on is how much the Google workosphere mirrors all the dotcoms that burst with the rest of the bubble. If it quacks like a duck...
I agree with them holding the boundaries laid out in their prospectus, but I have to wonder how many stockholders actually read the prospectus before buying. I'd bet many of the large institutional investors did, but I'll bet many individuals just joined the frenzy and said "buy me some GOOG", without reading first, and now they are surprised to have a company that doesn't behave like the rest.
What I see happening here is a crash in Google's stock because they stand their ground, causing one or more big investors to sell. If they don't stand their ground, then IMO, they are just another bubble stock, because the only reason they would kowtow to Wall Street would be because they really are just a paper tiger. It seems kind of interesting to me that Google lately is trying to demonstrate it is going new places (Google Video, Gmail for Domains, GDrive), but isn't really cutting the mustard. Google Video was a complete farce, and CBS' early withdrawal is a major blow to them, and the fact that the only major network they could sign being CBS is another major blow.
I hate to say it but I think this is a lose/lose for Google, one of my favorite companies. They're screwed if they play ball, and they're screwed if they don't. The Wall Street guys have thought this through, and they believe the short term investor loss from Google crashing is worth the gain of making Google into an example that nobody else will ever contemplate following in the future. I also think perhaps the employees there have been indulging a bit too much in the salmon lunches, doing laundry, free massages, etc. and not enough busting their asses and making results. Anyone in a successful enterprise, no matter what size, will tell you hard work is an essential component of success.
Unless you can fill an entire trailer, the "moving company" is just a fancy front end for a freight company. Your stuff will be unloaded at various depots, split up, reloaded, etc. unless like I said you fill the whole trailer. Can be a real pain in the back say if your bed arrives late.
Which one of your specified solutions is battery powered with a subwoofer, AND encased in resin so the subwoofer doesn't rattle the case? Exactly none.
Yes, they can create accessories if they want. But not without receiving the wrath of Apple haters seeking to spread some FUD. The only reason they did the iPod HiFi is because it fills a vacuum in the current offerings.
And a $99 iPod case? LOOOOL I'm sure the iPod case guys are shitting their pants now. OMG Nobody will want to buy our $35 case now. I actually interpret the pricing as a deliberate attempt by Apple to not offend or harm the case vendors, while still providing a solution for the oddball nut that insists on a 100%-Apple solutino.
I for one welcome our new Independent Film overlords.
LOL and what would you suggest? Run barefoot, eat granola and don't pay for their services? Like that'll work.
It was the Altair 8800 or the Altair MITS, and was not by "Bill Gates". Bill wrote a BASIC Interpreter that ran on the Altair. Get yer history straight whippersnapper.