You're absolutely correct that in state conflicts, there is an expectation of somewhat rational behavior, since of course the leaders of each state want to retain their existing power as much as possible, only trying to gain power when it doesn't place them at too great a risk.
Which is why it is all the more damning that we should surrender any of our fundamental principles in order to combat the current enemy -- one who cannot be dealt with rationally, one that is both unpredictable and anonymous, and is willing to strike any available target no matter the cost to himself. Short of sealing ourselves inside individual granite bomb shelters a hundred miles beneath the surface, there is no way we can stop them.
We should make whatever reasonable precautions are necessary and practical, but changing our fundamental way of life will make us only safer by degrees, and no change will eliminate the basic threat or the terrible consequences of their inevitable successes. People will die, structures will be destroyed. No matter how much we sacrifice that will be true, so long as such an enemy exists and has us in his sights.
Making the meetings public would amount to "giving our nation's enemies information they could use to most effectively attack a particular infrastructure and cause cascading consequences across multiple infrastructures," another departmental advisory council warned in August.
As I recall, in 1972, we were in the midst of fighting a Cold War that had, as a very real possible consequence, the end of life on Earth as we know it. We were fighting against a highly organized and well-funded enemy that had thousands of spies at all levels of government and industry, sleeper agents ready to be called on when necessary, and military capabilities that made us legitimately doubt whether we would prevail in any conventional armed conflict. An attack from their formidable stockpiles of intercontinental ballistic missiles would give us less than an hour to pray to the God of our choice before the sun vanished and our component molecules were suddenly and violently redistributed into the ash that would, hopefully, someday support life again.
And yet, even with this Sword of Damocles hanging over our very survival, we had the conscience and foresight to realize that while we cannot control the behavior of those who would be our enemies, we can control ourselves, and refuse to sacrifice the ideals we believe more important than life in the vain hopes that by abdicating oversight of our government we will somehow gain immunity from outside aggressors.
I find it the greatest irony of all that those in power right now, who present themselves so vaingloriously, act with such great cowardice. Their willingness to preemptively sacrifice the ideals we hold dear is an insult to the oaths they took, and the people who trust them with their lives.
No bomb is capable of destroying the historical significance of the Constitution, the concept of modern representative democracy, religious freedom, free speech, or the notion that man has the right and responsibility to govern himself by reason. Yet we find ourselves in the peculiar position of surrendering these, our most valuable possessions, in the vain hope that they will purchase us safety, when we know with certainty that such safety is a chimera, that our lives will always be in danger so long as we espouse such dangerous ideas.
It does not take courage to hide in a shelter, to stifle dissent or cut yourself off from contrary opinions. It does not take courage to meet in secret, to persecute those who are different, to deny the humanity of those who oppose you.
What takes courage is knowing there are people in this world who hate you so much they will kill you, and to still get up in the morning and walk out the front door, refusing to change your life or your beliefs due to fear. We knew this after September 11th, we were even told this at the time by our leaders, but for some reason both they and we have lost sight of such a simple insight.
Office 2004 is the latest Mac version, MS seems to alternate between PC and Mac rather than releasing both at the same time, which results in interesting feature leapfrogging.
My understanding from the time I worked at the hospital was that the VA was less efficient overall only because they actually ran facilities of their own, which raised overhead and administrative costs. But for drugs, they are definitely the most efficient because they negotiate in bulk, which the so-called supporters of free-market principles prohibit medicare from doing.
I hate to break it to you, but Medicare is the most cost-efficient health care system in the country.
So while government may inherently screw things up, it seems to be the case that some matters are guaranteed to be screwed up even worse by any private enterprise.
What's annoying is that it is getting impossible to find a decent PHONE. I don't want a camera, I don't want a web access device, I don't want an MP3 player. What I do want is a SMALL PHONE. It seems like any basic phone without gimmicks is three times the size of a RAZR, which makes no sense whatsoever.
All it does is cause headaches for those of us who work in secure environments and have to choose between carrying a walkie-talkie in our pocket looking like we have a tumor, or else we have to leave our compact phone at the security desk. Does ANYONE make a tiny clamshell phone that just, you know, makes phone calls and receives them?
The burning question is, of course, are homosexuals allowed to work on these translations? I mean, we've been kicking Arabic linguists out of the military for being gay, so obviously reading these documents isn't so important that we'd want gay residue on the translations.
You're making totally different arguments here. I was replying to your original post "Nobody makes sure only relevant rooms or boxes of records are searched. For it to qualify as a "search", you actually need to search and see everything."
You have the right to stand there with your attorney and object if they open a drawer or file cabinet you believe to be outside the warrant's scope. The physical limitations I offered as an example are only one possible violation, but there seems to be no similar oversight ability to prevent overzealous data mining when digital information is examined.
It is good that in this particular case, the judge has asked to verify information is relevant and in-scope before it is handed to the prosecutors, but there is no de facto or de jure requirement that data searches be constrained like that. Running across other incriminating evidence while searching for relevent evidece is very different from actively searching it outside the original scop for the purposes of finding new crimes or embarassing/confidential materials.
An analogy would be blood testing -- if you're accused of a crime where a drop of blood was found at the scene, the police might get a warrant to test your blood to see if it matches. If the criminal blood was type A and yours was type B, they wouldn't be allowed to go on and run a DNA sequence on your blood and look for genetic markers, since they already know it doesn't match. Even if your blood matched, they wouldn't be allowed to test it for HIV or gonorrhea since that isn't in the scope of the warrant. They are legally prohibited from running those searches, even though they have evrything necessary at their disposal to do them.
But with a computer, if they're looking for access logs, there is nothing to stop the investigator from actively searching for porn (perhaps by scanning sector by sector for jpg headers and recreating deleted image files). Searching a reporter's computer would be a great opportunity to type in the name of every officer you know and seeing if the reporter has any information on them, confidential sources, etc.
I don't think its any more relevant for a computer than for a home, complete with all kinds of records, etc. Nobody makes sure only relevant rooms or boxes of records are searched. For it to qualify as a "search", you actually need to search and see everything.
On the contrary, you have the right to be present during a search, and your attorney can be there, too -- solely for the purpose of verifying that the search does not exceed what is allowed by the warrant. If the police are looking for a footlocker, they are not allowed to look in desk drawers, since it is impossible to fit a footlocker in a desk drawer.
There seems to be no similar capacity for oversight in digital searches, even though dramatically more off-warrant material can be searched, without any evidence that it was examined.
They forgot reason #0 -- MySQL is "good enough". Most everyone who's done web development is used to MySQL, it works 99% of the time, why would they switch?
Skin tones are nowhere near as complicated as you'd think. M & Y are roughly equal across races, cyan will be less than 25% of that in a european, less than 10-15% in an asian, and 50%+ in an african. Obviously you can split the difference depending on where someone's skin tone fits in those general parameters -- plus add a bit more yellow for some asian tones, or a few points of magenta for a tanned individual.
Once you go darker than fair, white skin, (a 5%-10% gray value) a few percentage points of cyan isn't going to affect the color much. Skin tones cool dramatically when you get darker skin, so the fragile, easily contaminated yellows are quickly forgotten.
This is painting 101, which teaches a lot more about reproducing skin tones than any photo 101 or makeup 101 ever approaches. These are not new problems, and they were all solved centuries ago by guys using paint.
Never mind that the good ol' eyedropper tool can't predict for you how that color adjusment you just did off the top of your head will reproduce on different printing presses/paper stocks.
That's why you run color checks. Anyone who blindly sends a totally new file for a project on a totally unfamiliar paper deserves to have 50,000 bad copies of a magazine filling their garage while they look for a new job. Learning about paper and checking proofs is part of the job, and you shouldn't trust your monitor to do it, and you shouldn't trust a prepress guy to do it. "My CMS said the color was right" is not a valid defense to crimes against printing.
That lovely tone your CMS presents is going to look completely different depending on whether you're using UCR or GCR, yet there's no way to represent that on a monitor, no matter how well it is calibrated. That bright, saturated color is going to look totally different on an uncoated paper than it does on coated and varnished paper, but there's no way in hell your glossy backlit monitor is going to represent such a dramatic shift in perception. Your whole job is going to look different if it is printed in Mississippi during summer than it will if it is printed in Ontario during winter. Again, there's no way in hell your monitor can account for that.
Mathematical colormetric correction is a far cry from actually getting color RIGHT.
Note that nowehere have I said color management is bad or useless -- I use it, and you'd be silly not to take advantage of it. But it is not a silver bullet, and it will not save a designer or prepress engineer from ignorance about how color is reproduced or what CMYK tones are realistic for a desired color.
Or, you could, you know, LOOK AT THE CMYK VALUES. White skin tones have a pretty narrow range of recognizable values -- if someone is giving you images with too much cyan, I'm sorry. You don't need a 4kx4k scitex scan from a medium format transparency just to run an eyedropper over the skin tones in Photoshop. I worked in a lot of $million shops in the NYC magazine industry who had bought into the color calibration du jour all through the 90s, and for some reason those of us who were doing printing before "DTP" took off were the only ones the prepress guys would thank for having such well-prepared files.
I agree, there are a lot of untrained/inexperienced people making great color on thier monitors and sending it out thinking everything will be fine. The solution is not to fix the monitors and give them a false sense of security (though today you can get pretty close), it's to make them understand CMYK.
No offense, but if you're relying on the monitor to tell you anything, you're not very good at prepress. Years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we actally looked at CMYK values to do prepress work. You can even do prepress on a black and white monitor (and possibly get better results since you won't be swayed by bright pretty onscreen colors).
Yes, Windows sucks for color management, and I use a Mac for my imaging work partly for that reason, but I spent years and years doing corporate work in Windows and never had trouble except from silly print shop monkeys who found it hard to believe you could create files on a Windows system.
Would this have even been posted on/. if the guy had set fire to the corporate tower as he walked out the door. I think not. But, what he did was equally malicious.
If there was no evidence the corporate towers ever existed, nobody could say where they are, how big they were, what they were worth, and no construction company could ever be found that built them, then your analogy would be correct.
They are claiming he destroyed SOME data, but they don't know what it was, where it was, whether it was business or personal, and what if any value it had. You honestly think that should be a crime? How valuable could the data be to the company if the company can't even say for sure that it ever existed?
Yes, it is a crime to throw contraband from your vehicle to avoid getting caught with it. This is a pretty common tactic actually -- police set up a roadblock to check driver's licenses (or whatever), but what they are really doing is looking for anyone who either does something to avoid going to the roadblock, or throws something from their vehicle.
Yes, but what you're missing is that the iPod Nano 4GB weight almost HALF (1.5oz vs 2.8) what the gmini does. Again, it's not hard to build a device that weighs more and is larger than a particular ipod model for less money, but there is nobody making a device that is as light and small as an iPod selling them for any less. Other companies do make devices the same size and weight, and they charge EXACTLY the same amount as the iPod model they're gunning for. The only difference at retail is that Apple doesn't encourage discounting, so sometimes you'll see a flash player of the same size, capacity, weight for $15 less from someone else because it's on sale, while if you bought the iPod device you'd get a $15 cable or something for free but pay the full MSRP.
Apple desktops have a price premium, apple laptops less so. Apple iPods don't. They just don't -- they sell as cheaply as anyone else can manufacture them, the only difference being that because of Apple's volume they can make profit at the same price point their competitors merely break even.
Even ignoring all that, what every "computer" company (and you) seems to be missing is that the iPod is NOT a computer device. It isn't a geek toy where people buy the cheapest available device with a good spec sheet. This is a consumer electronic device, where consumers are more than happy to pay a premium for a reliable name. Sony is a company that has been charging a premium for their name in the consumer electronics biz for decades, and they continue to be one of the most popular brands. At a technical level, their stuff is no better than anyone else's, but consumers don't spend hours/days/weeks researching every purchase the way we do. So no, Apple is not going to be knocked off the pedestal by some cheap korean knock-off that happens to be $50 less, you're thinking like these are commodity network cards rather than adjusting to the idea that the market is totally different and looks for different things.
Apple's players do not cost more (well, sometimes there is a $10 or $20 difference up or down) than any other name brand players of the same size and capacity. Of course you can buy huge hard-drive based players for less, but no normal human being wants to carry around a brick like that. Creative leads the market in iPod-like players that are $50-100 less but weight 50% more and are larger.
This comment doesn't make any sense. The previous article on this very web site is about a newer product going up against an older product (Z5 vs iPod) and not being any better. Nobody anywhere on that was bitching about unfairness.
I think you should have that chip on your shoulder examinied, it could be malignant.
Yeah, the big difference is that the iPod has no "Apple Tax". this Samsung Z5 costs exactly the same amount as an iPod, but it isn't the real thing. Very few customers are going to select something other than the defacto standard if the alternatives all cost just as much and don't offer some amazingly compelling feature.
An OS X install only needs about a gig. Most people think it needs more because by default it installs all the printer drivers and foreign language suppport, which total over another gig and a half.
You should buy better motherboards. Most modern motherboards from good manufacturers support BIOS flashing from CD, in Windows, etc. I haven't had a floppy drive hooked to a computer in 3 or 4 years now.
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You're absolutely correct that in state conflicts, there is an expectation of somewhat rational behavior, since of course the leaders of each state want to retain their existing power as much as possible, only trying to gain power when it doesn't place them at too great a risk.
Which is why it is all the more damning that we should surrender any of our fundamental principles in order to combat the current enemy -- one who cannot be dealt with rationally, one that is both unpredictable and anonymous, and is willing to strike any available target no matter the cost to himself. Short of sealing ourselves inside individual granite bomb shelters a hundred miles beneath the surface, there is no way we can stop them.
We should make whatever reasonable precautions are necessary and practical, but changing our fundamental way of life will make us only safer by degrees, and no change will eliminate the basic threat or the terrible consequences of their inevitable successes. People will die, structures will be destroyed. No matter how much we sacrifice that will be true, so long as such an enemy exists and has us in his sights.
Yes, and a Modest Proposal was actually advocating the eating of babies!
I hope you've received your information on boarding the B-Ark, when it leaves I wouldn't want you to miss it!
Making the meetings public would amount to "giving our nation's enemies information they could use to most effectively attack a particular infrastructure and cause cascading consequences across multiple infrastructures," another departmental advisory council warned in August.
As I recall, in 1972, we were in the midst of fighting a Cold War that had, as a very real possible consequence, the end of life on Earth as we know it. We were fighting against a highly organized and well-funded enemy that had thousands of spies at all levels of government and industry, sleeper agents ready to be called on when necessary, and military capabilities that made us legitimately doubt whether we would prevail in any conventional armed conflict. An attack from their formidable stockpiles of intercontinental ballistic missiles would give us less than an hour to pray to the God of our choice before the sun vanished and our component molecules were suddenly and violently redistributed into the ash that would, hopefully, someday support life again.
And yet, even with this Sword of Damocles hanging over our very survival, we had the conscience and foresight to realize that while we cannot control the behavior of those who would be our enemies, we can control ourselves, and refuse to sacrifice the ideals we believe more important than life in the vain hopes that by abdicating oversight of our government we will somehow gain immunity from outside aggressors.
I find it the greatest irony of all that those in power right now, who present themselves so vaingloriously, act with such great cowardice. Their willingness to preemptively sacrifice the ideals we hold dear is an insult to the oaths they took, and the people who trust them with their lives.
No bomb is capable of destroying the historical significance of the Constitution, the concept of modern representative democracy, religious freedom, free speech, or the notion that man has the right and responsibility to govern himself by reason. Yet we find ourselves in the peculiar position of surrendering these, our most valuable possessions, in the vain hope that they will purchase us safety, when we know with certainty that such safety is a chimera, that our lives will always be in danger so long as we espouse such dangerous ideas.
It does not take courage to hide in a shelter, to stifle dissent or cut yourself off from contrary opinions. It does not take courage to meet in secret, to persecute those who are different, to deny the humanity of those who oppose you.
What takes courage is knowing there are people in this world who hate you so much they will kill you, and to still get up in the morning and walk out the front door, refusing to change your life or your beliefs due to fear. We knew this after September 11th, we were even told this at the time by our leaders, but for some reason both they and we have lost sight of such a simple insight.
you may as well launch something useful rather than a dumb telemetry package.
I am a telemetry package, you insensitive clod!
A thousand pardons sir, I had no idea you took your MS Office versioning so seriously and personally.
Office 2004 is the latest Mac version, MS seems to alternate between PC and Mac rather than releasing both at the same time, which results in interesting feature leapfrogging.
My understanding from the time I worked at the hospital was that the VA was less efficient overall only because they actually ran facilities of their own, which raised overhead and administrative costs. But for drugs, they are definitely the most efficient because they negotiate in bulk, which the so-called supporters of free-market principles prohibit medicare from doing.
I hate to break it to you, but Medicare is the most cost-efficient health care system in the country.
So while government may inherently screw things up, it seems to be the case that some matters are guaranteed to be screwed up even worse by any private enterprise.
What's annoying is that it is getting impossible to find a decent PHONE. I don't want a camera, I don't want a web access device, I don't want an MP3 player. What I do want is a SMALL PHONE. It seems like any basic phone without gimmicks is three times the size of a RAZR, which makes no sense whatsoever.
All it does is cause headaches for those of us who work in secure environments and have to choose between carrying a walkie-talkie in our pocket looking like we have a tumor, or else we have to leave our compact phone at the security desk. Does ANYONE make a tiny clamshell phone that just, you know, makes phone calls and receives them?
The burning question is, of course, are homosexuals allowed to work on these translations? I mean, we've been kicking Arabic linguists out of the military for being gay, so obviously reading these documents isn't so important that we'd want gay residue on the translations.
Great Hera, that thing is bigger than my microwave! I think Hemos (and Monarch) has a funny idea of what "portable" means.
You're making totally different arguments here. I was replying to your original post "Nobody makes sure only relevant rooms or boxes of records are searched. For it to qualify as a "search", you actually need to search and see everything."
You have the right to stand there with your attorney and object if they open a drawer or file cabinet you believe to be outside the warrant's scope. The physical limitations I offered as an example are only one possible violation, but there seems to be no similar oversight ability to prevent overzealous data mining when digital information is examined.
It is good that in this particular case, the judge has asked to verify information is relevant and in-scope before it is handed to the prosecutors, but there is no de facto or de jure requirement that data searches be constrained like that. Running across other incriminating evidence while searching for relevent evidece is very different from actively searching it outside the original scop for the purposes of finding new crimes or embarassing/confidential materials.
An analogy would be blood testing -- if you're accused of a crime where a drop of blood was found at the scene, the police might get a warrant to test your blood to see if it matches. If the criminal blood was type A and yours was type B, they wouldn't be allowed to go on and run a DNA sequence on your blood and look for genetic markers, since they already know it doesn't match. Even if your blood matched, they wouldn't be allowed to test it for HIV or gonorrhea since that isn't in the scope of the warrant. They are legally prohibited from running those searches, even though they have evrything necessary at their disposal to do them.
But with a computer, if they're looking for access logs, there is nothing to stop the investigator from actively searching for porn (perhaps by scanning sector by sector for jpg headers and recreating deleted image files). Searching a reporter's computer would be a great opportunity to type in the name of every officer you know and seeing if the reporter has any information on them, confidential sources, etc.
I don't think its any more relevant for a computer than for a home, complete with all kinds of records, etc. Nobody makes sure only relevant rooms or boxes of records are searched. For it to qualify as a "search", you actually need to search and see everything.
On the contrary, you have the right to be present during a search, and your attorney can be there, too -- solely for the purpose of verifying that the search does not exceed what is allowed by the warrant. If the police are looking for a footlocker, they are not allowed to look in desk drawers, since it is impossible to fit a footlocker in a desk drawer.
There seems to be no similar capacity for oversight in digital searches, even though dramatically more off-warrant material can be searched, without any evidence that it was examined.
They forgot reason #0 -- MySQL is "good enough". Most everyone who's done web development is used to MySQL, it works 99% of the time, why would they switch?
Skin tones are nowhere near as complicated as you'd think. M & Y are roughly equal across races, cyan will be less than 25% of that in a european, less than 10-15% in an asian, and 50%+ in an african. Obviously you can split the difference depending on where someone's skin tone fits in those general parameters -- plus add a bit more yellow for some asian tones, or a few points of magenta for a tanned individual.
Once you go darker than fair, white skin, (a 5%-10% gray value) a few percentage points of cyan isn't going to affect the color much. Skin tones cool dramatically when you get darker skin, so the fragile, easily contaminated yellows are quickly forgotten.
This is painting 101, which teaches a lot more about reproducing skin tones than any photo 101 or makeup 101 ever approaches. These are not new problems, and they were all solved centuries ago by guys using paint.
Never mind that the good ol' eyedropper tool can't predict for you how that color adjusment you just did off the top of your head will reproduce on different printing presses/paper stocks.
That's why you run color checks. Anyone who blindly sends a totally new file for a project on a totally unfamiliar paper deserves to have 50,000 bad copies of a magazine filling their garage while they look for a new job. Learning about paper and checking proofs is part of the job, and you shouldn't trust your monitor to do it, and you shouldn't trust a prepress guy to do it. "My CMS said the color was right" is not a valid defense to crimes against printing.
That lovely tone your CMS presents is going to look completely different depending on whether you're using UCR or GCR, yet there's no way to represent that on a monitor, no matter how well it is calibrated. That bright, saturated color is going to look totally different on an uncoated paper than it does on coated and varnished paper, but there's no way in hell your glossy backlit monitor is going to represent such a dramatic shift in perception. Your whole job is going to look different if it is printed in Mississippi during summer than it will if it is printed in Ontario during winter. Again, there's no way in hell your monitor can account for that.
Mathematical colormetric correction is a far cry from actually getting color RIGHT.
Note that nowehere have I said color management is bad or useless -- I use it, and you'd be silly not to take advantage of it. But it is not a silver bullet, and it will not save a designer or prepress engineer from ignorance about how color is reproduced or what CMYK tones are realistic for a desired color.
Or, you could, you know, LOOK AT THE CMYK VALUES. White skin tones have a pretty narrow range of recognizable values -- if someone is giving you images with too much cyan, I'm sorry. You don't need a 4kx4k scitex scan from a medium format transparency just to run an eyedropper over the skin tones in Photoshop. I worked in a lot of $million shops in the NYC magazine industry who had bought into the color calibration du jour all through the 90s, and for some reason those of us who were doing printing before "DTP" took off were the only ones the prepress guys would thank for having such well-prepared files.
I agree, there are a lot of untrained/inexperienced people making great color on thier monitors and sending it out thinking everything will be fine. The solution is not to fix the monitors and give them a false sense of security (though today you can get pretty close), it's to make them understand CMYK.
No offense, but if you're relying on the monitor to tell you anything, you're not very good at prepress. Years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we actally looked at CMYK values to do prepress work. You can even do prepress on a black and white monitor (and possibly get better results since you won't be swayed by bright pretty onscreen colors).
Yes, Windows sucks for color management, and I use a Mac for my imaging work partly for that reason, but I spent years and years doing corporate work in Windows and never had trouble except from silly print shop monkeys who found it hard to believe you could create files on a Windows system.
Would this have even been posted on /. if the guy had set fire to the corporate tower as he walked out the door. I think not. But, what he did was equally malicious.
If there was no evidence the corporate towers ever existed, nobody could say where they are, how big they were, what they were worth, and no construction company could ever be found that built them, then your analogy would be correct.
They are claiming he destroyed SOME data, but they don't know what it was, where it was, whether it was business or personal, and what if any value it had. You honestly think that should be a crime? How valuable could the data be to the company if the company can't even say for sure that it ever existed?
Yes, it is a crime to throw contraband from your vehicle to avoid getting caught with it. This is a pretty common tactic actually -- police set up a roadblock to check driver's licenses (or whatever), but what they are really doing is looking for anyone who either does something to avoid going to the roadblock, or throws something from their vehicle.
Yes, but what you're missing is that the iPod Nano 4GB weight almost HALF (1.5oz vs 2.8) what the gmini does. Again, it's not hard to build a device that weighs more and is larger than a particular ipod model for less money, but there is nobody making a device that is as light and small as an iPod selling them for any less. Other companies do make devices the same size and weight, and they charge EXACTLY the same amount as the iPod model they're gunning for. The only difference at retail is that Apple doesn't encourage discounting, so sometimes you'll see a flash player of the same size, capacity, weight for $15 less from someone else because it's on sale, while if you bought the iPod device you'd get a $15 cable or something for free but pay the full MSRP.
Apple desktops have a price premium, apple laptops less so. Apple iPods don't. They just don't -- they sell as cheaply as anyone else can manufacture them, the only difference being that because of Apple's volume they can make profit at the same price point their competitors merely break even.
Even ignoring all that, what every "computer" company (and you) seems to be missing is that the iPod is NOT a computer device. It isn't a geek toy where people buy the cheapest available device with a good spec sheet. This is a consumer electronic device, where consumers are more than happy to pay a premium for a reliable name. Sony is a company that has been charging a premium for their name in the consumer electronics biz for decades, and they continue to be one of the most popular brands. At a technical level, their stuff is no better than anyone else's, but consumers don't spend hours/days/weeks researching every purchase the way we do. So no, Apple is not going to be knocked off the pedestal by some cheap korean knock-off that happens to be $50 less, you're thinking like these are commodity network cards rather than adjusting to the idea that the market is totally different and looks for different things.
Apple's players do not cost more (well, sometimes there is a $10 or $20 difference up or down) than any other name brand players of the same size and capacity. Of course you can buy huge hard-drive based players for less, but no normal human being wants to carry around a brick like that. Creative leads the market in iPod-like players that are $50-100 less but weight 50% more and are larger.
This comment doesn't make any sense. The previous article on this very web site is about a newer product going up against an older product (Z5 vs iPod) and not being any better. Nobody anywhere on that was bitching about unfairness.
I think you should have that chip on your shoulder examinied, it could be malignant.
Yeah, the big difference is that the iPod has no "Apple Tax". this Samsung Z5 costs exactly the same amount as an iPod, but it isn't the real thing. Very few customers are going to select something other than the defacto standard if the alternatives all cost just as much and don't offer some amazingly compelling feature.
An OS X install only needs about a gig. Most people think it needs more because by default it installs all the printer drivers and foreign language suppport, which total over another gig and a half.
You should buy better motherboards. Most modern motherboards from good manufacturers support BIOS flashing from CD, in Windows, etc. I haven't had a floppy drive hooked to a computer in 3 or 4 years now.