There was a mini-FIRST made of VEX robots this year. We saw the demo at FRC Hartford last week. Very impressive, makes it more accessible to middle schoolers and they "play" with it less than Mindstorms. The electronics comes from Innovation FIRST, the folks who make the brains for the FIRST robotics teams, and they're also VEXLabs. We're using it for the Trinity College Firefighting Robotics Contest, and we've gotten a chassis built and running under program control and effectors prototyped in record time.
One thing better than Mindstorms is that you can more easily add other materials, parts etc., and make it more bombproof without resorting to toxic adhesives or plastic-eating tools...
We're still wondering why RS is having a fire sale - two local stores were cleaned out as of Friday night - we just loaded up the last ultrasound and light sensors we could find. Some have said they're just dropping the retail line at RS, some have said it's just a sale, an eMail to the edu & gov rep at RS Fort Worth is yet unanswered. VEXLabs is still selling at full price. Hope they're just switching horses, but with RS no longer selling electronic parts, this was the sweetest thing they'd had in a while.
Two heads-ups: the pushbutton inputs use negative logic (thanks, VEX - that was a half hour of "stump the chumps"...) - and there is no "run" switch on the bot - programs (and the wheels they control) run once they complete the download - so either mold some tiny cinder blocks or grab an extra bumper button (or other sensor) and create a latch as the first step in the program...
Because lord knows how many people were sitting around going "Dammit! I could afford to pay for health insurance to cover that new kidney if I only didn't have to pay those bastards at Comcast $50 a month so I could watch the Final Four on a 14" screen in the spare bedroom! Where's the phone, Marge - I'm callin' my congressman!"
...that Fight Club isn't about fighting per se - it's about someone who has a psychotic break and invents a world where he can be in awe of his imaginary friend Tyler Durden and vanquish his real life, all in a movie that was rated so that adults who mostly could 'get' the plot device would appreciate the film, while kids - who mostly wouldn't get the subtlety would either see it as an unspeakable reality or a really cool cartoon, or who knows what.
In a perfect world, parents don't buy adult games for their kids, kids see the humor instead of the malice, kids don't take is as an instructional video, and tiny bluebirds follow us around all day chirping as we think lovely wonderful thoughts. So much for perfect worlds.
It took the youth of America a non-zero time to stop thinking that Bart Simpson was a spokesmodel and realize he was a sardonic cartoon character. Ditto college students (and I was there) when Animal House came out.
If you've been a teacher in a K-12 school you realize fast that there are certain kids who will try almost anything regardless of the effects on others. Any 100 level psychology course can tell you why. The understood parts of it involve modeling behavior and kids' relative inability to think past the next immediate result involving themselves. Not every student, not all the time, but enough that if you'd been in a school (where despite the glib quoting of urban myths there's plenty of learning going on) things like this are closer than you think to shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre.
I have a dozen or so. Full screen, portrait mode on an iBook turned 90 CCW (for a righty) using the trackpad button as a page turner is pretty cool.
Price is #1. If they didn't have to spray it onto a pound of paper and sew it together, ship it, pay the local bookstore, then I want to see the value of it reduced. I'll pay for the intellectual property, but they did this because it's bits not atoms and electronic storage and distribution is cheaper for them, then it shoud be cheaper for us. Half price is interesting, so is paperback or trade edition pricing. But the DaVinci Code (let's try something everyone apparently wants) is a $14 (eBooks) or $10 (Amazon discount) download while the paperback is $8 everywhere. Sorry, that's upside down. It worked for music ($9.99 iTMS albums vs $16.99 CDs) and it can work here.
The library model is another thing they're missing - I can go to the local library, borrow a book, read it, give it back - all for free. An astonishing number of people still do this. If they can time limit an application demo, why not a book? You check it out, you have a few weeks to read it, then it collapses. If you want it forever, you buy it and reactivate it. Apple does this with iWork with every new mac. Thirty days free, nothing crippled, then you can convert it with a key or delete it.
Adobe DRM is another consideration. I like DRM, really. At least at the Apple iTMS sort. Adobe is a different beast altogether. It blows up when you - get a new computer - move your copy of Acrobat Reader - rename the folder containing Acrobat Reader - rename the folder containing the books - rename the hard drive - the DRM is in a set of files that don't have any apparent connection to anything called "adobe" or "DRM" or "where are &%#$@ my books" - it goes south when you look crosseyed at it. OK maybe the last one was a stretch, but I'm a geek - to a plain old user it's not a clear path. Last two times it took anguished phone calls to Adobe and enduring things like "We don't HAVE to do this for you, you know..." I don't need a scolding aunt in charge of my software license. I did migrate an old iBook to a new iBook last week and I think the migration assistant is the reason it went smoothly - only a visit to a series of Adobe pages to reauthorize and a few magical downloads later I have my dozen books back (n.b.: it did lock down all my digital editions - even the handmade originals that were plain old PDFs of my own writing... odd, but I know why - I loaded wvery PDF I wanted in the reader in the same "official" folder.)
Here again Apple is an object lesson. They've sold a billion songs, TV shows are apparently doing very well. What's so freaking hard about doing the same thing with books. Especially if you're Adobe and own the base technology. My iTunes has a pull down menu that says "Authorize" or "Deauthorize" and knows which one you need.
I love them, but they're neither fish nor fowl, they can't fit in a real pocket and aren't enough like a pad of paper. When it gets to 8.5 x 11 x.5 and 3lb, we'll treat it like a true book or notebook and use it for everything.
As long as they think they're breaking ground, when is someone with a "full" OS device going to give us if nothing else a piece of paper screen factor, because let's face it - we're still tied to pieces of paper for handling and output and the sad legacy of 24x80 CRT for display... seems easier to munge the screen than the paper or our brains.
Man, the press thought the Apple event was a non-starter, this looks like the headline of the day is "Yippee - Another Newton | Tablet | eBook"
There's been a form 8000 something that anyone in business has to report a cash (including drafts) transaction over $10K. 'Cept now it's DHS and the triggers are lower and the stakes are higher.
Software developers have to eat and shop. And when enough middle class people move out of your community, stores close. First the small ones, then the bigger ones, then the restaurants, then the grocery stores... It happened in our community - the grocery store that's left is the worst installation of a chain you've ever seen, a couple of tiny cheap restaurants and the world's smallest Blockbuster. The grocery chain store does half its business on welfare/wic/etc in one of the oldest established neighborhoods in our city. The pretty decent hotel is now a flophouse. The owner of the grocery store even bought the plaza across the street before all this happened to keep any competition out - now he's stuck with it. A decent grocery store is now 4 or 12 miles away. The stores that are typically migtrating from storefronts to boxes have all passed on this neighborhood and set up across town or closed. The greek diner is still doing well, thank goodness. The state is making the main road into a 4-lane state highway - all to get people through here to somewhere else. One well-placed call center or service center or assembly plant could turn it all around. But instead, the work is being done by people who will work for less because their life to date is lousy compared to ours, we don't have to pay them all those pesky benefits and follow all those tedious safety rules, and the people who used to make a decent living doing the work here are shoved into worse straits.
Plus, India can't afford what we make here. We can make the profits on marketing and distributing it all, but it'll all be made in China. Even our traditional strength is failing - Americans increasingly don't want American cars (GM+Ford+Dodge had a 50% US market share last year - it'll be less this year) why would the rest of the world?
What did we expect from a president who's got a noose around his sack being held by some of the richest CEOs still not in prison? You'd expect someone who's never going to run for anything, whose veep isn't going to run, whose majority leader isn't going to crawl, to have an epiphany and realize that since he can't win or lose, he should just do the right thing.
But the truth is these sorts of forced marriages only work if it's financially important to one of the companies or if there's true synergy in combining brands and products.
Or if you're a power-hungry mogul looking to expand your empire. Steve seems not to be like that, but to make your holdings make sense becvause they do something really well. Like the Berkshire Hathaway companies - that include Helzberg Diamonds, GEICO and Dairy Queen - but really have nothing to do with each other - Jobs should and could be content to have a great Pixar, and a Great Apple, but what he can do for Disney/ABC/ESPN is not clear.
I've always figured he did what he did for Pixar so they's stay clear of Disney - I admire what Disney does on some levels, but in control of Pixar they'd end up with a layer of acrylic on a great nugget of gold.
What can possibly be on AOL that isn't also already on the net - I mean is there some magic packaging they wrap around the rest of the content on the planet that makes it worth putting up with a non-standard browser and now this?
So you have their $26 monthly and then they ask you to slap on either a monthly $17 or $22 DSL account to get connected.
So I'm still at $48 per month to get to 3 meg and tied to their app.
application 20030114313 Worslet and Twist - then nearly all of this is a rehash of physics equations - 388 paragraphs of this stuff, then 12 paragraphs of claims, and a hundred paras of examples.
I'd love to be there when these guys show up with a couple of pringles cans, a car battery and some carefully made "flux capacitor" labels.
Good luck with this sort of thing and realtors. Bought my first house two years ago - one realtor sat in the front seat of their van with us in the back, our only shelter from the pouring rain, after spending 30 minutes going thru a house, filled out the papers for us and handed it to us with a pen and said we had to make an offer on this house before we left the driveway because it might not be available after that.
No. It's amazing they want you to take minutes to decide on something you'll spend 30 years in.
I said yes to the house that didn't have me walking up startled / worrying about it the morning after we saw it.
See Denny's See Fleet Bank. See other companies who have been dragged out into the daylight for refusing / changing service to certain demographics. The potential for abuse is pretty high the way they seem to word things, and they're apparent ability to shoot first, explain later.
This isn't like a lunch counter - Netflix knows where you live and they apparently are willing to lump people into a group based on behavior. Suppose thru analysis Netflix decides that certain zipcodes are "bad" customers - their decision, they don't have to say why - and that neighborhood just happens to be north of 125th or Dorchester MA or Park St Hartford CT... Stand back.
As for costs - if their biz model is so inflexible they can't balance the frequents and the infrequents - like very other model should - then they need to refigure it.
Let's see - Netflix makes movies unavailable to me because I rent a lot. If a brick and mortar store did the same thing, how would *you* see it being done? I'm trying to frame it in an analogy against a traditional service - there is an ugly trend for new business models to do things you could never get away with in the transparent world - and this is one of them.
Netflix is paying all the shipping? Out of what funds? They have some secret money that's not accounts receivable from customers that they use to pay shipping? Of course not. We pay them to provide a service. Flatten it. If you want us to pay more because you forgot to do the math on frequent renters - put in a sliding scale.
What's to stop them from tipping the scales and stopping or throttling service for certain zip codes, demographics, etc. So if they all of a sudden decide to stop renting to blacks and say "no reason" this is OK? Just because they're not a government agency in the act of hiring people? A dear friend of mine learned an amazing level of bladder control so that she didn't have to drag her young daughter into the black bathroom in a department store in Hartford CT well into the 60's. We stopped that, remember? Businesss practices need to be fair, partly to be even handed and also that they won't be along for very long.
Reed needs to understand that a survey that says "they're a bargain" can coexist with the one that says "they're evil bad".
They can justify this all they want, but it's the equivalent of the folks at a Blockbuster store seeing you come in for the 3rd time that week, scooping armfuls of new DVDs off the shelf and yelling "Hide! Everybody hide!" and ducking under the counter. How professional. "Cheese Shop" sketch anyone?
Plus the agreement you enter into contains such nice phrases as "We do not process returns or deliveries on Saturdays, Sundays or Holidays." Great. Even less than "banker's hours" Yes, that can't ship USPS on two of these days, but they can certainly pick and pack.
An then there's "We reserve the right to terminate or restrict your use of our service, without notice, for any or no reason whatsoever." IANAL but can they really think that will hold up? Does "any" include because I'm black/white/brown/yellow/man/woman? "No" of course means we don't have to remember the reason or tell you.
My current problem with them is their relationship with the USPS - I've had two DVDs disappear on the way back, one delayed two weeks, and another arrived envelope only, nothing inside. All on the same route, ourgoing on the same drop box. They calim until there's 6 incidents at the same address, they can'd do anything. USPS says they're all wet - they'll invstigate anything they're asked to. Also - Netflix envelopes can't go thru standard sortin equipment - the PO has to cull them and send them thru another way - prolly helps that they're bright red. That explains a lot of mangling, according to both them and the USPS local office.
Beyond that, there's also a secret magic number of delivery incidents that will get you kicked out. I may find it out at the hands of a local postal employee's good time. So who do i tick off?
Slashdot Mirror
There was a mini-FIRST made of VEX robots this year. We saw the demo at FRC Hartford last week. Very impressive, makes it more accessible to middle schoolers and they "play" with it less than Mindstorms. The electronics comes from Innovation FIRST, the folks who make the brains for the FIRST robotics teams, and they're also VEXLabs. We're using it for the Trinity College Firefighting Robotics Contest, and we've gotten a chassis built and running under program control and effectors prototyped in record time.
One thing better than Mindstorms is that you can more easily add other materials, parts etc., and make it more bombproof without resorting to toxic adhesives or plastic-eating tools...
We're still wondering why RS is having a fire sale - two local stores were cleaned out as of Friday night - we just loaded up the last ultrasound and light sensors we could find. Some have said they're just dropping the retail line at RS, some have said it's just a sale, an eMail to the edu & gov rep at RS Fort Worth is yet unanswered. VEXLabs is still selling at full price. Hope they're just switching horses, but with RS no longer selling electronic parts, this was the sweetest thing they'd had in a while.
Two heads-ups: the pushbutton inputs use negative logic (thanks, VEX - that was a half hour of "stump the chumps"...) - and there is no "run" switch on the bot - programs (and the wheels they control) run once they complete the download - so either mold some tiny cinder blocks or grab an extra bumper button (or other sensor) and create a latch as the first step in the program...
Because lord knows how many people were sitting around going "Dammit! I could afford to pay for health insurance to cover that new kidney if I only didn't have to pay those bastards at Comcast $50 a month so I could watch the Final Four on a 14" screen in the spare bedroom! Where's the phone, Marge - I'm callin' my congressman!"
...that Fight Club isn't about fighting per se - it's about someone who has a psychotic break and invents a world where he can be in awe of his imaginary friend Tyler Durden and vanquish his real life, all in a movie that was rated so that adults who mostly could 'get' the plot device would appreciate the film, while kids - who mostly wouldn't get the subtlety would either see it as an unspeakable reality or a really cool cartoon, or who knows what.
In a perfect world, parents don't buy adult games for their kids, kids see the humor instead of the malice, kids don't take is as an instructional video, and tiny bluebirds follow us around all day chirping as we think lovely wonderful thoughts. So much for perfect worlds.
It took the youth of America a non-zero time to stop thinking that Bart Simpson was a spokesmodel and realize he was a sardonic cartoon character. Ditto college students (and I was there) when Animal House came out.
If you've been a teacher in a K-12 school you realize fast that there are certain kids who will try almost anything regardless of the effects on others. Any 100 level psychology course can tell you why. The understood parts of it involve modeling behavior and kids' relative inability to think past the next immediate result involving themselves. Not every student, not all the time, but enough that if you'd been in a school (where despite the glib quoting of urban myths there's plenty of learning going on) things like this are closer than you think to shouting "fire" in a crowded theatre.
Really, now - I think you meant "Rat Not Dead Yet"
I have a dozen or so. Full screen, portrait mode on an iBook turned 90 CCW (for a righty) using the trackpad button as a page turner is pretty cool.
Price is #1. If they didn't have to spray it onto a pound of paper and sew it together, ship it, pay the local bookstore, then I want to see the value of it reduced. I'll pay for the intellectual property, but they did this because it's bits not atoms and electronic storage and distribution is cheaper for them, then it shoud be cheaper for us. Half price is interesting, so is paperback or trade edition pricing. But the DaVinci Code (let's try something everyone apparently wants) is a $14 (eBooks) or $10 (Amazon discount) download while the paperback is $8 everywhere. Sorry, that's upside down. It worked for music ($9.99 iTMS albums vs $16.99 CDs) and it can work here.
The library model is another thing they're missing - I can go to the local library, borrow a book, read it, give it back - all for free. An astonishing number of people still do this. If they can time limit an application demo, why not a book? You check it out, you have a few weeks to read it, then it collapses. If you want it forever, you buy it and reactivate it. Apple does this with iWork with every new mac. Thirty days free, nothing crippled, then you can convert it with a key or delete it.
Adobe DRM is another consideration. I like DRM, really. At least at the Apple iTMS sort. Adobe is a different beast altogether. It blows up when you - get a new computer - move your copy of Acrobat Reader - rename the folder containing Acrobat Reader - rename the folder containing the books - rename the hard drive - the DRM is in a set of files that don't have any apparent connection to anything called "adobe" or "DRM" or "where are &%#$@ my books" - it goes south when you look crosseyed at it. OK maybe the last one was a stretch, but I'm a geek - to a plain old user it's not a clear path. Last two times it took anguished phone calls to Adobe and enduring things like "We don't HAVE to do this for you, you know..." I don't need a scolding aunt in charge of my software license. I did migrate an old iBook to a new iBook last week and I think the migration assistant is the reason it went smoothly - only a visit to a series of Adobe pages to reauthorize and a few magical downloads later I have my dozen books back (n.b.: it did lock down all my digital editions - even the handmade originals that were plain old PDFs of my own writing... odd, but I know why - I loaded wvery PDF I wanted in the reader in the same "official" folder.)
Here again Apple is an object lesson. They've sold a billion songs, TV shows are apparently doing very well. What's so freaking hard about doing the same thing with books. Especially if you're Adobe and own the base technology. My iTunes has a pull down menu that says "Authorize" or "Deauthorize" and knows which one you need.
2-3 hour battery life on an "ultra portable pc" is death on a stick.
You're supposed to be able to keep this with you at all times and simply use it whenever.
Can we guess how much of that is a graphics processor trying to keep up with XP ?
I'll stick to my 5-6 hour 4lb iBook G4 or Portege 2000, thanks. Instant on (-ish), full work day, no-strain weight.
Yikes. The pic on this MS press page looks eerily like a Newton...
m ar06/03-09Mobile.mspx
.5 and 3lb, we'll treat it like a true book or notebook and use it for everything.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/
I love them, but they're neither fish nor fowl, they can't fit in a real pocket and aren't enough like a pad of paper. When it gets to 8.5 x 11 x
As long as they think they're breaking ground, when is someone with a "full" OS device going to give us if nothing else a piece of paper screen factor, because let's face it - we're still tied to pieces of paper for handling and output and the sad legacy of 24x80 CRT for display... seems easier to munge the screen than the paper or our brains.
Man, the press thought the Apple event was a non-starter, this looks like the headline of the day is "Yippee - Another Newton | Tablet | eBook"
There's been a form 8000 something that anyone in business has to report a cash (including drafts) transaction over $10K.
'Cept now it's DHS and the triggers are lower and the stakes are higher.
Software developers have to eat and shop. And when enough middle class people move out of your community, stores close. First the small ones, then the bigger ones, then the restaurants, then the grocery stores... It happened in our community - the grocery store that's left is the worst installation of a chain you've ever seen, a couple of tiny cheap restaurants and the world's smallest Blockbuster. The grocery chain store does half its business on welfare/wic/etc in one of the oldest established neighborhoods in our city. The pretty decent hotel is now a flophouse. The owner of the grocery store even bought the plaza across the street before all this happened to keep any competition out - now he's stuck with it. A decent grocery store is now 4 or 12 miles away. The stores that are typically migtrating from storefronts to boxes have all passed on this neighborhood and set up across town or closed. The greek diner is still doing well, thank goodness. The state is making the main road into a 4-lane state highway - all to get people through here to somewhere else. One well-placed call center or service center or assembly plant could turn it all around. But instead, the work is being done by people who will work for less because their life to date is lousy compared to ours, we don't have to pay them all those pesky benefits and follow all those tedious safety rules, and the people who used to make a decent living doing the work here are shoved into worse straits.
Plus, India can't afford what we make here. We can make the profits on marketing and distributing it all, but it'll all be made in China. Even our traditional strength is failing - Americans increasingly don't want American cars (GM+Ford+Dodge had a 50% US market share last year - it'll be less this year) why would the rest of the world?
What did we expect from a president who's got a noose around his sack being held by some of the richest CEOs still not in prison? You'd expect someone who's never going to run for anything, whose veep isn't going to run, whose majority leader isn't going to crawl, to have an epiphany and realize that since he can't win or lose, he should just do the right thing.
I've got a middle school full of kids who routinely make iMovies for educational products.
I hope college students in four years would get to do the same.
Beats the daylights out of shoeboxes with little clay figures.
Firewire is the way it gets done. iEEE 1394, iLink, whatever.
Cheapest iBook = $949, 6hr battery, XGA
Cheapest Thinkpad = $749 +$50 (512MB) +$100 (XPPro) = $899 still no firewire, a pound heavier, 4hr battery, WXGA
But the truth is these sorts of forced marriages only work if it's financially important to one of the companies or if there's true synergy in combining brands and products.
Or if you're a power-hungry mogul looking to expand your empire. Steve seems not to be like that, but to make your holdings make sense becvause they do something really well. Like the Berkshire Hathaway companies - that include Helzberg Diamonds, GEICO and Dairy Queen - but really have nothing to do with each other - Jobs should and could be content to have a great Pixar, and a Great Apple, but what he can do for Disney/ABC/ESPN is not clear.
I've always figured he did what he did for Pixar so they's stay clear of Disney - I admire what Disney does on some levels, but in control of Pixar they'd end up with a layer of acrylic on a great nugget of gold.
Buy what you need, and do what you do best.
This is a revolting development - they're obviously subversives trying to torpedo Slashot.
A (maybe) non-DRM music system;
A non-Apple music system;
A non-MS music system;
A music system that supports Ogg and FLAC.
Nothing left to talk about. *sniff* Cue crickets.
What can possibly be on AOL that isn't also already on the net - I mean is there some magic packaging they wrap around the rest of the content on the planet that makes it worth putting up with a non-standard browser and now this?
So you have their $26 monthly and then they ask you to slap on either a monthly $17 or $22 DSL account to get connected.
So I'm still at $48 per month to get to 3 meg and tied to their app.
application 20030114313 Worslet and Twist - then nearly all of this is a rehash of physics equations - 388 paragraphs of this stuff, then 12 paragraphs of claims, and a hundred paras of examples.
I'd love to be there when these guys show up with a couple of pringles cans, a car battery and some carefully made "flux capacitor" labels.
Good luck with this sort of thing and realtors. Bought my first house two years ago - one realtor sat in the front seat of their van with us in the back, our only shelter from the pouring rain, after spending 30 minutes going thru a house, filled out the papers for us and handed it to us with a pen and said we had to make an offer on this house before we left the driveway because it might not be available after that.
No. It's amazing they want you to take minutes to decide on something you'll spend 30 years in.
I said yes to the house that didn't have me walking up startled / worrying about it the morning after we saw it.
... or the properly mastered & recorded Katy Lied that Mobile Fidelity did...
Called "Cane Toads"
It mostly played art houses, I saw it at the local college.
But it wasn't as special-effect-y as Jurassic Park.
... when you shove electrodes into your own brain:
10. Guess he's never flying anywhere again.
9. Talk about your direct TV... Can he get HBO?
8. Potato powered clock? Feh. Watch this...
7. Wake me when he can control the 12-story Tetris game at Brown U.
6. Testing... 1... 2... *kick* SMASH! Oops. Sorry 'bout that, archbishop.
5. Most of us only use 10% of their brain. With the change of a little knob, his goes to 11.
4. Virtual Viagra 3.1
3. Doesn't support Ogg? Then this whole human brain idea is dead on arrival.
2. Sure, now there'll be a patent fight over the algoritm for whistling....
And the number one disturbing thing about putting electodes in your own brain,
1. Attach a frikken laser and he can rule the world!
Just the thing for my Apple //c
See Denny's See Fleet Bank. See other companies who have been dragged out into the daylight for refusing / changing service to certain demographics. The potential for abuse is pretty high the way they seem to word things, and they're apparent ability to shoot first, explain later.
This isn't like a lunch counter - Netflix knows where you live and they apparently are willing to lump people into a group based on behavior. Suppose thru analysis Netflix decides that certain zipcodes are "bad" customers - their decision, they don't have to say why - and that neighborhood just happens to be north of 125th or Dorchester MA or Park St Hartford CT... Stand back.
As for costs - if their biz model is so inflexible they can't balance the frequents and the infrequents - like very other model should - then they need to refigure it.
Ooh! Cool! Better go RTFA!
First used - PDP-11/10 Still ran last time we booted it a year or two ago.
First owned - NEC PC-8901a Also still runs.
Let's see - Netflix makes movies unavailable to me because I rent a lot. If a brick and mortar store did the same thing, how would *you* see it being done? I'm trying to frame it in an analogy against a traditional service - there is an ugly trend for new business models to do things you could never get away with in the transparent world - and this is one of them.
Netflix is paying all the shipping? Out of what funds? They have some secret money that's not accounts receivable from customers that they use to pay shipping? Of course not. We pay them to provide a service. Flatten it. If you want us to pay more because you forgot to do the math on frequent renters - put in a sliding scale.
What's to stop them from tipping the scales and stopping or throttling service for certain zip codes, demographics, etc. So if they all of a sudden decide to stop renting to blacks and say "no reason" this is OK? Just because they're not a government agency in the act of hiring people? A dear friend of mine learned an amazing level of bladder control so that she didn't have to drag her young daughter into the black bathroom in a department store in Hartford CT well into the 60's. We stopped that, remember? Businesss practices need to be fair, partly to be even handed and also that they won't be along for very long.
... makes the rules.
Reed needs to understand that a survey that says "they're a bargain" can coexist with the one that says "they're evil bad".
They can justify this all they want, but it's the equivalent of the folks at a Blockbuster store seeing you come in for the 3rd time that week, scooping armfuls of new DVDs off the shelf and yelling "Hide! Everybody hide!" and ducking under the counter. How professional. "Cheese Shop" sketch anyone?
Plus the agreement you enter into contains such nice phrases as "We do not process returns or deliveries on Saturdays, Sundays or Holidays." Great. Even less than "banker's hours" Yes, that can't ship USPS on two of these days, but they can certainly pick and pack.
An then there's "We reserve the right to terminate or restrict your use of our service, without notice, for any or no reason whatsoever." IANAL but can they really think that will hold up? Does "any" include because I'm black/white/brown/yellow/man/woman? "No" of course means we don't have to remember the reason or tell you.
My current problem with them is their relationship with the USPS - I've had two DVDs disappear on the way back, one delayed two weeks, and another arrived envelope only, nothing inside. All on the same route, ourgoing on the same drop box. They calim until there's 6 incidents at the same address, they can'd do anything. USPS says they're all wet - they'll invstigate anything they're asked to. Also - Netflix envelopes can't go thru standard sortin equipment - the PO has to cull them and send them thru another way - prolly helps that they're bright red. That explains a lot of mangling, according to both them and the USPS local office.
Beyond that, there's also a secret magic number of delivery incidents that will get you kicked out. I may find it out at the hands of a local postal employee's good time. So who do i tick off?