Well in any case it's too late to start building a solution now. Inventions (and I'm using that term in a very broad sense) tend to be invented by multiple people and companies within months of one another. If you start now and have something working six months from now it will be too late.
The same thing goes for other obvious ideas such as for example a Bitcoin market that actually performs well or an in-store e-payment system that works well. Some other startup is already 10+ months ahead of you on those.
You could try making a summarisation service or a Bitcoin market or an in-store payment service that's so awesome it'll take the market by storm even against large established competitors. But then it has to be super awesome and perfect.
Radio is reporting some commotion outside Boston, with "Fire in the hole!", a concussion, hollering for someone to get on the ground with hands behind their head, requests for reporters to turn off their cell phones.
Also a professor shot on MIT campus; who knows whether it's related.
The police claims it is related. One suspect has been shot dead, one Boston policeman is in critical condition. One suspect still at large. The FBI has reportedly sealed off some 20 city blocks to try to contain him. AlJazeera just claimed that the police is considering shutting down all transit in the Boston area.
Sounds like they feel pretty sure they've got the right men.
Here's some footage from the ground that shows both of the explosions (it's the long version of the clip that all the TV news channels are rolling): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=046MuD1pYJg The second explosion happens at 0:19 a couple of blocks away from the camera man.
Where is my commuter car-plane that is parked on my drive way?
Now: Not feasible until we have really good AI auto pilots. Future: Killed by noise regulation.
What about the high speed trains running in vacuum tunnels going from NY to LA in 90 minutes?
Not worth the cost because most people will just move to the city where they work or where their spouse lives. Come to think of it, it may actually become reality if housing prices continue to soar...
Still the same internal combustion engine burning the same damned oil.
That's slowly changing , but the electric motor is still held back by the lack of decent battery technology. It's gonna take decades to switch to electrics and hybrids.
What happened to crystallic fusion?
I don't know if that would be viable, but the government money went into tokamaks, which will be commercialized in (50 + 1*numOfYears) years from now...
Where the hell is my damned home that is mounted on a pivot that tracks the sun?
Too expensive and/or killed by NIMBY groups.
Generally speaking it's a lot easier to mess around with information than to mess around with matter.
I'm not sure the phone is the right platform for a heart rate monitor. A heart rate monitor would do more good if it could detect your heart rate 24/7, or at least during the whole day. I guess maybe smart clocks that Apple and Samsung are working on will probably have that feature.
Yeah, stereo mic is kind of a no brainer.
Radar may be possible, but I highly doubt you'll be able to see through walls with a sensor that tiny.
Why would you want a laser for medium range distance if you have a radar?
Thermal imaging sensors are dropping in price, so that's probably going to become a no-brainer at some point. Those will be great for parents who want to check if their kid has a temperature (spelling the end for the old thermometer under warm tap water trick, sorry kids...) and great for looking for heat leaks and water leaks in your home.
It appears that more an more evidence is surfacing that there have been DoS attacks much like you said, although I wonder if they were truly distributed attacks and not just a few guys with a small number of trade bots. Mt.Gox has admitted that some of the crashes were due to huge amounts of legitimate trading.
By the way, Mt.Gox must have been making about $50,000 per day in revenue the last few days, if I'm not mistaken. I think Mt.Gox is about to get some serious competition soon.
> I'm treating this like a game and I hope everyone else is too.
So, in other words, you exist to devalue an object. This is regardless of what intrinsic properties it might otherwise hold. Do you always actively put yourself in the company of pure investors, marketers and thrillseekers?
If people want to debunk the value of bitcoin, they can be right, and at the same time primarily debunk the value of humanity while optionally using themself as the example.
That's interesting and confusing. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning...
To be clear, my advice is this, if you ask me, spend zero dollars on Bitcoin. If you own Bitcoin, think of them as a lottery ticket with an unusually high chance of winning (so far).
Actually, if you were a user of the sites, you'd notice there is strong evidence that points to a coordinated DDOS. The spurts of traffic aren't continuous, and they "break" at suspicious timings. For example, at the bottom of the curves, the sites work fine, most of the market/chart sites get their feeds, etc. It's only during the drops/raises start, when it would be fortuitous for people to put in trades, and then freak out when they can't, that the connection issues occur.
I'm not entirely ruling out it being sheer volume of people, but if it was it wouldn't "Come and go" as drastically as it's doing. We're talking sites entirely unusable one minute, and suddenly perfectly fine the next, then unusable 30 min later.
Massive surges in trade are expected during a speculative boom-bust cycle. This is how it works: every now and then, for whatever reason, the price either drops or increases significantly into a territory where you enter into a self-reinforcing surge of traders (many of which will be small traders) who are scrambling to sell and/or buy before it's 'too late'. This goes on until the price stabilizes at which point people calm down.
AFAIK there hasn't been any evidence of an actual DDoS against any of the market sites. People who were using the biggest market site Mt.Gox reported 25 minute delays in their trade orders, most likely because of people scrambling to cash in on their bitcoins before it's too late and people looking to buy bitcoins at 'bargain' prices. The most popular chart site bitcoincharts.com crumbled completely, most likely under the load of people who were legitimately interested in viewing the data, or in my case semi-legitimately interested in it (it's fun to watch).
Full discosure: I sold my small fraction of a bitcoin back when the price was at $235. I currently hold 0 BTC. I'm treating this like a game and I hope everyone else is too. I feel sorry for anyone who is investing real money now. Don't be stupid.
Yes, but North Korea reportedly has many, many kilometers of deep underground tunnels and bunkers. The leaders could be hiding anywhere at any given time.
By the way, I'm afraid that China has a lot less influence over the north that one might think.
North Korea is basically the world's largest cult compound. China supplies food and energy, but you have to keep in mind that the folks who depend on those resources to survive are basically expendable for the greater good of the 'cult'. Plus, China doesn't really want to starve North Korea because that would trigger a refugee crisis along their border, which they don't want.
Yeah, I don't even know if North Korea has an air force in a practical sense. They cut to stock footage of airborne Mig-21:s (and older planes) in the propaganda film that they released the other week, which I guess suggest that they don't have anything that flies today.
North Korea does however have a tremendous amount of old military equipment including thousands of tanks and armored vehicles. If those are still able to roll and if they were allowed to mobilize and drive up to the DMZ they could cause a lot of trouble because of their sheer numbers if they were allowed to break through into South Korea. Their special forces could also cause lots and lots of damage if some of them managed to get through.
I'm not the one who brought up the idea of invading North Korea. I'm just pointing out that it would be costly and problematic.
I guess the most convenient way to end a war, should one erupt, would be to bomb them until their defenses are broken enough that you could safely patrol their air space with drones. Once you can do that you could maintain a relatively cheap low intensive war indefinitely or until there is some sort of regime change or revolution.
Well, they don't have oil, but they have probably stored enough diesel for the drive down to the south. North Korea has more than a million troops. Tens of thousands of those are special forces. You do no want those to start moving and gain momentum and gain the initiative.
Well, I don't think Kim wants to die. The guy is barely 30.
If you really want to invade North Korea you first have to immobilize and disable their 1M+ strong army so you don't have to fight a tower defense-like battle against a virtually never ending onslaught of semi-fast moving troops. You don't want to give the North Koreans a chance to take the initiative and go on the offensive, because if they do the cost in lives and destruction on the southern side would increase by orders of magnitude. What you do want is for the North Koreans to get pinned down and carpet bombed to oblivion on the Northern side of the DMZ.
You also don't want to fight a war from a starting point where you have a mere 28.000 US troops on the ground and, presumably, not nearly enough ammo and bombs in storage on the peninsula to fight a massive war. It's a lot safer and cheaper to ship in ammo and bombs months before the war than to try to airlift them in tomorrow.
The humanitarian side of it would be difficult regardless of when the war started. China might have to invade from the north and set up refugee camps inside North Korea to prevent millions of refugees from spilling over the border. Now you have to take care to not bomb the Chinese soldiers inside North Korea.
If you want to destroy an oppressive and unfriendly government it would probably be easier to invade Iran now, before they get nukes. If you tie up your forces in North Korea you'll give the Iranians free reign to work on their nuclear program while you try to end the war in Korea. You may be able to defeat North Korea in weeks, but ending the war and pulling out could take years.
I think that it's probably a move meant to give the North Koreans a chance to back down and declare 'victory' to their own people so that the crisis can end before things become unpredictable.
Even if the US wanted a war with North Korea this would not be the time. A war like that takes months of planning and logistics if it's going to go well. The US and South Korea could defeat North Korea over the next couple of weeks if necessary, but at what cost?
I would even go so far as to say in some areas a master's or PhD has little value above that of a bachelor's degree. Take into account the time and money spent getting the extra degrees, people going straight from a bachelors degree into industry might end up ahead.
Or a high school degree, or no degree at all. The value of a degree in something like literature depends on who your parents are, on who you become friends with in college and on how much your government is spending on education. A PhD in literature could be very valuable in economic terms if you're the right person for it. Of course, you have to love doing and teaching literary science, which I imagine few people do.
Now, if you dream of making money writing books, don't waste time on becoming a scientist of literature. People buy books because they essentially want a mental roller coaster of one kind of another. (This is also true of popular 'serious' literature. The best selling popular science books or "big idea" books such as Guns, Germs, and Steel are books that consist of an easy to grasp trail of neatly served intellectual insights that let the reader experience the high of feeling super smart over and over and over again). If you want to make money writing books you want to become the literary equivalent of a roller coaster designer, a tinkerer and an engineer of literature.
Here's what J K Rowling remembers from her time working towards her Bachelor's degree, according to the Wikipedia: "doing no work whatsoever"... "wore heavy eyeliner, listened to the Smiths, and read Dickens and Tolkien".
Well, Slashdot and the rest of the online nerdosphere is essentually a virtual Mensa where you can be a member without first having to complete those pesky little matrices.
(Sorry about the word 'nerdosphere'. Won't happen again, I promise.)
Yeah, I think that is Kim's plan and it will probably work as intended on people in North Korea and Pyongyang, but the problem is that virtually nobody outside of the country will fall for it.
It seems to me that the North Korean leadership has just spent all of its rhetorical ammo. If the next thing out of Kim's mouth isn't a launch code and an authorization to launch a nuclear tipped missile he's just ruined his credibility. And North Korea does not even have a nuclear tipped missile.
This is very dangerous, because this means that at some time before the next time Kim wants to blackmail South Korea and the US he is going to have to use enough force that his threats will regain credibility. I don't think there will be a major war, but I think a minor exchange of fire, at least, is inevitable at some point in the not too distant future if Kim wants to stay in power.
I wonder what his generals and other top officials in Pyongyang are whispering to one another when he can't hear. I guess the time to stage a coup without looking like total traitors would be a couple of months after this blows over.
Well, my understanding is that the working conditions have improved from outright dangerous to merely bad, which is par for the course in poor countries (and arguably better than subsistence agriculture) but certainly not something to be proud of for a market leading company with a profit margin above 20%.
Where did you find the salary figures? I guess $700 would be about median wage in China, which would be fantastic for a manual worker, but I doubt anyone who works at the factory floor actually makes anywhere close to that. This article from January of this year claims that the entry level wage in one factory is £180, or about $275.
How much would it hurt Apple's bottom line to increase gross wages by $100 per worker overnight (in addition to planned wage increases)? Well, Apple has less than a million workers in China, so it would be less than $1.2 billion a year which would bring Apples profit margin down by one or two percent. Apple does not think that it's worth it, but they might reconsider if they continue to get criticism.
Suicides are typically caused by things like depression, drug addiction, personal loss, unemployment, violence, persecution and other severe life crises. The suicide rate for all causes in China is about 20 per 100,000 people. I think working conditions or living conditions would have to be pretty damned poor for them to be the primary motive behind several suicides in a town of 100,000.
It's nice that things are improving. Who knows, if Apple keeps getting angry criticism, especially from their customers, they may get the working conditions up to where they'll be able to remove the suicide nets.
Okay, I have to say in retrospect I am sorry if anyone who's actually been the victim of or otherwise afflicted by rape read my comment and felt that it diminished their suffering.
The thing is though, any discussion about the merits and flaws of one company's offering is always going to become about that and it's competition and Apple is a company that should expect harsh criticism, not so much for it's practices in the west, but for the repeated allegations that it has been looking aside from what's happening in its factories in China. (The same criticism probably applies to many other brands as well.)
I swore off Samsung a few years ago when the 2.5 year old HDTV I had paid $1400 for died, and they wanted as much to repair it as a new TV would cost. Their products are shoddily made, and they don't stand behind them. They could produce the snazziest Jesus phone on the market and I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot poleaxe.
True, but much of the same could be said about Apple.
IIRC Apple's 30" $3000+ monitor shipped with a 1 year warranty (seriously?!). Apple has also, going on for years and years, routinely offered customers to pay extra upfront for warranty/insurance beyond the first year in markets where the law says you have to have more than 1 year of warranty on electronics.
Apple Jesus is a bit like Catholic Jesus. They know you'll come back even if you occasionally a**rape some of them...
Slashdot Mirror
Well in any case it's too late to start building a solution now. Inventions (and I'm using that term in a very broad sense) tend to be invented by multiple people and companies within months of one another. If you start now and have something working six months from now it will be too late.
The same thing goes for other obvious ideas such as for example a Bitcoin market that actually performs well or an in-store e-payment system that works well. Some other startup is already 10+ months ahead of you on those.
You could try making a summarisation service or a Bitcoin market or an in-store payment service that's so awesome it'll take the market by storm even against large established competitors. But then it has to be super awesome and perfect.
Your post reminded me of this: http://xkcd.com/385/
Radio is reporting some commotion outside Boston, with "Fire in the hole!", a concussion, hollering for someone to get on the ground with hands behind their head, requests for reporters to turn off their cell phones.
Also a professor shot on MIT campus; who knows whether it's related.
The police claims it is related. One suspect has been shot dead, one Boston policeman is in critical condition. One suspect still at large. The FBI has reportedly sealed off some 20 city blocks to try to contain him. AlJazeera just claimed that the police is considering shutting down all transit in the Boston area.
Sounds like they feel pretty sure they've got the right men.
Here's some footage from the ground that shows both of the explosions (it's the long version of the clip that all the TV news channels are rolling): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=046MuD1pYJg The second explosion happens at 0:19 a couple of blocks away from the camera man.
Wish I had mod points...
Where is my commuter car-plane that is parked on my drive way?
Now: Not feasible until we have really good AI auto pilots. Future: Killed by noise regulation.
What about the high speed trains running in vacuum tunnels going from NY to LA in 90 minutes?
Not worth the cost because most people will just move to the city where they work or where their spouse lives. Come to think of it, it may actually become reality if housing prices continue to soar...
Still the same internal combustion engine burning the same damned oil.
That's slowly changing , but the electric motor is still held back by the lack of decent battery technology. It's gonna take decades to switch to electrics and hybrids.
What happened to crystallic fusion?
I don't know if that would be viable, but the government money went into tokamaks, which will be commercialized in (50 + 1*numOfYears) years from now...
Where the hell is my damned home that is mounted on a pivot that tracks the sun?
Too expensive and/or killed by NIMBY groups.
Generally speaking it's a lot easier to mess around with information than to mess around with matter.
I'm not sure the phone is the right platform for a heart rate monitor. A heart rate monitor would do more good if it could detect your heart rate 24/7, or at least during the whole day. I guess maybe smart clocks that Apple and Samsung are working on will probably have that feature.
Yeah, stereo mic is kind of a no brainer.
Radar may be possible, but I highly doubt you'll be able to see through walls with a sensor that tiny.
Why would you want a laser for medium range distance if you have a radar?
Thermal imaging sensors are dropping in price, so that's probably going to become a no-brainer at some point. Those will be great for parents who want to check if their kid has a temperature (spelling the end for the old thermometer under warm tap water trick, sorry kids...) and great for looking for heat leaks and water leaks in your home.
It appears that more an more evidence is surfacing that there have been DoS attacks much like you said, although I wonder if they were truly distributed attacks and not just a few guys with a small number of trade bots. Mt.Gox has admitted that some of the crashes were due to huge amounts of legitimate trading.
By the way, Mt.Gox must have been making about $50,000 per day in revenue the last few days, if I'm not mistaken. I think Mt.Gox is about to get some serious competition soon.
> I'm treating this like a game and I hope everyone else is too.
So, in other words, you exist to devalue an object. This is regardless of what intrinsic properties it might otherwise hold.
Do you always actively put yourself in the company of pure investors, marketers and thrillseekers?
If people want to debunk the value of bitcoin, they can be right, and at the same time primarily debunk the value of humanity while optionally using themself as the example.
That's interesting and confusing. I don't quite follow your line of reasoning...
To be clear, my advice is this, if you ask me, spend zero dollars on Bitcoin. If you own Bitcoin, think of them as a lottery ticket with an unusually high chance of winning (so far).
Actually, if you were a user of the sites, you'd notice there is strong evidence that points to a coordinated DDOS. The spurts of traffic aren't continuous, and they "break" at suspicious timings. For example, at the bottom of the curves, the sites work fine, most of the market/chart sites get their feeds, etc. It's only during the drops/raises start, when it would be fortuitous for people to put in trades, and then freak out when they can't, that the connection issues occur.
I'm not entirely ruling out it being sheer volume of people, but if it was it wouldn't "Come and go" as drastically as it's doing. We're talking sites entirely unusable one minute, and suddenly perfectly fine the next, then unusable 30 min later.
Massive surges in trade are expected during a speculative boom-bust cycle. This is how it works: every now and then, for whatever reason, the price either drops or increases significantly into a territory where you enter into a self-reinforcing surge of traders (many of which will be small traders) who are scrambling to sell and/or buy before it's 'too late'. This goes on until the price stabilizes at which point people calm down.
AFAIK there hasn't been any evidence of an actual DDoS against any of the market sites. People who were using the biggest market site Mt.Gox reported 25 minute delays in their trade orders, most likely because of people scrambling to cash in on their bitcoins before it's too late and people looking to buy bitcoins at 'bargain' prices. The most popular chart site bitcoincharts.com crumbled completely, most likely under the load of people who were legitimately interested in viewing the data, or in my case semi-legitimately interested in it (it's fun to watch).
Full discosure: I sold my small fraction of a bitcoin back when the price was at $235. I currently hold 0 BTC. I'm treating this like a game and I hope everyone else is too. I feel sorry for anyone who is investing real money now. Don't be stupid.
Yes, but North Korea reportedly has many, many kilometers of deep underground tunnels and bunkers. The leaders could be hiding anywhere at any given time.
By the way, I'm afraid that China has a lot less influence over the north that one might think.
North Korea is basically the world's largest cult compound. China supplies food and energy, but you have to keep in mind that the folks who depend on those resources to survive are basically expendable for the greater good of the 'cult'. Plus, China doesn't really want to starve North Korea because that would trigger a refugee crisis along their border, which they don't want.
Yeah, I don't even know if North Korea has an air force in a practical sense. They cut to stock footage of airborne Mig-21:s (and older planes) in the propaganda film that they released the other week, which I guess suggest that they don't have anything that flies today.
North Korea does however have a tremendous amount of old military equipment including thousands of tanks and armored vehicles. If those are still able to roll and if they were allowed to mobilize and drive up to the DMZ they could cause a lot of trouble because of their sheer numbers if they were allowed to break through into South Korea. Their special forces could also cause lots and lots of damage if some of them managed to get through.
I'm not the one who brought up the idea of invading North Korea. I'm just pointing out that it would be costly and problematic.
I guess the most convenient way to end a war, should one erupt, would be to bomb them until their defenses are broken enough that you could safely patrol their air space with drones. Once you can do that you could maintain a relatively cheap low intensive war indefinitely or until there is some sort of regime change or revolution.
Well, they don't have oil, but they have probably stored enough diesel for the drive down to the south. North Korea has more than a million troops. Tens of thousands of those are special forces. You do no want those to start moving and gain momentum and gain the initiative.
Well, I don't think Kim wants to die. The guy is barely 30.
If you really want to invade North Korea you first have to immobilize and disable their 1M+ strong army so you don't have to fight a tower defense-like battle against a virtually never ending onslaught of semi-fast moving troops. You don't want to give the North Koreans a chance to take the initiative and go on the offensive, because if they do the cost in lives and destruction on the southern side would increase by orders of magnitude. What you do want is for the North Koreans to get pinned down and carpet bombed to oblivion on the Northern side of the DMZ.
You also don't want to fight a war from a starting point where you have a mere 28.000 US troops on the ground and, presumably, not nearly enough ammo and bombs in storage on the peninsula to fight a massive war. It's a lot safer and cheaper to ship in ammo and bombs months before the war than to try to airlift them in tomorrow.
The humanitarian side of it would be difficult regardless of when the war started. China might have to invade from the north and set up refugee camps inside North Korea to prevent millions of refugees from spilling over the border. Now you have to take care to not bomb the Chinese soldiers inside North Korea.
If you want to destroy an oppressive and unfriendly government it would probably be easier to invade Iran now, before they get nukes. If you tie up your forces in North Korea you'll give the Iranians free reign to work on their nuclear program while you try to end the war in Korea. You may be able to defeat North Korea in weeks, but ending the war and pulling out could take years.
I think that it's probably a move meant to give the North Koreans a chance to back down and declare 'victory' to their own people so that the crisis can end before things become unpredictable.
Even if the US wanted a war with North Korea this would not be the time. A war like that takes months of planning and logistics if it's going to go well. The US and South Korea could defeat North Korea over the next couple of weeks if necessary, but at what cost?
I would even go so far as to say in some areas a master's or PhD has little value above that of a bachelor's degree. Take into account the time and money spent getting the extra degrees, people going straight from a bachelors degree into industry might end up ahead.
Or a high school degree, or no degree at all. The value of a degree in something like literature depends on who your parents are, on who you become friends with in college and on how much your government is spending on education. A PhD in literature could be very valuable in economic terms if you're the right person for it. Of course, you have to love doing and teaching literary science, which I imagine few people do.
Now, if you dream of making money writing books, don't waste time on becoming a scientist of literature. People buy books because they essentially want a mental roller coaster of one kind of another. (This is also true of popular 'serious' literature. The best selling popular science books or "big idea" books such as Guns, Germs, and Steel are books that consist of an easy to grasp trail of neatly served intellectual insights that let the reader experience the high of feeling super smart over and over and over again). If you want to make money writing books you want to become the literary equivalent of a roller coaster designer, a tinkerer and an engineer of literature.
Here's what J K Rowling remembers from her time working towards her Bachelor's degree, according to the Wikipedia: "doing no work whatsoever" ... "wore heavy eyeliner, listened to the Smiths, and read Dickens and Tolkien".
I hope Ryanair isn't reading these comments. They might get ideas...
Well, Slashdot and the rest of the online nerdosphere is essentually a virtual Mensa where you can be a member without first having to complete those pesky little matrices.
(Sorry about the word 'nerdosphere'. Won't happen again, I promise.)
Yeah, I think that is Kim's plan and it will probably work as intended on people in North Korea and Pyongyang, but the problem is that virtually nobody outside of the country will fall for it.
It seems to me that the North Korean leadership has just spent all of its rhetorical ammo. If the next thing out of Kim's mouth isn't a launch code and an authorization to launch a nuclear tipped missile he's just ruined his credibility. And North Korea does not even have a nuclear tipped missile.
This is very dangerous, because this means that at some time before the next time Kim wants to blackmail South Korea and the US he is going to have to use enough force that his threats will regain credibility. I don't think there will be a major war, but I think a minor exchange of fire, at least, is inevitable at some point in the not too distant future if Kim wants to stay in power.
I wonder what his generals and other top officials in Pyongyang are whispering to one another when he can't hear. I guess the time to stage a coup without looking like total traitors would be a couple of months after this blows over.
Well, my understanding is that the working conditions have improved from outright dangerous to merely bad, which is par for the course in poor countries (and arguably better than subsistence agriculture) but certainly not something to be proud of for a market leading company with a profit margin above 20%.
Where did you find the salary figures? I guess $700 would be about median wage in China, which would be fantastic for a manual worker, but I doubt anyone who works at the factory floor actually makes anywhere close to that. This article from January of this year claims that the entry level wage in one factory is £180, or about $275.
How much would it hurt Apple's bottom line to increase gross wages by $100 per worker overnight (in addition to planned wage increases)? Well, Apple has less than a million workers in China, so it would be less than $1.2 billion a year which would bring Apples profit margin down by one or two percent. Apple does not think that it's worth it, but they might reconsider if they continue to get criticism.
Suicides are typically caused by things like depression, drug addiction, personal loss, unemployment, violence, persecution and other severe life crises. The suicide rate for all causes in China is about 20 per 100,000 people. I think working conditions or living conditions would have to be pretty damned poor for them to be the primary motive behind several suicides in a town of 100,000.
It's nice that things are improving. Who knows, if Apple keeps getting angry criticism, especially from their customers, they may get the working conditions up to where they'll be able to remove the suicide nets.
Okay, I have to say in retrospect I am sorry if anyone who's actually been the victim of or otherwise afflicted by rape read my comment and felt that it diminished their suffering.
The thing is though, any discussion about the merits and flaws of one company's offering is always going to become about that and it's competition and Apple is a company that should expect harsh criticism, not so much for it's practices in the west, but for the repeated allegations that it has been looking aside from what's happening in its factories in China. (The same criticism probably applies to many other brands as well.)
I swore off Samsung a few years ago when the 2.5 year old HDTV I had paid $1400 for died, and they wanted as much to repair it as a new TV would cost. Their products are shoddily made, and they don't stand behind them. They could produce the snazziest Jesus phone on the market and I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot poleaxe.
True, but much of the same could be said about Apple.
IIRC Apple's 30" $3000+ monitor shipped with a 1 year warranty (seriously?!). Apple has also, going on for years and years, routinely offered customers to pay extra upfront for warranty/insurance beyond the first year in markets where the law says you have to have more than 1 year of warranty on electronics.
Apple Jesus is a bit like Catholic Jesus. They know you'll come back even if you occasionally a**rape some of them...