Of course the Coop was just making up something off the top of their head when they used the "ISBN number" pretext.
I really would be curious to hear a serious legal analysis by someone who knows, though.
My completely naive notion would be that you're on the retailer's property, and it's not totally obvious what things you're doing by right and what things you're doing by custom and by permission. Certainly you can't steal a book. Certainly you can't damage a book e.g. by tearing a page out of it.
Certainly you can open a book and flip through it even though the cumulative effect of dozens of shoppers doing this eventually causes the book to become shopworn. But is this actually by right, or is this just by custom? Quite possibly it merely a courtesy extended to me by the store.
Price information and easy price comparison help the consumer. Denying this information helps the retailer. How far does the law go in requiring the retailer to make things easy for consumers? There are such things as hired comparison-shoppers who are working for the competition. They are not bona fide customers and are not going to buy the items they are looking at. Is a store required to be nice to them?
Gas stations have such big conspicuous outdoor price signs that it must be required by law, but is that state or federal law?
In Massachusetts, shelf labels in supermarkets and drugstores are required to show a computed unit price (which is oddly useless because of creative variation in the unit used, but never mind). Until very recently Massachusetts required individual price labels on every item (but caved to years of open defiance Wal*Mart and other national chains). So Massachusetts has a certain amount of law that sorta-kinda says the consumer has some legal rights to easy price-shopping.
The Coop and the college bookstores of the world have a pretty tight lock on textbook shopping. It's not absolute, but it's certainly not a frictionless free market and every college town I've ever been in has had one very clearly dominant bookstore, and, usually, one also-ran which has some of the books you need, just coincidentally at the exact same prices as the dominant store.
Completely tangential footnote: one of my proud moments as a dad occurred in the nineties, in the days when I was still using dialup and most people didn't know what "dot-com" meant, and my kid was in college, and called me, distraught because the college bookstore was out of a textbook she needed for a course, and was estimating six weeks for restocking. I logged into Amazon--quite possibly using lynx as my browser--saw they had it, smiled my big Daddy grin and (mentally) pulled out my big Daddy wallet and had them overnight it to her. In this case, of course, I was paying more than the bookstore price (but the overnight shipping was, of course, only a fraction of the book's cost).
I do not look forward to the replacement of what was starting to be a reliable, ubiquitous standard that "satisficed" with a New! Improved! version that shows no signs of actually achieving significantly higher throughput with current devices. Why does USB have to compete with SATA? Why can't USB just be USB?
I've been seriously disappointed with the number of times I've interconnected USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices and had them almost work, only to encounter various strangeness and glitches. I don't know who's to blame... whether it's a fault in the standard or in vendors' faulty implementations... and life's too short to care, because know who's to blame wouldn't do much to help solve the problem.
On the whole, I blame the standard, because these days standards are so incredibly huge, bloated, and complex that it is extremely unlikely that anyone actually implements it fully correctly.
With today's sloppy practices of testing to the market ("Let's try it with the most popular devices, or the ones which are most important to our business") instead of testing to the standard, the result is all sorts of opportunities to build devices that comply with the standard but do things just a little differently than the most popular devices... and have them not work even though they "should."
A typical example was an IOmega external CD burner I bought once for a USB 1.1 Mac. (I chose it because it was $30 cheaper than a FireWire model, I wanted both PC and Mac present and future compatibility), and I didn't really care about speed. The drive actually burned perfect CDs, but it always claimed erroneously that an error had occurred. But how could a sane person rely on that? I returned it, bought a different USB 2.0 external CD burner from a different vendor... and encountered exactly the same problem.
I've also seen various glitches and strangenesses trying to use USB 1.1 thumb drives in USB 2.0 CPUs and vice versa.
Regardless of whether or not homeopathy is valid or not, there's another problem: how is the consumer to know whether any homeopathic product is genuine?
HeadOn Extra Strength Sinus Headache Relief, from Miralus Healthcare, is stated to contain
"Golden Seal Hydrastis 30X HPUS 0.08%."
30X means that the ingredient has been diluted by a factor of ten thirty times. As in ten-to-the-minus-thirtieth power. As in over a million times Avogadro's Number. I'm not sure that the 0.08% means--probably that it started out at 0.08% before they diluted it, but after dilution to one nonillionth (Europeans: one quintillionth), who's counting?
How the heck would anyone know for sure whether or not the product actually contained any Golden Seal Hydrastis in it, or not? Even the "White Bryony 12X HPUS 0.04%" would be a challenge.
I suppose the "Potassium dichromate 6X HPUS 0.05%" is detectible, but exactly who is trying to detect it? Not the FDA, that's for sure.
That article reminds me of the dehydrated grape bricks my dad told me about. They were sold during prohibition, and they came with a packet of yeast, and a detailed warning explaining exactly how not to add the yeast to the rehydrated grape juice.
They're some of the brightest, most original small businesses going. Makes you understand how the Wright Brothers came out of that environment.
My wife is a devotee of Terry Precision Cycling. It was started by a woman who couldn't find a bike to fit her. She happened to be a mechanical engineer, and the light bulb came on over her head. My wife's bike came with a homemade desktop-published manual that is among the very best manuals I've ever seen for any product whatsoever. The first time my wife had a slightly tricky technical question about her bike she used the "email us" contact link on the site and was, dare I say, thrilled when she got a long, detailed, helpful reply from Georgena [sic] Terry.
Another great example of brilliant self-publishing is Barnett's Bicycle Manual.
Remember how Amazon once had a very nice, simple, policy, something like "we never share any of your information with third parties." And then one fine day, they changed it to something "we'll share any information we have about you with third parties, but only with third parties that we think are really good and have something of real value to offer you."
I hate myself for it, but I've kept using Amazon because, well, darn it, they're convenient and inexpensive and efficient.
Dave Barry once commented that he now has to drive ten miles to buy anything, because he realized that over the years there wasn't a single business within ten miles of which he hadn't said at one time or another "I'll never patronize them again."
In the 50s, 60s, 70s when there was science-fiction-inspired angst about the possibilities of computers taking over the world, the standard reassurance was that "after all, we can always unplug them." And I believe there was an SF story or two about how a computer could put up resistance to being unplugged. And of course everyone remembers the heartrending scene in 2001, A Space Odyssey when Dave shuts down Hal by physically ejecting Hal's logic modules.
It's funny how things work out:
"If you add up all 500 of the top supercomputers, it blows them all away with just 2 million of its machines. It's very frightening that criminals have access to that much computing power, but there's not much we can do about it." (emphasis supplied)
'"In every major application area I can think of, it is possible to build a SQL DBMS engine with vertical market-specific internals that outperforms the 'one size fits all' engines by a factor of 50 or so," he wrote.'
I know very little about DBMS systems, but I thought it has always been true that you can achieve monumental performance increases by building somewhat specialized database systems in which the internals of the system make assumptions, and are tied to, the structure of the data being modelled. In fact, when RDBMS systems came in, one of the knocks on them was that they were far more resource-intensive than the hierarchical databases they displaced. However, the carved-in-stone assumptions of those models made them difficult and expensive change or repurposed.
I'm sure I remember innumerable articles insisting that "relational databases don't need to be really all that much terribly slower if you know how to optimize this that and the other thing..."
In other words, as an outsider viewing from a distance, I've assumed that the increasing use of RDBMS was an indication that in the real world it turned out that it was better to be slow, flexible, and general, than fast, rigid, and specialized.
So, what is a "column store?" It sounds like it is an agile, rapid development methodology for generating fast, rigid, specialized databases?
So, now that more than one in a hundred thousand Vista systems has failed, will Microsoft acknowledge that during its first year it proved incapable of reaching "five nines" reliability?
Or will they find a way to define away this form of failure as not counting?
While I, too, am indignant, I'll point out only that accusations of online copyright infringement are almost always done semiautomatically, with a very broad brush, very unreliably, and with very little recourse. Without wanting to be sympathetic to the jerks who do it, most of these sites handle far too many items and have far too small a staff for each item to have any human intelligence applied to it. And the number of items that are unfairly pulled and accounts unfairly cancelled is too large for the sites to review them in any timely or intelligent or sympathetic way.
I'm not sure if it's still true, but at one point the eBay selling community warned people never to include terms like "CD-R" in an item description, because eBay automatically searched for such terms and automatically cancelled such auctions. The intention of course was to deal with people selling home-made copies of things on CD-R media, but it also caught obviously-innocent items ("TEAC Home Audio CD-R Recorder" would be a hypothetical example).
When I bought my Rocket eBook device, one of the selling points was an online site called the RocketLibrary which contained a wealth of material in Rocket format. Virtually all of it was personally created by site users or was conversions of public domain material, e.g. Project Gutenberg texts, to Rocket format. But eventually they shut down the entire site... even though the sales material mentioned the site was one of the reasons to own a Rocket eBook... claiming copyright violation. The actual copyright violations probably amounted to much less than 1% of the items on the site.
For a long time I used AudioGalaxy. Most of the things I downloaded from it were simply not available commercially (unless you are better at searching the iTunes store than I am and know where to find "My Reverie" as sung by Bea Wain), and many were in the public domain (1920s acoustic recordings of Vesta Victoria singing English music hall songs). Suddenly one day... a few months before the site folded, searches for this material would bring up a notice saying, specifically, that it had been removed because it was in violation of copyright. Of course I emailed them, explaining why the specific items I wanted to download were not under copyright, and of course I didn't even receive the courtesy of a reply. I surmise that what happened was that the music publishers provided AudioGalaxy with a list of material that had been properly licensed, and AudioGalaxy had taken it upon itself to claim that everything else was infringing, without spending ten seconds' due diligence.
And of course the Terms of Service on such services always say, basically, they can do whatever they feel like, remove any items they don't like, and cancel any accounts they feel like cancelling.
It upsets me, too, but railing against the stupidity of individual cases is probably a waste of indignation.
"I'm sorry. All of our Arabic language specialists are busy assisting other agents. Your call is important to the nation, so please do not hang up. Stay on the line and you will be assisted by the next available language specialist. The estimated waiting time for this call is six months and twenty-seven minutes"
followed by an overcompressed.mp3 of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons."
AT&T was founded on Theodore Vail's vision of "universal service." There were good and bad things about Ma Bell, but one good thing about it was that it united the nation with a uniform, uniformly priced, highly reliable service.
Exactly the same thing is true of the post office. It costs the postal service more to mail a letter to Alaska than to mail it across town, but the price of the stamp is 41 cents.
Universal service is only possible if the service provider is allowed to cross-subsidize the areas that are expensive to service with revenues from the areas that are cheap to service. Competition and the free market will always produce wildly varying prices and cream-skimming (in which the most profitable markets get service from multiple suppliers and the least profitable get no service at all).
If the Internet is now as fundamentally important as the telephone or the postal service, then--just as with the interstate highway system, or the system of air traffic control which enables airline service to be nationwide--there will need to be national policy to that effect. Otherwise it won't happen.
The motion picture industry began in New York and New Jersey, with much of the outdoor shooting being done in New Jersey. The cameras and projectors depended on a key patent on the "Latham Loop," the familiar loop of film that acts as a buffer between the slow-turning, high-inertia reels and the intermittent claw action that pulls the film through the film gate. WIthout it, it would be impossible to shoot or project more than about twenty-five feet of film at a time.
The patents were owned by a trust which charged a lot of money to use it. Properly licensed cameras were accordingly very expensive to rent.
Movie producers used pirated, improperly licensed cameras, and moved West to make it hard for process servers to reach them.
The movie industry as we know it was founded on violation of intellectual property.
In fact, the comic book "look" is actually the Citizen Kane "look."
The "serious" comic book artists of the 1940s were influenced by Citizen Kane and the use of odd "camera" angles, deep focus, views angling up that show the ceiling (traditionally avoided in cinema before Citizen Kane because the top of the set was open and angling up would have shown lights, catwalks, microphones, etc.) derived from it.
This was no secret... it explicitly acknowledged by them... I'm trying to remember where I read a comic book artist mentioning it in an interview.
GE does a lot of things besides manufacture light bulbs and generators. In fact they do a lot of things besides manufacturing light bulbs, generators, medical equipment, jet engines, finance, plastics, and railroad locomotives. Yet they feel no need to change their trading symbol.
Does anyone think that it would help Apple to change its trading symbol from APPL to IPOD?
Does AT&T worry that people will think telegraphs are old-fashioned?
GE, Apple, and AT&T are just names. For better or worse, people know what these companies are, not because of the names, but because of the companies. And the trading symbol is one step further removed.
SUN is an acronym for Stanford University Network. It should be a proud part of the company's heritage.
Wanting to fiddle with the trading symbol is a sure sign of a company that has no idea of what its identity is or what it is or should be doing. It also indicates an unhealthy focus on the stock, rather than company's business itself.
The 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz was almost an original creation. It was a success, not because of L. Frank Baum's story, but because of its wonderful performers, wonderful music, wonderful art direction, and interesting script. At least half of the cherished elements of the movie have no parallels in the original.
OK, so they have the Oz books, but have they got a Harold Arlen and a Ray Bolger and a Judy Garland?
Great material doesn't guarantee a great movie. Don't forget, there was also a Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings.
They add "3.99% to 12.99%" to the prime rate (which, itself, varies).
They don't say how exactly they will decide to "vary" that number... within that very wide range.
All of my past experience suggests... and recent news stories about mortgages ought to reinforce... that anything that called "variable" does, by gosh, vary. If they say they can go up to 12.99% above prime, you can bet your bippy that some fine day they will "vary" it. And of all the numbers in that range to vary it to, why would they vary it to 12.99%? I would, if I were them.
And I'll bet there's fine print that says they can change the rules at any time.
No, I take that back. There's bold print that says "Account and Cardmember Agreement terms are not guaranteed for any period of time, we may change all terms, including APRs and fees, in accordance with the Cardmember Agreement and applicable law."
That probably means they could even renege on that first no-interest teaser year.
This also fits my observations to date, which is that not yet have I seen one of these "affinity" cards that offered even a halfway-decent deal. All the ones I've seen, you pay the credit card company through the nose, and your charity gets a pittance.
Consumers won't buy into either format until they see some signs of stability.
As long as it's on-again, off-again, now-you-see-it, now-you-don't, consumers will just hold off.
Once a company declares it will support either format... or both... it should stick with whatever they've announced. Fickle commitments that change every six months just hurt both formats.
As with the stock market, what investors hate is uncertainty.
Slashdot Mirror
...on the day that the Senate just voted against restoring habeas corpus.
Thanks for the tip.
Next time I fly, if I want to read The Audacity of Hope I'll be sure to enclose it in a dust jacket from We Will Prevail.
...was not a sufficiently studied material to be safe for bridge construction.
Nervous Nellies. Holding up progress with silly demands for a risk-free existence.
Oh, wait...
Of course the Coop was just making up something off the top of their head when they used the "ISBN number" pretext.
I really would be curious to hear a serious legal analysis by someone who knows, though.
My completely naive notion would be that you're on the retailer's property, and it's not totally obvious what things you're doing by right and what things you're doing by custom and by permission. Certainly you can't steal a book. Certainly you can't damage a book e.g. by tearing a page out of it.
Certainly you can open a book and flip through it even though the cumulative effect of dozens of shoppers doing this eventually causes the book to become shopworn. But is this actually by right, or is this just by custom? Quite possibly it merely a courtesy extended to me by the store.
Price information and easy price comparison help the consumer. Denying this information helps the retailer. How far does the law go in requiring the retailer to make things easy for consumers? There are such things as hired comparison-shoppers who are working for the competition. They are not bona fide customers and are not going to buy the items they are looking at. Is a store required to be nice to them?
Gas stations have such big conspicuous outdoor price signs that it must be required by law, but is that state or federal law?
In Massachusetts, shelf labels in supermarkets and drugstores are required to show a computed unit price (which is oddly useless because of creative variation in the unit used, but never mind). Until very recently Massachusetts required individual price labels on every item (but caved to years of open defiance Wal*Mart and other national chains). So Massachusetts has a certain amount of law that sorta-kinda says the consumer has some legal rights to easy price-shopping.
The Coop and the college bookstores of the world have a pretty tight lock on textbook shopping. It's not absolute, but it's certainly not a frictionless free market and every college town I've ever been in has had one very clearly dominant bookstore, and, usually, one also-ran which has some of the books you need, just coincidentally at the exact same prices as the dominant store.
Completely tangential footnote: one of my proud moments as a dad occurred in the nineties, in the days when I was still using dialup and most people didn't know what "dot-com" meant, and my kid was in college, and called me, distraught because the college bookstore was out of a textbook she needed for a course, and was estimating six weeks for restocking. I logged into Amazon--quite possibly using lynx as my browser--saw they had it, smiled my big Daddy grin and (mentally) pulled out my big Daddy wallet and had them overnight it to her. In this case, of course, I was paying more than the bookstore price (but the overnight shipping was, of course, only a fraction of the book's cost).
I do not look forward to the replacement of what was starting to be a reliable, ubiquitous standard that "satisficed" with a New! Improved! version that shows no signs of actually achieving significantly higher throughput with current devices. Why does USB have to compete with SATA? Why can't USB just be USB?
I've been seriously disappointed with the number of times I've interconnected USB 1.1 and USB 2.0 devices and had them almost work, only to encounter various strangeness and glitches. I don't know who's to blame... whether it's a fault in the standard or in vendors' faulty implementations... and life's too short to care, because know who's to blame wouldn't do much to help solve the problem.
On the whole, I blame the standard, because these days standards are so incredibly huge, bloated, and complex that it is extremely unlikely that anyone actually implements it fully correctly.
With today's sloppy practices of testing to the market ("Let's try it with the most popular devices, or the ones which are most important to our business") instead of testing to the standard, the result is all sorts of opportunities to build devices that comply with the standard but do things just a little differently than the most popular devices... and have them not work even though they "should."
A typical example was an IOmega external CD burner I bought once for a USB 1.1 Mac. (I chose it because it was $30 cheaper than a FireWire model, I wanted both PC and Mac present and future compatibility), and I didn't really care about speed. The drive actually burned perfect CDs, but it always claimed erroneously that an error had occurred. But how could a sane person rely on that? I returned it, bought a different USB 2.0 external CD burner from a different vendor... and encountered exactly the same problem.
I've also seen various glitches and strangenesses trying to use USB 1.1 thumb drives in USB 2.0 CPUs and vice versa.
Regardless of whether or not homeopathy is valid or not, there's another problem: how is the consumer to know whether any homeopathic product is genuine?
HeadOn Extra Strength Sinus Headache Relief, from Miralus Healthcare, is stated to contain
"Golden Seal Hydrastis 30X HPUS 0.08%."
30X means that the ingredient has been diluted by a factor of ten thirty times. As in ten-to-the-minus-thirtieth power. As in over a million times Avogadro's Number. I'm not sure that the 0.08% means--probably that it started out at 0.08% before they diluted it, but after dilution to one nonillionth (Europeans: one quintillionth), who's counting?
How the heck would anyone know for sure whether or not the product actually contained any Golden Seal Hydrastis in it, or not? Even the "White Bryony 12X HPUS 0.04%" would be a challenge.
I suppose the "Potassium dichromate 6X HPUS 0.05%" is detectible, but exactly who is trying to detect it? Not the FDA, that's for sure.
That article reminds me of the dehydrated grape bricks my dad told me about. They were sold during prohibition, and they came with a packet of yeast, and a detailed warning explaining exactly how not to add the yeast to the rehydrated grape juice.
They're some of the brightest, most original small businesses going. Makes you understand how the Wright Brothers came out of that environment.
My wife is a devotee of Terry Precision Cycling. It was started by a woman who couldn't find a bike to fit her. She happened to be a mechanical engineer, and the light bulb came on over her head. My wife's bike came with a homemade desktop-published manual that is among the very best manuals I've ever seen for any product whatsoever. The first time my wife had a slightly tricky technical question about her bike she used the "email us" contact link on the site and was, dare I say, thrilled when she got a long, detailed, helpful reply from Georgena [sic] Terry.
Another great example of brilliant self-publishing is Barnett's Bicycle Manual.
Take a look at Sheldon Brown's bicycle website for another great example of the true nerd spirit at its best.
Remember how Amazon once had a very nice, simple, policy, something like "we never share any of your information with third parties." And then one fine day, they changed it to something "we'll share any information we have about you with third parties, but only with third parties that we think are really good and have something of real value to offer you."
I hate myself for it, but I've kept using Amazon because, well, darn it, they're convenient and inexpensive and efficient.
Dave Barry once commented that he now has to drive ten miles to buy anything, because he realized that over the years there wasn't a single business within ten miles of which he hadn't said at one time or another "I'll never patronize them again."
Veterinarians have been offering this for something like a decade, maybe more.
If they were inducing "malignant, fast-growing cancers" in "1 to 10%" of the implanted animals, you'd think that someone would have noticed.
A momentary image of a cross-dressed Judge Kimball flashed through my right brain before my left brain could finish parsing the sentence.
...it can only remove it from polywater.
In the 50s, 60s, 70s when there was science-fiction-inspired angst about the possibilities of computers taking over the world, the standard reassurance was that "after all, we can always unplug them." And I believe there was an SF story or two about how a computer could put up resistance to being unplugged. And of course everyone remembers the heartrending scene in 2001, A Space Odyssey when Dave shuts down Hal by physically ejecting Hal's logic modules.
It's funny how things work out:
"If you add up all 500 of the top supercomputers, it blows them all away with just 2 million of its machines. It's very frightening that criminals have access to that much computing power, but there's not much we can do about it." (emphasis supplied)
So much for "we can always unplug them," eh?
'"In every major application area I can think of, it is possible to build a SQL DBMS engine with vertical market-specific internals that outperforms the 'one size fits all' engines by a factor of 50 or so," he wrote.'
I know very little about DBMS systems, but I thought it has always been true that you can achieve monumental performance increases by building somewhat specialized database systems in which the internals of the system make assumptions, and are tied to, the structure of the data being modelled. In fact, when RDBMS systems came in, one of the knocks on them was that they were far more resource-intensive than the hierarchical databases they displaced. However, the carved-in-stone assumptions of those models made them difficult and expensive change or repurposed.
I'm sure I remember innumerable articles insisting that "relational databases don't need to be really all that much terribly slower if you know how to optimize this that and the other thing..."
In other words, as an outsider viewing from a distance, I've assumed that the increasing use of RDBMS was an indication that in the real world it turned out that it was better to be slow, flexible, and general, than fast, rigid, and specialized.
So, what is a "column store?" It sounds like it is an agile, rapid development methodology for generating fast, rigid, specialized databases?
So, now that more than one in a hundred thousand Vista systems has failed, will Microsoft acknowledge that during its first year it proved incapable of reaching "five nines" reliability?
Or will they find a way to define away this form of failure as not counting?
#2: "We bought the company because we like the way its run, now, and we have no plans to change anything..."
#3: "I'll be really, really careful, trust me, it will never happen again."
While I, too, am indignant, I'll point out only that accusations of online copyright infringement are almost always done semiautomatically, with a very broad brush, very unreliably, and with very little recourse. Without wanting to be sympathetic to the jerks who do it, most of these sites handle far too many items and have far too small a staff for each item to have any human intelligence applied to it. And the number of items that are unfairly pulled and accounts unfairly cancelled is too large for the sites to review them in any timely or intelligent or sympathetic way.
I'm not sure if it's still true, but at one point the eBay selling community warned people never to include terms like "CD-R" in an item description, because eBay automatically searched for such terms and automatically cancelled such auctions. The intention of course was to deal with people selling home-made copies of things on CD-R media, but it also caught obviously-innocent items ("TEAC Home Audio CD-R Recorder" would be a hypothetical example).
When I bought my Rocket eBook device, one of the selling points was an online site called the RocketLibrary which contained a wealth of material in Rocket format. Virtually all of it was personally created by site users or was conversions of public domain material, e.g. Project Gutenberg texts, to Rocket format. But eventually they shut down the entire site... even though the sales material mentioned the site was one of the reasons to own a Rocket eBook... claiming copyright violation. The actual copyright violations probably amounted to much less than 1% of the items on the site.
For a long time I used AudioGalaxy. Most of the things I downloaded from it were simply not available commercially (unless you are better at searching the iTunes store than I am and know where to find "My Reverie" as sung by Bea Wain), and many were in the public domain (1920s acoustic recordings of Vesta Victoria singing English music hall songs). Suddenly one day... a few months before the site folded, searches for this material would bring up a notice saying, specifically, that it had been removed because it was in violation of copyright. Of course I emailed them, explaining why the specific items I wanted to download were not under copyright, and of course I didn't even receive the courtesy of a reply. I surmise that what happened was that the music publishers provided AudioGalaxy with a list of material that had been properly licensed, and AudioGalaxy had taken it upon itself to claim that everything else was infringing, without spending ten seconds' due diligence.
And of course the Terms of Service on such services always say, basically, they can do whatever they feel like, remove any items they don't like, and cancel any accounts they feel like cancelling.
It upsets me, too, but railing against the stupidity of individual cases is probably a waste of indignation.
...and is greeted by a recording saying
.mp3 of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons."
"I'm sorry. All of our Arabic language specialists are busy assisting other agents. Your call is important to the nation, so please do not hang up. Stay on the line and you will be assisted by the next available language specialist. The estimated waiting time for this call is six months and twenty-seven minutes"
followed by an overcompressed
AT&T was founded on Theodore Vail's vision of "universal service." There were good and bad things about Ma Bell, but one good thing about it was that it united the nation with a uniform, uniformly priced, highly reliable service.
Exactly the same thing is true of the post office. It costs the postal service more to mail a letter to Alaska than to mail it across town, but the price of the stamp is 41 cents.
Universal service is only possible if the service provider is allowed to cross-subsidize the areas that are expensive to service with revenues from the areas that are cheap to service. Competition and the free market will always produce wildly varying prices and cream-skimming (in which the most profitable markets get service from multiple suppliers and the least profitable get no service at all).
If the Internet is now as fundamentally important as the telephone or the postal service, then--just as with the interstate highway system, or the system of air traffic control which enables airline service to be nationwide--there will need to be national policy to that effect. Otherwise it won't happen.
The motion picture industry began in New York and New Jersey, with much of the outdoor shooting being done in New Jersey. The cameras and projectors depended on a key patent on the "Latham Loop," the familiar loop of film that acts as a buffer between the slow-turning, high-inertia reels and the intermittent claw action that pulls the film through the film gate. WIthout it, it would be impossible to shoot or project more than about twenty-five feet of film at a time.
The patents were owned by a trust which charged a lot of money to use it. Properly licensed cameras were accordingly very expensive to rent.
Movie producers used pirated, improperly licensed cameras, and moved West to make it hard for process servers to reach them.
The movie industry as we know it was founded on violation of intellectual property.
In fact, the comic book "look" is actually the Citizen Kane "look."
The "serious" comic book artists of the 1940s were influenced by Citizen Kane and the use of odd "camera" angles, deep focus, views angling up that show the ceiling (traditionally avoided in cinema before Citizen Kane because the top of the set was open and angling up would have shown lights, catwalks, microphones, etc.) derived from it.
This was no secret... it explicitly acknowledged by them... I'm trying to remember where I read a comic book artist mentioning it in an interview.
GE does a lot of things besides manufacture light bulbs and generators. In fact they do a lot of things besides manufacturing light bulbs, generators, medical equipment, jet engines, finance, plastics, and railroad locomotives. Yet they feel no need to change their trading symbol.
Does anyone think that it would help Apple to change its trading symbol from APPL to IPOD?
Does AT&T worry that people will think telegraphs are old-fashioned?
GE, Apple, and AT&T are just names. For better or worse, people know what these companies are, not because of the names, but because of the companies. And the trading symbol is one step further removed.
SUN is an acronym for Stanford University Network. It should be a proud part of the company's heritage.
Wanting to fiddle with the trading symbol is a sure sign of a company that has no idea of what its identity is or what it is or should be doing. It also indicates an unhealthy focus on the stock, rather than company's business itself.
The Oz books are not very cinematic.
The 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz was almost an original creation. It was a success, not because of L. Frank Baum's story, but because of its wonderful performers, wonderful music, wonderful art direction, and interesting script. At least half of the cherished elements of the movie have no parallels in the original.
OK, so they have the Oz books, but have they got a Harold Arlen and a Ray Bolger and a Judy Garland?
Great material doesn't guarantee a great movie. Don't forget, there was also a Ralph Bakshi Lord of the Rings.
According to the terms and conditions:
They add "3.99% to 12.99%" to the prime rate (which, itself, varies).
They don't say how exactly they will decide to "vary" that number... within that very wide range.
All of my past experience suggests... and recent news stories about mortgages ought to reinforce... that anything that called "variable" does, by gosh, vary. If they say they can go up to 12.99% above prime, you can bet your bippy that some fine day they will "vary" it. And of all the numbers in that range to vary it to, why would they vary it to 12.99%? I would, if I were them.
And I'll bet there's fine print that says they can change the rules at any time.
No, I take that back. There's bold print that says "Account and Cardmember Agreement terms are not guaranteed for any period of time, we may change all terms, including APRs and fees, in accordance with the Cardmember Agreement and applicable law."
That probably means they could even renege on that first no-interest teaser year.
This also fits my observations to date, which is that not yet have I seen one of these "affinity" cards that offered even a halfway-decent deal. All the ones I've seen, you pay the credit card company through the nose, and your charity gets a pittance.
(That's irony).
Consumers won't buy into either format until they see some signs of stability.
As long as it's on-again, off-again, now-you-see-it, now-you-don't, consumers will just hold off.
Once a company declares it will support either format... or both... it should stick with whatever they've announced. Fickle commitments that change every six months just hurt both formats.
As with the stock market, what investors hate is uncertainty.