I can't help but shake my head as the US truly is regulating itself into oblivion.
It's not so much that they're passing regulations.
It's that they're entrenching into criminal law that it is the job of the government to police commercial interests. America has become completely beholden to companies, and the government is now more or less doing their bidding. They're also exporting this as a treaty.
You only have to look at the fact that ICE and DHS are doing raids of domain names on the basis that they might be infringing on copyright.
So, essentially, at the demand of the US... the governments of the world now will use tax payer's money to look out for the interests of corporations.
Not every country in the world has criminalized copyright infringement.
No, but anybody who does any meaningful amount of trade with the US is having ACTA crammed down their throat as a condition of continuing to do to so.
Sadly, any country which hasn't begun to criminalize it isn't being given a whole lot of options. The world is now so beholden to copyright, it isn't even funny any more.
It's a treaty they won't make public, which makes it all about what they want, and you and I can go get stuffed.
wouldn't, in the course of the suits, the patents get thoroughly vetted by the USPTO, under scrutiny of the court
Nope. The patent stands until the USPTO invalidates it. They're motivated to churn through patents and get paid for them... the USPTO isn't necessarily interested in making sure the patents are any good. And, the legal standard to overturn a patent is quite high. (Sorry, it's only a partial article)
Or am I applying too much logic and common sense to the patent system?
Far too much, sadly. It's a rigged game, with bad outcomes.
They were exotic fast things, and they didn't always behave properly, but at least they were actual products. Isn't that the ostensible reason why companies exist, to make products?
No, to make money is the reason companies exist. The legal system makes no requirements as to how you make your money.
As long as patents are something you can buy and sell, there will always be companies who own them just to squeeze licensing fees out of companies who actually do make things.
Welcome to capitalism, it's supposed to be the best thing ever.
(And, really, RAMBUS basically sat on standards committees and then filed submarine patents on the very stuff they and others had designed and agreed upon... seeing their patents get invalidated warms my heart. They're a bunch of bottom feeders.)
If a company is sued by a patent holder and forced to pay licensing fees, and that patent is later invalidated, is that company entitled to reimbursement?
Likely not. They'd likely argue that at the time they held a valid patent, and that you entered into a licensing agreement with them.
So, stupid people can issue lousy patents... but when that patent gets overturned, anybody who got extorted to pay for it is likely out of luck.
The sheer amount of shit that the major manufacturers put on PCs. HP is awful for that with all of their "assistants" and "wizards" and crap like that, and everybody wants to give you a bit steaming pile of trial-ware.
Getting a machine stripped of all of this junk is pretty damned hard.
The large trading houses, who have a direct wire into the exchange, do not pay fees on transactions like the rest of us do.
By doing all of these high volume trades, they more or less get to cut in line and gain benefits of being tied directly into the trading system.
This allows them to reap huge benefits by having a computer do something that you and I would not have access to.
This is literally a mechanism where the trading houses can game the system and skim off the top. You and I could not do this, because we would both be paying fees on the transactions, and because we wouldn't have the same level of access as they do.
Value is siphoned away, because they're exploiting their better access to more or less take their profit before anybody in this (supposedly free and fair) market has a chance to.
Personally, I think the practice should be illegal -- they really do gain access to profit taking that is only made possible by their special role in the way the system works.
It doesn't. It didn't work for real mail so why should it work for email?
You get something unsolicited, and you are free to do with it whatever you choose. It's up to the sender to get the address right in all cases.
Well, in this case, you have to make the explicit step of setting up an alternate site, and having something there to get email. So you've explicitly put stuff in place to catch these messages.
Under normal circumstances, the user would get a bounce-back of the message... so, someone might be able to argue that it's not like something was delivered to you out of the blue. You've actually created the thing that it gets delivered to, and made it look as close as you could to the intended one.
At a minimum, this might get into a gray area, and might be full on illegal, even if you were only passively receiving the mis-directed stuff thereafter.
I don't think you can make the claim that you just happened to be receiving these emails.
I'm not an expert, but i don't see why public-key encryption wouldn't work here. The browser (which supports the SSL) is still just a browser. It's just that your encrypted data gets sent via SMS rather than TCP/IP.
If you do this right, it's just another transport layer. At which point, it's just a variation of "IP over Avian Carrier". Just like any layer you treat as an unreliable datagram, you build the higher level stuff on top of it.
Not sure how fast it would be, but using the unlimited SMS to get around bandwidth limits is brilliant.
In other words: if it probable that searching your mom's/roommate's/girlfriend's laptop might lead to evidence in their copyright lawsuit, a plaintiff can go ahead and do so. Please keep this in mind. I always thought it was obvious that every computer or storage device in a household would be subject to search during a copyright infringement lawsuit. If this is surprising to anyone, I guess it is good that we have a story about it. IAAL, and this is not a controversial position. I wish it were otherwise, but FYI, there it is.
My problem isn't so much that when the search is probable to turn up something... my problem is that the people policing these things frequently have almost no actual evidence upon which to even assert they've got the right household, but then proceed as if they do.
This to me sounds more like narrow it down to a surprisingly broad area, and then basically run roughshod over every nearby on a fishing expedition to figure out which of many people might have done something you claim they did.
It just seems more like these guys are asking for license to just cast a wide net... again, with what I consider to be pretty thin evidence to begin with. They start discovery and say "we're sure he did it", and then they move onto "ok, it wasn't him, but someone within a city block of him did it and we need to search all of them".
Sadly, I don't expect this will end anywhere good. I expect RIAA enforcement to suddenly extend to 'all computer equipment on the premise' and more draconian identifying methods by ISPs.
Or, we can hope, sanity will prevail and it will more or less come down to "you don't have enough information to tell us who to look for, and you can't just go on a fishing expedition to look for computers that might be the one you think it is".
This is mostly about someone using information which the rest of us have always known was insufficient, using that to get far enough to identify someone, and then deciding they need to look at any computer within a 5 mile radius just in case it was them.
Their "evidence" gets weaker every time they try to say "we need to look at more because the last one wasn't enough". They're also at the discovery phase, which basically means they don't have enough evidence to know if they should be proceeding.
And, unless someone makes it illegal to have an open wifi, you can't go around saying that there is any contributory negligence or anything like that.
Unaffected? The market for open mobile devices is pretty much completely gone. when it comes time to upgrade my phone I'll have to hack an open OS onto an Android phone or something. This curation craze is affecting desktop computing. I'm far from unaffected.
Wait, I thought Android devices were open and you could put what you liked on it? And, really, was there a big huge market of open phones you could load arbitrary software onto before the current crop of smart phones?
not a general-purpose computing device that was artificially locked down. I don't want computers to be considered toys like consoles.
Sadly, the number of people buying tablets might mean there are simply more people who don't care than who do. And, for my own needs... I have little or no desire to get to the OS level of my tablet, it's a device. It should work like one with minimal fussing about. And if it gets a little out of sorts, I expect a reboot to pretty much sort that out.
On a "pack light" trip to Europe, the iPad will be left behind because of it's limitations. Leaving the laptop behind is not an option because we may need to take advantage of a full web browser including flash. The iPad is convenient but redundant.
Depends on what is it you need to do.
If I was on a truly "pack light" trip that wasn't work related, I wouldn't need a laptop. The ability to check my gmail from a wifi hotspot is all I really need. In fact, when I visit my parents or the in-laws, I only bring the iPad, and it works out perfect. I also have big enough memory cards (and spares) in my cameras that I don't offload while on the road anyway, so I don't need to do that. (If I go over the 20GB or so of memory cards I've got... well, they're easy to get.)
Lack of Flash for me is a non-issue... I don't have Flash installed on any machine that I don't use for work. In fact, I don't think I can name a single application of Flash that impacts me... occasionally, I watch something on You Tube, but they've already converted everything.
To me, what you perceive as an artificial limitation, I perceive as functionality that I wouldn't install on a machine anyway.
Now, obviously, what you need out of a machine on a trip can only be defined by you... for me, the iPad is more suited to that than a laptop. In fact, if there weren't a few things that I might truly did need my laptop for, I wouldn't even bring it on business trips. The last few, except for airport security, it didn't even come out of the bag.
Just out of curiosity, what is Flash based that you can't live without? I've avoided it for almost a decade, so I genuinely don't know what that might be.
Have people seen the light? Is the current cycle of the curated computing craze coming to an end?
See, the beauty of choice is that you are free to not use anything you deem to be curated computing. The millions of people who own iPads and the like will continue to use them and likely continue to be happy. Hardware vendors who have no interest in selling you an open, hackable product will continue to not give you one -- and those that do, will sell you something more open.
So, wow, you can continue to be unaffected by any of this... just like you were before. Or do you just feel compelled to whine about a product you weren't going to buy anyway?
And, really, the "Game Boy" in your nick was pretty damned well curated since they use cartridges. So I find your objection amusing.
Everyone had some sort of bulky case thingy that held the display, no one had a flat surfaced tablet. Tablet Designs Before and After the iPad [osxdaily.com].
Oh, come on... I have an iPad, and I'm hard pressed to see how any of these are different.
Here's my short take on this... unless it's radically different in shape from an Etch-A-Sketch, or a tablet of paper... how the hell is the shape of an iPad even something you could consider having any protection on?
The Greeks had stone tablets, and a mathematical ratio of an appealing size. This whole debate is stupid -- it's a fscking rectangle.
People base the opinion on the fact you can get superior product at a cheaper price.
Horseshit... for the simple fact that "superior" is subjective, and is the crux of the point being talked about here.
You believe a faster machine with more memory or that allows you to run Linux (or whatever) makes for a "superior" machine. Other people believe that a better designed user experience and interface is superior for them.
The whole point of this is that you don't get to decide that the entire factual basis for "superior" is the conditions you choose. Apple has never tried to compete on CPU speed or memory... they just made less work "better".
Because everybody I know who has ever owned a Mac (and I haven't and haven't used one in years so I don't know) say they like it better because it's less frustrating and mostly sticks to doing what they want. I've known guys with Master's degrees who had a laptop they could code on... but when they went home in the evening, it was their Mac they used.
For me, I find the interface of my iPod to be better than most other music players I've tried out; I actually find iTunes for managing the content on both my iPod and iPad exceedingly convenient and just works; and I like the fact that my iPad has been really nice to have, doesn't require a lot of mucking about with it, and has been optimized for being used in a different way than I use the desktop machine I'm typing this from. But the things it does well, my laptop can't even come close.
I could say your wrong based on the fact that I disagree with you... but then I'd be making the same logical fallacy as you did.
The fact of the matter is, we are using totally different criteria to arrive at a choice... and really, that's what it is. Feel free to make your own choices... and, please, get over mine. There's more than one set of "right" in this equation.
Imagine two people sitting at an airport terminal. One person, with business attire, opens up his laptop. It's a Lenovo. Another person, dressed casually but with taste, opens a Apple MacBook Pro. Which of the two would you expect to be more affluent? The answer to that question decides if you buy Apple for looks or for usability/service, etc.
Asking that question says more about you than whether Apple products are status symbols. Because I don't think about the relative affluence of total strangers.
I see the guy in a suit, and I think of how awful it is to have meetings right after a flight. I see screaming children, and I hope they're not on my flight. I see people with those stupid little doggy carry-ons, and I wonder why the hell they let people bring their pets into the cabin of an airplane. Other than that, I just want to be left alone to suffer the indignity of air travel in peace.
Just because there exists a subset of humanity who are superficial idiots, does not mean that if you see some of those with a given product you can make generalizations about all people who use that product.
I just missed the "World Series Quake" (1989, 7.0) having left the area just 36 hours before. My friend ran out of his apartment naked. Funny. Lots of people died when the freeway collapsed. Not so funny.
Yeah, in the late 90's or so I was in San Fran on business... and as we were driving down the highway, the local who was driving chose that time to tell me about how the very road I was on was the one that collapsed. Not what I most wanted to hear at that moment.
Naked people hilarious... the other stuff, not so much.
BTW, I just checked your wiki entry on the 2010 quake. Wow. Just wow.
Try sitting in a boardroom on the 14th floor while you experience your first earthquake. Then imagine the entire downtown doing the same thing. (Both government and corporate)
It was a big event around here, and it pretty much had everybody's attention.:-P
I very much agree that the two are related. I'm sure I'll get modded down for elaborating, but I think Apple's success is very much like Prada's. Ownership of an Apple product is more about status than it is about what the product does.
*shrug* Your mileage may vary, and perception can be reality. But...
I've had iPods for over a decade, because they did what I want then, and continue to do it now... contrast this with, oh, a Zune or any number of defunct devices.
And, when I bought my iPad there wasn't really another product on the market -- despite people saying there have been tablets for a long time, in terms of one I could buy at a consumer electronics store and that was widely supported, in my opinion, the iPad was the first product that was readily available to me.
I won't say that there aren't people for whom Apple is a status symbol... but as an overweight, non-trendy geek in his 40s who bought these purely on a user satisfaction basis... maybe it's a status symbol because it works well, not because other people also like them.
I don't know a single owner of Apple products who bought it on the basis of what other people would think of it. And, I know a lot of people who have Apple products. In fact, almost all of the people I know who own anything by Apple are at least 40, have worked in tech for at least 10-15 years, and typically have at least an undergraduate degree in computer science. The rest, do not want to know anything about how their tech works, and just want it to work without fuss.
Other than your belief that people only buy Apple because it's trendy, or that maybe anecdotal evidence suggests that superficial high school kids treat it as a status symbol... do you have anything which supports this assertion? Or is this merely your own perception or something you've just heard from other people? Because, quite frankly, I hear this a lot but without anything to support it.
Well, except in the 'what communism means in the real world rather than some happy fluffy fantasy where human nature doesn't exist' sense.
Well, at a minimum, you need to have state controlled ownership of industry. Their economic system bears no resemblance.
I'm not defending Communism in the happy fluffy fantasy sense of it... no more than I defend pure Capitalism as being something which works in the way its adherents claim.
Neither of them work in the "magical unicorns and perfect results" that the people who promote them blindly believe -- they both have massive shortcomings, and don't live up to the idealogues.
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It's not so much that they're passing regulations.
It's that they're entrenching into criminal law that it is the job of the government to police commercial interests. America has become completely beholden to companies, and the government is now more or less doing their bidding. They're also exporting this as a treaty.
You only have to look at the fact that ICE and DHS are doing raids of domain names on the basis that they might be infringing on copyright.
So, essentially, at the demand of the US ... the governments of the world now will use tax payer's money to look out for the interests of corporations.
That basically screws the rest of us over.
No, but anybody who does any meaningful amount of trade with the US is having ACTA crammed down their throat as a condition of continuing to do to so.
Sadly, any country which hasn't begun to criminalize it isn't being given a whole lot of options. The world is now so beholden to copyright, it isn't even funny any more.
It's a treaty they won't make public, which makes it all about what they want, and you and I can go get stuffed.
Nope. The patent stands until the USPTO invalidates it. They're motivated to churn through patents and get paid for them ... the USPTO isn't necessarily interested in making sure the patents are any good. And, the legal standard to overturn a patent is quite high. (Sorry, it's only a partial article)
Far too much, sadly. It's a rigged game, with bad outcomes.
No, to make money is the reason companies exist. The legal system makes no requirements as to how you make your money.
As long as patents are something you can buy and sell, there will always be companies who own them just to squeeze licensing fees out of companies who actually do make things.
Welcome to capitalism, it's supposed to be the best thing ever.
(And, really, RAMBUS basically sat on standards committees and then filed submarine patents on the very stuff they and others had designed and agreed upon ... seeing their patents get invalidated warms my heart. They're a bunch of bottom feeders.)
Likely not. They'd likely argue that at the time they held a valid patent, and that you entered into a licensing agreement with them.
So, stupid people can issue lousy patents ... but when that patent gets overturned, anybody who got extorted to pay for it is likely out of luck.
Yup.
The sheer amount of shit that the major manufacturers put on PCs. HP is awful for that with all of their "assistants" and "wizards" and crap like that, and everybody wants to give you a bit steaming pile of trial-ware.
Getting a machine stripped of all of this junk is pretty damned hard.
Ah, yes ... sell at a loss and make it up on volume.
I've seen that one before. It didn't work out any better. :-P
Yes, but this is Germany.
What is the underlying principle of the law there?
The large trading houses, who have a direct wire into the exchange, do not pay fees on transactions like the rest of us do.
By doing all of these high volume trades, they more or less get to cut in line and gain benefits of being tied directly into the trading system.
This allows them to reap huge benefits by having a computer do something that you and I would not have access to.
This is literally a mechanism where the trading houses can game the system and skim off the top. You and I could not do this, because we would both be paying fees on the transactions, and because we wouldn't have the same level of access as they do.
Value is siphoned away, because they're exploiting their better access to more or less take their profit before anybody in this (supposedly free and fair) market has a chance to.
Personally, I think the practice should be illegal -- they really do gain access to profit taking that is only made possible by their special role in the way the system works.
Well, in this case, you have to make the explicit step of setting up an alternate site, and having something there to get email. So you've explicitly put stuff in place to catch these messages.
Under normal circumstances, the user would get a bounce-back of the message ... so, someone might be able to argue that it's not like something was delivered to you out of the blue. You've actually created the thing that it gets delivered to, and made it look as close as you could to the intended one.
At a minimum, this might get into a gray area, and might be full on illegal, even if you were only passively receiving the mis-directed stuff thereafter.
I don't think you can make the claim that you just happened to be receiving these emails.
If you do this right, it's just another transport layer. At which point, it's just a variation of "IP over Avian Carrier". Just like any layer you treat as an unreliable datagram, you build the higher level stuff on top of it.
Not sure how fast it would be, but using the unlimited SMS to get around bandwidth limits is brilliant.
I don't think you're missing much.
My problem isn't so much that when the search is probable to turn up something ... my problem is that the people policing these things frequently have almost no actual evidence upon which to even assert they've got the right household, but then proceed as if they do.
This to me sounds more like narrow it down to a surprisingly broad area, and then basically run roughshod over every nearby on a fishing expedition to figure out which of many people might have done something you claim they did.
It just seems more like these guys are asking for license to just cast a wide net ... again, with what I consider to be pretty thin evidence to begin with. They start discovery and say "we're sure he did it", and then they move onto "ok, it wasn't him, but someone within a city block of him did it and we need to search all of them".
Or, we can hope, sanity will prevail and it will more or less come down to "you don't have enough information to tell us who to look for, and you can't just go on a fishing expedition to look for computers that might be the one you think it is".
This is mostly about someone using information which the rest of us have always known was insufficient, using that to get far enough to identify someone, and then deciding they need to look at any computer within a 5 mile radius just in case it was them.
Their "evidence" gets weaker every time they try to say "we need to look at more because the last one wasn't enough". They're also at the discovery phase, which basically means they don't have enough evidence to know if they should be proceeding.
And, unless someone makes it illegal to have an open wifi, you can't go around saying that there is any contributory negligence or anything like that.
He's got a patent on tele-presence? Web cams? Virtual meeting rooms? Avatars?
I don't get it ... other than the belt, how is this conceptually different from lots of things which have been out there for some time now?
I mean, really, how far back can you go with a movie that has a hologram sitting at the meeting table? Star Wars maybe? Maybe older?
Wait, I thought Android devices were open and you could put what you liked on it? And, really, was there a big huge market of open phones you could load arbitrary software onto before the current crop of smart phones?
Sadly, the number of people buying tablets might mean there are simply more people who don't care than who do. And, for my own needs ... I have little or no desire to get to the OS level of my tablet, it's a device. It should work like one with minimal fussing about. And if it gets a little out of sorts, I expect a reboot to pretty much sort that out.
Depends on what is it you need to do.
If I was on a truly "pack light" trip that wasn't work related, I wouldn't need a laptop. The ability to check my gmail from a wifi hotspot is all I really need. In fact, when I visit my parents or the in-laws, I only bring the iPad, and it works out perfect. I also have big enough memory cards (and spares) in my cameras that I don't offload while on the road anyway, so I don't need to do that. (If I go over the 20GB or so of memory cards I've got ... well, they're easy to get.)
Lack of Flash for me is a non-issue ... I don't have Flash installed on any machine that I don't use for work. In fact, I don't think I can name a single application of Flash that impacts me ... occasionally, I watch something on You Tube, but they've already converted everything.
To me, what you perceive as an artificial limitation, I perceive as functionality that I wouldn't install on a machine anyway.
Now, obviously, what you need out of a machine on a trip can only be defined by you ... for me, the iPad is more suited to that than a laptop. In fact, if there weren't a few things that I might truly did need my laptop for, I wouldn't even bring it on business trips. The last few, except for airport security, it didn't even come out of the bag.
Just out of curiosity, what is Flash based that you can't live without? I've avoided it for almost a decade, so I genuinely don't know what that might be.
See, the beauty of choice is that you are free to not use anything you deem to be curated computing. The millions of people who own iPads and the like will continue to use them and likely continue to be happy. Hardware vendors who have no interest in selling you an open, hackable product will continue to not give you one -- and those that do, will sell you something more open.
So, wow, you can continue to be unaffected by any of this ... just like you were before. Or do you just feel compelled to whine about a product you weren't going to buy anyway?
And, really, the "Game Boy" in your nick was pretty damned well curated since they use cartridges. So I find your objection amusing.
Oh, come on ... I have an iPad, and I'm hard pressed to see how any of these are different.
Here's my short take on this ... unless it's radically different in shape from an Etch-A-Sketch, or a tablet of paper ... how the hell is the shape of an iPad even something you could consider having any protection on?
The Greeks had stone tablets, and a mathematical ratio of an appealing size. This whole debate is stupid -- it's a fscking rectangle.
Horseshit ... for the simple fact that "superior" is subjective, and is the crux of the point being talked about here.
You believe a faster machine with more memory or that allows you to run Linux (or whatever) makes for a "superior" machine. Other people believe that a better designed user experience and interface is superior for them.
The whole point of this is that you don't get to decide that the entire factual basis for "superior" is the conditions you choose. Apple has never tried to compete on CPU speed or memory ... they just made less work "better".
Because everybody I know who has ever owned a Mac (and I haven't and haven't used one in years so I don't know) say they like it better because it's less frustrating and mostly sticks to doing what they want. I've known guys with Master's degrees who had a laptop they could code on ... but when they went home in the evening, it was their Mac they used.
For me, I find the interface of my iPod to be better than most other music players I've tried out; I actually find iTunes for managing the content on both my iPod and iPad exceedingly convenient and just works; and I like the fact that my iPad has been really nice to have, doesn't require a lot of mucking about with it, and has been optimized for being used in a different way than I use the desktop machine I'm typing this from. But the things it does well, my laptop can't even come close.
I could say your wrong based on the fact that I disagree with you ... but then I'd be making the same logical fallacy as you did.
The fact of the matter is, we are using totally different criteria to arrive at a choice ... and really, that's what it is. Feel free to make your own choices ... and, please, get over mine. There's more than one set of "right" in this equation.
Asking that question says more about you than whether Apple products are status symbols. Because I don't think about the relative affluence of total strangers.
I see the guy in a suit, and I think of how awful it is to have meetings right after a flight. I see screaming children, and I hope they're not on my flight. I see people with those stupid little doggy carry-ons, and I wonder why the hell they let people bring their pets into the cabin of an airplane. Other than that, I just want to be left alone to suffer the indignity of air travel in peace.
Just because there exists a subset of humanity who are superficial idiots, does not mean that if you see some of those with a given product you can make generalizations about all people who use that product.
Now, Monster Cable, there's a status symbol. ;-)
Yeah, in the late 90's or so I was in San Fran on business ... and as we were driving down the highway, the local who was driving chose that time to tell me about how the very road I was on was the one that collapsed. Not what I most wanted to hear at that moment.
Naked people hilarious ... the other stuff, not so much.
Try sitting in a boardroom on the 14th floor while you experience your first earthquake. Then imagine the entire downtown doing the same thing. (Both government and corporate)
It was a big event around here, and it pretty much had everybody's attention. :-P
*shrug* Your mileage may vary, and perception can be reality. But ...
I've had iPods for over a decade, because they did what I want then, and continue to do it now ... contrast this with, oh, a Zune or any number of defunct devices.
And, when I bought my iPad there wasn't really another product on the market -- despite people saying there have been tablets for a long time, in terms of one I could buy at a consumer electronics store and that was widely supported, in my opinion, the iPad was the first product that was readily available to me.
I won't say that there aren't people for whom Apple is a status symbol ... but as an overweight, non-trendy geek in his 40s who bought these purely on a user satisfaction basis ... maybe it's a status symbol because it works well, not because other people also like them.
I don't know a single owner of Apple products who bought it on the basis of what other people would think of it. And, I know a lot of people who have Apple products. In fact, almost all of the people I know who own anything by Apple are at least 40, have worked in tech for at least 10-15 years, and typically have at least an undergraduate degree in computer science. The rest, do not want to know anything about how their tech works, and just want it to work without fuss.
Other than your belief that people only buy Apple because it's trendy, or that maybe anecdotal evidence suggests that superficial high school kids treat it as a status symbol ... do you have anything which supports this assertion? Or is this merely your own perception or something you've just heard from other people? Because, quite frankly, I hear this a lot but without anything to support it.
And, very high customer satisfaction. Coincidence? I think not.
Well, at a minimum, you need to have state controlled ownership of industry. Their economic system bears no resemblance.
I'm not defending Communism in the happy fluffy fantasy sense of it ... no more than I defend pure Capitalism as being something which works in the way its adherents claim.
Neither of them work in the "magical unicorns and perfect results" that the people who promote them blindly believe -- they both have massive shortcomings, and don't live up to the idealogues.