Microsoft's strategy has been establishing a lock-in to the Microsoft ecosystem. Google strategy is to disrupt lock-ins that would in turn potentially disrupt access to their core businesses.
We're still talking big business with both Google and Microsoft. But those who point out that Google is such a business and everything is about making money are missing the point. Google's actions might not be entirely altruistic but their strategy is considerably more in line with consumer rights, and many hacker sensibilities, than most in the industry.
That crossed my mind. I had played with Latitude a bit with friends and family. But ultimately stopped using it over the concern of what kind of data trail I'm volunteering. Granted - I always knew that mobiles are essentially tracking devices anyway. The question is whether generating additional copies of a set of personal data is worth the risk for what I get out of it. I don't think it is; at least not in most cases.
No, me not watching your shows because they aren't in the format I wish will "disrupt your current and future revenue streams" though.
I know the smug response to this idea is going to be along the lines of dismissing the guy who talks about how they don't watch TV in their house. There is this underlying belief that the mainstream is chained to their favorite programs and they will climb every mountain in their way to maintain their program loyalty. Those who make a big deal about breaking that bond are the ones who turned their backs on the water-cooler society and fled to the mountains to be strange social pariah hermits; nobody else wants to be like that. But that's not it.
Once one misses one or two episodes of a show because of scheduling conflicts, it is much easier to miss the 3rd, 4th, and 5th episode and so on. If that happens enough, the show loses viability. That happens to enough shows on a given channel, the channel loses viability. The key here is what constitutes a scheduling conflict. In the day of Tivo, bit torrent, and other competitors who don't mind streaming their shows... the bar for conflict is dropping steadily.
One can almost hear the sound of revenue streams being disrupted line pane after pane of glass being shattered. It's already happening as people outside the industry proper toss around DVR and P2P rocks. Its only going to get worse as competing networks pick up a bat and start casting their programs through alternative channels.
My management runs a company that's very dependent on IT and the software being run. That software involves a combination of off-the-shelf and custom code. Everything is managed by an IT team who's job is very much IT and software maintenance. Even if we don't sell software to our customers, we are very much in the business of information and services being offered through our IT. And that makes IT our business.
Apple's customer base buys things that Just Work. They don't screw around with components of the underlying OS (as loosely defined by the general public's view of what an OS might be - not the more accurate, strict definition of what an OS really is). Whether their iBook contains bunches of GPL code or not, they're not going to care even if they can piece together an iBook from component parts. Apple is selling a service as much as a product.
In any case, it's a moot point. We're not talking about Apple's business. The parent claims that it is not possible to sell GPL software while there are examples of businesses doing just that.
True. But we wouldn't be paying Redhat anything if it wasn't for the software and the distribution they put together. Yes - we can (and sometimes do) get the exact same software for the cost of a download. But then - one can say that about "pirated" software as well. The fact that Redhat is working on the very software we're interested in is why we buy software from them. And make no mistake about it - my management sees RHEL as being as much software purchase and support contract. Its the exact same way that they see Dell, Windows, and Sun / Solaris.
No, it doesn't. That's a ridiculous assertion presented without any evidence or reason.
That's sortof disingenuous, GPL has always been a Hobson's choice. You can always "sell" a piece of GPL software, but unless you are the original rights holder the GPL has the practical effect of ruining any mechanism for monetizing the software. If any distribution of the software requires the source code be included, it destroys the competitive advantage of the seller in a market and makes it impossible to prevent free-riding by users. You can only "sell" a GPL'd piece of software if you are the author, and then only by withholding code yourself; anyone who contributes is obliged to hand back their work in a manner that prevents them from monetizing any direct benefits.
Crap. What are we doing with all those RHEL licenses? Apparently this is not possible.
SCO didn't die in vain, they were just sacrificed to make this kind of insane posturing and attitude of corporate entitlement seem normal. We got most of our shock at those tactics out of the way over the years McBride & Co attacked Linux, clearing the path for bigger fish, like Microsoft, to publicly act the same without as much backlash.
Good marketing effort. Idiots.
I'm not sure it's that way. Microsoft put together the play book and placed it out there for someone to follow. SCO picked it up and ran with it. But not many others did. So the question then becomes whether SCO was the over-the-top publicity event to dull our senses or whether Microsoft is being forced to run their own plays since nobody else is.
Wait, they don't switch these off, when they go for a bombing run?
Doesn't this defeat the whole idea of stealth?
Not all military aircraft are stealth. Note one of the examples is a F-16 running Wild Weasel missions; not a stealth aircraft. Aircraft are also pretty noisy on the RF spectrum. During the Gulf War, there was a very high demand for F-4G Wild Weasels. Initial Weasel strikes did a pretty good job taking out the normal collection of AAA / SAM threats. But most missions still called for a F-4G in the mix to suppress remaining SAM threats. Those remaining threats tended to remain because as soon as they identified a F-4 by its nav radar, they shut down. Mission planners took a risk and occasionally included a F-4C (unarmed reconnaissance aircraft) in the place of a F-4G since the Recy looked like a Weasel to SAM operators and essentially filled the same role when SAM threats when offline to avoid being attacked by what they mis-identified as a Weasel.
This is why the state of Copyright is so screwed up; people just don't know what it is. There's a difference between classified material and a copyright.
That's because the decision to protect or not protect civilians is essentially 100% correlated with either oil or some sort of important political motive. Humanitarianism is not a factor in the equation -- if it were, we'd invade Africa.
One can dream eh? Imagine how easy it'd be to filter searches. Even seemingly innocuous searches return a bunch of porn links nowadays..XXX should have been there from the start.
What the hell are you searching for? The only time I'm getting anything pornographic is when I'm searching for something pornographic. And then it usually takes an image search.
Wikileaks is releasing the cables and guaranteeing they are actual cables. They are not guaranteeing that the information contained within the cables is real. It is certainly possible that bogus cables are intentionally sent by diplomats for the express purpose of counter-intelligence in case anyone is listening.
Or that the cables contain faulty analysis of information.
Would you rather stay in the dark and unknowingly support torture, selling children for Afghan cops' sex slaves (google for "DynCorp" and "Bacha Bazi") and whatever other disgusting stuff your tax money has been spent in? Is that just dubious Afghanistan related stuff that you have no interest in aware of? Well... some people say that ignorance is a bliss.
I would suggest you go do the Google search you mentioned. That whole incident is some local agent working for DynCorp going off and hiring "Bacha Bazi" entertainment (which does appear to often involve child prostitution). The local government finds out, busts the guy. Some reporter gets wind of it and the local government wants the State Departement to lean on the reporter and hush it all up as they're very happy with DynCorp, believe this represents a lapse in judgment on their own citizen, and don't want the negative publicity. The State Department informs the local government representative that such things are not possible in the US and, besides, would simply escalate the problem. End of story. But somehow we end up with an ongoing meme of the State Department hiring out child prostitution. Sure - the series of events are there but you really have squint to make it appear in that light.
Many times you see pro-piracy guys on slashdot suggesting, or might I say demanding publishers to use alternative ways to get money. Or just do it for the fun. Well, here again we see that those guys cannot see things clearly from both sides. They just want free stuff.
How many times do you see the anti-piracy guys on slashdot suggesting, or might I say demanding that every free copy of something is a guaranteed lost sale? Or just producing a product is guaranteed financial success? Well, here again we see that those guys cannot see things clearly from both sides. They just expect money.
I would disagree. When I dig in to these stories and actually read the cables, I find that the actual case is far less sensational than the headlines make it seem. And in these cases, it's no different. Let's take the McDonald's case since it is your first citation. Yes - it sounds all very scary; corporate interests petitioning to alter international policy. An indeed, McDonald's representatives did, in fact, request delay in the proceedings to pressure Salvadore's government to pursue various legal cases that had been languishing in Salvadoran courts. However, the US Ambassador apparently convinced the representatives that such tactics would not benefit either McDonalds nor financial reform the US was after. What appears to be corporate strings pulling at a shadow government turns out to be a frustrated corporation trying to resolve ongoing court cases while not actually altering any government behavior. And if we're going to take the cable as being unvarnished truth, it appears McDonald's may have had a very valid complaint.
Why does the military need sockpuppet software when they have people like you to spread these kind of lies? The information provided by wikileaks was a contributing factor. The same way that Libya's revolution was a contributing factor to Egypt's revolution. You can't say that these sort of things are solely dependent on any one factor, and to say that the effects of wikileaks was insubstantial is bullshit.
I'm not too keen on spending tax dollars on sockpuppet software. But neither am I keen to let propaganda fly in my own community. Was wikileaks a contributing factor? Very likely. But keep in mind that the material that Wikileaks produced was US communications. And those communications are being held up as unvarnished truth and undisputed fact. Any other time, US communications on these subjects would be viewed as highly suspect and given pretty strong scrutiny (and rightfully so). Which really underscores how much this was not solely Wikileaks' doing. After all, these leaked cables are not penned by Wikileaks themselves. Right? In respect to your final statement, attributing substantial effect to Wikileaks is also bullshit.
Listen, I'm a big fan of the USA. We've done some awesome stuff, and despite the issues, I think our way of doing things is pretty good. A lot better then some of the alternatives out there. But if we are doing things that make us assholes, then we need to fix that, and stop doing it.
I'm not standing up and saying "USA: love it or leave it." To be sure, we have our problems. We do have corruption and... well... amazingly short-sighted thinking threaded throughout the corridors of political and economic power in our society. You want to talk about Guantanamo Bay, wiretapping laws, and selling out corporate long-term viability for a quick buck, I'm right there with you. But the criticisms h
Why is the whole Islamic world up in arms against their own governments now? Because Wikileaks showed them what their governments were really up to, and it pushed a long-fermenting resentment over the top. A few people associated with Wikileaks did what the U.S. could not with the trillions of dollars they've put into their attempts to influence policy in the region.
Right - because this is all Wikileaks' doing. It's got nothing to do with any other events in regional politics or economics. It's all Wikileaks. And Wikileaks did it all on their own by leaking documents that were essentially hearsay being passed between US Government offices. That's right; it was all Wikileaks.
So, now we're going to simultaneously give Wikileaks its victory by taking advantage of the unrest it fermented, and prosecute the folks who brought us that victory.
It just doesn't seem fair.
"Those who brought us that victory?" You mean the young Army intel analyst who thought he would show "how the first world exploits the third, in detail" and then failed to deliver? Manning was a fool who will likely pay a hefty price for that foolishness if the Army put forward a decent case against him. If you mean people like Assange, I doubt it. The US Government are obviously seeking some way to touch Wikileaks but I would be surprised if they can produced anything that will stick.
My impression was finding the nearby Wal-Mart having power and providing a charging station for people's cell phones and giving away bannanas (while throwing out massive amounts of perishables) and doing their best to stock shelves.
A few years back my local Safeway was out of power for a day and they were tossing out the meat. I asked the butcher why I couldn't have any for free (since they were tossing it out) and he told me that once it's gotten warmer than a certain temperature health regulations forbade them providing it for human consumption.
Yeah - I had no interest in the food they were throwing out. The store had been sitting there without power for a couple days before they started ramping things up and cleaning it out. I happened to take a back route in to the store parking lot and saw them dumping boxes of hotdogs in to one of two construction site style dumpsters they had brought in. I mention all this just because it made an impression.
The banana thing was curious. When I drove by to see if they had opened yet, some guy had a pickup truck parked out front and was loading up banana boxes. I thought maybe they had gotten boxes for some unknown use (self moving tip - hit up wal-mart during stocking times and most stores will let you carry out as many boxes as you want). Then I noticed a lot on box still had bananas in it. Then I realized most people walking out of the store had bananas. And I was really wondering what was so special about bananas at a time like this. Then I found out that they had this big produce bin full of bananas (and they were hauling out additional boxes) with a sign reading "free". No idea why - my guess is that they knew they couldn't sell their stock in time so they decided to simply give it away (which isn't what I'd expect).
And I'm guessing it appears stores are still open to pick up necessities - here the shelves would be cleared of everything within the hour as everyone starts hoarding.
I guess you missed the part in TFA that mentioned hording in some areas.
I was in Houston, TX when it got hit by Ike. The majority of the city was without power for at least a week (in some cases at least two). That affected a lot of the normal sundries of life in the area. It was very surreal driving down the highway and seeing huge lines at gas stations. My cynical side expected chaos. But life went on rather smoothly, all things considered. My impression was finding the nearby Wal-Mart having power and providing a charging station for people's cell phones and giving away bannanas (while throwing out massive amounts of perishables) and doing their best to stock shelves. I would expect there is at least some hording involved there, but then at the same time, when your entire meat and produce section is bare there's little surprise that your canned goods are going to sell out. We had BBQ every night. Our neighborhood ended up having a nightly block party where a community grill was fired up. Things did not go all Road Warrior over night. That's not to say there wasn't crime; I think the statistic was somewhere around 100 cases of looting in Houston. Nearby Galveston had it worse in almost every way from damage to crime.
Now - that experience pales in comparison to what has to be going on in some parts of Japan. But I think there's been trials-by-fire in various parts of the US that demonstrate that everything does not "run amok"; at least, not in every region.
Slashdot Mirror
So this is like a wiretap that can retrieve past phone calls. Which is a really cool idea.
I think you misspelled horrifying. Twitter should probably be deleting these messages every so often in the future.
I suspect that's telling them that they should occasionally throw money in to the furnace.
We like repartee.
Apple sucks, so we have to copy everything they do.
So what you're saying is that if Samsung is going to copy Apple's astroturfing campaigns, they need to do a better job of it?
Microsoft's strategy has been establishing a lock-in to the Microsoft ecosystem. Google strategy is to disrupt lock-ins that would in turn potentially disrupt access to their core businesses.
We're still talking big business with both Google and Microsoft. But those who point out that Google is such a business and everything is about making money are missing the point. Google's actions might not be entirely altruistic but their strategy is considerably more in line with consumer rights, and many hacker sensibilities, than most in the industry.
That crossed my mind. I had played with Latitude a bit with friends and family. But ultimately stopped using it over the concern of what kind of data trail I'm volunteering. Granted - I always knew that mobiles are essentially tracking devices anyway. The question is whether generating additional copies of a set of personal data is worth the risk for what I get out of it. I don't think it is; at least not in most cases.
No, me not watching your shows because they aren't in the format I wish will "disrupt your current and future revenue streams" though.
I know the smug response to this idea is going to be along the lines of dismissing the guy who talks about how they don't watch TV in their house. There is this underlying belief that the mainstream is chained to their favorite programs and they will climb every mountain in their way to maintain their program loyalty. Those who make a big deal about breaking that bond are the ones who turned their backs on the water-cooler society and fled to the mountains to be strange social pariah hermits; nobody else wants to be like that. But that's not it.
Once one misses one or two episodes of a show because of scheduling conflicts, it is much easier to miss the 3rd, 4th, and 5th episode and so on. If that happens enough, the show loses viability. That happens to enough shows on a given channel, the channel loses viability. The key here is what constitutes a scheduling conflict. In the day of Tivo, bit torrent, and other competitors who don't mind streaming their shows... the bar for conflict is dropping steadily.
One can almost hear the sound of revenue streams being disrupted line pane after pane of glass being shattered. It's already happening as people outside the industry proper toss around DVR and P2P rocks. Its only going to get worse as competing networks pick up a bat and start casting their programs through alternative channels.
My management runs a company that's very dependent on IT and the software being run. That software involves a combination of off-the-shelf and custom code. Everything is managed by an IT team who's job is very much IT and software maintenance. Even if we don't sell software to our customers, we are very much in the business of information and services being offered through our IT. And that makes IT our business.
Apple's customer base buys things that Just Work. They don't screw around with components of the underlying OS (as loosely defined by the general public's view of what an OS might be - not the more accurate, strict definition of what an OS really is). Whether their iBook contains bunches of GPL code or not, they're not going to care even if they can piece together an iBook from component parts. Apple is selling a service as much as a product.
In any case, it's a moot point. We're not talking about Apple's business. The parent claims that it is not possible to sell GPL software while there are examples of businesses doing just that.
True. But we wouldn't be paying Redhat anything if it wasn't for the software and the distribution they put together. Yes - we can (and sometimes do) get the exact same software for the cost of a download. But then - one can say that about "pirated" software as well. The fact that Redhat is working on the very software we're interested in is why we buy software from them. And make no mistake about it - my management sees RHEL as being as much software purchase and support contract. Its the exact same way that they see Dell, Windows, and Sun / Solaris.
That's sortof disingenuous, GPL has always been a Hobson's choice. You can always "sell" a piece of GPL software, but unless you are the original rights holder the GPL has the practical effect of ruining any mechanism for monetizing the software. If any distribution of the software requires the source code be included, it destroys the competitive advantage of the seller in a market and makes it impossible to prevent free-riding by users. You can only "sell" a GPL'd piece of software if you are the author, and then only by withholding code yourself; anyone who contributes is obliged to hand back their work in a manner that prevents them from monetizing any direct benefits.
Crap. What are we doing with all those RHEL licenses? Apparently this is not possible.
SCO didn't die in vain, they were just sacrificed to make this kind of insane posturing and attitude of corporate entitlement seem normal. We got most of our shock at those tactics out of the way over the years McBride & Co attacked Linux, clearing the path for bigger fish, like Microsoft, to publicly act the same without as much backlash.
Good marketing effort. Idiots.
I'm not sure it's that way. Microsoft put together the play book and placed it out there for someone to follow. SCO picked it up and ran with it. But not many others did. So the question then becomes whether SCO was the over-the-top publicity event to dull our senses or whether Microsoft is being forced to run their own plays since nobody else is.
Wait, they don't switch these off, when they go for a bombing run? Doesn't this defeat the whole idea of stealth?
Not all military aircraft are stealth. Note one of the examples is a F-16 running Wild Weasel missions; not a stealth aircraft. Aircraft are also pretty noisy on the RF spectrum. During the Gulf War, there was a very high demand for F-4G Wild Weasels. Initial Weasel strikes did a pretty good job taking out the normal collection of AAA / SAM threats. But most missions still called for a F-4G in the mix to suppress remaining SAM threats. Those remaining threats tended to remain because as soon as they identified a F-4 by its nav radar, they shut down. Mission planners took a risk and occasionally included a F-4C (unarmed reconnaissance aircraft) in the place of a F-4G since the Recy looked like a Weasel to SAM operators and essentially filled the same role when SAM threats when offline to avoid being attacked by what they mis-identified as a Weasel.
This is why the state of Copyright is so screwed up; people just don't know what it is. There's a difference between classified material and a copyright.
That's because the decision to protect or not protect civilians is essentially 100% correlated with either oil or some sort of important political motive. Humanitarianism is not a factor in the equation -- if it were, we'd invade Africa.
Troll or geography lesson - you be the judge.
One can dream eh? Imagine how easy it'd be to filter searches. Even seemingly innocuous searches return a bunch of porn links nowadays. .XXX should have been there from the start.
What the hell are you searching for? The only time I'm getting anything pornographic is when I'm searching for something pornographic. And then it usually takes an image search.
Wikileaks is releasing the cables and guaranteeing they are actual cables. They are not guaranteeing that the information contained within the cables is real. It is certainly possible that bogus cables are intentionally sent by diplomats for the express purpose of counter-intelligence in case anyone is listening.
Or that the cables contain faulty analysis of information.
Would you rather stay in the dark and unknowingly support torture, selling children for Afghan cops' sex slaves (google for "DynCorp" and "Bacha Bazi") and whatever other disgusting stuff your tax money has been spent in? Is that just dubious Afghanistan related stuff that you have no interest in aware of? Well... some people say that ignorance is a bliss.
I would suggest you go do the Google search you mentioned. That whole incident is some local agent working for DynCorp going off and hiring "Bacha Bazi" entertainment (which does appear to often involve child prostitution). The local government finds out, busts the guy. Some reporter gets wind of it and the local government wants the State Departement to lean on the reporter and hush it all up as they're very happy with DynCorp, believe this represents a lapse in judgment on their own citizen, and don't want the negative publicity. The State Department informs the local government representative that such things are not possible in the US and, besides, would simply escalate the problem. End of story. But somehow we end up with an ongoing meme of the State Department hiring out child prostitution. Sure - the series of events are there but you really have squint to make it appear in that light.
Many times you see pro-piracy guys on slashdot suggesting, or might I say demanding publishers to use alternative ways to get money. Or just do it for the fun. Well, here again we see that those guys cannot see things clearly from both sides. They just want free stuff.
How many times do you see the anti-piracy guys on slashdot suggesting, or might I say demanding that every free copy of something is a guaranteed lost sale? Or just producing a product is guaranteed financial success? Well, here again we see that those guys cannot see things clearly from both sides. They just expect money.
See? I can do that too.
I'd say he showed how it happens in pretty good detail.
I would disagree. When I dig in to these stories and actually read the cables, I find that the actual case is far less sensational than the headlines make it seem. And in these cases, it's no different. Let's take the McDonald's case since it is your first citation. Yes - it sounds all very scary; corporate interests petitioning to alter international policy. An indeed, McDonald's representatives did, in fact, request delay in the proceedings to pressure Salvadore's government to pursue various legal cases that had been languishing in Salvadoran courts. However, the US Ambassador apparently convinced the representatives that such tactics would not benefit either McDonalds nor financial reform the US was after. What appears to be corporate strings pulling at a shadow government turns out to be a frustrated corporation trying to resolve ongoing court cases while not actually altering any government behavior. And if we're going to take the cable as being unvarnished truth, it appears McDonald's may have had a very valid complaint.
Why does the military need sockpuppet software when they have people like you to spread these kind of lies? The information provided by wikileaks was a contributing factor. The same way that Libya's revolution was a contributing factor to Egypt's revolution. You can't say that these sort of things are solely dependent on any one factor, and to say that the effects of wikileaks was insubstantial is bullshit.
I'm not too keen on spending tax dollars on sockpuppet software. But neither am I keen to let propaganda fly in my own community. Was wikileaks a contributing factor? Very likely. But keep in mind that the material that Wikileaks produced was US communications. And those communications are being held up as unvarnished truth and undisputed fact. Any other time, US communications on these subjects would be viewed as highly suspect and given pretty strong scrutiny (and rightfully so). Which really underscores how much this was not solely Wikileaks' doing. After all, these leaked cables are not penned by Wikileaks themselves. Right? In respect to your final statement, attributing substantial effect to Wikileaks is also bullshit.
Listen, I'm a big fan of the USA. We've done some awesome stuff, and despite the issues, I think our way of doing things is pretty good. A lot better then some of the alternatives out there. But if we are doing things that make us assholes, then we need to fix that, and stop doing it.
I'm not standing up and saying "USA: love it or leave it." To be sure, we have our problems. We do have corruption and... well... amazingly short-sighted thinking threaded throughout the corridors of political and economic power in our society. You want to talk about Guantanamo Bay, wiretapping laws, and selling out corporate long-term viability for a quick buck, I'm right there with you. But the criticisms h
Nice troll. http://www.vasco.com/products/product.html?product=70
What would be dangerous is if they stole the serial# secret initializer mapping, or the key to decode the mapping if it is algorithmic.
Or discovered a flaw in the implementation.
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4226.txt
Persistent means it isn't a one-time shot; something more involved than a crime-of-convenience.
Why is the whole Islamic world up in arms against their own governments now? Because Wikileaks showed them what their governments were really up to, and it pushed a long-fermenting resentment over the top. A few people associated with Wikileaks did what the U.S. could not with the trillions of dollars they've put into their attempts to influence policy in the region.
Right - because this is all Wikileaks' doing. It's got nothing to do with any other events in regional politics or economics. It's all Wikileaks. And Wikileaks did it all on their own by leaking documents that were essentially hearsay being passed between US Government offices. That's right; it was all Wikileaks.
So, now we're going to simultaneously give Wikileaks its victory by taking advantage of the unrest it fermented, and prosecute the folks who brought us that victory.
It just doesn't seem fair.
"Those who brought us that victory?" You mean the young Army intel analyst who thought he would show "how the first world exploits the third, in detail" and then failed to deliver? Manning was a fool who will likely pay a hefty price for that foolishness if the Army put forward a decent case against him. If you mean people like Assange, I doubt it. The US Government are obviously seeking some way to touch Wikileaks but I would be surprised if they can produced anything that will stick.
A few years back my local Safeway was out of power for a day and they were tossing out the meat. I asked the butcher why I couldn't have any for free (since they were tossing it out) and he told me that once it's gotten warmer than a certain temperature health regulations forbade them providing it for human consumption.
Yeah - I had no interest in the food they were throwing out. The store had been sitting there without power for a couple days before they started ramping things up and cleaning it out. I happened to take a back route in to the store parking lot and saw them dumping boxes of hotdogs in to one of two construction site style dumpsters they had brought in. I mention all this just because it made an impression.
The banana thing was curious. When I drove by to see if they had opened yet, some guy had a pickup truck parked out front and was loading up banana boxes. I thought maybe they had gotten boxes for some unknown use (self moving tip - hit up wal-mart during stocking times and most stores will let you carry out as many boxes as you want). Then I noticed a lot on box still had bananas in it. Then I realized most people walking out of the store had bananas. And I was really wondering what was so special about bananas at a time like this. Then I found out that they had this big produce bin full of bananas (and they were hauling out additional boxes) with a sign reading "free". No idea why - my guess is that they knew they couldn't sell their stock in time so they decided to simply give it away (which isn't what I'd expect).
And I'm guessing it appears stores are still open to pick up necessities - here the shelves would be cleared of everything within the hour as everyone starts hoarding.
I guess you missed the part in TFA that mentioned hording in some areas.
I was in Houston, TX when it got hit by Ike. The majority of the city was without power for at least a week (in some cases at least two). That affected a lot of the normal sundries of life in the area. It was very surreal driving down the highway and seeing huge lines at gas stations. My cynical side expected chaos. But life went on rather smoothly, all things considered. My impression was finding the nearby Wal-Mart having power and providing a charging station for people's cell phones and giving away bannanas (while throwing out massive amounts of perishables) and doing their best to stock shelves. I would expect there is at least some hording involved there, but then at the same time, when your entire meat and produce section is bare there's little surprise that your canned goods are going to sell out. We had BBQ every night. Our neighborhood ended up having a nightly block party where a community grill was fired up. Things did not go all Road Warrior over night. That's not to say there wasn't crime; I think the statistic was somewhere around 100 cases of looting in Houston. Nearby Galveston had it worse in almost every way from damage to crime.
Now - that experience pales in comparison to what has to be going on in some parts of Japan. But I think there's been trials-by-fire in various parts of the US that demonstrate that everything does not "run amok"; at least, not in every region.