If the stores are crowded... well, that happens when a store is busy, which happens when it's popular.
Finding a place to "pay and get out" is as easy as finding someone in an Apple shirt, which is a pretty good system except (as you discovered) when they are busy.
The profit advantage of Apple's vertical integration in retail is often overstated. Yes, they can capture 100% of the retail sale price, which Motorola or HP cannot. But they also have the expense of operating the retail stores, complete with rent, maintenance, labor costs, buying new t-shirts every few months, etc. And for the iThings they sell through AT&T/Verizon stores, Best Buy, and every place else you can pick them up these days, that advantage is lost.
Yeah, calling it "ego" implies that it's unwarranted. Professionals/experts in any field (including academics) often get sick of dealing with retards, trolls, under-informed know-it-alls, control-freaks with OCD, and your basic antisocial sociopaths... and Wikipedia has lots of those.
I wouldn't say that big companies are "inherently evil", but I would agree that they're not as good as small ones. Big companies lead to less competition, less innovation, Too Big To Fail Syndrome, and a host of other socially and economically detrimental things. If I ran the world, I'd put a cap on the size of any corporation, probably based on the dollar-amount of business they do. If a company exceeded that cap for any period of time, they'd have to break it up, by geography, product line, sales vs. service, or whatever.
The Christopher Eccleston series was the beginning of the "current" Dr Who program, and that makes it an excellent place to start. You don't need to know much of anything about the previous Doctors' adventures (though it helps if you know what a Dalek is, etc), and allowing for the usual sorts of hills and valleys along the way, the production values, writing, acting, etc. are all very good. Once you've caught up with that, you can go back and sample the earlier Doctors, watching the ones you enjoy and skipping the ones you don't.
The differences between China and Tunisia/Egypt/Yemen/even-Libya are pretty dramatic. If those governments are dominoes toppling each other, China's is a brick.
If you cross-examine any of the "success" stories that Exodus International produces, you'll find that they haven't lost the "temptation" (i.e. homosexual attraction), they've only learned not to act on it, and maybe they now go through the motions of heterosexual intercourse without really enjoying it much. Which is very much like "curing" left-handedness by training someone not to use their left hand, to the point that they can write legibly (but clumsily) with their right hand.
And those are the "successes". Interview the countless ex-ex-gays who've "relapsed" after their Exodus conditioning fails (which is most of them), and you'll find that nearly all of these "straight" men were thinking of men during intercourse/masturbation, and most were sneaking off for anonymous bathroom and rest-area sex all along. The "cure" actually produces worse behavior than the "disease".
It takes a massive dose of wishful thinking and denial of reality for anyone (in the program or not) to believe that any "gay cure" program actually does what it says in the trifold brochure.
I am gay, I consider Exodus International's activities deceptively cruel to the point of fraud, and I find the app itself offensive.
And I hope that Apple allows the app to remain in the App Store.
No one has a right to not be offended. If the principle of free speech means anything it means that offensive speech is also allowed and protected, or it's a hollow and hypocritical principle. Even so-called "hate speech" is still just "speech" that expresses a feeling of "hate". It should be allowed.
Just categorize the app accurately: put it with the fart apps.
You seem confused by the term "DRM". It has nothing to do with Apple's app-approval process or their policies requiring a cut of the revenue. Go ahead and complain about those all you want (because you have a good point there), but don't confuse them with DRM.
An example of Apple's DRM are the restrictions on how many devices you can load one of the music files or app bundles onto, and the restrictions on moving files from an iPod to a computer rather than the other way 'round. By allowing users to play a music file on 5 different computers/iPods, they undercut the user's motivation to go to the torrents for DRM-free MP3s. That's what "somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM" means.
This is what I've figured, and I have mixed feelings about it. As a consumer, of course I'm all in favor of lower prices. But as someone who hopes to create stories and art and software and other things, and to do that for a living, it's depressing. The Big Media represented by the RIAA and MPAA and a dozen or so novelists may be getting money for nothing and chicks for free, and there's the occasional two-guys-and-a-dot-com success story, but most independent creators (in various media) are already struggling to make a living at it, even with their prices "too high".
"Apple proved you can cut down on piracy with DRM with their App store for the iPhone and iPad."
No they didn't; they did it with pricing and convenience. The somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM on Apple's wares is easily broken. What the iTunes and App stores have shown is that if the prices are perceived as reasonable, and the DRM doesn't get in their way (much), people will not bother with piracy.
This whole "G" stuff has been vague, undefinable nonsense from the beginning, or at least since before anyone outside of the telecom industry had heard the term. The debates about whether EDGE was 2G or 2.5G (as if generations were subject to real/fractional values) was proof enough of this.
Calling the 2nd iPhone model the "iPhone 3G" has proven to be a misstep on Apple's part, rather effectively confusing the heck out of its model generations, and forcing them to resort to nonsense like "3Gs" before reverting to something more sensible: an integer indicating which generation of the device it is.
How about calling a phone technology by... its name. LTE, CDMA, EDGE, ETC. If you want to make a boast about how fast it is, do it like they used to do with modems: give us an actual numeric speed (e.g. 1200bps, 19.2kbps). Because this xG marketing nonsense is useless... and always has been.
Slashdot Mirror
If the stores are crowded... well, that happens when a store is busy, which happens when it's popular.
Finding a place to "pay and get out" is as easy as finding someone in an Apple shirt, which is a pretty good system except (as you discovered) when they are busy.
The profit advantage of Apple's vertical integration in retail is often overstated. Yes, they can capture 100% of the retail sale price, which Motorola or HP cannot. But they also have the expense of operating the retail stores, complete with rent, maintenance, labor costs, buying new t-shirts every few months, etc. And for the iThings they sell through AT&T/Verizon stores, Best Buy, and every place else you can pick them up these days, that advantage is lost.
Yeah, calling it "ego" implies that it's unwarranted. Professionals/experts in any field (including academics) often get sick of dealing with retards, trolls, under-informed know-it-alls, control-freaks with OCD, and your basic antisocial sociopaths... and Wikipedia has lots of those.
I wouldn't say that big companies are "inherently evil", but I would agree that they're not as good as small ones. Big companies lead to less competition, less innovation, Too Big To Fail Syndrome, and a host of other socially and economically detrimental things. If I ran the world, I'd put a cap on the size of any corporation, probably based on the dollar-amount of business they do. If a company exceeded that cap for any period of time, they'd have to break it up, by geography, product line, sales vs. service, or whatever.
"... and I feel fine!"
It's worse than that ... it's physics, Jim!
also: Barnard's star, couch surf, dot-bomb, drill-down, ego-surf, RSA, and tinfoil hat
See also: http://www.oed.com/public/latest/latest-update/
FYI, FYI is hardly an "internet abbreviation". I remember hearing it back in the early 1970s (when I was very, very young, FYI).
Possibly of more interest to the /. crowd is the fact that hentai is being added to the book.
...but not as we know it."
The Christopher Eccleston series was the beginning of the "current" Dr Who program, and that makes it an excellent place to start. You don't need to know much of anything about the previous Doctors' adventures (though it helps if you know what a Dalek is, etc), and allowing for the usual sorts of hills and valleys along the way, the production values, writing, acting, etc. are all very good. Once you've caught up with that, you can go back and sample the earlier Doctors, watching the ones you enjoy and skipping the ones you don't.
It sounds like a deliberate publicity stunt to me. This way the release gets covered twice.
As soon as he's over 80.0000 years old, even if by a second, he's in his 9th decade.
I can get behind that.
The differences between China and Tunisia/Egypt/Yemen/even-Libya are pretty dramatic. If those governments are dominoes toppling each other, China's is a brick.
very heavy sigh.
Why would it make a difference if it were an Android app? Wrong is wrong.
The exact same argument could be made regarding "The O'Reilly Factor". I don't think that should be suppressed either.
Not all that rare. Just shouted down by the faction who don't really get it.
If you cross-examine any of the "success" stories that Exodus International produces, you'll find that they haven't lost the "temptation" (i.e. homosexual attraction), they've only learned not to act on it, and maybe they now go through the motions of heterosexual intercourse without really enjoying it much. Which is very much like "curing" left-handedness by training someone not to use their left hand, to the point that they can write legibly (but clumsily) with their right hand.
And those are the "successes". Interview the countless ex-ex-gays who've "relapsed" after their Exodus conditioning fails (which is most of them), and you'll find that nearly all of these "straight" men were thinking of men during intercourse/masturbation, and most were sneaking off for anonymous bathroom and rest-area sex all along. The "cure" actually produces worse behavior than the "disease".
It takes a massive dose of wishful thinking and denial of reality for anyone (in the program or not) to believe that any "gay cure" program actually does what it says in the trifold brochure.
I am gay, I consider Exodus International's activities deceptively cruel to the point of fraud, and I find the app itself offensive.
And I hope that Apple allows the app to remain in the App Store.
No one has a right to not be offended. If the principle of free speech means anything it means that offensive speech is also allowed and protected, or it's a hollow and hypocritical principle. Even so-called "hate speech" is still just "speech" that expresses a feeling of "hate". It should be allowed.
Just categorize the app accurately: put it with the fart apps.
You seem confused by the term "DRM". It has nothing to do with Apple's app-approval process or their policies requiring a cut of the revenue. Go ahead and complain about those all you want (because you have a good point there), but don't confuse them with DRM.
An example of Apple's DRM are the restrictions on how many devices you can load one of the music files or app bundles onto, and the restrictions on moving files from an iPod to a computer rather than the other way 'round. By allowing users to play a music file on 5 different computers/iPods, they undercut the user's motivation to go to the torrents for DRM-free MP3s. That's what "somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM" means.
I rest my case.
This is what I've figured, and I have mixed feelings about it. As a consumer, of course I'm all in favor of lower prices. But as someone who hopes to create stories and art and software and other things, and to do that for a living, it's depressing. The Big Media represented by the RIAA and MPAA and a dozen or so novelists may be getting money for nothing and chicks for free, and there's the occasional two-guys-and-a-dot-com success story, but most independent creators (in various media) are already struggling to make a living at it, even with their prices "too high".
"Apple proved you can cut down on piracy with DRM with their App store for the iPhone and iPad."
No they didn't; they did it with pricing and convenience. The somewhat-loosely-restrictive DRM on Apple's wares is easily broken. What the iTunes and App stores have shown is that if the prices are perceived as reasonable, and the DRM doesn't get in their way (much), people will not bother with piracy.
If "used by less than 10% of Slashdotters" made something irrelevant, we'd never have stories about "BSD", "Facebook", or "other people's genitalia".
This whole "G" stuff has been vague, undefinable nonsense from the beginning, or at least since before anyone outside of the telecom industry had heard the term. The debates about whether EDGE was 2G or 2.5G (as if generations were subject to real/fractional values) was proof enough of this. Calling the 2nd iPhone model the "iPhone 3G" has proven to be a misstep on Apple's part, rather effectively confusing the heck out of its model generations, and forcing them to resort to nonsense like "3Gs" before reverting to something more sensible: an integer indicating which generation of the device it is. How about calling a phone technology by... its name. LTE, CDMA, EDGE, ETC. If you want to make a boast about how fast it is, do it like they used to do with modems: give us an actual numeric speed (e.g. 1200bps, 19.2kbps). Because this xG marketing nonsense is useless... and always has been.