The fact that this is hard to do on a tablet right now speaks more to the fact that Human-Computer Interface design has always lagged behind technical functionality in computing. The command line was first, and it was okay (and is still best for some things, don't get me wrong), but being able to manipulate things on screen and Fitts' law and all those other interesting things didn't show up for some time.
Apple's working on it; I assume the other tablet/smartphone manufacturers are thinking about it too. We're still thinking in terms of keyboards and mice, and multi-touch is still very primitive. Windowing isn't a necessity, it's just the way we happen to work right now (it's not even necessarily the best way to work at desktop machines, merely the most popular. And that's for business reasons as much as technical and interface reasons.)
A friend of mine (a much smarter friend, truth be told) once said about C++, "The design philosophy of C++ is that you don't pay for anything you don't use, so as a result, there isn't anything worth paying for."
Most rapes are committed by people that the victim knows. This has always been the case, not just for child rape, but for every kind of rape.
Statistically speaking, a father is considerably more likely to rape their children than a random stranger.
A lot of these people that are 'sex offenders' aren't rapists and never have been. The number of things that can get you assigned that label is positively asinine, and you're not making your kids any safer by knowing who these people are.
People that are dangerous need to serve their time, get their treatment, and then go free if they're no longer a danger. If your crime was trading nude pictures while you were underage with your underage girlfriend, then you were NEVER a danger. It's a badly broken system.
I'm an EA employee. I used to work at BioWare. There's my disclosure.
I'm not allowed to talk very much about the game, for obvious reasons. I AM allowed to disclose that I was part of an internal beta late last year. (At least, at the time I was in it, I was allowed to disclose that. Hopefully that hasn't changed.)
Everyone that I know that was playing it was playing it addictively. We all loved it. The storyline that WE got to play was impressively well put together; I felt more at the center of that universe than I ever have in WoW (and I'm playing Cataclysm again, just so you know. I also think it's great).
This 'review' is pretty vague, and betas are betas. I can't promise the game will be great, and there's obviously a massive bias for me to say that it will be, but I was really sad when the beta completed. The first 6 hours of WoW are just you running around killing small, nearly defenceless animals; the first 6 hours of MY ToR experience was so much more. I really wish I could reveal everything that went on; it was really rich, engaging storytelling, with interesting conversations and dialogue. I don't remember skipping over any of the dialogue – spoken dialogue, of course –even once. Most of the time in WoW, I just click through as quickly as possible and read the quest text only if I really obviously become stuck. (Cataclysm's introduction of forced cutscenes in the beginner areas actually makes things a lot better.)
Seriously, give the game a chance. Beating up on it before you play it and based entirely off of the experiences of one person that played a few levels is hardly the way to judge an entire MMO.
Not to dump on your message per se, but it turns out children are people. They have personalities. Each one is different.
Some children will want more freedom, and will be better off for it. I suspect that many children need strict boundaries, and will benefit from that. Some kids will thrive with a more middle of the road approach.
I had a Chinese Mom and a Caucasian Dad. She was strict as hell, he was a bit more laissez-faire. That worked for me and my sister. I had friends with two Chinese parents, and for whatever reason, those parents were always insanely domineering. Those friends didn't seem to rebel or have any problems later in life. I know people that have had a massive lack of direction in their lives, gotten into crazy trouble, and somehow ended up okay.
I'm not a parent; maybe my analysis is too uninformed. However, I think that any parent that spends enough time with their child to understand their particular needs will figure out how much intervention is required. It's just a matter of communication, the same thing that makes ALL successful relationships work.
Canadian prices. The current Escape Hybrid costs $34,899 before you start doing anything else at all to it. Current incentives drop the price to about $32000.
The problem is that cars in Canada are still priced largely as if the CDN dollar was at 70c to the US dollar, and not 97-98c as it is today. The historical exchange rate really works against us.
The methodology is merely that it was done in Canada at Canadian prices. Our petrol is more expensive, too.
Seriously. If you dump $2500 on a computer (which is a gaming rig, let's be honest here; very few desktop machines are $2500 these days without being corporate workstations or gaming rigs. Even a friggin' Quad-core Mac Pro is $2600CDN) then make sure you keep $50 around to buy a motherbiting game.
If you can afford to buy the Hummer, make sure you can afford to buy the gas. Anything else is just absurdly poor planning. Lack of foresight does not forgive you for not paying for someone else's work. If you forget to bring your wallet to a restaurant, you STILL HAVE TO PAY FOR YOUR MEAL.
With this story, we're not even talking about paying the $60 for a AAA game. This indy developer is selling the game for $20 ($5 right now!), and you're telling me I shouldn't expect someone with a $2500 computer to have the money to pay for it? There's not even a subscription fee!
Work costs money. Pay for the work that you consume, whether it's a game, a haircut, a car or a meal. I'm no huge fan of rampant, unchecked capitalism (I'm Canadian, after all), but COME ON.
IN THE QUARTER. In the quarter. It's the biggest platform IN THE QUARTER.
Rather than admonishing other people to read your links, please read the story that you're talking about. They haven't caught up to anyone yet, they're just selling faster.
Ignore the 851% figure because it's meaningless. If I sell 1 phone in my first quarter and TEN phones in my second quarter, that's a growth of 1000% per quarter! All it tells us is that Android didn't have much market penetration before and it's up now.
In the end, this isn't news. There are MANY manufacturers using Android as a platform and only Apple using iOS as a platform. Apple is tied to the most hated major network in America, and Android isn't. The actual question is 'what took them so dang long?'
Apple's belief has always been that function FOLLOWS form. The user interface guidelines that they publish dictate form because it results in better function from a user perspective.
This still holds true for the iPhone 4; getting Facetime to work is function, getting it to work without a bunch of tedious setup is form. Because they required it to work without a bunch of tedious setup, we're only now seeing it in generation 4 of the phone; before pure function is allowed out the door, the form must be acceptable.
Apple's very good at marketing, and we all remember CmdrTaco's famous comments on the original iPod, another device that seemingly put form first. But that form dictated the function, and it brought MP3 players into the mainstream. This is why Apple's products STILL make them so much money.
In this case, it would have been better for them to do a bit more form->function->form revision, I guess, but sometimes things work just good enough to get out the door, no matter what company you're talking about. And this is a limited problem (not everyone can reproduce it) with a few easy fixes. In the video games industry this would be classified as a 'KS' bug: 'Known Shippable'. And they did.:)
There are plenty of gay people that think marriage is a broken institution, too.
I agree with you in principle: gay people should have the same rights as straight people, period. However, the guy that you're responding to at least has internal consistency on his side (not that you don't; just in comparison to other gay marriage protestors), and he's the only kind of non-gay-marriage supporter that I can honestly understand. As long as he's working to vote against marriage in general, I think that's fine. If he's apathetic about changing the system and STILL votes against gay marriage, I don't think he's as unbiased as he claims.
I'd like to stop hearing about how Apple is a terrible corporation because they do a thorough (sometimes overzealous) vetting of the applications that go up on the store before they go there. I'd also like to stop hearing about how because they've laid out a certain set of restrictions (i.e., no porn apps), they're trying to brainwash us. At least they told everyone in advance what they're getting into.
This is something that Google should have the right to do, and something that they should do if they have to. The security and utility of the network may be at stake in some cases.
I know a lot of people are aghast that google has poked at your phone from afar, now, but you're not the only one on the network, no matter what you think. If an app is bad -- maliciously or otherwise -- it's not fair that you get to keep it and screw other people up. Your right to own any app you want ends when it has the potential to impact my network security or service.
These are the conditions of owning a little computer attached to a wireless network in the modern age. If you don't like it, I'm afraid that's too bad.
I know this is a bit late, but I'm going to respond anyway.
You seem to have this weird idea that people don't know what's going on when they buy the phone. Like they're being defrauded. They were promised a porn-phone and they got a locked-down puritan-phone. That's simply not the case.
Apple doesn't control the behaviour of the consumer at any point in the process. You CHOSE to buy the phone. You CHOSE to buy the apps. Or you CHOSE to throw the iPhone away because it doesn't meet your needs and you think it's a piece of junk.
By restricting the types of applications that are permitted to be developed, Apple only exerts control over their space. If you write an app for your phone -- you can do that, you know -- they don't come over and delete it, no matter how it works or what it does. It can break every single rule they have, but it doesn't matter, because you're not trying to sell it. There's very little post-facto control over your usage of the device.
You may as well complain that Firefox controls your behaviour because it has tools to prevent arbitrary code execution on your computer. Or perhaps you'd like to complain about Sony's or Microsoft's online game stores not stocking hard-core pornography applications. I'll wager that even the Android store doesn't allow completely unrestricted application development. Unless you're advocating for 100% unfettered development, you're really just post-justifying a hatred of Apple because you can.
Vote with your feet. There are other phones, so why is it an issue?
Do you hold car companies to the same standard? Or NASA? Despite NASA's stellar (ha ha) record, I think even they have a worse than 1/1000 failure rate.
Failure rates are less significant than failure rates AND level of failure AND the resolution process. 1/1000 is bad if it makes your phone explode or there's never any recourse. As we've seen, neither thing is true. The failures are hardly catastrophic, and fairly often, there's a reasonable resolution at the end of the road.
That's not Apple's problem or Apple's fault. Next time don't enter into a 3 year contract if you suspect that your needs are going to change before the contract is up.
The fact that the wireless market needs an overhaul is a different matter. (And in fact, you should be bowing down to Apple here; for the first time, a handset maker dictated the terms to a carrier. They made the market ready for Android. The fact that there's any competition in this area right now is in no small part due to Apple.)
Western governments -- ostensibly -- act only on the advice of their electorate. Laws are in place not because of some arbitrary system, or because someone you don't know was just doing it for the hell of it, but because they were elected to enact controls that we already thought were best.
Murder isn't illegal because the government said so, murder is illegal because we've decided that as a society, that's something that we find reprehensible and should be punished. Then we codify this societal value in something we call a 'law', and it sits on the books, waiting to be applied.
While I can't deny that governments seem to have drifted a bit far from the ideal of 'by the people, of the people, for the people', laws are still in place because we've implicitly agreed to that social contract. (That is, if you're not working to change a law in some fashion, we can assume that you think it's a good idea.)
If Apple had a bad product that nobody wanted and the apps were trash and nobody wanted THOSE, people wouldn't buy them. People buy iPhones and iPads and iApps because they fulfill some sort of criteria. Apple's control is only on the manufacturing end. They may restrict the specifications of an application (e.g., no porn), but that's hardly control over the consumer.
Alberta is conservative, but not THAT conservative. It's also the province with the most oil, and the the Rocky mountains.
Consider that, as the most conservative province, the discussion of abortion has never really come up. Even conservative premiers believe that it's between a woman and her doctor.
They fought half-heartedly against same-sex marriage legislation, and now it's a dead issue. It's been legal for years, even in Alberta, and as near as I can tell, nobody cares.
We're keeping Alberta. But we'd be happy to have you. Just come on up. Have a beer, put some maple syrup on your bacon (it's just bacon, incidentally; Canadian bacon is something that only the US calls what we call back bacon), and get a good coat for the winter.:)
This is an utter lie. 95% of Canadians will tell you that the system works well enough. We'd all like a bit better access, but we're willing to work with what we have.
There was a case recently where the courts decided that a guy that had to go down to the States to get advanced treatment that wasn't available in Canada (though there was A treatment available, cutting edge treatment was available south of the border; nobody here will deny that the USA has some of the most ADVANCED medical care in the world) was eligible for the health system reimbursing his medical costs.
Canadian health care even pays for procedures not available here (if they're medically necessary, and not available here). That's pretty friggin' good.
The stories you hear about long waiting lists is only partly true. The people that you saw in those propaganda videos that claimed the Canadian system failed them were hypochondriacs that couldn't get immediate service for non-life-threatening conditions. The Premier of Newfoundland is independently wealthy and decided to get service in the states because it's just as good, a bit faster, and vastly more luxurious, if you can pay. He would have gotten adequate service in our country, but he would have been taking up the same kind of hospital bed as everyone else. (And honestly, as a Canadian, I'm glad he took that way out; it opened up a bed for someone else that just wants the surgery and doesn't care about how nice the room is.)
Canadians love the healthcare system. Every province runs it differently, and it's the one thing that you cannot talk about cutting funding to. Canadians will give up funding on almost every other service before we let you cut our health budget. It's political suicide.
So don't tell me we don't love it. That's garbage.
They don't have to sell in the Amazon/Apple marketplace. If there was a realty company that set the prices when you put your house up for sale, it would be your decision (and problem) if you listed with them. Don't like the rules, don't play the game. Play somewhere else.
People are playing by Apple and Amazon's rules because they (apparently) feel that it's the best game in town. Whether it is or not is up for debate, certainly, but Apple sure sells a lot of music, and Amazon's been selling a lot of books. Hard to argue with those results.
Price fixing implies collusion, not setting a price. If all the gas stations across town agree to charge you the same (inflated) price for petrol, regardless of the market, that's price fixing.
A store can set any price it wants to sell the goods in it. Many sell items at a loss to attract business, and sell other items at a great profit. Companies (notably razor companies, like Gilette) do this too. It's called a loss-leader.
I think it's you that doesn't understand economics well. Given the balance sheet of Apple, I'd say they understand economics better than any of the rest of us by several orders of magnitude. They'll push this as far as they can because it maximizes profits in some manner or another, or maybe just for user-interface/optics reasons (people like numbers that end in.99; studies have shown that strange, non-round prices seem to turn consumers off. The average human is weird like that.)
Really, in the end, you accidentally got something right: the market is involved, and the market will decide. If Apple cocked this one up, we'll see it.
Incidentally, how many times can you lose 'all respect' for Apple? I'd figure you could only do it once.
I don't really have a need for an iPad, I admit. I saw it and was a bit disappointed.
Then I thought, 'Boy, I wish I had bought Mom this instead of that Mac Mini'.
Aside from not being able to play import asian movies on VCD, the iPad is perfect for her. She can read her email, browse the internet, do a few time-waste-y things here and there, and it's all compact and easy to move around. It requires almost no technical knowledge and even less technical support.
The thing that computer people (and I'm one of them; I'll spare you my boring credentials, but I've got a smaller/. ID than you for what that's worth;) have a hard time understanding is that non-computer people *don't work like computer people do*.
Computers are hard. They ARE. We've done a lousy job of making computers easy to use. The iPad is moving to make the computer an appliance. You pick it up. You tell it what to do in a simple way (i.e., you touch the thing you want), it does that thing. When you're done, you put it down. That's all.
There are no viruses to worry about, and you can probably live without the OS updates, by and large. Pick it up. Read it. Put it down. Done. There are those of us that will always need high powered desktop machines with which to PRODUCE content, but for people that want to consume it, it needs to be simple.
I think you're giving them too much credit. The Conservatives oppose it because taxes and levies are unpopular. Politically, it's as simple as that.
None of the parties have given the levy enough thought; there are so many reasons why it's bad and the product of old-school, bricks-and-mortar-store thinking.
Actually, burning a mix CD for your friend is technically illegal. However, if they borrow the CD and make a copy for themselves, that's fine. Our version of fair use tries to impose the burden of holding the media yourself so you don't make a dozen copies and give them out; your record store scenario is exactly the sort of thing they're trying to prevent (even if there's no money involved).
Either way, this levy isn't very well thought out.
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The fact that this is hard to do on a tablet right now speaks more to the fact that Human-Computer Interface design has always lagged behind technical functionality in computing. The command line was first, and it was okay (and is still best for some things, don't get me wrong), but being able to manipulate things on screen and Fitts' law and all those other interesting things didn't show up for some time.
Apple's working on it; I assume the other tablet/smartphone manufacturers are thinking about it too. We're still thinking in terms of keyboards and mice, and multi-touch is still very primitive. Windowing isn't a necessity, it's just the way we happen to work right now (it's not even necessarily the best way to work at desktop machines, merely the most popular. And that's for business reasons as much as technical and interface reasons.)
A friend of mine (a much smarter friend, truth be told) once said about C++, "The design philosophy of C++ is that you don't pay for anything you don't use, so as a result, there isn't anything worth paying for."
Most rapes are committed by people that the victim knows. This has always been the case, not just for child rape, but for every kind of rape.
Statistically speaking, a father is considerably more likely to rape their children than a random stranger.
A lot of these people that are 'sex offenders' aren't rapists and never have been. The number of things that can get you assigned that label is positively asinine, and you're not making your kids any safer by knowing who these people are.
People that are dangerous need to serve their time, get their treatment, and then go free if they're no longer a danger. If your crime was trading nude pictures while you were underage with your underage girlfriend, then you were NEVER a danger. It's a badly broken system.
I'm an EA employee. I used to work at BioWare. There's my disclosure.
I'm not allowed to talk very much about the game, for obvious reasons. I AM allowed to disclose that I was part of an internal beta late last year. (At least, at the time I was in it, I was allowed to disclose that. Hopefully that hasn't changed.)
Everyone that I know that was playing it was playing it addictively. We all loved it. The storyline that WE got to play was impressively well put together; I felt more at the center of that universe than I ever have in WoW (and I'm playing Cataclysm again, just so you know. I also think it's great).
This 'review' is pretty vague, and betas are betas. I can't promise the game will be great, and there's obviously a massive bias for me to say that it will be, but I was really sad when the beta completed. The first 6 hours of WoW are just you running around killing small, nearly defenceless animals; the first 6 hours of MY ToR experience was so much more. I really wish I could reveal everything that went on; it was really rich, engaging storytelling, with interesting conversations and dialogue. I don't remember skipping over any of the dialogue – spoken dialogue, of course –even once. Most of the time in WoW, I just click through as quickly as possible and read the quest text only if I really obviously become stuck. (Cataclysm's introduction of forced cutscenes in the beginner areas actually makes things a lot better.)
Seriously, give the game a chance. Beating up on it before you play it and based entirely off of the experiences of one person that played a few levels is hardly the way to judge an entire MMO.
Not to dump on your message per se, but it turns out children are people. They have personalities. Each one is different.
Some children will want more freedom, and will be better off for it. I suspect that many children need strict boundaries, and will benefit from that. Some kids will thrive with a more middle of the road approach.
I had a Chinese Mom and a Caucasian Dad. She was strict as hell, he was a bit more laissez-faire. That worked for me and my sister. I had friends with two Chinese parents, and for whatever reason, those parents were always insanely domineering. Those friends didn't seem to rebel or have any problems later in life. I know people that have had a massive lack of direction in their lives, gotten into crazy trouble, and somehow ended up okay.
I'm not a parent; maybe my analysis is too uninformed. However, I think that any parent that spends enough time with their child to understand their particular needs will figure out how much intervention is required. It's just a matter of communication, the same thing that makes ALL successful relationships work.
In this case, though, it's just about the phrasing.
Instead of saying that a unified theory may not exist, he can just say that a non-unified theory PROBABLY exists.
It's too easy to take the negative on either side; if he had said that a non-unified theory is probably impossible, the same quote would apply.
I think it's okay for us to all admit that we don't know, and he's just offering an opinion based on his experience.
There's a problem with warranties being honoured in a lot of situations like that from what I hear.
Canadian prices. The current Escape Hybrid costs $34,899 before you start doing anything else at all to it. Current incentives drop the price to about $32000.
The problem is that cars in Canada are still priced largely as if the CDN dollar was at 70c to the US dollar, and not 97-98c as it is today. The historical exchange rate really works against us.
The methodology is merely that it was done in Canada at Canadian prices. Our petrol is more expensive, too.
Well then, SCREW THEM.
Seriously. If you dump $2500 on a computer (which is a gaming rig, let's be honest here; very few desktop machines are $2500 these days without being corporate workstations or gaming rigs. Even a friggin' Quad-core Mac Pro is $2600CDN) then make sure you keep $50 around to buy a motherbiting game.
If you can afford to buy the Hummer, make sure you can afford to buy the gas. Anything else is just absurdly poor planning. Lack of foresight does not forgive you for not paying for someone else's work. If you forget to bring your wallet to a restaurant, you STILL HAVE TO PAY FOR YOUR MEAL.
With this story, we're not even talking about paying the $60 for a AAA game. This indy developer is selling the game for $20 ($5 right now!), and you're telling me I shouldn't expect someone with a $2500 computer to have the money to pay for it? There's not even a subscription fee!
Work costs money. Pay for the work that you consume, whether it's a game, a haircut, a car or a meal. I'm no huge fan of rampant, unchecked capitalism (I'm Canadian, after all), but COME ON.
IN THE QUARTER. In the quarter. It's the biggest platform IN THE QUARTER.
Rather than admonishing other people to read your links, please read the story that you're talking about. They haven't caught up to anyone yet, they're just selling faster.
Ignore the 851% figure because it's meaningless. If I sell 1 phone in my first quarter and TEN phones in my second quarter, that's a growth of 1000% per quarter! All it tells us is that Android didn't have much market penetration before and it's up now.
In the end, this isn't news. There are MANY manufacturers using Android as a platform and only Apple using iOS as a platform. Apple is tied to the most hated major network in America, and Android isn't. The actual question is 'what took them so dang long?'
Has nobody mentioned the elegant subdivisions of a golden ratio tattoo? I've seen several, and they're all quite nice.
I feel like you're only half right.
Apple's belief has always been that function FOLLOWS form. The user interface guidelines that they publish dictate form because it results in better function from a user perspective.
This still holds true for the iPhone 4; getting Facetime to work is function, getting it to work without a bunch of tedious setup is form. Because they required it to work without a bunch of tedious setup, we're only now seeing it in generation 4 of the phone; before pure function is allowed out the door, the form must be acceptable.
Apple's very good at marketing, and we all remember CmdrTaco's famous comments on the original iPod, another device that seemingly put form first. But that form dictated the function, and it brought MP3 players into the mainstream. This is why Apple's products STILL make them so much money.
In this case, it would have been better for them to do a bit more form->function->form revision, I guess, but sometimes things work just good enough to get out the door, no matter what company you're talking about. And this is a limited problem (not everyone can reproduce it) with a few easy fixes. In the video games industry this would be classified as a 'KS' bug: 'Known Shippable'. And they did. :)
There are plenty of gay people that think marriage is a broken institution, too.
I agree with you in principle: gay people should have the same rights as straight people, period. However, the guy that you're responding to at least has internal consistency on his side (not that you don't; just in comparison to other gay marriage protestors), and he's the only kind of non-gay-marriage supporter that I can honestly understand. As long as he's working to vote against marriage in general, I think that's fine. If he's apathetic about changing the system and STILL votes against gay marriage, I don't think he's as unbiased as he claims.
I agree. I agree entirely. I own an iPhone.
I'd like to stop hearing about how Apple is a terrible corporation because they do a thorough (sometimes overzealous) vetting of the applications that go up on the store before they go there. I'd also like to stop hearing about how because they've laid out a certain set of restrictions (i.e., no porn apps), they're trying to brainwash us. At least they told everyone in advance what they're getting into.
This is something that Google should have the right to do, and something that they should do if they have to. The security and utility of the network may be at stake in some cases.
I know a lot of people are aghast that google has poked at your phone from afar, now, but you're not the only one on the network, no matter what you think. If an app is bad -- maliciously or otherwise -- it's not fair that you get to keep it and screw other people up. Your right to own any app you want ends when it has the potential to impact my network security or service.
These are the conditions of owning a little computer attached to a wireless network in the modern age. If you don't like it, I'm afraid that's too bad.
I know this is a bit late, but I'm going to respond anyway.
You seem to have this weird idea that people don't know what's going on when they buy the phone. Like they're being defrauded. They were promised a porn-phone and they got a locked-down puritan-phone. That's simply not the case.
Apple doesn't control the behaviour of the consumer at any point in the process. You CHOSE to buy the phone. You CHOSE to buy the apps. Or you CHOSE to throw the iPhone away because it doesn't meet your needs and you think it's a piece of junk.
By restricting the types of applications that are permitted to be developed, Apple only exerts control over their space. If you write an app for your phone -- you can do that, you know -- they don't come over and delete it, no matter how it works or what it does. It can break every single rule they have, but it doesn't matter, because you're not trying to sell it. There's very little post-facto control over your usage of the device.
You may as well complain that Firefox controls your behaviour because it has tools to prevent arbitrary code execution on your computer. Or perhaps you'd like to complain about Sony's or Microsoft's online game stores not stocking hard-core pornography applications. I'll wager that even the Android store doesn't allow completely unrestricted application development. Unless you're advocating for 100% unfettered development, you're really just post-justifying a hatred of Apple because you can.
Vote with your feet. There are other phones, so why is it an issue?
Do you hold car companies to the same standard? Or NASA? Despite NASA's stellar (ha ha) record, I think even they have a worse than 1/1000 failure rate.
Failure rates are less significant than failure rates AND level of failure AND the resolution process. 1/1000 is bad if it makes your phone explode or there's never any recourse. As we've seen, neither thing is true. The failures are hardly catastrophic, and fairly often, there's a reasonable resolution at the end of the road.
That's not Apple's problem or Apple's fault. Next time don't enter into a 3 year contract if you suspect that your needs are going to change before the contract is up.
The fact that the wireless market needs an overhaul is a different matter. (And in fact, you should be bowing down to Apple here; for the first time, a handset maker dictated the terms to a carrier. They made the market ready for Android. The fact that there's any competition in this area right now is in no small part due to Apple.)
Western governments -- ostensibly -- act only on the advice of their electorate. Laws are in place not because of some arbitrary system, or because someone you don't know was just doing it for the hell of it, but because they were elected to enact controls that we already thought were best.
Murder isn't illegal because the government said so, murder is illegal because we've decided that as a society, that's something that we find reprehensible and should be punished. Then we codify this societal value in something we call a 'law', and it sits on the books, waiting to be applied.
While I can't deny that governments seem to have drifted a bit far from the ideal of 'by the people, of the people, for the people', laws are still in place because we've implicitly agreed to that social contract. (That is, if you're not working to change a law in some fashion, we can assume that you think it's a good idea.)
If Apple had a bad product that nobody wanted and the apps were trash and nobody wanted THOSE, people wouldn't buy them. People buy iPhones and iPads and iApps because they fulfill some sort of criteria. Apple's control is only on the manufacturing end. They may restrict the specifications of an application (e.g., no porn), but that's hardly control over the consumer.
Alberta is conservative, but not THAT conservative. It's also the province with the most oil, and the the Rocky mountains.
Consider that, as the most conservative province, the discussion of abortion has never really come up. Even conservative premiers believe that it's between a woman and her doctor.
They fought half-heartedly against same-sex marriage legislation, and now it's a dead issue. It's been legal for years, even in Alberta, and as near as I can tell, nobody cares.
We're keeping Alberta. But we'd be happy to have you. Just come on up. Have a beer, put some maple syrup on your bacon (it's just bacon, incidentally; Canadian bacon is something that only the US calls what we call back bacon), and get a good coat for the winter. :)
This is an utter lie. 95% of Canadians will tell you that the system works well enough. We'd all like a bit better access, but we're willing to work with what we have.
There was a case recently where the courts decided that a guy that had to go down to the States to get advanced treatment that wasn't available in Canada (though there was A treatment available, cutting edge treatment was available south of the border; nobody here will deny that the USA has some of the most ADVANCED medical care in the world) was eligible for the health system reimbursing his medical costs.
Canadian health care even pays for procedures not available here (if they're medically necessary, and not available here). That's pretty friggin' good.
The stories you hear about long waiting lists is only partly true. The people that you saw in those propaganda videos that claimed the Canadian system failed them were hypochondriacs that couldn't get immediate service for non-life-threatening conditions. The Premier of Newfoundland is independently wealthy and decided to get service in the states because it's just as good, a bit faster, and vastly more luxurious, if you can pay. He would have gotten adequate service in our country, but he would have been taking up the same kind of hospital bed as everyone else. (And honestly, as a Canadian, I'm glad he took that way out; it opened up a bed for someone else that just wants the surgery and doesn't care about how nice the room is.)
Canadians love the healthcare system. Every province runs it differently, and it's the one thing that you cannot talk about cutting funding to. Canadians will give up funding on almost every other service before we let you cut our health budget. It's political suicide.
So don't tell me we don't love it. That's garbage.
They don't have to sell in the Amazon/Apple marketplace. If there was a realty company that set the prices when you put your house up for sale, it would be your decision (and problem) if you listed with them. Don't like the rules, don't play the game. Play somewhere else.
People are playing by Apple and Amazon's rules because they (apparently) feel that it's the best game in town. Whether it is or not is up for debate, certainly, but Apple sure sells a lot of music, and Amazon's been selling a lot of books. Hard to argue with those results.
Price fixing implies collusion, not setting a price. If all the gas stations across town agree to charge you the same (inflated) price for petrol, regardless of the market, that's price fixing.
A store can set any price it wants to sell the goods in it. Many sell items at a loss to attract business, and sell other items at a great profit. Companies (notably razor companies, like Gilette) do this too. It's called a loss-leader.
I think it's you that doesn't understand economics well. Given the balance sheet of Apple, I'd say they understand economics better than any of the rest of us by several orders of magnitude. They'll push this as far as they can because it maximizes profits in some manner or another, or maybe just for user-interface/optics reasons (people like numbers that end in .99; studies have shown that strange, non-round prices seem to turn consumers off. The average human is weird like that.)
Really, in the end, you accidentally got something right: the market is involved, and the market will decide. If Apple cocked this one up, we'll see it.
Incidentally, how many times can you lose 'all respect' for Apple? I'd figure you could only do it once.
I don't really have a need for an iPad, I admit. I saw it and was a bit disappointed.
Then I thought, 'Boy, I wish I had bought Mom this instead of that Mac Mini'.
Aside from not being able to play import asian movies on VCD, the iPad is perfect for her. She can read her email, browse the internet, do a few time-waste-y things here and there, and it's all compact and easy to move around. It requires almost no technical knowledge and even less technical support.
The thing that computer people (and I'm one of them; I'll spare you my boring credentials, but I've got a smaller /. ID than you for what that's worth ;) have a hard time understanding is that non-computer people *don't work like computer people do*.
Computers are hard. They ARE. We've done a lousy job of making computers easy to use. The iPad is moving to make the computer an appliance. You pick it up. You tell it what to do in a simple way (i.e., you touch the thing you want), it does that thing. When you're done, you put it down. That's all.
There are no viruses to worry about, and you can probably live without the OS updates, by and large. Pick it up. Read it. Put it down. Done. There are those of us that will always need high powered desktop machines with which to PRODUCE content, but for people that want to consume it, it needs to be simple.
I think you're giving them too much credit. The Conservatives oppose it because taxes and levies are unpopular. Politically, it's as simple as that.
None of the parties have given the levy enough thought; there are so many reasons why it's bad and the product of old-school, bricks-and-mortar-store thinking.
Actually, burning a mix CD for your friend is technically illegal. However, if they borrow the CD and make a copy for themselves, that's fine. Our version of fair use tries to impose the burden of holding the media yourself so you don't make a dozen copies and give them out; your record store scenario is exactly the sort of thing they're trying to prevent (even if there's no money involved).
Either way, this levy isn't very well thought out.