It's not difficult to learn other languages, it just requires effort. Problem is, since much of the rest of the world learns English in school, Americans don't feel the need to bother with other languages. We could fix that problem by starting foreign language education in early elementary school, actually, that's what we should do, but there's too much political baggage that goes along with language for that to happen any time soon.
The thing to note though, is that depending on the languages, it's not hard to be multi-lingual. It's not that big a deal for someone to speak French, Italian, and Spanish, they're all basically the same language. I speak Spanish, have never studied either Italian or French, but I can understand spoken Italian and can read it, and I can read French and I don't consider myself to be particularly talented in the language learning department. Being able to speak completely unrelated languages is another thing altogether, and that does take work, though the more languages you know, the easier it becomes to learn more. And, back to the original article, the more connections you make in your brain, even when you start losing some, you're still ahead of the poor schlubs who never built those connections in the first place.
That would be the reason why my family absolutely hates watching most movies with me. I have enough of a photographic memory that if I've read something somewhere, no matter when it was or how old I was, I remember it. Combine that with the fact that as a child, my mother's response to "I'm bored" was "Read a book," and her response to "But I don't have any books to read" was "Read the encyclopedia," and the upshot is that between reading the encyclopedia and all of the random books I've read over the years, I've been acquiring a vast compendium of marginally useful information on entirely unrelated topics from about the time I learned how to read. It's great for playing board games, but not so much for watching movies. There are too many topics that I'm sufficiently familiar with that I can recognize glaring errors. And, I figure that if I know enough to recognize the error, then probably everything else is wrong too, which then compulsively sends me online to find out exactly what all of the errors are (and which ends up adding new information to my useless information database, which further ruins movies for me and those watching with me).
That's rather interesting, considering that the the granddaddy of fantasy literature, The Lord of the Rings, was written by a Christian. Ok, I'm probably exaggerating LOTR's role in the genre, but you get the point.
As I suspected though, the contents of my bookshelf are as schizophrenic as I thought--I've got books that are unsuggestions sitting just a few feet apart on my bookshelves. My general feeling is that to be a well-rounded person, you've got to read as widely as possible (though I'm more than I little bit embarrassed to admit that I've actually read anything by Nicholas Sparks).
And, the reason the thing was hacked was because she was stupid enough to put the name of her dog as the challenge question to recover her password. No self respecting geek would put the name of their famous dog as a password recovery question. For that matter, no self respecting geek would have a famous dog.
...is that I, a geek girl, could possibly be grouped together with Paris Hilton for any reason. I can think of very few well known people who I would less like to be like, and most of those are either dictators or warlords. And, not only is it an insult to the famous scientific women that they left off the list, it's an insult to the women who are on the list, because it trivializes their accomplishments if a blond heiress who's best know for a sex tape actually belongs on the same list as women like Marie Curie and Grace Murray Hopper.
Umm, sorry to burst your bubble, but this isn't European technology that we're talking about. The technology of Damascus steel is a Middle Eastern and Indian developed technology that was introduced to Europeans when the Crusaders showed up in the Middle East and ran into swords that were unlike those that they knew in Europe at the time.
Yeah, that's for sure. I still don't know who my new US Congressperson is going to be, and it's all the fault of the county south of me thinking that touch screen voting machines were a good way to go. Now, thanks to the fact that there were 18,000 fewer votes in that race than there were people who voted overall, we're in for the loser putting us through the long protracted court battles that Florida is becoming known for. I might be the voting machines going haywire, it might be that 18,000 people decided they didn't want either bum (the reason I didn't vote for either of them), but since there's no paper trail, there's no way of knowing.
The article specifically mentions India as one of the target markets, but I don't see how it's really going to take off because from what I can tell, you can't even text message. In a country where people send SMS much more than they call (SMS is cheap, airtime isn't), a phone that lacks that capability is dead in the water already. My brother who lived in India for four years was rather surprised that Americans don't use SMS all that much. On top of that, the people I talked to while I was in India last year were quite quick to point out how their communications technology is superior to that in the US and how most people in India have better phones than the average American has. I just don't see the draw except for elderly people who want phones but are afraid of the technology--the same market the phone would play to in the US. And, while Motorola may not have a significant market penetration in India, that is not to say that India is an emerging cellular market--I saw more people walking around with phones than I see in the US.
"In the "long search" case they apparently also spent most of their time browsing the iPhoto and Photoshop albums and asked me a lot of questions about other places I had been."
That's good to know, for future reference, that they check those things. The other thing that's, umm, interesting is traveling with someone who's passport is almost completely full--I met up with my brother in Europe as he was working his way back to the US after four years of living in India, over the ten years he's had his passport he's managed to completely fill all but one page off his passport with entry stamps from countries not all of which are entirely stable or exactly like America, and while he's used to getting extra questions at borders, it was interesting to me to watch the reactions that come from that. When we returned to the US, the customs official was particularly interested in what sort of job my brother had to have such a full passport because he hadn't seen anybody who didn't work for Halliburton with that many stamps for the sort of places he's been. I shudder to think of the hassle if he hadn't managed to get his laptop stolen a few months before.
It's been my prediction for the last year or so that Iran has under 10 years before their government gets overthrown from within. My take is that this action just brought my prediction another step closer. The younger generation, by and large, doesn't like the restrictions, they don't buy into the apocalyptic religious extremism, and if they keep making life more and more uncomfortable for those folks, it's only a matter of time until they get fed up and another student revolt goes down.
Much of the time, foreign aid ends up doing little more than giving foreign aid workers the chance to live in luxury while the people they're supposed to help are starving. Sure, that's a cynical view of all of it, but the reality is that massive amounts of cash thrown at a situation rarely do anything significant to fix the problem. There are good development models that can provide long term solutions, however, those take far more time and effort than simply having a bunch of celebrities running around making statements. If you aren't careful, you can actually make the situation worse for people in the particular region you're trying to help. I'm all for international aid, my sister even has a degree in community development, but you've got to have more than just good intentions. The combinitation of unintended consequences and relief workers who see their job as a way to get rich (and you can do quite well for yourself if you work for certain agencies) can wreak all sorts of havoc.
I'm about as conservative as you can get on most issues, but I still enjoy watching The Daily Show. I've found that those conservatives with a sense of humor and a willingness to laugh at the absurdity that is politics (and who are we kidding, the whole thing gets pretty bizarre at times) are more inclined to like The Daily Show. It's those who take themselves too seriously who don't like it.
Besides, if you actually want to know what people think, Jon Stewart's interviews are far more informative than those on the rest of cable news because they don't degenerate into screaming fests. Heck, I've even managed to convince my Limbaugh listening, Hannity watching parents that it's worth watching the show for the interviews, if nothing else.
Whatever the reason why device manufactures decided to leave out AM and only put in FM is irrelevant to my purchasing decisions. All I, as a consumer, really need to know is whether it has AM, and if it doesn't then it's virtually useless feature to me. I own an iPod for a reason--I don't like most of what is on music radio, and if I'm going to listen to radio I'm going to listen for news, sports talk, or hockey, all of which is on AM.
As a geek, I can consider all of the reasons why an engineer would decide that AM isn't worth the trouble, but as a consumer, all I care about is if it has what I want. For that reason, the FM feature in Zune is just as useless to me as the iPod radio remote. If I wanted to listen to music on the radio I would have kept my 10yo Walkman.
Many, if not most, Americans understand that oil is a worldwide commodity sold on the open market to the highest bidders. There's no gas company conspiracies to inflate the price of gasoline, the profit margin on gasoline is relatively average to small.
I wish that were the case, but I think you're giving people too much of a benefit of a doubt. I've lost count of how many times I've tried to explain to people that the various schemes to try to drive down gas prices won't work, and it's reached the point where I've given up because it's too much work getting people to understand that supply and demand work on a global scale and not just local and national levels. Frankly, it's discouraging how many people know so little, and they're so convinced that the US is the center of the universe that they can't see how the growing demand in India and China, despite the fact that they make up 1/3 of the world's population, could have any impact whatsoever on what we, "the world's greatest superpower" and all that, pay for gas.
Heck, I flew all the way to India, didn't get let off the plane for 18 hours (security in London was extra tight because it was right after the subway bombings so they wouldn't let us off during the refueling stop), and I had nothing but a book and an old portable CD player to keep me entertained. Wasn't the most pleasant plane trip, but I survived, and not only that, came home smarter because I ran out of books in the middle of the trip and found A Brief History of Time in a bookstore (it made surprisingly good travel reading). People who feel the need to drag their computers along on vacation miss out on the benefits that come from reading a good book while traveling.
The thing with the Louie case is that it's not even particularly attractive. I looked at that case and concluded that it was a complete waste to put such a bulky case on such an attractive electronic device. Now, Vaja cases on the other hand--if you actually care about style and not just pimping out a label, well, all of the money in the world wouldn't induce me to buy the Louis Vuitton case. Bomb testing is all it's good for. Or not good for, as the case may be...
what we have really discovered here is that pluto was not a one of a kind in a pretty unique orbit but part of a belt of very similar lumps of rock. School textbooks talk about the asteroid belt but not ceres in particular. Similarly they should talk about the kuiper belt but not pluto in particular.
I'm not sure what school textbooks you read when you were in school, but I certainly seem to remember my textbooks talking about the asteroid belt and then discussing Ceres in particular. I tend to hold that it doesn't matter whether it's part of a larger belt or not, if it's large enough that it's round due to gravity, then it counts.
This whole argument doesn't seem to be so much about science as it is about politics within the astronomical community, and it all seems to come down to what's in school textbooks or what might wind up in school textbooks, and that's not how you're supposed to do science.
I don't like to travel with checked baggage, it's too much of a hassle, and with a properly packed carry on you can travel indefinitely with the appropriate clothes for any situation in just that carry on. I did a three week trip through Eastern Europe and Turkey this summer with just a carry on, by the end of the trip I was wishing that I'd brought even less and feeling sorry for all of the backpackers with bags big enough to take you to Everest base camp. My first thought when they banned liquids was "well, there goes any hope of me ever again traveling with just a carry on." My second thought was, "No wait, I can just switch to a non-liquid makeup and buy shampoo, etc, when I get there."
If they ever decide to ban electronic equipment on flights out of the US, that's when I'll get unhappy--my transatlantic flights pre-ipod were much less tolerable than the trip I took after getting the iPod. And for travel in the US, I'll just drive or bite the bullet and take a train if the hassle of air travel becomes too great.
I've never understood people that tried bringing ALL of their belongings into the cabin with them...
And I've never understood the people who spent all sorts of time waiting at baggage claim for their overloaded suitcases full of 10 times as much stuff as they really need for a trip when they can grab their one carry on and walk right out of the airport. I've tried traveling both ways, and I'd much rather take as little as possible and skip the baggage claim. After missing a connecting flight because I was stuck waiting for my checked bag at customs, I swore that whatever it was that I thought I needed to cram into the bigger bag wasn't worth it.
My brother bought a new Macbook Pro for starting graduate school in the fall, one of the reasons that I convinced him to switch was because he could run Windows on it if he needed to. Well, it's been several weeks of running entirely OS X and he's now not sure that's it's even worth the hassle of installing Windows because he likes OS X so much.
Incidentally, Apple stores are the only computer stores that I, a female computer geek, can walk into and not have to start throwing around teenage hacker language that I never use in real life in order to get a decent level of customer service. It's not at all why I switched to Mac (I got sick of fixing Windows problems, and I like being able to go to command line being the two main reasons), but getting rid of one more hassle is always a good thing.
I can count on one hand the times that people in my family have failed in our attempts to get large companies to settle issues to our satisfaction. Companies are banking on the fact that people either are too lazy or don't know how to follow a chain of command and that if they give you enough run around you'll give up and go away. My dad has even gone so far as to call up the president of the company on several occasions when dealing with the customer service reps and their supervisors wasn't getting him anywhere. Sometimes you have to try multiple approaches to get an issue resolved to your satisfaction--know that customer service reps are supposed to be logging calls, so even if you don't succeed with one rep, it's helpful if they have logged in their records that you're threatening to call the State Attny. General's office to get them to pursue a fraud case if the issue isn't resolved (or, on the flip side, if there isn't a log of the conversation and you just got transferred into no-man's land, that can also be worked to your advantage because the rep isn't following protocol).
It's a bit harder when you're dealing with offsite call centers, especially if they're not in your country and you have to deal with a cultural barrier as well (British Airways, for example, is a pain to deal with because they have different cultural protocol for complaints), or if there aren't multiple levels of supervisors in the same location, but given persistance, more often than not you'll succeed.
And, if all else fails, threatening negative publicity doesn't hurt. My mom had an issue where she paid a department store credit card bill but because of a cash register glitch the payment never posted to the main system. After months of unsuccessfully trying to resolve it with politeness, she sent off an e-mail through the corporate feedback site threatening to call up the TV stations and then walk into the store manager's office at the local store and cut up her card--the payment miraculously credited to her account within a matter of hours after she sent the e-mail.
Yes, my stock line, upon being asked if I've had a recent tetanus shot is, "I had a really bad reaction to the last tetanus shot I got, my doctor said that if I am ever exposed to anything that I'm supposed to be given Human Tetanus Immunoglobulin because it's not safe to risk giving me the tetanus vaccine." Even though the paperwork for every vaccine that I've ever been given says that if you've had a serious reaction to the vaccine in the past you shouldn't get the vaccine again, and even though I always launch into what my doctor said I should do if I am possibly exposed to tetanus, I am still treated like a vaccine nut. In fact, more often than not, they act like they don't believe me that I've had a reaction.
Not that the nurses at the Health Department even know what they're talking about though, because despite being given the 3rd degree on the tetanus thing, I had to argue with them to convince them to give me a polio booster shot because the CDC says that in the country I was visiting, the oral vaccine was not effective against the strain of polio that is prevalent and that travelers need to get the shot. They kept insisting that because I'd been given the full course of the oral vaccine I didn't need the shot, contrary to CDC guidelines.
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It's not difficult to learn other languages, it just requires effort. Problem is, since much of the rest of the world learns English in school, Americans don't feel the need to bother with other languages. We could fix that problem by starting foreign language education in early elementary school, actually, that's what we should do, but there's too much political baggage that goes along with language for that to happen any time soon.
The thing to note though, is that depending on the languages, it's not hard to be multi-lingual. It's not that big a deal for someone to speak French, Italian, and Spanish, they're all basically the same language. I speak Spanish, have never studied either Italian or French, but I can understand spoken Italian and can read it, and I can read French and I don't consider myself to be particularly talented in the language learning department. Being able to speak completely unrelated languages is another thing altogether, and that does take work, though the more languages you know, the easier it becomes to learn more. And, back to the original article, the more connections you make in your brain, even when you start losing some, you're still ahead of the poor schlubs who never built those connections in the first place.
People like you don't understand when someone is joking...
That would be the reason why my family absolutely hates watching most movies with me. I have enough of a photographic memory that if I've read something somewhere, no matter when it was or how old I was, I remember it. Combine that with the fact that as a child, my mother's response to "I'm bored" was "Read a book," and her response to "But I don't have any books to read" was "Read the encyclopedia," and the upshot is that between reading the encyclopedia and all of the random books I've read over the years, I've been acquiring a vast compendium of marginally useful information on entirely unrelated topics from about the time I learned how to read. It's great for playing board games, but not so much for watching movies. There are too many topics that I'm sufficiently familiar with that I can recognize glaring errors. And, I figure that if I know enough to recognize the error, then probably everything else is wrong too, which then compulsively sends me online to find out exactly what all of the errors are (and which ends up adding new information to my useless information database, which further ruins movies for me and those watching with me).
That's rather interesting, considering that the the granddaddy of fantasy literature, The Lord of the Rings, was written by a Christian. Ok, I'm probably exaggerating LOTR's role in the genre, but you get the point.
As I suspected though, the contents of my bookshelf are as schizophrenic as I thought--I've got books that are unsuggestions sitting just a few feet apart on my bookshelves. My general feeling is that to be a well-rounded person, you've got to read as widely as possible (though I'm more than I little bit embarrassed to admit that I've actually read anything by Nicholas Sparks).
And, the reason the thing was hacked was because she was stupid enough to put the name of her dog as the challenge question to recover her password. No self respecting geek would put the name of their famous dog as a password recovery question. For that matter, no self respecting geek would have a famous dog.
...is that I, a geek girl, could possibly be grouped together with Paris Hilton for any reason. I can think of very few well known people who I would less like to be like, and most of those are either dictators or warlords. And, not only is it an insult to the famous scientific women that they left off the list, it's an insult to the women who are on the list, because it trivializes their accomplishments if a blond heiress who's best know for a sex tape actually belongs on the same list as women like Marie Curie and Grace Murray Hopper.
Umm, sorry to burst your bubble, but this isn't European technology that we're talking about. The technology of Damascus steel is a Middle Eastern and Indian developed technology that was introduced to Europeans when the Crusaders showed up in the Middle East and ran into swords that were unlike those that they knew in Europe at the time.
Yeah, that's for sure. I still don't know who my new US Congressperson is going to be, and it's all the fault of the county south of me thinking that touch screen voting machines were a good way to go. Now, thanks to the fact that there were 18,000 fewer votes in that race than there were people who voted overall, we're in for the loser putting us through the long protracted court battles that Florida is becoming known for. I might be the voting machines going haywire, it might be that 18,000 people decided they didn't want either bum (the reason I didn't vote for either of them), but since there's no paper trail, there's no way of knowing.
The article specifically mentions India as one of the target markets, but I don't see how it's really going to take off because from what I can tell, you can't even text message. In a country where people send SMS much more than they call (SMS is cheap, airtime isn't), a phone that lacks that capability is dead in the water already. My brother who lived in India for four years was rather surprised that Americans don't use SMS all that much. On top of that, the people I talked to while I was in India last year were quite quick to point out how their communications technology is superior to that in the US and how most people in India have better phones than the average American has. I just don't see the draw except for elderly people who want phones but are afraid of the technology--the same market the phone would play to in the US. And, while Motorola may not have a significant market penetration in India, that is not to say that India is an emerging cellular market--I saw more people walking around with phones than I see in the US.
"In the "long search" case they apparently also spent most of their time browsing the iPhoto and Photoshop albums and asked me a lot of questions about other places I had been."
That's good to know, for future reference, that they check those things. The other thing that's, umm, interesting is traveling with someone who's passport is almost completely full--I met up with my brother in Europe as he was working his way back to the US after four years of living in India, over the ten years he's had his passport he's managed to completely fill all but one page off his passport with entry stamps from countries not all of which are entirely stable or exactly like America, and while he's used to getting extra questions at borders, it was interesting to me to watch the reactions that come from that. When we returned to the US, the customs official was particularly interested in what sort of job my brother had to have such a full passport because he hadn't seen anybody who didn't work for Halliburton with that many stamps for the sort of places he's been. I shudder to think of the hassle if he hadn't managed to get his laptop stolen a few months before.
It's been my prediction for the last year or so that Iran has under 10 years before their government gets overthrown from within. My take is that this action just brought my prediction another step closer. The younger generation, by and large, doesn't like the restrictions, they don't buy into the apocalyptic religious extremism, and if they keep making life more and more uncomfortable for those folks, it's only a matter of time until they get fed up and another student revolt goes down.
Much of the time, foreign aid ends up doing little more than giving foreign aid workers the chance to live in luxury while the people they're supposed to help are starving. Sure, that's a cynical view of all of it, but the reality is that massive amounts of cash thrown at a situation rarely do anything significant to fix the problem. There are good development models that can provide long term solutions, however, those take far more time and effort than simply having a bunch of celebrities running around making statements. If you aren't careful, you can actually make the situation worse for people in the particular region you're trying to help. I'm all for international aid, my sister even has a degree in community development, but you've got to have more than just good intentions. The combinitation of unintended consequences and relief workers who see their job as a way to get rich (and you can do quite well for yourself if you work for certain agencies) can wreak all sorts of havoc.
I'm about as conservative as you can get on most issues, but I still enjoy watching The Daily Show. I've found that those conservatives with a sense of humor and a willingness to laugh at the absurdity that is politics (and who are we kidding, the whole thing gets pretty bizarre at times) are more inclined to like The Daily Show. It's those who take themselves too seriously who don't like it.
Besides, if you actually want to know what people think, Jon Stewart's interviews are far more informative than those on the rest of cable news because they don't degenerate into screaming fests. Heck, I've even managed to convince my Limbaugh listening, Hannity watching parents that it's worth watching the show for the interviews, if nothing else.
Whatever the reason why device manufactures decided to leave out AM and only put in FM is irrelevant to my purchasing decisions. All I, as a consumer, really need to know is whether it has AM, and if it doesn't then it's virtually useless feature to me. I own an iPod for a reason--I don't like most of what is on music radio, and if I'm going to listen to radio I'm going to listen for news, sports talk, or hockey, all of which is on AM.
As a geek, I can consider all of the reasons why an engineer would decide that AM isn't worth the trouble, but as a consumer, all I care about is if it has what I want. For that reason, the FM feature in Zune is just as useless to me as the iPod radio remote. If I wanted to listen to music on the radio I would have kept my 10yo Walkman.
Many, if not most, Americans understand that oil is a worldwide commodity sold on the open market to the highest bidders. There's no gas company conspiracies to inflate the price of gasoline, the profit margin on gasoline is relatively average to small.
I wish that were the case, but I think you're giving people too much of a benefit of a doubt. I've lost count of how many times I've tried to explain to people that the various schemes to try to drive down gas prices won't work, and it's reached the point where I've given up because it's too much work getting people to understand that supply and demand work on a global scale and not just local and national levels. Frankly, it's discouraging how many people know so little, and they're so convinced that the US is the center of the universe that they can't see how the growing demand in India and China, despite the fact that they make up 1/3 of the world's population, could have any impact whatsoever on what we, "the world's greatest superpower" and all that, pay for gas.
Heck, I flew all the way to India, didn't get let off the plane for 18 hours (security in London was extra tight because it was right after the subway bombings so they wouldn't let us off during the refueling stop), and I had nothing but a book and an old portable CD player to keep me entertained. Wasn't the most pleasant plane trip, but I survived, and not only that, came home smarter because I ran out of books in the middle of the trip and found A Brief History of Time in a bookstore (it made surprisingly good travel reading). People who feel the need to drag their computers along on vacation miss out on the benefits that come from reading a good book while traveling.
The thing with the Louie case is that it's not even particularly attractive. I looked at that case and concluded that it was a complete waste to put such a bulky case on such an attractive electronic device. Now, Vaja cases on the other hand--if you actually care about style and not just pimping out a label, well, all of the money in the world wouldn't induce me to buy the Louis Vuitton case. Bomb testing is all it's good for. Or not good for, as the case may be...
what we have really discovered here is that pluto was not a one of a kind in a pretty unique orbit but part of a belt of very similar lumps of rock. School textbooks talk about the asteroid belt but not ceres in particular. Similarly they should talk about the kuiper belt but not pluto in particular.
I'm not sure what school textbooks you read when you were in school, but I certainly seem to remember my textbooks talking about the asteroid belt and then discussing Ceres in particular. I tend to hold that it doesn't matter whether it's part of a larger belt or not, if it's large enough that it's round due to gravity, then it counts.
This whole argument doesn't seem to be so much about science as it is about politics within the astronomical community, and it all seems to come down to what's in school textbooks or what might wind up in school textbooks, and that's not how you're supposed to do science.
But how much of those numbers came from people wanting to see Jennifer Lopez in wet clothing and nothing else?
I don't like to travel with checked baggage, it's too much of a hassle, and with a properly packed carry on you can travel indefinitely with the appropriate clothes for any situation in just that carry on. I did a three week trip through Eastern Europe and Turkey this summer with just a carry on, by the end of the trip I was wishing that I'd brought even less and feeling sorry for all of the backpackers with bags big enough to take you to Everest base camp. My first thought when they banned liquids was "well, there goes any hope of me ever again traveling with just a carry on." My second thought was, "No wait, I can just switch to a non-liquid makeup and buy shampoo, etc, when I get there."
If they ever decide to ban electronic equipment on flights out of the US, that's when I'll get unhappy--my transatlantic flights pre-ipod were much less tolerable than the trip I took after getting the iPod. And for travel in the US, I'll just drive or bite the bullet and take a train if the hassle of air travel becomes too great.
I've never understood people that tried bringing ALL of their belongings into the cabin with them...
And I've never understood the people who spent all sorts of time waiting at baggage claim for their overloaded suitcases full of 10 times as much stuff as they really need for a trip when they can grab their one carry on and walk right out of the airport. I've tried traveling both ways, and I'd much rather take as little as possible and skip the baggage claim. After missing a connecting flight because I was stuck waiting for my checked bag at customs, I swore that whatever it was that I thought I needed to cram into the bigger bag wasn't worth it.
Plus, the fuel in Top Fuel dragsters is alcohol as well...
My brother bought a new Macbook Pro for starting graduate school in the fall, one of the reasons that I convinced him to switch was because he could run Windows on it if he needed to. Well, it's been several weeks of running entirely OS X and he's now not sure that's it's even worth the hassle of installing Windows because he likes OS X so much.
Incidentally, Apple stores are the only computer stores that I, a female computer geek, can walk into and not have to start throwing around teenage hacker language that I never use in real life in order to get a decent level of customer service. It's not at all why I switched to Mac (I got sick of fixing Windows problems, and I like being able to go to command line being the two main reasons), but getting rid of one more hassle is always a good thing.
I can count on one hand the times that people in my family have failed in our attempts to get large companies to settle issues to our satisfaction. Companies are banking on the fact that people either are too lazy or don't know how to follow a chain of command and that if they give you enough run around you'll give up and go away. My dad has even gone so far as to call up the president of the company on several occasions when dealing with the customer service reps and their supervisors wasn't getting him anywhere. Sometimes you have to try multiple approaches to get an issue resolved to your satisfaction--know that customer service reps are supposed to be logging calls, so even if you don't succeed with one rep, it's helpful if they have logged in their records that you're threatening to call the State Attny. General's office to get them to pursue a fraud case if the issue isn't resolved (or, on the flip side, if there isn't a log of the conversation and you just got transferred into no-man's land, that can also be worked to your advantage because the rep isn't following protocol).
It's a bit harder when you're dealing with offsite call centers, especially if they're not in your country and you have to deal with a cultural barrier as well (British Airways, for example, is a pain to deal with because they have different cultural protocol for complaints), or if there aren't multiple levels of supervisors in the same location, but given persistance, more often than not you'll succeed.
And, if all else fails, threatening negative publicity doesn't hurt. My mom had an issue where she paid a department store credit card bill but because of a cash register glitch the payment never posted to the main system. After months of unsuccessfully trying to resolve it with politeness, she sent off an e-mail through the corporate feedback site threatening to call up the TV stations and then walk into the store manager's office at the local store and cut up her card--the payment miraculously credited to her account within a matter of hours after she sent the e-mail.
Yes, my stock line, upon being asked if I've had a recent tetanus shot is, "I had a really bad reaction to the last tetanus shot I got, my doctor said that if I am ever exposed to anything that I'm supposed to be given Human Tetanus Immunoglobulin because it's not safe to risk giving me the tetanus vaccine." Even though the paperwork for every vaccine that I've ever been given says that if you've had a serious reaction to the vaccine in the past you shouldn't get the vaccine again, and even though I always launch into what my doctor said I should do if I am possibly exposed to tetanus, I am still treated like a vaccine nut. In fact, more often than not, they act like they don't believe me that I've had a reaction.
Not that the nurses at the Health Department even know what they're talking about though, because despite being given the 3rd degree on the tetanus thing, I had to argue with them to convince them to give me a polio booster shot because the CDC says that in the country I was visiting, the oral vaccine was not effective against the strain of polio that is prevalent and that travelers need to get the shot. They kept insisting that because I'd been given the full course of the oral vaccine I didn't need the shot, contrary to CDC guidelines.