WOXY already do podcasts of their in-studio guest appearances with some very good modern rock acts. That's something very rare for celestial stations anymore, and the fact that they make them available via podcast is even rarer.
And if you've listened to WOXY for any length of time, and are into modern rock, $10/month is nothing. Their jocks have an extraordinary skill into crafting their playlists and really immerse you in the music without feeling like they are indier-than-thou. I've been introduced to a wide range of music i might never thought I would like had it not been for this staff.
I have mod points, but I can't find the "terminally clueless" rating. Can anyone give a brother a hand?
As others have already pointed out, the papers pay for the Reuters and AP feeds, so it's no wonder their stories looks almost verbatim to the feeds.
That said, I can't believe that the papers want to take on Google when they're doing nothing more than pushing eyeballs to the papers' sites. Of course, in a golden goose scenario, the papers probably think they'll make more by making Google license those snippets of the story instead of capitalizing on the users who are visiting their site that wouldn't have, had it not been for the most ubiquitous search engine.
That's not because they haven't heard of CSS. It's just that time is money to people other than the CSS/web standards purists and when you're generating rows of data a simple table row is much more efficient than its CSS float 'n div equivalent.
Strawman. If you truly are rendering out tabular data, you SHOULD be using tables. No CSS advocate would tell you otherwise.
If, however, you are rendering a discrete section of code, yes, you should be encapsulating it with a <div class="foo" and </div> pair of tags and letting a page designer worry about how it renders on the page.
Any time our developers try to tell me that non-tabular output has to be done in tables, I press them and ask them why. Usually it's because they don't understand how to use divs correctly.
So what was Microsoft's mutually beneficial strategy for killing off IE for the Mac?
And as the AC below reminds us, Microsoft sold off their apple shares years ago -- which were only bought as part of a settlement for infringing on Apple copyrights.
Microsoft have nothing to gain from Apple anymore...besides the fact that Mac users still buy actual legal copies of office at a rate that exceeds that of the windows side...
Granted, in 1996, yes, the Mac was not doing well. But the meme was still alive and thriving in 1999, 2000, 2001...and with Dvorak, as late as 2004...even as Apple was making positive strides on the balance sheet, stock price, and in mindshare.
But now, a mere 10 months after his Dec. 2004 column about the Mac's demise was posted, Dvorak is up in arms that the Windows Way is getting the short end of the stick because the media is paying too much attention to a 'dying' platform...
I'll bet most non-techie Mac users have at least these items on their systems:
Microsoft (!) Word
Microsoft (!) Entourage
Microsoft (!) Excel
Microsoft (!) PowerPoint
Microsoft (!) IE
The primary difference I see between Apple and Microsoft is that Apple develops productivity and utility apps to protect against Microsoft yanking their products -- or at least give Mac users options for similar software that is not (inadvertantly or intentionally) hobbled versions of the Windows versions. There is no other explanation for Pages, Keynote, or Safari.
The other thing you'll notice about Apple's software offerings is that they are not aggressively attacking their competitors in order to bring more users in house with their software. In fact, Apple often touts the fact that you CAN run the main Office apps on their machines. When was the last time Redmond ever advertised someone else's word processor as a feature?
I am astounded that such an astute observer as Dvorak didn't seem to pick up on the fact that the virulent "Apple is Dying" meme in the 90s was perpetuated primarily by PC-using columnists...
You're ignoring my premise: the user in my hypo is doing research to determine IF he should buy the album. In this case, the downloader doesn't know if he will get any enjoyment out of the track or not. If he does, he buys the track. If he doesn't, he abandons it, because, really, who's going to play a track they don't enjoy? And that, really, goes to the heart of the original poster's question: if downloading a track results in me never buying the track -- and never listening to it again -- who is hurt?
(Well, I guess those execs whose business model is predicated on people buying things blindly are hurt. My bad.)
As for your red herring examples, sure, you can never be 100% certain about the kinds of transactions/commitments you noted, but you can, with appropriate research, minimize your risks. Sure, a $15 CD isn't the same as a house or a car, but you still perform more due dilligence than just trusting the salesman -- which is essentially what you're doing when you buy an album based solely on the radio tracks.
In fact, this feature is one of the reasons why the iTunes Music Store is actually consumer friendly -- and an ethical alternative to what you are objecting to. It gives potential buyers of music a chance to sample music without outlaying any cash. It's also that feature that has more than a couple of music execs grumbling, because despite the fact that downloaded tracks are nearly pure profit (no physical stock to create, maintain, or distribute, after all), if an album only contains three decent tracks, they only get three tracks worth of income instead of 12.
That instance of the product and that enjoyment of the product is something a non-paying consumer of the product is not entitled to enjoy.
Riddle me this: why download a product if it were not to be enjoyed?
Maybe they wanted to see if they would enjoy it enough to actually shell out the money to buy either the song or the entire album. And since today's corporate radio never goes more than 2 or 3 cuts into any record, maybe downloading the tune to preview it is the user's only chance to determine if the music is actually worth paying for.
Granted, there are users who want nothing more than free music to fill their iPods. But there are also users who want to know WHY they should be making a $12-$20 investment in music without any guarantees that they will get enjoyment out of it?
To those users, you seem to be advocating a black box model of retailing: "Don't think of listening to anything before you buy, just trust us. You'll enjoy this music! I know you haven't heard a note, but we can tell you right now it doesn't sound like a cat getting suffocated underneath Paris Hilton's bony ass."
However, most people, when presented with this statement, do NOT see this bluff as obvious. They are terrified of losing their music or TV from the sources they currently get them from.
You mean I won't be able to get my Ashlee Simpson CDs any more?! Or videos of my boyband du jour?!! Or my soap operas? Or Inside Edition?!?!
**gasp!!!!**
By all means, Mr. Media Man, please do whatever you need to in order to keep feeding me all the pablum that keeps me docile and believing that I can be someone special as long as I know what's going on in Hollywood!
If you want your markup to be purely semantic, it should have no presentational aspect at all (no DIVs, no SPANs).
Au contraire. How does a div or span tag impart ANY presentational information? In fact, those tags are inherently semantic -- they don't tell the browser how to present any information; they merely inform the user agent that the content contained within those tags are related in some way.
Of course, div and span tags without classes or IDs are pretty useless, so you have to add those attributes. However, by doing such a thing, you're only making those tags that much more semantic...by telling the user what the relationship of the content within those tags are.
The fact that you can attach styles to classes or IDs doesn't make divs and spans presentational; any visual presentation information is a function of the style sheet, not the divs and spans. I can still go into the source code of a page that has been marked up semantically, and read the source text in the order in which it was written, and still get a strong idea of what the author meant to convey. On the other hand, if I go into a slice table and try to read the segments of text contained between the calls to.gif files, there's no guarantee that I will be able to find all the blocks of text, let alone read them in the order in which the author intended.
Of course, the more practical application of coding using semantic markup is not having a human read the source code, but instead having the same page be able to be used by screen reader, palmtop browser, cell phone, or even a printer. By dividing related page pieces through div and span tags, it makes it that much easier to present the same page on all those different devices.
UGH! We have the exact same problem. And no matter how many times we tell our authors to NOT paste things into CMS directly from word, they still ignore us. In fact, I think a good number of them ignore us because they want their web pages to look exactly like their word docs; a couple have even complained that the page that went live looks nothing like what they submitted for approval.
We are supposed to be implementing the telerik RAD editor in the next couple months, but our lead developer is stymied over how to make it strip much of anything from Word text, so I think I'm still going to be telling users to paste in plain text. Personally, I will continue to pre-convert text to HTML and paste it in in to HTML mode.
OK, it sounds like you're on the right track -- knowing that your text needs to be marked up to indicate its structure. The next step is to actually make Word work with you.
1. Set up Word styles to reflect the major structural parts of your document. By this I mean put your main headings in Heading 1 style, subheads in Heading 2 style, paragraphs in a new "paragraph" style, article titles in a character style called "articleTitle", etc.
2. Use these styles to mark up your documents appropriately by applying the styles to the appropriate parts of the doc.
3. Use the search & replace command to search for the styles...
3a. use the "advanced > format > style" option and select the style you are looking to grab
3b. replace it with the "Find What Text" (see the "special" option in the S&R dialog) surrounded by the appropriate tag.
3c. the replacing text can be as simple as ^& (for surrounding the selected text with h1 tags) to providing a custom span or adding a class to a tag to reflect the actual semantic use of the text (e.g. ^& )
4. After some cleanup -- Word will insert paragraph marks before your ending tags where you have used paragraph styles -- you can save your file as a text file to strip the word formatting and you should have a clean html file.
Granted, this process assumes that you're willing to do a little Word formatting work up front, that you know how to use word styles, and that your formatting is fairly straightforward. It's also the result of some very cursory testing on word:Mac v.X; YMMV.
Very simply, it's more expensive to provide free terminals than it is free access points. Wired terminals mean that computers are already in place -- which have presumably been bought and installed by the owner of the establishment. With WiFi, however, the owner only provides an access point, and the customers supply the computer.
unfortunately, since the labels don't see any of the ticket or merchandise money -- only money from the sales of the albums -- they couldn't care less about anything from your post after "downloading music illegally".
I think it is equally acceptable to simply say: "No, I actually don't know how fast I was going"
Do realize, however, that by admitting on the scene that you didn't know how fast you were going, you could be setting yourself up to have no defense against the officer's allegations if you do decide to challenge the charges.
BTW, it is equally acceptable to answer his question with a simple "yes." By answering that way, you are answering the question truthfully, but at the same time you are not incriminating yourself.
You seem to think they would WANT to sell a media-less product that has absolutely minimal costs to them...;-)
However, this move seems to indicate that RIAA still sees single-song sales as a liability. After all, if the kids can just buy and download the one hit song off a given album and avoid the rest of the dreck, RIAA has just lost a CD sale. And by losing that CD sale, in their beancounter minds, they've had a net loss on that purchase.
(The loss: they only got $.65 for the sale instead of the profit they would have made on the entire $13 album less the manufacturing, storage, transport, and retail charges. Even with those charges, you can bet they're making more than $.65 per unit.)
So either RIAA encourages people to buy the more profitable physical unit (and make the consumer give tacit approval to keep on producing the dreck that accompanies the "hit" songs) or they charge a premium for the downloads to try and mitigate the "loss" they would incur on the otherwise unrealized CD sale (and ignore the financial vote for better content).
besides the fact that THEY DON'T BELONG THERE? And what's in my business is my business?
I dunno. Those two things are a couple of biggies.
Have some probable cause to search my home. Get a judge to a agree to the search. Present me with a warrant defining precisely what they're looking for. And have the goverment agents be prepared to defend against a harassment suit if they are going on a fishing expedition firvolously or maliciously.
Why should the government be entitled to looking through my house without submitting to those simple checks and balances? Besides the annoyance of actually having to be accountable for their actions?
I don't think it's an issue of having anything to hide. It's an issue of why does the government need to know my reading habits?
Give them this inch, and they'll take it a mile. There is nothing to stop them from redefining "terrorism" to mean "anything counter to my world view and philosophy."
Of course i understand that. $4000? Thats greed not capitalism. Not really supply and demand.
Capitalism is all about greed -- greed on behalf of both consumers and producers. The consumers may want them, but how badly? Surely there will be those consumers who are greedy enough for the first units to pay top dollar for that privelege. Just because you're not one of them doesn't make them bad people, does it?
The demand is high as far as i'm concerned. There isnt a person on this forum that wouldnt stand there fist full of dollars to buy one if the price were right.
And yet, there are others for whom $3299 is the right price. Why should Apple ignore them and their checkbooks for people who aren't willing to pay that much? Remember, Apple's first loyalty, like any for-profit company, is to maximize profits. As long as consumers are willing to help them to that end, they will serve those consumers.
Will the number sold at $4000 out number the sales if they had sold them at $800 ??
Probably not. But Apple isn't in the business of moving units; they're in the business of maximizing revenue. They most certainly could sell n units at $800. But out of that set of n people, there may also be q people who are willing to buy the displays at $3299. And r who are willing to buy the displays at $2500 per unit. And s at $2000 per unit. And t at $1500 per unit. So at the end of the day, which makes Apple's accountants and shareholders happier? $800*n? or ($3299*q) + ($2500*r) + ($2000*s) + ($1500*t) + ($800*(n-(q+r+s)))?
If capitalism is about getting rich while exploiting overseas slaves to manufacture your $4000 picture tube...Leave me out of it. Frankly i think its best that we stop ripping each other off, and start selling things at fair prices.
I am not 100% positive, but I am pretty sure that Apple would probably be strongly opposed to using slaves to manufacture video displays. If you can prove that they are actually using slaves, please do so; otherwise I think we can safely say that you are grandstanding for maximum guilt effect.
At any rate, who is getting ripped off? The people who are freely giving their money in exchange for the product they desire? The people who are working in a factory in exchange for the salary they agreed to receive? I'm not seeing any ripoffs here. And as long as someone is willing to pay the price tag, the price is fair.
Capitalism is fine... But when its used to profit at the expense of all else...shame on us.
Congratulations. That might be the best damnation of capitalism based on not wanting to pay the asking price of a brand new product that I've read all week.
Yes i get that. These arent Ford GTs we're talking about. We're talking about monitors that come off an assembly line....
Um, doesn't a Ford GT come off an assembly line? I fail to see what the means of mass assembly for every commodity manufactured for the past hundred years has to do with this conversation.
...Does apple even manufacture the monitor?
Congratulations! Two red herrings in one paragraph!
I'm betting that Apple doesn't make them directly. But I'm also betting that the company with whom they have contracted doesn't make them cheaply. It's not like this is a simple $200 TV that you would find at Besty Buy just made real big-like and marked up 2000%. There are engineering costs, manufacturing costs, and R&D costs to be recouped. Oh, and the shareholders would prefer that Apple not give them away without taking in some money to repay them for their kind investments.
Yes new items will be priced high... i understand greed. I get it. But $4000?
Well, along with two red herrings, you've also thrown in a whooper of a rounding inaccuracy. $4000 may be closer to $3299 than $0, but it's still $701 away from Apple's actual price for this monitor. Considering that a few years ago a 20-inch monitor was selling for a similar amount, $3299 is not a bad price for a quality display -- particularly if your work (prepress, graphic design, photo editing, video editing, etc.) requires a lot of real estate.
Review the economics lessons alluded to earlier in the thread. Early adopters pay a premium because they want or need the product. No one is forcing them to pay $3299 for anything. If a user can't afford today's price tag, they wait until it goes down or until they can afford it. In the meantime, Apple gets to recoup its costs. As production ramps up, as Apple's bills get paid, and as fewer and fewer people are willing to pay $3299 for this fine product, the price will, without a doubt, go down. And all without Apple forcing anyone to do anything they didn't want to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the original poster was talking about the increase in royalties paid to the artists and their representatives.
WOXY already do podcasts of their in-studio guest appearances with some very good modern rock acts. That's something very rare for celestial stations anymore, and the fact that they make them available via podcast is even rarer.
And if you've listened to WOXY for any length of time, and are into modern rock, $10/month is nothing. Their jocks have an extraordinary skill into crafting their playlists and really immerse you in the music without feeling like they are indier-than-thou. I've been introduced to a wide range of music i might never thought I would like had it not been for this staff.
I knew those Harlequin Novels were a political statement!
I have mod points, but I can't find the "terminally clueless" rating. Can anyone give a brother a hand?
As others have already pointed out, the papers pay for the Reuters and AP feeds, so it's no wonder their stories looks almost verbatim to the feeds.
That said, I can't believe that the papers want to take on Google when they're doing nothing more than pushing eyeballs to the papers' sites. Of course, in a golden goose scenario, the papers probably think they'll make more by making Google license those snippets of the story instead of capitalizing on the users who are visiting their site that wouldn't have, had it not been for the most ubiquitous search engine.
Strawman. If you truly are rendering out tabular data, you SHOULD be using tables. No CSS advocate would tell you otherwise.
If, however, you are rendering a discrete section of code, yes, you should be encapsulating it with a <div class="foo" and </div> pair of tags and letting a page designer worry about how it renders on the page.
Any time our developers try to tell me that non-tabular output has to be done in tables, I press them and ask them why. Usually it's because they don't understand how to use divs correctly.
So what was Microsoft's mutually beneficial strategy for killing off IE for the Mac?
And as the AC below reminds us, Microsoft sold off their apple shares years ago -- which were only bought as part of a settlement for infringing on Apple copyrights.
Microsoft have nothing to gain from Apple anymore...besides the fact that Mac users still buy actual legal copies of office at a rate that exceeds that of the windows side...
Granted, in 1996, yes, the Mac was not doing well. But the meme was still alive and thriving in 1999, 2000, 2001...and with Dvorak, as late as 2004...even as Apple was making positive strides on the balance sheet, stock price, and in mindshare.
But now, a mere 10 months after his Dec. 2004 column about the Mac's demise was posted, Dvorak is up in arms that the Windows Way is getting the short end of the stick because the media is paying too much attention to a 'dying' platform...
I'll bet most non-techie Mac users have at least these items on their systems:
The primary difference I see between Apple and Microsoft is that Apple develops productivity and utility apps to protect against Microsoft yanking their products -- or at least give Mac users options for similar software that is not (inadvertantly or intentionally) hobbled versions of the Windows versions. There is no other explanation for Pages, Keynote, or Safari.
The other thing you'll notice about Apple's software offerings is that they are not aggressively attacking their competitors in order to bring more users in house with their software. In fact, Apple often touts the fact that you CAN run the main Office apps on their machines. When was the last time Redmond ever advertised someone else's word processor as a feature?
And HA!
I am astounded that such an astute observer as Dvorak didn't seem to pick up on the fact that the virulent "Apple is Dying" meme in the 90s was perpetuated primarily by PC-using columnists...
You're ignoring my premise: the user in my hypo is doing research to determine IF he should buy the album. In this case, the downloader doesn't know if he will get any enjoyment out of the track or not. If he does, he buys the track. If he doesn't, he abandons it, because, really, who's going to play a track they don't enjoy? And that, really, goes to the heart of the original poster's question: if downloading a track results in me never buying the track -- and never listening to it again -- who is hurt?
(Well, I guess those execs whose business model is predicated on people buying things blindly are hurt. My bad.)
As for your red herring examples, sure, you can never be 100% certain about the kinds of transactions/commitments you noted, but you can, with appropriate research, minimize your risks. Sure, a $15 CD isn't the same as a house or a car, but you still perform more due dilligence than just trusting the salesman -- which is essentially what you're doing when you buy an album based solely on the radio tracks.
In fact, this feature is one of the reasons why the iTunes Music Store is actually consumer friendly -- and an ethical alternative to what you are objecting to. It gives potential buyers of music a chance to sample music without outlaying any cash. It's also that feature that has more than a couple of music execs grumbling, because despite the fact that downloaded tracks are nearly pure profit (no physical stock to create, maintain, or distribute, after all), if an album only contains three decent tracks, they only get three tracks worth of income instead of 12.
Maybe they wanted to see if they would enjoy it enough to actually shell out the money to buy either the song or the entire album. And since today's corporate radio never goes more than 2 or 3 cuts into any record, maybe downloading the tune to preview it is the user's only chance to determine if the music is actually worth paying for.
Granted, there are users who want nothing more than free music to fill their iPods. But there are also users who want to know WHY they should be making a $12-$20 investment in music without any guarantees that they will get enjoyment out of it?
To those users, you seem to be advocating a black box model of retailing: "Don't think of listening to anything before you buy, just trust us. You'll enjoy this music! I know you haven't heard a note, but we can tell you right now it doesn't sound like a cat getting suffocated underneath Paris Hilton's bony ass."
You mean I won't be able to get my Ashlee Simpson CDs any more?! Or videos of my boyband du jour?!! Or my soap operas? Or Inside Edition?!?!
**gasp!!!!**
By all means, Mr. Media Man, please do whatever you need to in order to keep feeding me all the pablum that keeps me docile and believing that I can be someone special as long as I know what's going on in Hollywood!
Sincerely,
Seventh Grade Girls Everywhere
If you want your markup to be purely semantic, it should have no presentational aspect at all (no DIVs, no SPANs).
Au contraire. How does a div or span tag impart ANY presentational information? In fact, those tags are inherently semantic -- they don't tell the browser how to present any information; they merely inform the user agent that the content contained within those tags are related in some way.
Of course, div and span tags without classes or IDs are pretty useless, so you have to add those attributes. However, by doing such a thing, you're only making those tags that much more semantic...by telling the user what the relationship of the content within those tags are.
The fact that you can attach styles to classes or IDs doesn't make divs and spans presentational; any visual presentation information is a function of the style sheet, not the divs and spans. I can still go into the source code of a page that has been marked up semantically, and read the source text in the order in which it was written, and still get a strong idea of what the author meant to convey. On the other hand, if I go into a slice table and try to read the segments of text contained between the calls to .gif files, there's no guarantee that I will be able to find all the blocks of text, let alone read them in the order in which the author intended.
Of course, the more practical application of coding using semantic markup is not having a human read the source code, but instead having the same page be able to be used by screen reader, palmtop browser, cell phone, or even a printer. By dividing related page pieces through div and span tags, it makes it that much easier to present the same page on all those different devices.
UGH! We have the exact same problem. And no matter how many times we tell our authors to NOT paste things into CMS directly from word, they still ignore us. In fact, I think a good number of them ignore us because they want their web pages to look exactly like their word docs; a couple have even complained that the page that went live looks nothing like what they submitted for approval.
We are supposed to be implementing the telerik RAD editor in the next couple months, but our lead developer is stymied over how to make it strip much of anything from Word text, so I think I'm still going to be telling users to paste in plain text. Personally, I will continue to pre-convert text to HTML and paste it in in to HTML mode.
OK, it sounds like you're on the right track -- knowing that your text needs to be marked up to indicate its structure. The next step is to actually make Word work with you.
1. Set up Word styles to reflect the major structural parts of your document. By this I mean put your main headings in Heading 1 style, subheads in Heading 2 style, paragraphs in a new "paragraph" style, article titles in a character style called "articleTitle", etc.
2. Use these styles to mark up your documents appropriately by applying the styles to the appropriate parts of the doc.
3. Use the search & replace command to search for the styles...
3a. use the "advanced > format > style" option and select the style you are looking to grab
3b. replace it with the "Find What Text" (see the "special" option in the S&R dialog) surrounded by the appropriate tag.
3c. the replacing text can be as simple as ^& (for surrounding the selected text with h1 tags) to providing a custom span or adding a class to a tag to reflect the actual semantic use of the text (e.g. ^& )
4. After some cleanup -- Word will insert paragraph marks before your ending tags where you have used paragraph styles -- you can save your file as a text file to strip the word formatting and you should have a clean html file.
Granted, this process assumes that you're willing to do a little Word formatting work up front, that you know how to use word styles, and that your formatting is fairly straightforward. It's also the result of some very cursory testing on word:Mac v.X; YMMV.
Hope this helps.
Very simply, it's more expensive to provide free terminals than it is free access points. Wired terminals mean that computers are already in place -- which have presumably been bought and installed by the owner of the establishment. With WiFi, however, the owner only provides an access point, and the customers supply the computer.
unfortunately, since the labels don't see any of the ticket or merchandise money -- only money from the sales of the albums -- they couldn't care less about anything from your post after "downloading music illegally".
I think it is equally acceptable to simply say: "No, I actually don't know how fast I was going"
Do realize, however, that by admitting on the scene that you didn't know how fast you were going, you could be setting yourself up to have no defense against the officer's allegations if you do decide to challenge the charges.
BTW, it is equally acceptable to answer his question with a simple "yes." By answering that way, you are answering the question truthfully, but at the same time you are not incriminating yourself.
Freehand; it's a direct competitor with Illustrator.
I'm sure you felt much better when you realized that was only $2.38 US. ;-)
You seem to think they would WANT to sell a media-less product that has absolutely minimal costs to them... ;-)
However, this move seems to indicate that RIAA still sees single-song sales as a liability. After all, if the kids can just buy and download the one hit song off a given album and avoid the rest of the dreck, RIAA has just lost a CD sale. And by losing that CD sale, in their beancounter minds, they've had a net loss on that purchase.
(The loss: they only got $.65 for the sale instead of the profit they would have made on the entire $13 album less the manufacturing, storage, transport, and retail charges. Even with those charges, you can bet they're making more than $.65 per unit.)
So either RIAA encourages people to buy the more profitable physical unit (and make the consumer give tacit approval to keep on producing the dreck that accompanies the "hit" songs) or they charge a premium for the downloads to try and mitigate the "loss" they would incur on the otherwise unrealized CD sale (and ignore the financial vote for better content).
besides the fact that THEY DON'T BELONG THERE? And what's in my business is my business?
I dunno. Those two things are a couple of biggies.
Have some probable cause to search my home. Get a judge to a agree to the search. Present me with a warrant defining precisely what they're looking for. And have the goverment agents be prepared to defend against a harassment suit if they are going on a fishing expedition firvolously or maliciously.
Why should the government be entitled to looking through my house without submitting to those simple checks and balances? Besides the annoyance of actually having to be accountable for their actions?
I don't think it's an issue of having anything to hide. It's an issue of why does the government need to know my reading habits?
Give them this inch, and they'll take it a mile. There is nothing to stop them from redefining "terrorism" to mean "anything counter to my world view and philosophy."
Capitalism is all about greed -- greed on behalf of both consumers and producers. The consumers may want them, but how badly? Surely there will be those consumers who are greedy enough for the first units to pay top dollar for that privelege. Just because you're not one of them doesn't make them bad people, does it?
And yet, there are others for whom $3299 is the right price. Why should Apple ignore them and their checkbooks for people who aren't willing to pay that much? Remember, Apple's first loyalty, like any for-profit company, is to maximize profits. As long as consumers are willing to help them to that end, they will serve those consumers.
Probably not. But Apple isn't in the business of moving units; they're in the business of maximizing revenue. They most certainly could sell n units at $800. But out of that set of n people, there may also be q people who are willing to buy the displays at $3299. And r who are willing to buy the displays at $2500 per unit. And s at $2000 per unit. And t at $1500 per unit. So at the end of the day, which makes Apple's accountants and shareholders happier? $800*n? or ($3299*q) + ($2500*r) + ($2000*s) + ($1500*t) + ($800*(n-(q+r+s)))?
I am not 100% positive, but I am pretty sure that Apple would probably be strongly opposed to using slaves to manufacture video displays. If you can prove that they are actually using slaves, please do so; otherwise I think we can safely say that you are grandstanding for maximum guilt effect.
At any rate, who is getting ripped off? The people who are freely giving their money in exchange for the product they desire? The people who are working in a factory in exchange for the salary they agreed to receive? I'm not seeing any ripoffs here. And as long as someone is willing to pay the price tag, the price is fair.
Congratulations. That might be the best damnation of capitalism based on not wanting to pay the asking price of a brand new product that I've read all week.
Um, doesn't a Ford GT come off an assembly line? I fail to see what the means of mass assembly for every commodity manufactured for the past hundred years has to do with this conversation.
Congratulations! Two red herrings in one paragraph!
I'm betting that Apple doesn't make them directly. But I'm also betting that the company with whom they have contracted doesn't make them cheaply. It's not like this is a simple $200 TV that you would find at Besty Buy just made real big-like and marked up 2000%. There are engineering costs, manufacturing costs, and R&D costs to be recouped. Oh, and the shareholders would prefer that Apple not give them away without taking in some money to repay them for their kind investments.
Well, along with two red herrings, you've also thrown in a whooper of a rounding inaccuracy. $4000 may be closer to $3299 than $0, but it's still $701 away from Apple's actual price for this monitor. Considering that a few years ago a 20-inch monitor was selling for a similar amount, $3299 is not a bad price for a quality display -- particularly if your work (prepress, graphic design, photo editing, video editing, etc.) requires a lot of real estate.
Review the economics lessons alluded to earlier in the thread. Early adopters pay a premium because they want or need the product. No one is forcing them to pay $3299 for anything. If a user can't afford today's price tag, they wait until it goes down or until they can afford it. In the meantime, Apple gets to recoup its costs. As production ramps up, as Apple's bills get paid, and as fewer and fewer people are willing to pay $3299 for this fine product, the price will, without a doubt, go down. And all without Apple forcing anyone to do anything they didn't want to do.
Oh, those damn dirty capitalists!