Astro-tirfing may or may not be happening, but I seriously doubt that is the only cause. A lot of people simply don't care for endless anti-MS whining that doesn't have any point or make any sense. I've noticed far fewer down-mods of posts that make legitimate, novel and insightful criticisms of MS products and business practices than posts that whine about having to use IE for 30 seconds on a fresh install in order to download Firefox (or Opera/Safari/whatever) or do nothing more than remind us for the umpteen-millionth time that MS is a convicted monopoly.
I've been up and down-modded for both, and while the latter seems to be getting *slightly* more common, the former still works fine. My only sore point is that any time I talk about what a crappy experience the Win7 Beta was for me, I get downed... maybe they're running an astro-turf just to keep those stories from getting out, but I kind of doubt it.
Sounds Mexican, I'll bet he's an illegal just here to steal our welfare that requires a legal work history and privatized medicine you can't get for free even as a citizen. Plus, he probably sends his kids to school, the bastard.
To be fair, ubiquitous internet is still new enough that an extremely disproportionate number of users are only grades 7-10, so I'd say the problem is perhaps less dire than you might think.
That said, until the day comes when we can stop greedy anarchists from gutting education on the rationale that it somehow harms society to raise the standards of literacy and knowledge through public institutions, there is very little anyone can do to cure the disease rather than accommodate the symptoms. Don't hold your breath.
Some of the other comments have referred to other outrageous claims this company made, but given that other players in the market have unlimited* use plans for the same price, that one doesn't seem particularly implausible.
Reading comprehension isn't actually one of my issues, how about you?
Unlimited voice from Virgin Mobile in the US is $49.99 per month. Unlimited* everything through Boost Mobile is $50 per month.
Some of the other comments have referred to other outrageous claims this company made, but given that other players in the market have unlimited* use plans for the same price, that one doesn't seem particularly implausible.
Crack is, in essence, cocaine on steroids... and speed. And PCP.
In a lot of ways, crack really is the "all-American" drug, we took a decent import, then beefed the hell out of it by mixing it up with all sorts of other drugs and better living through science to make it stronger, faster, easier and cheaper and built one of the world's last unadulterated capitalist markets around it.
"If a device is simple enough that it can be reverse-engineered once it hits the market, there is no insetive for the society to ever grant a patent on such device."
Only if you don't count "rewarding ingenuity so that it might be repeated" as an incentive. There are all sorts of non-obvious devices out there which are trivial to reverse engineer, and it is absolutely of benefit to society that the people who invented them be rewarded for their effort. If the best and most reasonable benefit we can give them is a limited-time monopoly on making and selling the device, then so be it.
That said, there needs to be a whole lot more oversight and investigation put into our patent system because there are far too many flagrant abuses going both ways.
It is both "free as in beer" and open source (the source code is available for all to see), it just doesn't let you do certain things with it (ie. commercial use).
Also, from their FAQ:
"For (1) [Vanish core], we have chosen to, at least for now, use a UW-specific Academic License. Our choice of license is based largely on the fact that Vanish is still an experimental research prototype. You'll notice a number of terms and conditions with this license. Just so that there are no unexpected surprises, our license highlights the fact that Vanish will destroy data (which is not something one finds in normal applications). Also, as we note elsewhere in this FAQ, Vanish raises interesting questions from a legal perspective. Our license discusses how users must assess for themselves the legal implications of Vanish for their own situations. See the license itself for all the details."
Here in the future, we have CD-RWs that can be erased and rewritten. We also have DVD+/-RWs that do the same. Enjoy your stay, I'm pretty sure you'll find that things now are... um... rad?
No, he's saying that the people looking at the store can't possibly follow thousands of titles assaulting their eyeballs at once. They didn't actually get rid of the indie games section, they just aren't bending over backwards to promote shitty indie titles over major publishers' that sell better. I'm sure they have no problem with hyping the really good indie titles, I'd even suspect that they stand to make more money per unit on indie titles and would make a killing if one of them became a blockbuster smash hit, but 99.9% of the indie titles out there are amateurish dreck.
Keep in mind that they're actually selling two products here: games to the consumer, and game sales to the publisher. They need the latter to get the former, and they can't get it if they are unable to demonstrate an ability to promote... if they start pushing a bunch of crap that won't sell, that's a lot of bad data points.
Yep, they work very closely to ensure that all phones they vend have any cool features stripped out in order to promote even tangentially related paid services through Verizon. The phone can print via Bluetooth? Remove that so we can better sell data plans for upload to your home PC via the internet. The phone has a user facing camera to allow for videoconferencing? Yeah, that might hurt our services, so you'd better nix that too. Built in WiFi? We can't charge $1.99/mB for WiFi, are you crazy?
If they are doing work which doesn't need to be done, then by definition it's not very useful.
How about we retask them to building out infrastructure or educating children? At least that way we get something useful for making life better, rather than another device we don't need to make it shorter.
The vast majority of welfare payments are actually some sort of unemployment or disability insurance payout, virtually none are for people who simply claim they can't find any work and don't feel like trying to either.
They aren't mutually exclusive at all: you can simultaneously believe that there is no god and that you have no way of actually proving it. It is also possible to believe that there is no god and that you CAN prove it, or to believe that there is a god but you cannot prove it.
Agnosticism is a measure of how confident you are in your ability to accurately determine the potential existence of a deity, something which has no direct bearing on that determination.
Diesel DOES beat gasoline, so that's pretty much OK.
How about looking into the correlation between gallons of fuel used vs. dollar amount of damage done and basing rates on that? It would get around the city/highway issue, wouldn't penalize small cars, and would actually have a much greater effect on pollution (say what you will about AGW, pollution and vehicle emissions are a pretty serious health and ecology problem either way)
As far as privacy concerns... this doesn't need to be mandatory for private personal vehicles. If you're really concerned, then you don't have to report anything to your insurer and they will just assume you are in the top usage bracket (which would make it more expensive, but doing it any other way would just create a situation where heavy drivers don't report in order to save money) and you can pretend that ensures you greater privacy in some way. Commercial and government vehicles- including trucks, taxis, limos, patrol cars, maintenance vehicles, company cars and anything claimed as a business expense on your tax return- however, should have mandatory reporting. Businesses have very few rights, and privacy just isn't one of them.
Oblivion was crap. They kept all of the worst things about Morrowind, and got rid of all the best. The graphics were pretty, but frankly they had to make Cyrodiil too small in order to achieve it.
Possibly, but only because the markets are so good at grinding an actual productive economy to a screeching halt through speculation. It's a gift to Wall Street, not a serious ecological policy.
"Nationalized health care will cost more and provide less."
We currently spend a much larger percent of our GDP on health care than any other nation, including those with nationalized health care. The WHO has repeatedly reported that the world's most effective health care systems are overwhelmingly nationalized. There is scant evidence to support your assertion, and a large number of data points which directly contradict it.
"Not all Americans are as full of shit as you. They will wake up soon enough and leave you whimpering in the corner about how it's not fair."
Nor are many as full of shit as you. They woke up a few months ago and left you whimpering in the corner about how it's not fair.
"Hey, I can't sync my iPod with Windows Media Player! MICROSOFT MONOPOLY ABUSE!"
Probably, yes. Was that supposed to be inflammatory or shocking? Microsoft are assholes, and so are Apple, what's your point?
"Apple has no obligation whatsoever to let anyone else sync with iTunes, just like any other playlist/sync app has no obligation to let other software sync with theirs. There is nothing stopping Palm from making their own software or getting a plugin for something like WinAmp. In addition, unless you have DRM'ed iTunes music, you can pull all of that music right out and sync it with any other software that supports the Pre. Anyone who didn't see this coming a mile away is obviously not thinking very clearly."
No, nor does Microsoft have any obligation to not break iTunes on Windows. Palm isn't forcing users to download iTunes, the users are doing it for themselves because they like the Pre and they like iTunes. You're right about one thing though, anyone who didn't see this coming from a mile away probably aren't thinking clearly: Apple pull this kind of douchebaggery all the time. What I don't get is how you or anyone else can actually rationalize this as a fair and reasonable thing to do.
"Your argument is little more than petty Apple-bashing and holds no water. Apple isn't keeping people from using their music on the Pre. They're keeping people from using iTunes to sync with their Pre, which is very different. Like someone else said, it would be pretty simple for Palm to make an app that reads the iTunes XML file and syncs your music from there instead of within iTunes. There are a hundred different ways Palm can sync their device. Piggybacking on iTunes was one of the dumbest."
NONE OF WHICH ACTUALLY JUSTIFIES APPLE INTENTIONALLY, SPECIFICALLY, AND MALICIOUSLY PREVENTING THE PRE FROM SYNCING WITH ITUNES. Read your statement, then read that sentence one more time and let it sink in. Apple went out of their way to do this simply for the sake of doing it, they stand to gain absolutely nothing from it, the only possible explanation is that they are upset that people are buying the Pre instead of iPhones, and criticizing them for it is "little more than petty Apple-bashing that holds no water." Wow. I don't care if there are a thousand ways to put music on a Pre, and I don't care if syncing it with iTunes is somehow pointless or stupid or inferior, because that still isn't a good reason for Apple to do that. They could have improved their software to make it work better and marketed it as a feature, they could have fixed the incorrect identification of the Pre as an iPod, or they could have done nothing at all, but instead they chose to reduce functionality out of spite. Seriously.
"a) Can you connect an iPod and sync it with Zune software? I was not aware of this functionality. If not, it seems to me that your argument doesn't really work."
Somebody else does it too, so it's OK. That excuse stopped working in kindergarten. I never said Microsoft were saints, I said that Apple were being petty and obnoxious for no gain... a statement which is true regardless of whether or not you can sync an iPod with Zune software.
"b) Who is paying Apple when they buy a Palm Pre? You buy a Palm Pre, you download iTunes for free. What is Apple getting from this transaction? At no time do you need to pay Apple anything."
No, when you buy a Palm Pre, you buy a Palm Pre. When you buy an iPhone, you buy an iPhone. When you download iTunes for free, you download iTunes for free, and you never to to buy an iPod or iPhone to do it. Apple is welcome to start charging for iTunes whenever they want if they feel that they are entitled to make money off of everyone using it, or they can continue to give it away for free. Of course, that last might jeopardize their position as running the largest and most successful music store on Earth, but it would certainly keep those freeloading Pre owners out... right? You're intentionally glossing over the way things actually work and inserting logical non sequiturs in order to portray Palm and Pre owners as ripping off Apple in some way and to imply that Apple is entitled to make money on things they don't sell.
"If you're talking about buying music from iTMS, you can still do that and sync it with another app. Just like I could still buy music from the Zune Marketplace and sync it with my iPod via iTunes. Woops, no I couldn't, because Zune Marketplace songs are all DRM'd."
Microsoft aren't nice. Wah. If I cared, that would really bother me. If ITMS has no lock in, and the whole thing is irrelevant... then why bother willfully breaking compatibility in the first place? Oh, right, because people like using iTunes, and that has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they like using a Palm Pre, but Apple wants more money and they're The Good Guys (tm) because you can't sync an iPod to Zune software and that makes it totally reasonable to make Palm waste an extra hour and a half to unbreak something that never needed to be broken. Microsoft, incidentally, remains completely uninvolved in the whole thing, but they still aren't nice. Wah.
"Wait, who's the villain in your argument again?"
That would be Apple. The company going out of their way to break compatibility and interoperability purely out of spite. Try to keep up.
"Maybe if Google comes out with an mp3 player and an app to sync with it, then we can talk about how they're bigger dicks than Microsoft. But at this point, if you're talking the lesser of two evils, Microsoft ain't it."
Wait... what? Apple makes an indefensible dick move to screw over Pre owners who also use iTunes, and now I'm waiting for Google to release an MP3 player and syncing software so I can assert that they're bigger dicks than Microsoft? If Microsoft went out of their way to make sure that the Palm Pre couldn't interact with Windows because they were bitter that it doesn't use Windows Mobile, or if Google made sure that the Pre couldn't open GMail because Palm didn't make their search engine the default for their web browser they would be jerks. Apple went out of their way to make sure the Pre couldn't interact with iTunes because they are bitter about it not being an iPhone. Even if all three happened, Apple would STILL be assholes, and they would be joined by Microsoft and Google in that.
So you'd rather spend more money on inferior health care than have the government pay the bill for you (with, ultimately, your money)? We don't have the best health care in the world, we do have the most expensive. Seems like strong evidence that an inefficient government might be worse at bilking you than an extremely efficient for-profit corporation. If you want to pay for your health care out of pocket, that's great, but don't drag those of us without a masochistic streak down with you.
Unless, that is, people realize that gold isn't actually good for much of anything and stop accepting it in trade. Gold is valuable solely because people believe it to be valuable, but when you get down to it there's no pile of gold big enough to replace food, water and shelter. You can't really say that a pack of cigarettes won't ever gain value compared to an ounce of gold, because they are completely dissimilar... cigarettes are a consumable good in fluctuating demand, where gold is just another currency.
You might also want to look into some of the different ways that cultures outside of Europe view(ed) gold, I think you'd be surprised at just how universal a currency it actually wasn't before European explorers and conquerors imposing it around the world. Turns out that very heavy, shiny yellow metal too malleable to be used for anything other than decoration just isn't worth much to a lot of people.
That's the biggest load of BS I've ever seen. If Apple really cared about brand dilution rather than breaking interoperability, they would have made iTunes detect the Pre and sync it under a properly labeled tab rather than just break syncing, it wouldn't require appreciably more code than what they did, and it wouldn't be a ridiculous dick move either... or completely futile as this is likely to prove when Palm works around it in under a week.
Apple is being petty and obnoxious to their own PAYING CUSTOMERS simply because some people made the cardinal sin of buying a semi-related product they didn't make. I can only imagine what the people honestly trying to defend that would say if Microsoft did this instead of Apple, or even if Google did this instead of Apple.
Slashdot Mirror
Astro-tirfing may or may not be happening, but I seriously doubt that is the only cause. A lot of people simply don't care for endless anti-MS whining that doesn't have any point or make any sense. I've noticed far fewer down-mods of posts that make legitimate, novel and insightful criticisms of MS products and business practices than posts that whine about having to use IE for 30 seconds on a fresh install in order to download Firefox (or Opera/Safari/whatever) or do nothing more than remind us for the umpteen-millionth time that MS is a convicted monopoly.
I've been up and down-modded for both, and while the latter seems to be getting *slightly* more common, the former still works fine. My only sore point is that any time I talk about what a crappy experience the Win7 Beta was for me, I get downed... maybe they're running an astro-turf just to keep those stories from getting out, but I kind of doubt it.
Sounds Mexican, I'll bet he's an illegal just here to steal our welfare that requires a legal work history and privatized medicine you can't get for free even as a citizen. Plus, he probably sends his kids to school, the bastard.
To be fair, ubiquitous internet is still new enough that an extremely disproportionate number of users are only grades 7-10, so I'd say the problem is perhaps less dire than you might think.
That said, until the day comes when we can stop greedy anarchists from gutting education on the rationale that it somehow harms society to raise the standards of literacy and knowledge through public institutions, there is very little anyone can do to cure the disease rather than accommodate the symptoms. Don't hold your breath.
Seems you missed my second paragraph:
Some of the other comments have referred to other outrageous claims this company made, but given that other players in the market have unlimited* use plans for the same price, that one doesn't seem particularly implausible.
Reading comprehension isn't actually one of my issues, how about you?
Who wants to mix a microwave with porno and Sar Trek memorabilia? It sounds like a recipe for pain, fumes and sterilization.
Unlimited voice from Virgin Mobile in the US is $49.99 per month. Unlimited* everything through Boost Mobile is $50 per month.
Some of the other comments have referred to other outrageous claims this company made, but given that other players in the market have unlimited* use plans for the same price, that one doesn't seem particularly implausible.
*supposedly
Crack is, in essence, cocaine on steroids... and speed. And PCP.
In a lot of ways, crack really is the "all-American" drug, we took a decent import, then beefed the hell out of it by mixing it up with all sorts of other drugs and better living through science to make it stronger, faster, easier and cheaper and built one of the world's last unadulterated capitalist markets around it.
Can there be a rule requiring all /b/fags to quaff bleach? That would solve a lot of problems for everyone.
"If a device is simple enough that it can be reverse-engineered once it hits the market, there is no insetive for the society to ever grant a patent on such device."
Only if you don't count "rewarding ingenuity so that it might be repeated" as an incentive. There are all sorts of non-obvious devices out there which are trivial to reverse engineer, and it is absolutely of benefit to society that the people who invented them be rewarded for their effort. If the best and most reasonable benefit we can give them is a limited-time monopoly on making and selling the device, then so be it.
That said, there needs to be a whole lot more oversight and investigation put into our patent system because there are far too many flagrant abuses going both ways.
It is both "free as in beer" and open source (the source code is available for all to see), it just doesn't let you do certain things with it (ie. commercial use).
Also, from their FAQ:
"For (1) [Vanish core], we have chosen to, at least for now, use a UW-specific Academic License. Our choice of license is based largely on the fact that Vanish is still an experimental research prototype. You'll notice a number of terms and conditions with this license. Just so that there are no unexpected surprises, our license highlights the fact that Vanish will destroy data (which is not something one finds in normal applications). Also, as we note elsewhere in this FAQ, Vanish raises interesting questions from a legal perspective. Our license discusses how users must assess for themselves the legal implications of Vanish for their own situations. See the license itself for all the details."
Doesn't seem so nefarious in that context.
That just raises the new question of: what were you doing with the lawnmower!?!?!?!?!?!
It will also appear to be made of rock coal, which might be something of a problem.
The real question here is:if people were already living here, how could Vikings OR Colombus genuinely have been considered to discover anything?
Here in the future, we have CD-RWs that can be erased and rewritten. We also have DVD+/-RWs that do the same. Enjoy your stay, I'm pretty sure you'll find that things now are... um... rad?
No, he's saying that the people looking at the store can't possibly follow thousands of titles assaulting their eyeballs at once. They didn't actually get rid of the indie games section, they just aren't bending over backwards to promote shitty indie titles over major publishers' that sell better. I'm sure they have no problem with hyping the really good indie titles, I'd even suspect that they stand to make more money per unit on indie titles and would make a killing if one of them became a blockbuster smash hit, but 99.9% of the indie titles out there are amateurish dreck.
Keep in mind that they're actually selling two products here: games to the consumer, and game sales to the publisher. They need the latter to get the former, and they can't get it if they are unable to demonstrate an ability to promote... if they start pushing a bunch of crap that won't sell, that's a lot of bad data points.
Yep, they work very closely to ensure that all phones they vend have any cool features stripped out in order to promote even tangentially related paid services through Verizon. The phone can print via Bluetooth? Remove that so we can better sell data plans for upload to your home PC via the internet. The phone has a user facing camera to allow for videoconferencing? Yeah, that might hurt our services, so you'd better nix that too. Built in WiFi? We can't charge $1.99/mB for WiFi, are you crazy?
If they are doing work which doesn't need to be done, then by definition it's not very useful.
How about we retask them to building out infrastructure or educating children? At least that way we get something useful for making life better, rather than another device we don't need to make it shorter.
The vast majority of welfare payments are actually some sort of unemployment or disability insurance payout, virtually none are for people who simply claim they can't find any work and don't feel like trying to either.
They aren't mutually exclusive at all: you can simultaneously believe that there is no god and that you have no way of actually proving it. It is also possible to believe that there is no god and that you CAN prove it, or to believe that there is a god but you cannot prove it.
Agnosticism is a measure of how confident you are in your ability to accurately determine the potential existence of a deity, something which has no direct bearing on that determination.
Diesel DOES beat gasoline, so that's pretty much OK.
How about looking into the correlation between gallons of fuel used vs. dollar amount of damage done and basing rates on that? It would get around the city/highway issue, wouldn't penalize small cars, and would actually have a much greater effect on pollution (say what you will about AGW, pollution and vehicle emissions are a pretty serious health and ecology problem either way)
As far as privacy concerns... this doesn't need to be mandatory for private personal vehicles. If you're really concerned, then you don't have to report anything to your insurer and they will just assume you are in the top usage bracket (which would make it more expensive, but doing it any other way would just create a situation where heavy drivers don't report in order to save money) and you can pretend that ensures you greater privacy in some way. Commercial and government vehicles- including trucks, taxis, limos, patrol cars, maintenance vehicles, company cars and anything claimed as a business expense on your tax return- however, should have mandatory reporting. Businesses have very few rights, and privacy just isn't one of them.
Oblivion was crap. They kept all of the worst things about Morrowind, and got rid of all the best. The graphics were pretty, but frankly they had to make Cyrodiil too small in order to achieve it.
"Cap and Trade will destroy the economy
Possibly, but only because the markets are so good at grinding an actual productive economy to a screeching halt through speculation. It's a gift to Wall Street, not a serious ecological policy.
"Nationalized health care will cost more and provide less."
We currently spend a much larger percent of our GDP on health care than any other nation, including those with nationalized health care. The WHO has repeatedly reported that the world's most effective health care systems are overwhelmingly nationalized. There is scant evidence to support your assertion, and a large number of data points which directly contradict it.
"Not all Americans are as full of shit as you. They will wake up soon enough and leave you whimpering in the corner about how it's not fair."
Nor are many as full of shit as you. They woke up a few months ago and left you whimpering in the corner about how it's not fair.
"Hey, I can't sync my iPod with Windows Media Player! MICROSOFT MONOPOLY ABUSE!"
Probably, yes. Was that supposed to be inflammatory or shocking? Microsoft are assholes, and so are Apple, what's your point?
"Apple has no obligation whatsoever to let anyone else sync with iTunes, just like any other playlist/sync app has no obligation to let other software sync with theirs. There is nothing stopping Palm from making their own software or getting a plugin for something like WinAmp. In addition, unless you have DRM'ed iTunes music, you can pull all of that music right out and sync it with any other software that supports the Pre. Anyone who didn't see this coming a mile away is obviously not thinking very clearly."
No, nor does Microsoft have any obligation to not break iTunes on Windows. Palm isn't forcing users to download iTunes, the users are doing it for themselves because they like the Pre and they like iTunes. You're right about one thing though, anyone who didn't see this coming from a mile away probably aren't thinking clearly: Apple pull this kind of douchebaggery all the time. What I don't get is how you or anyone else can actually rationalize this as a fair and reasonable thing to do.
"Your argument is little more than petty Apple-bashing and holds no water. Apple isn't keeping people from using their music on the Pre. They're keeping people from using iTunes to sync with their Pre, which is very different. Like someone else said, it would be pretty simple for Palm to make an app that reads the iTunes XML file and syncs your music from there instead of within iTunes. There are a hundred different ways Palm can sync their device. Piggybacking on iTunes was one of the dumbest."
NONE OF WHICH ACTUALLY JUSTIFIES APPLE INTENTIONALLY, SPECIFICALLY, AND MALICIOUSLY PREVENTING THE PRE FROM SYNCING WITH ITUNES. Read your statement, then read that sentence one more time and let it sink in. Apple went out of their way to do this simply for the sake of doing it, they stand to gain absolutely nothing from it, the only possible explanation is that they are upset that people are buying the Pre instead of iPhones, and criticizing them for it is "little more than petty Apple-bashing that holds no water." Wow. I don't care if there are a thousand ways to put music on a Pre, and I don't care if syncing it with iTunes is somehow pointless or stupid or inferior, because that still isn't a good reason for Apple to do that. They could have improved their software to make it work better and marketed it as a feature, they could have fixed the incorrect identification of the Pre as an iPod, or they could have done nothing at all, but instead they chose to reduce functionality out of spite. Seriously.
"a) Can you connect an iPod and sync it with Zune software? I was not aware of this functionality. If not, it seems to me that your argument doesn't really work."
Somebody else does it too, so it's OK. That excuse stopped working in kindergarten. I never said Microsoft were saints, I said that Apple were being petty and obnoxious for no gain... a statement which is true regardless of whether or not you can sync an iPod with Zune software.
"b) Who is paying Apple when they buy a Palm Pre? You buy a Palm Pre, you download iTunes for free. What is Apple getting from this transaction? At no time do you need to pay Apple anything."
No, when you buy a Palm Pre, you buy a Palm Pre. When you buy an iPhone, you buy an iPhone. When you download iTunes for free, you download iTunes for free, and you never to to buy an iPod or iPhone to do it. Apple is welcome to start charging for iTunes whenever they want if they feel that they are entitled to make money off of everyone using it, or they can continue to give it away for free. Of course, that last might jeopardize their position as running the largest and most successful music store on Earth, but it would certainly keep those freeloading Pre owners out... right? You're intentionally glossing over the way things actually work and inserting logical non sequiturs in order to portray Palm and Pre owners as ripping off Apple in some way and to imply that Apple is entitled to make money on things they don't sell.
"If you're talking about buying music from iTMS, you can still do that and sync it with another app. Just like I could still buy music from the Zune Marketplace and sync it with my iPod via iTunes. Woops, no I couldn't, because Zune Marketplace songs are all DRM'd."
Microsoft aren't nice. Wah. If I cared, that would really bother me. If ITMS has no lock in, and the whole thing is irrelevant... then why bother willfully breaking compatibility in the first place? Oh, right, because people like using iTunes, and that has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they like using a Palm Pre, but Apple wants more money and they're The Good Guys (tm) because you can't sync an iPod to Zune software and that makes it totally reasonable to make Palm waste an extra hour and a half to unbreak something that never needed to be broken. Microsoft, incidentally, remains completely uninvolved in the whole thing, but they still aren't nice. Wah.
"Wait, who's the villain in your argument again?"
That would be Apple. The company going out of their way to break compatibility and interoperability purely out of spite. Try to keep up.
"Maybe if Google comes out with an mp3 player and an app to sync with it, then we can talk about how they're bigger dicks than Microsoft. But at this point, if you're talking the lesser of two evils, Microsoft ain't it."
Wait... what? Apple makes an indefensible dick move to screw over Pre owners who also use iTunes, and now I'm waiting for Google to release an MP3 player and syncing software so I can assert that they're bigger dicks than Microsoft? If Microsoft went out of their way to make sure that the Palm Pre couldn't interact with Windows because they were bitter that it doesn't use Windows Mobile, or if Google made sure that the Pre couldn't open GMail because Palm didn't make their search engine the default for their web browser they would be jerks. Apple went out of their way to make sure the Pre couldn't interact with iTunes because they are bitter about it not being an iPhone. Even if all three happened, Apple would STILL be assholes, and they would be joined by Microsoft and Google in that.
Wait, who's the good guy in your argument again?
So you'd rather spend more money on inferior health care than have the government pay the bill for you (with, ultimately, your money)? We don't have the best health care in the world, we do have the most expensive. Seems like strong evidence that an inefficient government might be worse at bilking you than an extremely efficient for-profit corporation. If you want to pay for your health care out of pocket, that's great, but don't drag those of us without a masochistic streak down with you.
Unless, that is, people realize that gold isn't actually good for much of anything and stop accepting it in trade. Gold is valuable solely because people believe it to be valuable, but when you get down to it there's no pile of gold big enough to replace food, water and shelter. You can't really say that a pack of cigarettes won't ever gain value compared to an ounce of gold, because they are completely dissimilar... cigarettes are a consumable good in fluctuating demand, where gold is just another currency.
You might also want to look into some of the different ways that cultures outside of Europe view(ed) gold, I think you'd be surprised at just how universal a currency it actually wasn't before European explorers and conquerors imposing it around the world. Turns out that very heavy, shiny yellow metal too malleable to be used for anything other than decoration just isn't worth much to a lot of people.
s/interesting/boring
That's the biggest load of BS I've ever seen. If Apple really cared about brand dilution rather than breaking interoperability, they would have made iTunes detect the Pre and sync it under a properly labeled tab rather than just break syncing, it wouldn't require appreciably more code than what they did, and it wouldn't be a ridiculous dick move either... or completely futile as this is likely to prove when Palm works around it in under a week.
Apple is being petty and obnoxious to their own PAYING CUSTOMERS simply because some people made the cardinal sin of buying a semi-related product they didn't make. I can only imagine what the people honestly trying to defend that would say if Microsoft did this instead of Apple, or even if Google did this instead of Apple.