"I am the Dread Pirate CowboyNeal."

I had a Lisa! It was the successor to my Apple ][+. It had a 5 MB hard drive you had to turn on a few minutes before the main computer so that the drive would spin up and stabilize before the Lisa tried to access it. The drive was as big as a 24" monitor laying horizontally and sat on top of the computer. I used Modula-2 to program it.

A couple of years later I worked at a printing company and their prepress department had dozens of Lisa's all happily composing away. Great money saver for the company.

Clear winner on this issue.

Nice troll. Do you have that figure?

The vast majority of people buy a PC at Best Buy, and use what's on it, crapware and all. Only a tiny percentage of consumers can delete partitions and install OS's.

Can any excess heat be concentrated and sent back into the central star, rendering it indistinguishable from natural fusion energy release? Apologies in advance if that's a hopelessly noob question.

With a link to goatse in the body text.

I'll add in Born in Hope, a LOTR masterpiece about the birth of Aragorn and the life & death of his father. If PJ claimed he filmed this, no one would blink, it's that good.

http://www.bornofhope.com/

No, I wasn't connected in any way other than being a fan....

I also have been a past user of the ever-popular Linksys. Back in those days I went the extra mile to be nice and set a password on the way out of the connection, since they would also leave "admin" open. Just doing my part for security...

The Billy Goat (great place, highly recommended) is only a couple of blocks from this school.

I'll assume, in the absence of any actual facts, the OP goes to that high school and had an unpleasant encounter with the normal clientele of that fine establishment.

If you try to play Drake in the Billy Goat:

You're gonna have a bad time.

if you think this is a real possibility in your line of work, there's always the classic teenager move - the decoy account. The decoy account using your real name gets very bland, vanilla posts with bland, vanilla pictures, just active enough to make it look real (Mary Sue now LIKE'S the United Way and Habitat for Humanity). The other account with a fake name has those ones of you with the stack of red solo cups on your head while you're passed out and the sharpie drawings all over your face. The employers get free access to your decoy account, which not coincidentally, links to your parents' accounts and other decoy accounts.

I want one of these for my next flight.

Using a cell phone after the door is closed and the flight attendant told you to turn your phone off?

Five year old loudly announcing their boredom every 30 seconds?

and the best...

Pilot refusing to stop announcing that on the left is the Grand Canyon, what the ground wind speed is at our destination, and giving a special welcome to our frequent fliers?

Don't carriers drop Apple? "We'll lose money on every transaction but make it up in volume" has nevevr worked.

Or, is it that profits are reduced, not eliminated? Value destruction means losing money, not reduced margins. Pretty important to distinguish. If they were losing huge buckets of money, we wouldn't see carriers clamoring to carry the devices. OTOH, selling at reduced margins at high volume can potentially be profit maximizing (e.g., Wal*Mart).

They've been there, done that:

http://www.punageothermalventure.com/

A 30 MW plant producing heat and energy from the world's most active volcano. An 8 MW addition was just approved, and the utility (HELCO) is looking to expand even further:

http://www.hawaii247.com/2012/01/06/helco-announces-plans-to-expand-geothermal-energy-on-the-big-island/

If there is an area that has a shot at 100% of their electricity from non-petroleum sources, it's the Big Island, with abundant wind, solar and geothermal options.

Dramatic oversimplification, but that's common in armchair marketers. After all, everyone's an expert in marketing, right?

Not so much.

An antecedent post got it right - marketing is assessing customer needs, assessing product features, communicating how they align, and influencing product development when they don't. Examples like Axe are fine in the consumer packaged goods industry, but you don't sell corn on sexy. You don't sell industrial supplies on rockstar vibe. You don't sell ERP systems on hipster cool. You do sell iPads and shower soap that way, true; but that isn't a representative sample of the world economy.

Sales is convincing you to buy. Very different skill set than Marketing.

I was a programmer for years, then wrote a marketing system for my employer, who promptly moved me to Marketing to make me eat my dog food. It was great, until we were bought by new corporate overlords who gutted us for our manufacturing plants and closed us down... 25 years and several company moves later I'm a VP in Marketing in a Really Big Company. Been on both sides. And dealing with programmers is still frustrating to me as well as my peers who do not share the same background.

Why? Because the programmers are typically condescending, do not value what their clients do, and take the fashionable mentality of "Tell us what problem you are trying to solve and WE'LL design your solution." They inevitably return with something very powerful, horribly ugly, and far too complex for our employees to use. IT departments need to do a little marketing themselves - and develop in partnership with their customers. Understand our needs, yes, but work with us on designing our solutions. An unusable power solution that doesn't get used did not solve my needs.