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Comment Re:they are all evil (Score 2) 378

While a la carte would be nice, a lot of the channels bundled together would fail to grab enough viewers to make them economically feasible. You know that very few people will actually watch all 26 of those channels that Viacom has. Instead they'll opt to watch a two or three. Remove the bundling and all of the sudden the provider doesn't make enough money to keep airing all of those channels. A few might still make it, but a large portion of those channels would just cease to exist. When you lose channels, you lose variety and eventually you end up paying the same amount of money or more for a small subset of the channels you can get now with bundling.

Comment Re:Perspective (Score 1) 438

This has little to do with offering better service and more to do with offering a product that is universally wanted. AT&T is typically regarded as the worst of the wireless carriers (in the US), but they still have the iPhone and have had it far longer than anyone else. Apple knows that people want the iPhone and can charge whatever they want for it and since the carriers know that people want the iPhone, they'll risk lower profit margins (per device) in the hopes of higher sales and hopefully come out ahead.

Comment UPC Codes (Score 1) 532

I've seen a couple of products at different stores that have the original UPC covered up with a store specific UPC that displays no useful information when you scan it with a phone. The product might be available online elsewhere, but it makes it really annoying to look up with your phone.

Comment Re:Kill Used Games? Say Hello to Piracy (Score 1) 543

How would piracy work for XBOX games? Computers and their OS's are fairly malleable, you can either modify the system to ignore bad keys or modify the game to not need a key. But with XBOX being a fairly closed computer system, how would one bypass something like a CD Key that requires online validation (that would probably them by tied to your account),especially when you have no access to the game files? I'm sure it's possible, but what would be required to bypass such a system and could the average person who just wanted to play their friends game be able to do it?

Alternatively this could just lead to a more Steam like system and games would be attached to your account and allow you to download on any device and play as long as you were logged in. I wouldn't mind that as long as they had sales on games like steam does and an offline mode.

Comment Re:The customer is the university..... (Score 1) 376

That's fine if you just want to learn University Physics on your own, but in college the professor will usually assign homework from problems in the book, which a comparable book won't have.

Also, for K-12, although the thought of being able to buy books for $15 sounds great I think the start-up/maint costs will be too much. Hardware will increase every year, and hardware requirements for software will increase to match that. You end up with 4-5 year lifespan before you have to buy new iPads because the old ones aren't compatible with new textbooks/educational software. Plus you add in the IT related costs of having to maintain a fleet of iPads along with replacements for breakage/insurance premiums. Most schools use books for many years before they replace them with newer editions.

I'm not trying to down play the how awesome it would be to go digital with textbooks, I just think with the resiliency of books and the cost of hardware this is not going to be the revolution apple thinks its going to be, right now anyway. (But then again, maybe I'm wrong)

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