In the world of marketing that is one of the worst or best things that can happen to a brand, depending on who you ask. In extreme cases people might not realize a particular name is actually just a brand name (such as escalator or thermos). It then becomes very difficult to market your product properly and next to impossible to fix it after it's already happened. Worse, if you let your brand become that genericized you risk losing the ability to enforce your trademark. In the case of thermos or escalator, the two companies can no longer sue people for using those two terms because of how widespread those names have become.

I was just trying to stick with the shoes mentioned in the original post. Poor example, I agree.

And it really has little to do with protection of the customer and more to do with limiting losses and easier quality control.

This potential privacy issue also lacks an implementation, but still represents more information than anyone specifically needs to have.

If those shoes were found to contain pieces of jagged metal as a result of a manufacturing issue, then a quick RFID scan could give a company the details it needs to issue a recall with as narrow a scope as possible. Perhaps less an issue with shoes, but for things like food, this information would invaluable. If they narrowed down an issue to one particular manufacturing line using RFID they could limit their recall to hundreds of items instead of tens of thousands. As it stands food companies try to cram as much information into some cryptic codes on their packaging, but RFID would allow even more information to be stored on the product in a way that would be much easier to decipher (with the aid of a reader that is).

A friend of mine was having issues in the parking lot of their apartment building. Kids were breaking windows and damaging locks to get inside cars to steal change, sunglasses, cds, etc. After breaking in they would sometimes slash the seats if there wasn't anything of value to steal. It was happening every couple months and was costing my friend a lot of money because each time it wasn't meeting their deductible. When talking to the insurance company about reducing their deductible to be able to cover these costs the agent, off the record, told my friend just to remove anything of value and leave the doors unlocked (and by no means tell the insurance company you are doing this). The kids will just go inside your car, see there is nothing to steal and move on. After issues with the kids slashing the seats it seems like a crazy move, but it works. I guess the theory is that the kids resort to damaging the vehicle after being frustrated that there was nothing to steal after expending the effort and time they used to get into it. That was 2 years ago and they haven't had any damage to their cars since.

It's funny what can be done to protect your property. In certain situations, sometimes the easiest and cheapest things work the best.

I didn't mean to imply that each individual bottle has to hold the thousands of pounds of weight, but the bottle as a part of the whole layer.

In response to Todd: It deforms on purpose. That is how it holds that weight. A bottle that doesn't flex will break under enough pressure. By allowing it to flex in a controlled manner (with the aid of an hourglass shape and ridges placed in certain locations to stop it from buckling) you can minimize the amount of material and maximize the strength by distributing the weight.

So try taking an unopened bottle and do just what you said, try to crush it with one hand on the cap and one hand on the bottom. Try to get it to break. Let me know how that turns out for you.

They use different plastics because they are produced using different methods. The bottle is produced by injection molding the top part with the threading and blow molding the rest. There are many things that have to be taken into account when choosing the right polymer to use (and price is only one of them). The ability to blow mold, the strength of the plastic (ie the ability to stack several cases of water on top of each other, amounting to potentially thousands of pounds), the flexibility (A bottle with little flexibility could puncture easily. The injection molded lid then has to have different characteristics in order to work properly. Trust me, the makers are not stupid. A water bottle is incredibly complex and it takes enormous amounts of knowledge and experience to create. You need understandings of biology, chemistry, physics, engineering and economics to design that little thing that costs pennies to make.

To summarize: Try and design something that has the following characteristics (which is only a fraction of what is required) then come back and tell me that bottle designers are stupid:

1)Has to contain a liquid without leaking
2)Has to be relatively puncture proof
3)Has to be lightweight
4)Has to be cheap
5)Needs to be manufactured quickly and must be able to be produced by machine perfectly every time.
6)Has to be able to support thousands of pounds while filled with liquid without breaking or deforming (this isn't an exaggeration. Cases of water will be stacked 6 or 7 tall on a pallet then two or three more full pallets will be stacked on top of that.)
7)Has to be ergonomic
8)Has to withstand heat and freezing temperatures and the tendency for the liquid inside to expand when frozen
9)Has to have a unique shape for branding purposes and still meet all the above criteria
10)Needs to be designed to maximize the quantity on a pallet and in turn maximize the quantity on a truck. Most bottles have short necks for this reason (then go and try and create a short neck that is capable of withstanding weight)
11) The lid needs to be able to be removed easily, but still is able to withstand the weight, the pressure and the temperature changes without leaking.

You have no idea how potentially evil these signs can be. The thing is, age is very tough to identify with certainty with this sort of software (gender is really easy). If you want to know someone's age you first have to know something else about them....Their race. Now it's possible that they're only designing these things to measure people of Japanese descent, but if they're not, I'm willing to bet you that they also check for race to calculate age. The technology exists. I know, I've seen it in action. It works about 95% of the time for gender and they're getting better (I'm part of the 5% that it thinks is the wrong gender...sigh). There would be obvious issues with checking for race so if it does its most likely only using it for calculating age and not being stored, but the ability is most certainly there.

For some reason we concentrate on what we add to our diet and the health effects and ignore what we subtract from our diets. Should we be concerned for our health that our corn has caterpillar genes? Maybe, but probably not. But what about the things that genetic manipulation (GMOs and selective breeding alike) are removing from our food? We have had a pretty poor track record when it comes to that sort of thing. A hundred years ago there were those who considered protein a 'poison' and not essential to our diet. Another perfect example is scurvy. Time and time again people became inflicted with the disease and time and time again they had to 'rediscover' that the disease wasn't caused by some communicable disease, but a lack of Vitamin C. Even then people still didn't fully understand the necessity of Vitamin C and replaced Vitamin C rich citrus with other acids thinking they were equally good at preventing scurvy...with, in hindsight, expectedly poor results. Hell, even in the early 20th century people were still forgetting scurvy was the result of a lack of something in the diet and again thinking it was the result of bacteria from tainted meat. We would even pasteurize milk to get rid of bacteria, destroy the vitamin C in the process then wonder why our young children came down with the disease.

The one issue I see arising from GMO crops is the removal of what at the time seems like unnecessary or unwanted traits then find out that those traits are essential to our health. Much like when we started refining wheat to improve its shelf life, not realizing that its shelf life is improving because you've eliminated many of the nutrients bacterias and molds like to feed off of, the same nutrients that are important to our health.

Before we start removing these traits from our food maybe we should be making damn sure that these traits don't play a pivotal role in our overall health. But frankly, even if we exhausted all available research on the matter, I still wouldn't trust it, because we've shown numerous times that what we don't know could fill a dump truck.

A friend of mine who worked for a major software company in a division that was very much connected to video games told me something interesting a few years ago.

There was concern that video games were running full speed into a dead end and there wasn't anything anybody could do about it. At the time there really wasn't such thing as a 'casual gamer', you either played games or you didn't. And those who played games were demanding ever increasing realistic graphics, massive games, orchestrated music and rendered cutscenes. Basically for most gamers to be satisfied a game would have to cost increasing millions in development costs. It was becoming tougher and tougher to develop a game that would make a profit unless you were one of the big guys developing the next sequel. And eventually even they would have to deal with the issue too.

The big problem was that the number of people in the gaming market wasn't really increasing. Part of this he guessed was the result of these bigger and more impressive games requiring newer, more complex and more expensive hardware that scared a lot of people away from gaming.

With this soon to be unsustainable trend, him and his colleagues guessed that the gaming industry would collapse in as little as 5 to 10 years unless something drastic happened. He had even started sharpening his skills in other areas in the event he would have to jump ship.

At one point there was some hope for the Game Cube. Nintendo had attempted to bring in new gamers with its less intimidating system and if it had worked would have provided developers with a more profitable system to create games for. The more casual gamers brought in by the Game Cube would haven't had the same demands as traditional gamers in terms of graphics and power and could have reduced the financial strain involved with creating the blockbusters that hardcore gamers were expecting. Unfortunately it failed. Traditional gamers shunned the system for its family friendly style and Nintendo was never really able to sell it to the families well enough to create the influx of casual gamers they were hoping to get.

When the GameCube failed there were some in the industry that were getting ready to pack their bags, and I'm sure a collective sigh a relief when the Wii managed to succeed where the GC could not. With an influx of new gamers whose only demand for a game that it be fun, the industry is healthier than it has ever been. A few years ago there were huge portions of the population who wouldn't have been able to pick up a video game without their friends turning their nose up at them. Now it's socially acceptable for almost anyone to play video games. We're now seeing scores of games that are relying more upon innovation and fun and less on graphical power and it's changing the industry from the bottom up.

If Sony killed the video game industry with the PS2, then Nintendo revived it with the Wii.

My friend, let's call him Futeroot, had bought an R4 card for his DS after someone stole about a dozen of his legitimately bought games (Probably double that $220 value). Not wanting to repurchase all those games again and with no new decent games out, the DS unit got shelved and forgotten. Then one day a friend of Futeroot's told him about the R4 card and Futeroot thought 'Great! Now I can play Mario Kart again and not have to pay twice!'

The DS got dusted off, and later a shiny new DS was purchased, and despite the availability of thousands of games for free, several games were purchased in this revival (New Mario Bros, Zelda, Guitar Hero, etc... easily over the $220 value)

In the end you could say that the piracy of some of those games created a positive value of several hundred dollars, but if you were to look at the files downloaded, you would conclude that piracy in this case created a loss of at least $10,000. That's a pretty big discrepancy.

Now, this is a single case in millions of different cases, but it illustrates that the situation is far more complex then a simple 'lets look at the download numbers and multiply' scenario. In this case there are a few things worth pointing out:

-Futeroot couldn't dream of affording the $10,000 worth of games, so in no way, shape or form should that be considered lost sales.

-When files were downloaded they were downloaded in bulk for two main reasons
1) It is easier to download a big torrent with multiple games than having to track down and find individual game files and
2) There are a lot more seeders for torrents that contain multiple games than ones for individual games. As a result a couple hundred games might be downloaded when only a dozen or two are even wanted. Sorry EA, Futeroot didn't want a copy of MySims, but keep dreaming.

-Additionally, while engaged in this DS revival, Futeroot had convinced 3 people directly to get DSes of their own, who each went out and bought games for their new DSes.

That's what I love about Apple fanboys. When Apple ultimately removes some feature or functionality, the fanboys simply convince themselves they never needed it to begin with. When applications for doing a specific are removed from the App store, fanboys will happily use only Apple's authorized specific task app. When websites fail to work for containing Flash, fanboys will happily flock to Apple-friendly websites and pretend that the content on the other websites weren't worth viewing anyways. And when a mac eventually de-evolves into a webcam with a wi-fi connection, fanboys will loyally claim that this and only this was what they were looking for in a computer .

The Sims is such an excellent example of corporate greed at work. The amount of money one could potentially spend on the series is staggering. Let's say someone buys the Sims 1 and all 7 expansion packs, you're looking at $300-$400. Then the Sims 2 comes out and stripped back to its base game so they can release another 8 expansion packs (we're at around $800 at this point). They realize that there is a huge demand for extra objects such as furniture and clothing and people are willing to pay for them without the added content an expansion pack normally provides so they end up releasing 'stuff packs', 10 in total (Priced cheaper, but still raising our total to around $1000). During the process of releasing stuff packs they realize they can make even MORE money by licencing out the packs and the H&M and Ikea packs are born.

That brings us to the Sims 3. Again, stripped back to its most basic elements. Hell, some elements that have been around since the very first game have even been REMOVED, such as the hot tub. Realizing that objects that are made by third parties are incredibly popular (and that some people are even willing to pay for them), they take advantage by 1) Making it difficult for third parties to create their own objects and 2) Introducing their own library of downloadable objects (for a fee of course).

That library was up and online at least a month prior to the game being released, selling extra objects for a game that hadn't even been completed yet. It's one thing to release updates after a game is released, but to purposely leave things out with the intention of selling them as 'extras' is the definition of greed.

Already we have an expansion pack released with another on its way plus one 'stuff pack'. Add that to the total, plus add on some pay per download objects and you are easily over $1000.

To date, the Sims 3 has sold over 5.9 Million copies. If you add up all the expansion packs, they have sold over 100 million copies. They have made billions on this franchise and yet they still are trying to nickel and dime people.

Well, that's exaggerating a little, but they would most certainly have an impact. Think about it for a minute, think about all the time that gets invested into an MMO. Most console games have a total play time of maybe, 10-20 hours? For an MMO we're taking at least 10 hours a week for months on end. That's -one- game that is taking up the time that could have been spent playing dozens of other games. I know that when I had played MMOs I had stopped playing most other PC games and certainly stopped buying them. There is a certain obligation that comes with MMO gaming. The financial one: the fact that you're making monthly payments to play this game so when given the choice between the mmo and playing another game, you should probably spend your time in the game you've already invested in. And the social obligation: When other guild members are expecting you to contribute your time and the requirement to keep leveling to stay on par with your friends or risk playing alone when they start outlevelling you.

So while the gaming industry grows, so do MMOs as a portion of PC game sales (they're not really going to affect console game sales, relatively speaking). And consequently as MMO popularity grows within that PC games sector, other game sales are bound to suffer on a factor more than what is going into the growing MMO portion.

And with so many game companies trying to jump onto the mmo bandwagon, it's only going to get worse. It's a chain reaction that will make MMOs the only financially sensible type of PC game to make (other than browser based, ad-fueled game market that target casual and non-gamers)

And nobody. Nobody ever says 'goodbye' when hanging up the phone. They usually just end the call after the end of a sentence, giving the person on the other end no warning or no real reason to believe that the conversation has ended. I always like to picture the person on the other end saying something along the lines of :"Hello? Hello?! You jackass, did you just hang up on me? ... Hello?"