They are welcome, they just don't get their tickets gratis. If they bought a ticket they would be at the keynote. You can construct whatever narrative you like. Either this is apple imposing their iron fist on dissent or this is Gizmodo getting their comeuppance for buying stolen property and attempting to extort apple for it. In both cases apple (presumably) has the right to refuse to extend a welcome to a press organization. That may be unseemly, but it is true.

I don't think either party comes out looking good, but Gizmodo is really milking it. You bought a leaked phone, attempted to get confirmation that the phone was real to get a scoop, and you got burnt. Oh well. that shit happens. If you don't want to get burnt, don't play with fire. This isn't the pentagon or the white house, where some public service is gained through continued access by all parties--Apple is not a government agency. They are a private company. We may feel (As I do) that Apple SHOULD allow press to attend regardless of their orientation, but apple is under no mandate to do so. If we feel strongly enough, we should refuse to buy the products and/or own the stock on the basis of our reservations. Beyond that, we don't have much sway.

Considering that he's been making these kinds of comments on various subjects for a few years, no I don't think Larry saw it coming. I'm always amused by the deference granted to Sanger. He left a successful albeit chaotic project to form a total failure. He didn't fail because he lacked startup funds or media attention (he was funded and the newspapers ate up the Citizendium breakoff). He failed because he misjudged the nature of the internet--badly. What makes you think he has some grand strategic vision?

It's not CYA. Sanger hasn't been involved in wikipedia for almost half a decade. Sanger had hoped that his new project (Citizendium) would have taken off, but it didn't, so he spends his time making random comments about Wikipedia. Trolling and nonsense mostly.

Meaning that the problem is central to the nature of the beast. If you take issue with facebook's privacy conventions, adjustment of various settings isn't going to cut it. I didn't say it would doom fb. This privacy thing will get a lot of people to cancel accounts, but you aren't going to see a real exodus until something new comes along, and I don't think that will happen for a while.

As for the solutions you mention, sure. You can leave facebook just like you can leave google. But I'm not interested in dichotomous breakdowns where bad policies can only be compelled and surrendered rights aren't worth complaining about. Take most EULAs, for example. You have to click "yes" to agree--if you disagree you can choose not to use the product or service. But what does that really say about consent? Can you modify the EULA if you have a complaint? Fuck no. Can you impose a similar restraint on the company for the right to have you as a customer? No. :) The resulting "agreement" lies in a large gray area between full consent and compulsion. It gets worse as products become more ubiquitous. Who in this thread has NEVER clicked an EULA for windows? For Flash? Likewise Facebook (and to a lesser extent google) demand an implicit contract in return for their free services. We can say that users have to agree, but does that even really compute? Do most facebook users understand the tradeoffs? Do they share the idea that people should have "one identity"? Do they think it is duplicitous to have more than one face in the online world? I doubt it. More importantly, are they empowered to make changes apart from cutting off their friends entirely?

Insofar as those two things are separate. Both of these measures are security measures. The former a convenience measure designed hopefully to get people to use better passwords in exchange for not having to remember them on a half dozen mobile devices. The latter for damage control of sorts.

The fundamental problem remains: facebook's founder and corporate elite have a specific interpretation of privacy, identity and self. Their service is built around this interpretation and so their users are forced to share it, operationally. That is the problem which eats away at the core of facebook. Small feature changes only shore up the edges.

My point was that the first statement ("I do/don't like product A") does not at all lead into the second statement ("Product A will/will not succeed commercially").

But we're just dancing around the term "pc". I don't want to be able to rewrite the BT stack on my computer, FFS (which I can on a jailbroken iPad). I mean, a modern car won't let you at many of the internals that cars even 15 years ago would, but you still call it a car, right? The definition revolves around using it for it's main purposes. Granted you couldn't learn how to be an auto mechanic on a modern car, nor could you teach your son/daughter the fundamentals of a combustion engine simply using a modern car as an example. But it gets you from point a to point b. It doesn't cease to be a car because you can't tinker with certain parts. We can denigrate it all we want, but most people want a computer to be able to write, check emails, surf the web and watch movies (or play games). To a large extent, the ipad does that,

So?

I'm really puzzled by the persistence of this view and the rancor which is usually associated with it. First off, if people spent 500 bucks on an ipad knowing full well it doesn't do the suite of things you mention, who cares? I can't do econometric analysis or write software on my ipad, but I don't intend to. I sure as hell can surf the web, watch movies, answer emails, etc. You make a good point that the tablet market doesn't really devour the laptop market. But that doesn't generalize too well. How big is the segment of the market which wants a netbook but can't stomach a tablet? My guess is that it is pretty small. It may grow bigger as netbooks grow more powerful, but tablets are growing in power as well. The ipad wasn't even conceivable 3 years ago. Three years from now when netbook class devices can rival "real" laptops, what will the limits to tablets?

Man when you can point me to a non-vaporware tablet in the price range, do so. I'll take a look at it. Until then it seems absurd to compare a real product which shipped in the PAST with some notional product which may ship in the future.

Great. I have little use for a netbook. So....netbook sales are dropping? Anecdata doesn't cut it.

Nope. Just have to have a growth rate smaller than the expansion of the market. For a very crude analogy, take the employment ratio in the united states (you can find it at bls.gov). The employment ratio can fall even if the economy doesn't shed jobs, because people are instantly entering the labor market. If job growth doesn't keep up with labor force grow, the employment ratio falls.

Yeah, market saturation is at work here, but I don't think the contemporaneous nature should be overlooked. I suspect there are different spheres of customers. Some for whom a netbook is not replaceable by an ipad and some for whom an ipad offers an easy substitute. I think a case can be made that two things happened. First, the introduction of the ipad offered that substitute to our second group. Second, the growth of the ipad sucked out the oxygen in the netbook world, pushing manufacturers toward tablet devices.

That's just as much conjecture as sales projections through interviews. I have only your analysis (which doesn't seem at all derived from a distaste of one product) to guide me in determining if netbooks and tablets are satisfying different markets. What if they do serve different roles but the act of purchasing one or the other is a revelatory moment about value of the "other" computer? If I buy an ipad maybe I'll discover I don't need a netbook and vice versa. We need to wait six months or so to get a real feel for the demand on ipads, but I wouldn't be surprised that a decent segment of the population only buys one.

/. Is gonna give a sloppy bj to any platform that competes with the iPad, regardless of nature or any crank who hitched about apple regardless of credibility. There is traffic to be earned in stoking outrage about "the Steve" and RDF.