Honestly, I've seen some VERY good uses of Segways (Most obviously one used by a physically disabled person in place of a wheelchair, which is just a beautiful use of technology)

I also wouldn't use one myself, not because it's dorky but because I already have a system built in for movement over regular distances. Feet. I LOVE walking and I for one am happy to walk all day if I can. Which is the problem, as the best market for normal sales would be people in walking friendly places.

'cep people just walk.

The place where I live has a family that each have them, We'll see them go into our town center with them, and all I can ever think is... Why not just walk? What's the rush?

Actually from a free market standpoint, YES. Because in a truly free market I should have the right to decide where to spend my money. But how can I make an informed decision unless company's label their product fully and accurately? That would force them to compete and let the consumer decide who deserves sales.

Plus from a food safety standpoint, yes everyone should know their suppliers and ingredients of every product in the chain. There's simply no excuse in this day and age to not have that information.

Well an obvious way is to complain if you're an Apple customer. Honestly, companies behave this way because a lot of very ridiculous minority groups raise a HUGE fuss against stuff like this on TV, or in the AppStore or whatnot. But the majority of people who could care less, or simply think parents should look at the ratings before handing it to their kids? They don't bother to raise a fuss. They shrug and move on. So yes, buying android is a solution (and a decent one at that, after all, taking away money from the bottom line is a hugely important tactic in getting companies to act in the way we the consumer's would like), but let them know WHY you're buying Android and are no longer a Apple customer.

So seriously, e-mail Tim Cook and say this is not how you want the AppStore on the device you paid for run.

feedback
http://www.apple.com/feedback/
http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html

support
http://www.apple.com/support/mac/app-store/

And I'm sure anyone on this site can find Tim Cook's email without too much trouble. If you can't then why are you on /.?

No amount of money (And $1k is nothing when talking product development), guarantees returns. So in this case, Apple rejecting the concepts is just another risk to add onto the list.

If it's the straw that breaks the camel's back, then pick a different platform to develop the concept for. Except every other platform carries it's own risks and benefits.

The catch is that while sites like /. are full of people who are vocal about caring, most of the customer base just simply doesn't. Hell, I highly doubt it's actually 18 million people. Given that for instance I'd be counted in that number, except I don't jailbreak my current device. I only jailbreak older devices just to mess with it.
Plus a lot of those are going to be the same people jailbreaking multiple devices.

But lets assume for a second there really are 18 million customers who jailbreak: Then those 18 million customers should tell Apple. If all 18 million customers legitimately (I mean, don't spam, be polite) emailed Tim Cook asking for Apple to add a "Root" mode on the phones, you might just get policy change.

But no, people mess around with it because it's available, but very few seem to make purchase decisions based on it's availability. Apple is going to close these security holes, because they are security holes that are now known to everyone.

Does it matter? Honestly, let EA go the way of the Dodo trying to figure it out. It will open a void for indie's and small company's that simply get no marketing right now because everyone wants to talk about EA and Ubisoft instead of all the good DRM free games out there.

To enforce it you need people to stop buying crap like that. But given that SimCity has been selling hugely apparently, despite the horrible reviews and the protestations.

See, I don't like any of that stuff either... so I didn't -BUY- it.

You want to protest this stuff, then do it. Don't buy it, don't steal it, it's entertainment, you seriously don't need it to survive or even to enjoy the day. There are other things to do. Support the companies that show respect to you and tell the other companies to screw off that they can't have your money or your eyeballs.

Actually, sounds almost exactly like what I'd think was the beginnings of the Borg.

Honestly the list of good uses of 3D in apps is quite limited. There's certain apps that cry out for the ability to do 3D rendering such as games, or science apps, but the reason it doesn't "take off" is because good 3D is -hard-. Remember the vast majority of the web doesn't look all that nice or well designed even in 2D. Adding 3D models to everyone's tumblr blogs isn't really going to accomplish anything. The groups that need 3D rendering abilities to fill their needs will already do what they need to for it, whether that's Flash, native apps, or whatnot.

Yeah, in that sense twitter can certainly be used semi-anonymously. But one should remember that it is still effectively a gigantic public forum (As is /.), and no matter the name you're using, if you talk about things directly related to your life (Such as employment) you may identifiable.

As the grandparent post said, the real name policy is not the issue here though. Facebook is simply not the place for anonymous or private chatter. It's a site that should at all times, real name policy or not, be treated as a massive public forum. Not using Facebook is absolutely a solution, and even if you DO you use Facebook, you should stay aware that everything on it may as well be public information.

So in that sense it's not the place to post about issues in your life.
There's other, anonymous and/or private places for that.

Google+, Twitter, and Facebook, real names or not, are not the best places for anonymous or private discussion. As long as people keep that in mind and remember it, then the whole world is a safer place.

On the flip side, the Pebble watch (http://getpebble.com) was also funded on Kickstarter, and last news I saw said that the first batches were arriving for backers.

If I was a shareholder I'd be rather pissed off if they tried selling off the one division that seems to be making any progress. If they want to break up, then at least do the world a favor and just spin them off as a separate company entirely. Perhaps than, entertainment can move away from having to rely on other pieces of the MS ecosystem. Might even increase sales of XBox more if they weren't tied to MS so tightly any longer.

But selling them to Sony? Way to kill two platforms with one stone, might as well just burn the shareholders cash.

Apple's %30 is less about making money from what I've seen (This is also substantiated by SEC reports) and more about customer support management. Remember, those of us here on /. are perfectly capable of knowing that when we buy app from Vendor B, and it's billing breaks, that it's not Apple's fault, but Vendor B's. For most consumers that is simply not the case though, they buy the wrong thing from Vendor B and the charge gets messed up? They're not even going to look up that company's phone number, they're going to call Apple and complain about the charge. Who can't do anything because it didn't even run through their system. A whole lot of people -still- don't realize that their ISP isn't the whole Internet, that their Dell isn't every computer, and that their iPhone and everything on it wasn't produced by Apple.

So we get this, where every charge runs through their system.

On the flip side, people who do their subscriptions through web apps should damn well know where they went to buy, since they had to literally type in the company's name in some fashion (Google search, the URL bar, SOMETHING) to reach the checkout cart.

I haven't had the plugin enabled in the browser for years. But I do have it installed, and use it on a daily basis as a IDE I use (AppCode by JetBrains) requires it, as well as some other desktop apps I use.

Which is unfortunate, because every one of them IMO would be better served by not being written in Java.