Lives in dark? No pigment?
i.e. -- mom's basement.
As for "carefully organized screwing over of consumers," that's what the DoJ thought it convicted Apple of. But the Judge seems to be more convinced Apple carefully organized a screwing of Amazon, which had the extremely illegal side-effect of screwing consumers. And if that's the case the way you prevent future occurrences isn't by gutting Apple, it's by ensuring there's a guy at the Board Meeting who can say "Morons, if you do this business move it will screw consumers and I will tell the Judge to fine you $8 Billion."
It's a very fine line, but I think you (and the judge) are probably on to something there.That having been said, they knew what they were doing.
BTW, I sincerely doubt Apple's fine will be as high as you'd like.
I don't particularly want to see apple fined at all.They obviously make very good products that people like. Because of this, they don't need to screw consumers, but they did it anyway. I think they should be prevented from doing so again. Personally, I'd rather see them forced to allow people to be able to buy ebooks through the kindle or nook app than forcing them to pay a big fine.
what are good things to do with a significant other who is less into combat, and more into collaboration, exploration, creativity, and storytelling?
There are several muds that fit that bill nicely. Text based. No explosions. Solve puzzles. Act out a character. Contribute to a story.
Then, there were the restrictions. 80% of the storage was reserved for DRM'd material - if you downloaded restriction-free files from Gutenberg or similar you could only fill 20% of the provided storage. Oh, and remember all those "free" books I researched before buying it? *Every one* on the US site refused to download saying that "For copyright reasons this content is restricted to US downloads only". Even though I was in Scotland, and the books were published in Scotland, *in the 1800s*...
Ebooks take up so little space, that I've found that isn't a problem. It might be different if I wanted to store movies on our various nooks (a simple touch, a nook color, and a nook tablet) but having books hasn't been a problem yet.
Oh, and the clunky DRM support requires you to run a piece of third-party (Adobe) software to "authenticate" the device that's not available in any form under Linux. I ended up having to download and install a pirate copy of Windows just to be able to initialise the machine! (I feel so *dirty*...)
HUH?!? I don't have any windows machines in my house, and I have no problems with any of our nooks. This doesn't match up with my experience at all. I connect the nook to my linux computer with the cable provided, and load whichever epub files I want. It may be different for me because I run opensuse, which isn't the most popular linux distro, but I seriously doubt that. Really this seems to come out of left field. I have absolutely no problem at all using my nooks with a linux computer and I don't have any (pirated or genuine) copies of windows.
The credit card complaint is legitimate. But other tablets are the same. I created a single-use charge number using my credit card's "online shopping" features, and never worried about it again.
are they perfect? No. They make great e-readers, but unless you root them, they make poor tablets. That having been said, in my experience they are not nearly as poor as the OP's experience.
The algorithm for finding the longest path in a graph is NP-complete. For you systems people, that means it's *real slow*. -- Bart Miller