I mean...if you want to take a bad analogy and refine it a bit...

It's buying a generic lock from home depot to protect your house after being on the news discussing your extensive jewelry collection on display in your bedroom.

Or buying a cheap generic safe to hold a your stash of gold bars.

Or being a famous person who's probably been offered a 6- (or 7-)figure sum to pose nude/make porn...then doing it yourself...letting it on the internet...and thinking it somehow would stay secret. Oh wait...

Feels violated* ... ... ...

That she wasn't paid for said pictures. Playing victim is a skill some people are very very good at. The rest of us don't walk (stumble) down the dark alley drunk at 3AM.

Applying that back to the original issue...

We definitely should have lots more celebrities take nude selfies, let hackers acquire and release them, then - since it's a sting and we're prepared - arrest the 13 year olds and throw them in jail for ... oh what? wait...they're underage? They can't go to...do we can't...but then...well at least we saw xyz's tits. Let's try this again.

Also 'getting rid of thieves' should have a sarcasm tag attached ^.^

Well attrition is NBD these days anyhow. Any time your stock price isn't high enough and the CEO wants to sell some shares to buy his next mansion or bonus time is coming and his $retarded bonus is directly related to share prices ... they just lay off a bunch of people to 'fix' the P/L and bump up the share price.

While above is trollish, it's also VERY much true. Layoffs almost invariably raise the stock price of a company so they've become yet another tool in doing business. Spending a career at one company is virtually unheard of in the US. It's a sad state of being.

Let's lay off 10% of our workforce and outsource another 15% (which basically means laying off 25% and giving some outsource company a fraction of what that 15% was paid). Hey look, we reduced our employee compensation costs by 20% ... now look at how much money the company is earning for investors! Go us! Woohoo! Stock market is on the riseeeeee...economy is doing welllllllll....things are all sunshineeeeeeee.....happy dance down the street

Oops...

Let me know when AirBnB starts listing convention centers that can host 10K+ person events.

Yes (I think), but this is very expensive and also blocks voice/sms/email/etc. on phones. Good luck with a convention center where people can't make phone calls.

There may be some restrictions on that related to 911 access too.

You misunderstand.

Guests in the common areas and rooms pay $stupid per day for WiFi.
Convention areas have different APs and charge $Obscene per day per account/device for WiFi.

Enforcement is...difficult at best.

When APs were big and bulky and more scarce perhaps. These days though my daily carry bag has 2 or 3 APs in it (iPhone, android, sometimes hotspot or iPad). Chromecast uses WiFi. Samsung printers with NFC use wifi ... as to a plethora of other things that people don't even realize.

Yes you can get some directional antennas and start triangulating people...but you've probably got dozens of WiFi networks that the owners don't even know exist and aren't using to get internet anyhow. So chasing them down doesn't earn you a sale and just pisses people off.

You're confusing unlicensed with unregulated. The FCC regulates ALL the RF spectrum in the US.

With that said...The rules include:

"...no person shall willfully or maliciously interfere with or cause interference to any radio communications of any station licensed or authorized by or under this chapter or operated by the United States Government"

This was definitely willful and arguably malicious as well.

That's at least not willful and malicious.

Large venues do beef up their cellular network but there are finite limits on the number of channels and frequencies available. Generally they do a pretty good job at stadiums and concert venues. Ad-hoc venues? Well good luck :)

WiFi is another story. I always use 5GHz and typically don't have an issue even living in NYC. 2.4GHz? Lol...good luck.

So they basically got away with it. $600k when they're charging $250-$1K per wireless account? Yeah...that's fair.

Personal experience:
I was a vendor at a conference in this exact hotel in 2013. Internet access was ridiculously expensive...per account which they prohibited sharing between devices of course. Handy when you're trying to present and sell technical services...and your hotspot doesn't work. Many vendors complained about how their hotspots weren't working, quite a few sucked it up and paid the extortion fee. Now I guess we know why. What I want to know is ... where are the refunds? Where are the damages being paid back? My conference was fairly small (this hotel is beyond enormous mind you) and there still had to be 100+ vendors. We were one of ... I don't know ... 5-10 conferences that weekend?

At a bare minimum the FCC should find them equal to all the WiFi access fees they collected while this system was in place. Would some have paid anyhow? Yes. This is meant to punitive after all.

Oh...and don't let me get started on how they *required* you to "rent" carpet for your booth 10'x10' booth (starting at several hundred dollars) and pay for power connections - another several hundred dollars for the lowest ~300w 110v connection. Then there were fees to receive fedex boxes, fees to store them until you got them, fees to deliver them to you, etc. Want to rent a TV for your display? They quoted something like 6 grand for two 42" TVs with speakers. Yah huh. The vendor that got that quote laughed at them, went to costco and bought two TVs for ~$1500, then raffled them off.

Yes but you're the ideal 'unlimited' customer. You do most of your data on WiFi and don't really use much otherwise while traveling.

The 'bad' unlimited customer is a road warrior that has work VPN running for 8-10 hours a day and personal streaming, netflix, torrents, downloads, etc. running the remainder of his/her personal time. My office PC has pushed 4.3GB in the past 6 days for example. It might be a bit less if I was on a cellular connection but...not by much.

The short answer? The stock market. No really, no tin-foil hats here.

It's become a race to the bottom in order to push the stock prices up. It's not even ROI anymore. The balance sheet for a corporation has more in common with the matrix computers than your checkbook...but if the symbols line up just right you win (and your stock price goes up). Cut 10% of your workforce (even if they're actively earning money) and your numbers look immediately better. Stock price typically goes up.

Why?

Companies are run by their senior staff and board members; All of whom receive large stock-based compensation and/or typically have large holdings in the company. So laying off a bunch of hard working people or doing other shitty things even if your company is doing just fine...suddenly starts to make sense. If you own 12 million shares and cutting a department or two pushes up the stock price a buck you just make $12 million. The board is probably thrilled with you and increase your bonus this year by another 100k shares or something on top of it.

So the same game applies to stuff like patents and apps and whatnot. It's all about swinging the bigger dick and look like you're running your competition out of business. Doesn't matter if you do or not. Doesn't matter if you put a bunch of people out of work. Doesn't matter if you have a stupid. Stock price goes up? Execs win.

Granted most other people lose in the process. Buy hey, we don't count.

Not only that, but Apple *does* do a ridiculous amount of engineering in all their devices. While they don't have a dominating % of the market anymore ... the % they do have is still immense in absolute numbers and since the number of different models they offer is small ... each of those gets far more attention/money/engineering than most others.

I'm not particularly a fan or hater but will say their devices pretty much always fall under the 'premium' heading. That doesn't mean there aren't sometimes shortcomings or design flaws...but they sure as shit make them pretty :)

I'm not sure about that...

Right now they surely are production-constrained, however with that comes some financial constraint. Limited income means it's costly to throw money at things that aren't yet necessary (or can be had for free). Yes there's $bajillions backing them as/if/when needed...but having that much $ is indicative of knowing when, and what NOT, to spend it.

Why pay for advertising when you don't have enough product to sell? Why not 'fight the good fight' and get all your press for free so people are lined up waiting for when you DO have products finally sell? Spend the advertising dollars on lawsuits you'd have to fight anyhow. People listen to stories about your company/cars ... then flip channels when news pauses for GM/ford/etc. commercials. You build the brand...and continue to remain production-constrained with minimal advertising spend.

People will line up to jump through hoops - if there are hoops.