Everything has a price, and if the buyer and seller come to an agreement then it's worth it. If you're a lawyer making $350/hr and you decide that it's worth $20 to have someone hand deliver your lunch instead of you going out and getting it, is that okay? If you're a driver getting 5 of those orders and hour and are grossing $100/hr, is that okay? What if you're just having a shitty day and $20 means getting a meal you *really* want without having to go out in the rain. You don't have to be rich to be lazy every once in a while.

To be fair, both Uber and Amazon don't *want* to have people working for them in absolutely horrible conditions for little pay. On the contrary, they'd like to eliminate those positions entirely and automate everything. Which really doesn't bode any better for local service people.

OTOH, this shouldn't be a surprise. The computer geeks have already put many, many typists, calculators (people, not boxes), secretaries, drafters, and similar people out of business just as the industrial revolution put many laborers out of a job. Do you really think that self-checkouts and ATMs have increased the number of employees in checkers/teller positions?

Taxi drivers are not going to be happy about self-driving cars, and though it's not possible now, it will be in the future. The bar on what can and can't be done automatically raises each year. Those close to the line need to see the writing. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who have already been passed by the line and will never / can never catch up to it. It's going to make for a very bumpy ride over the next half a century.

Prodigy tried pop-up and in-line ads and died, too. Sometimes it's neither the product nor the delivery, but simply market timing.

You say that, but how many analog VHS tapes have we been able to read from ancient Babylon?

Ahhh, but as soon as it's an emergency, then the rules are suspended and you don't need to be a HAM to broadcast and would not be limited by the regulations that HAM operators are required to follow. And, let's face it - in a true emergency situation all the rules go out the window anyway. When it comes to saving a life or following the written word of regulation, life safety will always trump.

The only real thing that keeps encryption from being on the airwaves is hardware support - i.e. the availability of radios which both encrypt and allow operation on HAM frequencies. Most manufacturers are obligated to respect the rules, though clearly some Chinese versions tend to not disallow operation that goes afoul of the US regs.

If OSX comes "free" with their hardware, but is also sold separately - or even just has a defined value separately - they will likely fall afoul of the law. Unless, of course, the judge is an Apple user in which case it will be swept under the rug.

iOS is definitely a different beast. You can't run any other software on an iDevice, and you can't buy it (developer licenses are not quite the same as an operational license). Same with Android and Windows Phone edition - the OS is arguably integral with the phone. At least, for now!

It's one thing to know what the sound of a single excited atom is but, as they say on the internets - pics or it didn't happen.

Though, now that I think about it, I guess if it's just one atom, you're really more in the vein of Turning Japanese.

You must have been out sick the day the entire marketing class discussed the challenges associated with market leaders such as Kleenex and Xerox.

Here's the cliff notes version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.... Even for the neck-beardiest android geek, deep in the logic center of the brains he knows that iPad has taken on a genericized condition in the mainstream.

The whole embargo smacks of "well, we've always done it this way" at this point. I don't really see any point to the embargo. It didn't work 40 years ago; it's not working today (for whatever purpose the government thinks it's doing). Time to use more carrots and less sticks, imho.

So will PP keep your BC and dollars separate, or will you be able to swap back and forth between the currencies (either directly or via ACH transfers into/out of you account)?

On the contrary, if EVERYTHING is copyrighted, then if you have something and can't show you've paid for it, then it's illegal. When every shared or transferred file is illegal, it make enforcement simple - you share a file, you go to jail.

Shortening (c) terms to something reasonable (certainly less than patents; why should a cure for AIDS be less protected than last night's episode of Ow, My Balls!*) means having to know when your licenses expire. And that's just too much overhead.

*An IP lawyer I know feels the opposite, that copyrights should last longer so that "public good" ideas pass into public domain earlier.

The initial price was that of a super-premium phone, which it wasn't. Amazon has never been about making money on hardware, but about eyeballs. This cash grab was unfounded. They lost the chance to make it as easy as "sign up and get your free phone, supported by the Amazon ecosystem". Now it's just an also-ran.

I didn't mean to imply health from BMI, but rather the general mass to height ratio - were these people who were carrying significantly more or less than average weight for their height?

I could have said body fat percentage, but that's a lot harder to calculate accurately - and if you're going to be inaccurate you may as well make it easy. If the study were packed with people in the 30+ BMI range, maybe the difference in weight loss wasn't really attributable to the specifics of the diet (we're talking a net caloric deficit of 78 calories a day - half a soda or fruit juice drink).

Obesity *is* a problem, as is physical conditioning. But basing dietary recommendations on studies which don't understand the actual mechanics and science of nutrition is a bad idea. It was a bad idea when they used it to create the "food pyramid" and it's still a bad idea today.

It's be nicer if it didn't look like it was styled after a 1970s movie prop. It's one of the biggest problems with most electric cars (and many hybrids) - they look like someone from Disney's Imagineering division was tasked with designing a style that would fit into the World of Tomorrow. Why can't they just look like a car? (and before you claim aerodynamics, the same argument can be made for an ICE car and yet nobody worries about those last few percent on those)

Mutually Assured Destruction is more of a pro than a con when considering certain element of society which are willing to, say, strap explosives to their chest and detonate them in a public venue. Projecting your morality onto others in order to predict behaviors is a dangerous game.