Yup, i've been working in web-oriented programming shops since the late 90's and I have never had ANYONE actually use the gimp for anything.

We make use of hundreds of other open source tools, ranging from Java to now Ruby, IDE's, OS's, scripting, etc. ... no gimp.

A few people here and there claim to use it, prefer it over photoshop, and good for them. Makes me wonder if they are even professional designers, and if so, if they have a job.

My hunch is no and no. :)

Doing design work in Gimp seems about as fun as doing Java programming in Emacs.

The reality is, we are free to chose with our Dollars which phone we want to buy. Nobody had a gun to my head when i signed a contract on my iPhone.

The reality of it is if i want an open platform, I'll go buy a open phone. At some point developer mindshare might shift towards the Android App Store, but there is no force at work with the app store other than free market control. As it makes financial sense for apple to open up their 'walled garden', they will do so. Until then to legislate what they can or can't sell, or how to control the nature of the content they accept or reject seems like a slippery slope, arguably just as evil as something as broad as the DMCA.

An infringement on a corporations freedom to operate their business is going to be an infringement on my personal freedoms.

We have anti-competitive laws, anti-price fixing laws, all sorts of regulations to promote fair competition and I don't see how this is even an issue.

Google knows that they can't play in Apples sandbox fairly, so what did they do? They are doing exactly what they should be doing and creating a competitive sandbox. They are going to leverage all their corporate offerings to entice the user to play in their sandbox instead. If you think that Google is creating the Android phone to be an open platform to liberate the people from a closed platform like iPhones and the sort, think again. There is a calculation that the mindshare of having people on android will yield more add revenue, and possibly corporate services (hosted apps, etc) than not.

If Android didn't mean $$ for Google, it would be canned faster than a middle-management position at Sun.

The fact that google has an incredible cloud-stack to put behind the Android phones and make it stupid-simple to make it all work together should make Apple VERY VERY nervous.

I expect to see some serious cloud offerings from apple in the near future to counter this juggernaut google, who has the iPhone square in their cross-hairs.

The stakes are -huge- for smart phone market share. Google understands that this is the next stage of their growth to maintain global search and adword marketshare they currently enjoy.

The king is dead, long live the king. Competition.

Yup, and I am sure if you were to put a polite notice on your ticket that you WILL be contacting your bank for a chargeback, they will be a bit more responsive.

Companies like Valve (Steam product) live and die by their chargeback rates. Most companies, if the charge backs are too high, they have to get a high-risk merchant or can lose the merchant altogether. Amex has almost NO chargeback tollerance with vendors, and if they don't cooperate with or fraud timely, they will indeed lose the merchant account. And not with the bank, but get black-balled by Amex or Visa.

In my experience the threat of charge back is often the best way to get your case escalated quickly up the support tiers.

You have no chance to survive make your time.

About 4 months now, I was playing wow for a few years and just needed a change.

The universe is complex, but the training and progression system is unbelievable. I have friends int he service who are on duty for sometimes weeks at a time. They are progresssing at the exact same pace that the rest of us are that might play 3-4 nights a week. After about 6 months, you're competent with just about anything you want to do, and then further specialization allows for deeper access to ships and better equipment.

The difference i like between EVE and WoW, you don't really need to raid to get into a decent ship and get good equipment. Just about everyone has access to everything in the game. Just fly to Jita and buy what you're looking for :)

Ridiculous Exhibit of Terminally Abused Retired Drives

Greed? How so?

It's basic economics of supply and demand. There is no more "Greed" in the equation than that of the publishers selling paper books at $20, they have their margins and operating costs.

My guess is what your definition of greed is, "It's a toy that I can't justify for the price, though I might like to have it if it was cheaper".

Sounds more like your crying 'sour grapes' to me.

You were making sense until you stated

"Further, I'll end with a categorical statement in order to offend people: Anybody with strong feelings about which web browser is the best is probably spending too much time surfing the web, and is in fact suffering from an internet addiction. IE 7, Opera, and Firefox are all pretty similar from a normal end-user perspective."

Now you sound like a generalizing fool.

A lot of us have pretty much eliminated ALL of our desktop applications, even work applications with web based products.

To assume that anyone that cares about the platform of their computer experience as 'internet addicted' is simply blindly generalizing, which I find not only distasteful with any generalization, but also ignorant.