I don't think mixing "literally" and "legitimately" in the same sentence make sense, since the latter is entirely a determination of opinion.

You may not agree with Apple's position that every single milimeter and ounce matters, but that position is legitimate. There are consequences to that position, such as not being able to replace the battery yourself -- but its not like Apple is hiding that its laptops don't have user replaceable batteries.

Its a perfectly legitimate design decision and trade off. Maybe for you that means the products aren't for you -- that doesn't make it not *legitimate*, let alone not *literally* so.

You, sir, are daring to bring facts to a gunfight.

The audacity!

What? I've had several hardware failures on Macs over the years, and the *longest* was a five day wait -- the second longest a two day wait, and every other failure was a same day or next day fix.

That five day wait was with a moderately aged (2.5 years: out of warranty) Mac Pro having a motherboard failure and they had run out of replacements in-house, so they sent out for new ones and it took a few days to get there. They got more then just mine in on that shipment, so someone else comes in tomorrow, next week, they will have a one day turnaround. Its worth noting that the mac is still going two+ years later with no other issues after that replacement.

That repair cost me not a dime. There are worst-case scenarios with Apple where you may be sans a machine a few days, a week maybe -- *MAYBE* even two weeks, but that seems to require a level of outdated hardware that you're better served going to an independent repair shop -- but it is *absolutely* untrue that the general, average component failure of a "vendor built" machine, if built by Apple, has you out for two weeks.

It doesn't happen. Apple Stores can do a huge number of component replacements in-house, and they keep a stock of parts to do it.

Yeah, I got charged for another machines fix that was out of warranty, but it took absolutely no special work. There was no effort or drama attached to try to somehow convince them to deign to help me as you suggest. They had the part on hand, and charged me a reasonable fee for the replacement + work, and I picked the box up the next day. This was out of warranty, without AppleCare. It just cost me. Had they been out the part, it might have taken longer to get replaced-- but my experience says looking at a week as the *extreme* and not average is a reasonable expectation.

In short: I have never bought AppleCare, have had a few service needs, and only one wasn't what I'd call fast-- and it was five days (COUNTING a weekend in there, not five "business days" extending to seven or eight) and that was on a device solidly outside of their normal, expected maintenance window -- even under AppleCare.

I don't doubt it might not happen that some Apple user sometimes has a two week wait, but that is the exception and not the rule. I can get to Fry's and hope they have the part (they have /frequently/ been out of a particular one I've wanted... and I won't even talk about how often I've bought items from there which turned out defective or the service issues I've had with them as a result...) or I can make an appointment, go in, drop off my box, explain an issue, and 80% of the time, come back later that day or the next day, and its fixed.

That 80% is based on personal experience, YMMV.

You sure about that? Huawei's status as an employee-owned company that it calls a "collective" is dubious; in theory it is owned by its employees, but its management structure is opaque and it is only rather recently that they even admitted who their board of directors were -- and its totally unclear how much real ability the employees have to accomplish anything.

The CEO of Huawei, the guy who founded it, is hugely secretive and has strong ties to the Communist Party. As do most of the other known bosses. Its politically useful (especially at the time it was founded) for the Party and the Chinese to think of Huawei as a collective, even though there's no real evidence its anything but. Doing so has allowed the state to support Huawei in circumstances it normally wouldn't be inclined to do politically.

Now, I don't buy into the Huawei conspiracy theories, but c'mon.... you're reading too much into "employee-owned".

The thing is, you're wrong.

Very, very little of what Obama wants or has done is even close to what the progressives of the left actually want. Health care reform? He enacted the model proposed by the Republicans and devised by a right wing think-tank to create a market-based approach to near-universal healthcare: if you think the left is happy with Obamacare, you're not paying attention.

Its simply *better*, and so we will stick with it. What the left wanted was a single-payer really universal healthcare, but we compromised and were willing to go along with the ACA as long as we'd get a single-payer *option*. Then that got dropped, but most of the left decided to support the ACA anyways because really, it was better then what we have now.

Obama is a centrist; center-right in most issues, occasionally center-left. There is nothing even remotely radical about anything he's done, there's been no great pull to the left. The left has gone a bit farther left then we were a decade or so ago, but that's been in response to the monumental shift the right has gone.

There's a wholesale assault on reproductive and fundamental voting rights going on from the right these days, which is just stunning in that these are things that *only* the most extreme of the right's base want.

On civil rights, surveillance, foreign policy, environment, business regulation, ... and on and on, Obama is not at all in line with what the left wants. He's just not as bad as what the crazy people on the far right want.

Yes, there are some narrow places where the far left and the libertarian wing of the far right actually agree, and its weird when it happens: but those are on very specific and very narrow issues. The problem with that libertarian wing is then they fall flat on their face in when the social conservative bloc of the far right has to be dealt with in primaries, and suddenly small government meets bedroom and private health, and oops.

The Employee-Employer relationship is fundamentally different then the relationship between Card and I: there is an imbalance of power in that relationship and that invalidates the comparison.

Here, I am the customer: there are any number of possible places where my money can go and no one has any claim on it. If I do not buy something it is not a penalty, therefore the act of not buying something is not a punishment. He has no claim on my money, and so its lack is not a penalty. It is not something he would otherwise have had or that he would have had through some obligation or which has been taken away from him -- those are what make something a penalty.

The act of buying something is entirely within my sole discretion and is entirely my unqualified right to determine, for any reason.

That said: it is not merely his public opinions that are at issue. I do not boycott people who disagree with me. I could, and it would be entirely within my right, and entirely moral for me to do so, but I don't so its moot. Card is not being boycotted for his opinions (by me) -- he is being boycotted because he is a political activist, and therefore the money I give him supports and funds activism that I find reprehensible.

Yes, if someone wants to not shop at a store because it has gay people in it, they are entirely free to do so. Doing so does not punish the store.

If someone wants to spend their money only in stores run by Christians, that's entirely fine and moral. If someone wants to spend their money only in stores which have a good reputation for being 'green', that's entirely fine and moral. If someone does not want to buy a product because they believe the company is harming the environment or its suppliers are being abused, that's entirely fine and moral. The inverse of these are all also true, and just as fine -- though rarely do people want to buy something because the company is hurting the environment, more likely the inverse is that people don't care... which is ALSO entirely fine. Importantly, in none of those cases are they punishing anyone.

Card's political agenda is hurting people, his political activism is hurting people. Thus, I will not patronize him -- or Chick-fil-A, for that matter -- because it is my unqualified right to support those businesses and people I want to. My money is power, and empowering people who are actively championing against basic human dignity is something I choose not to do.

I... there is so much wrong here.

I'll say only: I am not castigating anyone for any beliefs. I am calling out someone who is a *political activist* who is attempting to impose his beliefs upon the nation and refusing to financially support him because of that activism.

I reject your definition of private.

Once one becomes an activist and puts their name, their reputation, their money behind a cause that is no longer a private matter. It is at that point entirely justified to consider those matters of public policy that they are so strongly advocating when deciding if you want to give them your business or not.

Card has done that, and in doing so has forfeited any claim to this being a private opinion or belief that he holds.

There's a lot of false equivalencies you have going on there that I'm not gonna address because the above is sufficient, but--

First, It is not "punishment".

Card has no expectation or right to my money; and no one is advocating that his opinion be criminalized or penalized in any way. He has a right to whatever money he has earned through his work. If I choose to give -- or not as the case may be -- him money, that's me exercising my rights. That does not punish him.

Second, Card does not merely "not support" gay marriage: he does not merely have an opinion. He is an activist and major player in the political arena to deny gay people the right to marry. He is an influential member of a Church which poured huge amounts of money into Prop 8 in California, he sits on the board of the National Organization for Marriage. He is not merely a man with an opinion, he is an active political force on this issue.

Third, his stance is not merely that he is against gay marriage or for "protecting traditional marriage" -- go read his writings. He has argued that adult, consensual homosexuality has no place in society and should be criminalized. He since said that he merely wanted to keep existing laws "on the books" passively and that he wouldn't argue to reinstate them, but that doesn't really jive with what he said.

Every dollar I give him, small as my individual dollars are, is a dollar towards a person who is an active force against something I believe is an issue of fundamental rights and fair society. It's not that I'm threatened, its that it is counterproductive. To donate money to the Human Rights Campaign and turn around and patronize establishments like Chick-fil-A or this movie simply does not make sense.

I don't hate him, there's no exclamation marks involved in my thinking, and anyone who does go see this movie or buy his books I don't view as a bigot or supportive of bigotry. Some may be ignorant of what's behind it, some may prioritize their life and money differently, but for those of us who do KNOW who he is and what he has said, supports, and actively tries to do in society, our choice to not support him is valid.

It is not "punishment", he has neither right nor claim to our patronage. It is political, though.

Bear in mind, that's just one of many. Card has written many, many, many times on this subject -- even arguing that homosexual acts should be criminalized, that an adult willfully engaging in sex he doesn't find acceptable with other consenting adults should go to *jail* and be deemed an unacceptable part of society.

Not all hate speech is going to say 'faggot' and 'burn in hell' and stuff like that: those extreme positions are also supported and maintained by more intellectual and softly spoken declarations of the inhumanity of the minority and supporting that it has no right to be seen as a peer because its difference is too different to allow.

Did you miss the part of RTFA where it talks about movie distribution contracts? They aren't free to set any business model they want. They owe a percentage to the upstream provider based on "ticket sales" -- every person in a seat for every showing -- and are *required* to track that.

Now, I have no idea how they're calculating ticket sales or basing the percentage owed off of what value or any of the various details involved, but public showing of movies requires a separate license and those terms are not something three guys in some small town can just get set at whatever is most convenient for their ideal business situation.

It'd surely be better for consumers if it were an all you can use service, but I bet they are still with its once-per-movie plan actually intending on getting most of their money from refreshments and the like..., because movie theaters really don't make that much off of ticket sales. I don't know the precise details, but for new releases theaters only get like 20-30% or so of the ticket sales... after a month or so, they may get most of it, but they always end up paying.

And remember, a big point of this plan is these local people *do* want to go out and watch new releases and have social events after them with their community, and not have to drive an hour away to do that. So while some people will be going and watching when this theater gets most of the money, a lot will be going when they have to pay most of it to the movie's owner.

"The FBI" is not a monolithic thing.

He didn't take it to an FBI technician-- if he did, it'd probably have been cleaned up tight and fast. He took it into his office, where TFA says *they don't have cyber guys*. I.e., he's in some dingy little office without a cyber crimes unit. This doesn't sound implausible at all, the guy's in an FBI office across the Pacific in a US territory, not in Los Angeles.

Then he took it in to a local computer repair shop, and it doesn't at all sound implausible to me that they might have fibbed on just what they did. Instead of re-imagining it, they may have just done a quick scrub of the user settings.

"The FBI" didn't go through a two step process. A guy who is also an FBI agent went through a two step process. Not everything an FBI agent does is with the full force and resources of The FBI.

Not all FBI agents are computer wizzes. TFA said that the office he was in had no computer crimes unit which is where the computer wizzes congregate.

And it surprises you that a computer repair shop might not actually do what they say they are going to? Really?

Read TFA -- the Judge made a note of this. The initial report that he got was just him as a father: after that what he was doing was basically being an FBI agent. *However* even though he was, the fact that the computer was essentially stolen meant the guy had no expectation of privacy for it. anyways.

That's what I thought at first, having lived through Andrew in Florida -- I was all, "psh, its only a category 1". However, thi sisn't a Yankees media situation. Sandy was significantly more powerful then the category would imply.

For one thing, by the time it hit NYC, it was no longer a hurricane -- it had merged with one or two cold storm systems that were coming in from the other direction. This changed the dynamic of the storm significantly: whereas hurricanes gain their energy from the warm ocean waters, this type of storm gained its energy from the difference between the cold and hot storm systems merging together. Or something. (The precise details are not clear to me: I'm not a meteorologist)

Sandy was also *huge* -- measuring the total energy in the storm, it was bigger then Katrina. Hurricanes can get intense but the brunt of their power is focused. They may have a lot of wind speed, and strictly by that measure Sandy wasn't very impressive... but when you have a cat 1 spread out as far as Sandy was, its pulling in a HUGE amount of water.

It wasn't the wind that was so destructive here: it was the storm surge that the huge storm system brought with it.

More sciency stuff at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/post/sandy-packed-more-total-energy-than-katrina-at-landfall/2012/11/02/baa4e3c4-24f4-11e2-ac85-e669876c6a24_blog.html (Warning: yankee media)

But, really. Its not just rhetoric of omg the Yanks are finally getting hit that made this seem bad. It really was a very, very, very bad storm and the hurricane classification only makes it seem small.