Once you get out of elementary school, you might learn that for the purposes of market capitalism, 2 players doesn't suffice for competition. They will inevitable fall into a sort of tacit agreement to keep prices high and service low.

It's also notable that many of those included in 'ilk' seem also to have a tacit agreement to stay out of each other's staked out territory meaning there may be several such providers but only 1 in a given area. That fairly neatly explains how there can be more than one and still not even minimal competition.

He probably also knows a lot more than Comcast's residential support staff.

Quite possibly. Sadly, I'm not so sure about the number of people who studied CS who find this obvious. A lot of people see a bunch of f.write and think I/O, must be a faster way.

It's actually not the same. You do have to pay for it by law, but nobody's going to try to jail you if you attempt to pay when you order.

Likewise for Best Buy, you do have to pay, but as long as you do, that's the end of it legally speaking. No law says you have to submit to a search.

Actually, such overt prejudice is much more on display in the North these days. I'm not claiming there is no predjudice in the South, but it tends to be a bit more subtle than that.

I believe his point is that their holy book contains many lamentations about the days when they were the minority discriminated against and how wrong it all was.

I'd tell him some distant ancestor of mine might have been black and he would voluntarily leave.

If not, I'd tell him to come back in his street clothes and be polite to my other customers.

No, they're punishing those who are happy to help those homophobes and racists move from talk to action against the groups they don't like.

REALLY?!? You read that and STILL don't grasp that they were aware of how non-optimal it is? REALLY?!?

WOW, you didn't even finish reading the summary!

That's a big consideration for me. As near as I can tell, the only way to find out if you're wasting your time or not is to go ahead and waste it. After spending time writing your app, it may or may not be allowed at all. If not, you will be quite lucky to learn why and if you fix that, it may not change anything as you'll get rejected for something that was said to be acceptable the first time. If rejected you might later see another app that does exactly what yours was rejected for.

If you do get the app in, you may or may not be able to update it, even if the update is purely a bug fix that does nothing different other than not screwing up.

None of that makes me want to spend time and money developing an app. None of that motivates anyone to put forth their best effort. If you're going to get your work thrown away, it might as well be half-assed work. You can't even half ass it as a trial and then update to a well done version once in.

I have better things to do than jump through flaming hoops for a corporation that apparently doesn't care if I live or die just for the chance to buy a lottery ticket that might possibly pay back it's cost if I get lucky.

Whenever Radio Shack asked me for my address I just said I wasn't interested in giving it to them. But a friend of mine did one better... he always wrote down the address of the White house and signed it Mickey Mouse. And the sales person dutifully entered it into the computer, no questions asked.

-Matt

They were QUITE clear in the paper that they deliberately chose the least optimal string handling. They stated it EXPLICITLY. It's not their fault you skimmed with intent to belittle.

Spoken like someone who can't even begin to imagine living somewhere that doesn't have ubiquitous communication with the outside world.

Perhaps that's because all of the blame naturally falls on one party. Remove all stupidity from the world and there will still be crime. Remove all the crime from the world and there is none.

Stupidity is contextual anyway and accurate judgments of it don't cross cultural and social barriers readily. In some places, leaving your door unlocked is not at all stupid. Locking your door borders on criminal in some places. In some places wasting your time and energy locking up your tools at the end of the day is stupid. In others, not doing so would be stupid. The constant though is that the person who steals your stuff is in the wrong.

Consider, in small places, that is places where you can actually know everyone there and where communication with the outside is limited, caveat emptor often does not really apply. No merchant in that situation is going to risk being run out of town over a few small items. Just imagine one day that small place gets a connection to the internet. To you and me, actually responding to a spam is stupid. There's no way you won't get ripped off. But to the people in that small place, there is nothing stupid about it. It's simply a novel situation they are ignorant of.