Free trial periods are fairly common and standard though; not just for internet services but in everything from telecoms to consumer products ("If you're not completely satisfied in 30-days return it for a full refund") to drug dealers. Some states even have a "cooling off period" where you are able to return a new car for a full refund within a certain period of time. So why is Taylor Swift, or anyone else, singling out Apple; besides the standard-issue irrational BS dating all the way back to "what kind of an idiot talks to a computer with a mouse?" (Or, as she herself put it: Haters gonna hate.)

Three months is longer than most, sure. But I suspect that the calculation is that those three months will convince more users to convert to paying customers than a normal 15 or 30 day trial would be. Though I notice that Spotify's $1 trial period is also three months. And Swift had her Spotify-hate thing going on a while back. So maybe she is not privy to those projections and really is just butt-hurt about the length of the trial.

Also, Apple can't unilaterally do a free trial of any length. They need the permission and support of the rights holders, be they major labels or minor. Not that that bunch is in any way virtuous themselves. But again, free trial periods are fairly common across the board. And why would they make this one three months unless the business types HAVE predicted that it would result in more paying post-trial customers than a shorter one?

For the life of me, I don't see why this is suddenly a controversy. So far as I can recall, Facebook has had the "real names" policy the entire time they've been around; all the way back to when they were "The Facebook" and were exclusive to college students. And they've never hidden the policy. In fact, they used to advertise it as a feature to distinguish themselves from the cesspool of fake accounts and trolling that MySpace had degenerated into. The people whining about it now remind me of those people who move into houses next to airports and then complain that the airplanes make noise.

And as far as the drag queens' complaints, Facebook does in fact 0provide mechanisms, separate from individual pages, for promoting your stage name, band, business, or whatever else you consider your brand. So that is also a stupid non-issue.

The article is roasting Apple for a lot of things no one but the music industry really cares about, with the exception of getting big acts like Adele and Taylor Swift signed on. But really, whether they do or not, the buying public doesn't really care that much. It is a tempest in a teapot.

I was actually kind of surprised at the "most popular artist of the last decade" part about Taylor Swift. I knew she was doing indie rock or folk or something back before she went mainstream with 1989. (And yeah, I have to admit that Shake It Off is catchy and well-produced. Just a few seconds of it gets it stuck in my head for quite a while.) But I had no idea that folk or indie draws that large of a following these days. I guess Beyonce really did have something to be jealous of when she sent in her idiot brigade to assault Swift for winning that award that she coveted for herself.

Fair point about the Biebers, Brittneys, Iggys, Kanyes, and Taylors of music these days.

But just to be a bit pedantic... You can't really properly call Nine Inch Nails a band. NiN is basically just Trent Reznor in his studio producing. When he feels like making a bit of extra cash touring he hires whatever guitarists and keyboardists are available, has them learn his songs, dresses them in black for a a few months, and still uses a drum machine to keep the beat.

You're forgetting the countless incredible pieces of music which is instrumental/synthesized only.

... which are sold to the DJs who perform it, at exorbitant prices, on Beatport, or sometimes even on vinyl still. (If they're smart, those same DJs are writing those purchases off as a business expense anyway. So don't weep for the DJs' wallets.) Hell... sometimes said producers themselves do go on tour. Above & Beyond played two sold-out nights in a row at the Bill Graham auditorium here in San Francisco, for example. And Deadmaus and BT are pretty active touring producers, even though they're best known for what they do in the studio.

So, I know Walmart are a bunch of evil bastards. And I'll do a little happy dance the day the whole bloody lot of them are put out onto the street to starve in the gutter.

But what's wrong with Denny's? Aside from the low-quality and overpriced (Ever since they got rid of the $1.99 "are you out of your mind?" grand slam.) food that would make me ill in any situation other than "I've already been up half the night and put my body through worse things than what I'm eating right now.", that is. It's certainly not fine, or even fair, dining by any stretch of the imagination. But what puts them on the level of Walmart?

> As an example, we recently had a password issue
> where users were required to change passwords
> every 90 days. It was a dumb idea, and I'm not
> entirely sure why I agreed to it in the first place,

In some cases, you don't have a choice. Work somewhere that takes credit card payments? Section 8.5.9 mandates that all users must be made to change their passwords every 90 days. And I'm pretty sure that HIPAA and the rest of the big standards have similar requirements. Yeah, it's a dumb policy that results in users creating dumb passwords. And yeah, it's annoying to have to enforce it, especially when users forget the dumb passwords they knocked up and complain. But, unless Visa, MasterCard, and such can someday be persuaded otherwise; anyone who wants to take payments has to do it.

If banner ads were still static, or even animated, gif images, I wouldn't block them. But many "regular banner ads" these days come with some pretty obnoxious javascript, stupid HTML5 tricks, and sometimes even flash (still). That sort of resource-hogging, battery-draining, vulnerability-inducing, malware-spreading nastiness needs to die, whether it's in a pop up/under, an interstitial, or "just" a banner.

So yah, I block them and don't blame anyone else for doing so. I do whitelist some sites I want to support though. But any shenanigans, and back into the blackhole they go.

Heh... if your resume includes drunken sword fights you're either doing life really, really right or really, really wrong.

More to the point, as much of a badass as we know he was during WW2, we don't even know how much of a badass he really was because so much of what he did in the war is still classified.

Regardless of the opinions of anyone on "flatness"; a big motivator was a growing dislike of skeuomorphism amongst the public and Apple's developers. They couldn't get rid of it, though, because Scott Forrestal was in love with the idea and had the clout to force it on everyone. And when he bungled the Maps transition and "retired" later on, what should probably have been a more careful and gradual transition was rushed. causing some annoying peculiarities.

They didn't remove Pandora when they launched iTunes Radio. They didn't remove the Kindle app when they launched iBooks. Netflix is still available, despite the existence of the Movie and TV sections of the iTunes store. Chrome is available as an alternative to Safari. And when Apple dumped Google maps from its default position, Google fairly quickly came up with a less embarrassingly out-of-date maps app that's in the app store right now.

Why should it be any different with Spotify?

So, Apple is dominant this week, not doomed, beleaguered, suffering dramatic loss of market share, and just about to finally be utterly destroyed by the superior-in-every-way-both-morally-and-technologically juggernaught that is Android... like they were last week?

It's so hard to keep that straight.

Well, this was Massachusetts; where light-up Mooninite signs are treated as a "terrorist threat" worthy of a city-wide alert; wearing a t-shirt with some blinkenlights on it is "justification" for threatening Course VI students with submachine guns (and then arresting them); and where police, entering with neither warrant nor invitation, accost (black) university professors in their own homes, arresting them for disturbing the peace should they get irate and raise their voice; and all of this goes unpunished.

So, expecting a reasonable and calm common-sense reaction out of the police there is Quixotic at best.

Well, even if he did open fire; an Imperial Stormtrooper would be hard-pressed to hit the side of the school's *buildings* at more than ten yards or so. So, unless I'd happened to wear a red shirt to school that day, I wouldn't worry very much.