I presume you have an iPhone. A friend of mine that has jailbroken his phone pointed out to me that the bars represent the 3G signal strength, and not necessarily the regular network strength. I was considering AT&T because the T-Mobile strength in my house is terrible. He had 3-4 bars on his IPhone, but when he turned off 3G and went to EDGE only, it averaged 1-2 bars. Point is, I don't think the signal strength always means what we think it means. 8/

More up-to-date, BB has posted that Ralph Loren has admitted a "my bad," and that they promise to be more diligent about it in the future. Scroll to just above the comments.

I'm reasonably certain it's been shown a number of times that if you build a PC with the exact same hardware as a Mac, you'll end up with a PC that costs about the same.

Actually, it has been shown to be cheaper to build your own Mac.

I'm only addressing your Hardware comparison. In reality, there are more things that go into the value of a "computer solution" than just the hardware components: software availability/quality for your own needs, support, design/appeal, etc.

You have your own answer... if it is the most sparsely populated country, then it needs the fewest towers which also means the least infrastructure investment.

As long as the company providing coverage has other markets (to take advantage of the bulk buying of equipment and leveraging of technology staff), then this becomes an "incremental expense" to them.

I suspect it would be different pricing if a cell company was trying to exist only in this market. But, I digress...

And another word of warning: with the Systemax purchase of CompUSA, consumers will be exposed to the same sourced inventory, but not realize that it is the same entity as TigerDirect.

So if you're not happy with TigerDirect, don't consider the re-formed CompUSA as an alternative... it isn't.

The real sign of failure is that video games now have even bigger opening weekends - Halo 3, followed hotly by GTA 4, really showed Holywood what an opening weekend could be.

That's an apples-to-oranges comparison. Games cost $50-$70 each, while your movie ticket is going to be around $10; there's a larger in-rush of cash during an opening weekend of a game because there's a heavier hit.

If the average movie-going crowd was 5-7 people, then it could be a better comparison.