However, a subscription model is also a good counter to this quantity-over-quality price strategy they have...
They can pump out as much crappy movies as they want and the viewers can choose to watch it or not... but compared to a traditional model you only need to see 2 or 3 movies to 'break even'
This is one of those things the government did NOT screw up..
Philosophically, "we the people" empower the government to enforce stability and rules. Some of these 'rules' are more annoyances -- but we're certainly glad they are there... such as public urination... or the requirement for a business that serves food and drink to allow you to use their restroom..
Sometimes businesses need to be kept in check because they start to break this social contract of people playing nice... and individuals don't have enough power to do anything about it, and it's technically legal.. so a new law needs to be passed to keep things working
Did this take away from valuable congress debate time? Probably not.. Most of the violations were small local or small businesses, or otherwise businesses without big pockets to buy a congressman or 40...
So I'm fairly sure this one went by smoothing and quickly.... without someone reading books for 2 months to hold up congress like the Civil Rights act... Wish I was there, I love audible.
Point to clarify:
When I say she should have access to my information, I mean in bulk --
E.g. "3000 people listened to song Y" -- the fact I, specifically, listened to it should not be included.. just general numbers of which I am included
I get a feeling her problem is along the lines of:
1) You paid money (or paid with eyes/ears on an advertisement) to listen to her song
2) She doesn't know you did so...
She's not getting "Money for you listening".. or at least, she has no way to know it.. Pandora doesn't tell her how many times her music was listened to... Being in a business.. it IS helpful to know exactly how many transactions you made to get your $500... or
I agree with you.. She doesn't need my name, or birthday, or my financial information.... But if she wants to know I listened to Her Songs X, Y, and Z... and that I bought Her Song A.. She should, in my opinion, be able to get some kind of breakdown of that information (Here is $250, your songs were listened to by 20,000 people.. 240 bought the following songs:)
This data requires no data mining.. It's data Pandora already has and uses to pay her royalty... and the only cost is from writing the artist a semi-detailed receipt to go with her royalty check.. currently Pandora says "Here's $300, no.. you can't know how many times each song was listened to.. no.. you can't know how many songs people bought"
Great for us.. Great for Pandora... makes learning what we (the audience) like to listen to and buy impossible without getting the tainted groups of fanatics who seek the artist out on their own..
" One of the new T-Mobile plan's flaws, though, is that it cannot be used for tethering "
Verizon & AT&T do not either.. not a huge flaw there as T-Mobile gets a one-up on their higher market share competitors.. on top of being GSM like AT&T, you get a bit more phone freedom (minus the #g band differences, which seem to be more of a moot point nowadays anyways for international travelers... since 3g band frequencies change by country)
I don't mind sites showing advertisements
I mind when sites use ad servers that slow down my computer and/or mobile device because it tries to make a dozen calls to different servers to try and load in some complex advertisement..
Then I go to try and zoom in on the website's content and the advertisement shows up 1/2 cut off.. and the little "Close" button gets stuck off-screen.. So I lose not only the ability to read a content on a website, but am forced to see half of an advertisement without the ability to get past it....
Unless I block/avoid the advertisement.
I Love google ads, most of the other ads use obnoxious strategies to annoy me into reading their message
I hold a theory that seems to have worked well for me (9 times out of 10)...
The more they advertise a movie (other then trailers before ) just before and as it is released, the less confident the studios are in the movie..
For SciFi/Action/etc, it seems to work well for me.. I got really worried about Promethus with the trailers every 10 minutes
Would your grandmother/parents/other non-techie friends pay $9/month for internet if it was a 3 year agreement paid up front from a fairly reputable (as in not likely going under) company?
My grandfather paid $15/month for dial up, I'll wager Google is giving these $300 customers more then 56Kbps even if they throttle them..
I pay over $50 a month for FiOS and I don't even get over 30 Mbps.. If i wanted gigabit speeds I could not even request it from FiOS... and their plans hit $300/month without hitting *half* this service... I'd say the pricing is great
I think right now servers & computers will be the bottleneck... Unless you're writing your download to a SSD or RAID array... you barely can handle a 1 Gbps write (quick math, 1Gbps = ~125MB/s)
Are we looking at the same article?
They would have to lose another 50% to fall below ASUS.. and ASUS is still listed above "Others"
Unfortunately ST is acting like old carriers still...
They proclaim avidly they are unlimited and hide behind their TOS whenever you ask them about data limits... or dodge the question entirely on their support forums...
as an AT&T MVNO they probably have a 2GB limit per billing cycle
didn't google desktop also do searches for both ?
same with using a netbook..
Ubuntu 12 is annoyingly slow on an eee pc... Gnome 3 defaults to fallback mode and is still slow... Unity is very slow as well..
Doesn't make a great intro distribution
Can a gun shop owner deny a sale to someone who says "As soon as you sell this to me, I'm going to go home and kill my Wife"
YES.
That's what happened here... Girl said "I'm going to send this to Iran" while speaking in Farsi, and the employee overheard and understood it.
Nearly all US businesses (except for state-specific exceptions) are allowed to have policies that are non-discriminatory.
Refusing a sale that will directly and knowingly lead to an illegal act is not discriminatory... She said it in Farsi, but she said "I'm going to do something illegal after I buy this"... The employee tried to stop her from doing something illegal and followed Apple's Non-discriminatory policy.
Usually the customers don't admit to the person they are buying from "I am going to break the law"... not to mention most $8/hr employees don't speak too many languages or otherwise care about US law or company policies.
Apple has an unusual employment base (fanatics), that read all the policies and rules to avoid losing their dream jobs... He happened to note that apple policy and enforced it when the customer informed them they were going to break the law....
Also, most people, if they were confronted like this, would realize admitting they wanted to break US export laws was a bad idea and wouldn't grab a camera crew to come and record them attempting to purchase an item that is going to be exported illegally... and would instead just keep quiet and go down the street to another store..........
She, obviously, wants attention and wants to make sure DHS and whomever handled export laws to KNOW she is trying to export illegal electronics....
But yeah, most people are smart enough to not put up a fight when they are told they are going to break the law when doing so.. and as i said.. quietly go somewhere else.
In Farsi she said "Its a gift for my grandmother in Iran" or some such.. and the employee understood what she said as he understood the language.
So, She was NOT denied the sale because of her origins, but because she said in Farsi she was going to purchase the product and violate US law (and apple policy)
If you walk into best buy and say "I'm gonna rip these people off with this bogus return" in Farsi, and the guy behind the counter hears that, you'll bet he will deny the return! That's basically what happened here...
8 Catfish = 1 Octo-puss
