I'm a karate instructor. A lot of times we have parents bring their kids in after them being bullied in school. The administrators are loath to do anything beyond calling the offending childs parents. Even if the bullying is taking place on school grounds (it usually is) no one will raise a finger. We teach our kids to try and avert the situations without violence. Assertively telling the person to stop. Usually just standing up for yourself, and really showing that you mean it, is enough to stop common bullying. Sometimes it isn't, and our kids fight back. Again, it usually only takes once to make someone realize it isn't worth it. If it keeps happening, things escalate. A few years ago we had a freshman in high school bust the nose and two ribs of a kid who had been pushing him around for weeks. The guy came back with a few of his buddies and beat him up pretty well. A few of us followed a group of them home from school one day and very nicely explained that if our 'cousin' was touched again each of them would get far worse. We were pretty persuasive. But the point of the story is that no one who should have been making this stop was really getting anything done.

I'm a trader and also a huge nerd and this is too true. My current setup is 6 monitors on 4 computers. That works out to 2 for quotes, 2 for inbound orders, 2 for outbound orders (one of which is also used for communications) The (litteral) desk that I'm on has 4 traders and a total of 18 monitors. There is room to maybe squeeze in another 2 if we had to but otherwise its litterally a wall of monitors.

I was more referring to the initial sale numbers which were reported as rather low by the media. I don't know about you but I never thought of Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/munster-china-iphone-sales-a-disappointment-2009-11 , and the LA Times http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-china-iphone7-2009nov07,0,4313958.story someones blog, as opposed to, you know, like, real journalism.

I thought people were in agreement that Chinese iPhone sales were dismal?

A little offtopic, but I was looking into running a service based on transactions under $1 but I simlpy couldn't make the numbers work. All the services I looked at that would accept credit cards took at least $.20 of any transaction which would just trash any margins we would have. Any ideas?

I'm an ex Apple retail employee. If there is one thing I can say about my coworkers, itâ(TM)s that they fucking loved that company. About half of the people I worked with were part time employees with full time jobs doing photo and A/V work, usually for their own smallish firm. Why did they work at Apple? The discounts. Sure the store didn't pay the best (~$12/hour starting) but when you can get that $6000 mac pro / 30" screen combo for half off it starts to look very attractive for 20 hours a week. Apple loved it; they got some very knowledgeable employees to move their merch. Also, Apple treated us pretty damn well. As a whole, retail sucks. At least where I was, the managers were flexible and understanding. There were plenty of product giveaways to employees (in the 6 months I was there I got a free Shuffle when it had just come out as well as a free OS upgrade. I also picked up a week old mac book pro for ~50% off) I'm not too sure what MS is offering, but a lot of the people who were at the Apple Store weren't there for just the paycheck.

Agreed wholeheartedly. I started playing MUDs when I was in 3rd grade or so (that must have been pretty annoying to the other members of the server), sure enough when it came to vocab I was miles in front of my Hop on Pop reading peers.

I would take someone bearable who usually does it right over either of those.

Your ration of 1984 has been increased to 0 copies in celebration of a great victory!

Define computer... at work I have 3 systems for a total of 5 monitors running at once. I guess my main system has two, but I do have to switch between all 3 computers depending on what I need to be doing. 3 keyboards is a bitch (Stock Broker)