Your safety is the main reason why drugs are so expensive, not research or marketing.
Sure. Next time you better at least try to omit "your" from these kind of sentences. It reads like a cheap ad now (which it is).
Shame you did not really understand what the AC said and chose to nitpick instead. The AC was right and pretty precise in his description.
There is no real GPS in iPhone. There is a real GPS in this Nokia device. If you are still having a hard time understanding what the difference between them is, go check some navigation software for mobile phones. Take a close look at its accuracy (or lack thereof).
Even funnier: check some recent Ericsson phone (C905), they have Google Maps installed -- a special build that can use the internal GPS. If you download Google Maps from Google website, you get a different version that is unable to use the GPS.
BTW, "A-GPS" means exactly nothing. It's a marketing terms.
My girlfriend and me have both a Sony-Ericson phone, bought 3 years apart. Guess what ? Both chargers and connectors are proprietary, fragile, weird and different! Of course if you lose it you'll have to spend an arm to get a replacement.
While I am more than happy to have the proprietary chargers replaced by a common standard, the statement above contains at least misinformation, if not ill will.
I've been using Ericsson phones since nearly 15 years now. For the better part of it, they had one standard of charging port. Some three years ago they decided to change it to a new standard. Yes, both were proprietary, but neither of them was weird nor fragile (they are not as trivial as a simple jack is but you quickly come to appreciate their actual solution when you notice it is just the right balance between stiffness/ stability of the connection and the protection from doing damage to either the port or the connector).
And no, they are not expensive to get. New chargers on Ebay cost some 3 EUR, if you are afraid they are not "genuine" you can go to a phone dealer and get one for twice as much (my estimate, given the cost of other accessories from SE).
Most people in the military , especially men, go into jobs that involve killing people.
Well, yes, this is what I expect you can tell about a significant part of army employees (?) -- they like shooting, they don't mind killing (it's "patriotic", and plenty of other excuses). I mean, I imagine it works this way, given that guns, army, etc play a big role in the American culture. And, there are not that many jobs you can do with this kind of mindset after you leave army.
However, I suspect there's another group of people that simply don't have any better idea on what to do with their lives. They like that fact that army gives them a job, that they don' t need to think about minor daily problems most other people have. And as soon as they quit army, they are in trouble: they don't like what they see, and they are accustomed to being cared for (in every aspect of their lives) by the army. But that's just my suspicion.
I left home at 19 and an Ivy League University - joined the military to continue college.
Article:
Mr. Ross figures he has been homeless for about 15 years, surviving on his Army pension
What is it about this correlation between being in the military in the past and being homeless later? Forgive my ignorance, I am not from the US and I have not been in the army (any army). What does army do to people that they have problems living "normal" lives later? Or, were these people "different" from the very beginning and army was an interesting option for them (unlike "regular" jobs & lifestyle)?
[...] VMWare Player. Is that program also going to become free? (If not, I guess it should be replaced with VirtualBox, but VirtualBox doesn't seem quite as polished.)
Care to elaborate on that (VirtualBox being less polished in this scenario)?
I seem to have exactly the opposite impression; I used to work a lot with VMWare but I was forced to check other options when VMWare failed to run on one of my PCs and since that time I am using exclusively VirtualBox.
I'm (hopefully) going to be in a similar situation as you in a year. [...] Nothing in the english/spanish world has the same opportunities in CS as the US, with few exceptions.
So let me summarize:
This is, yes... reasonable. And so non-surprising.
That's the reason for the pricing model. SMS has to be priced high enough to make sure its use doesn't grow faster than voice.
No, that's not true. The sole reason for SMS prices is the economy, i.e. how much the carriers think they can charge the users. Since SMS usage is not falling (it's growing, actually), they see no reason for lowering the prices.
If Lego's products are better, they'll win on quality and be worth the price. Or perhaps the general public doesn't value the difference, in which case the public gets what it wants. This is capitalism working well: competition, with competitors competing on quality and price and consumers having options.
No.
First of all, you did not consider the fact that the general public is often unaware of the quality difference; what the general public sees is (1) the price, (2) the ads saying that (in this case) "our bricks are just like Lego, just cheaper"; any serious thoughts about quality usually come several years later (and it's usually way too late for the original company which is floating belly up by that time). In general, it's naive to think that competitors really compete on the quality plane.
Lego is a perfect example of this; actually, given the current price of these toys, it's a low hanging fruit every toy producer in the world is or has been thinking of.
And, don't get me wrong: I think Lego (the company behind it) deserves a good ass-kicking, if not for the exorbitant prices (that I doubt is only high enough to make up for the high quality), then at least for the dumb marketing practices (who the fsck needs Star Wars sets with only a handful of bricks, most of them custom at that? where are the generic bricks?).
I am just pointing out that it has nothing to do with "beneficial" effects of capitalism.
And, Lego is unlikely to survive it, at least as we know it today.
"Look! There! Evil!.. pure and simple, total evil from the Eighth Dimension!" -- Buckaroo Banzai
