Maybe all their genuinely cool stuff was taken out back and shot before it saw the light of day; but I'm not sure (based on what they actually sent to market) that "We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did."

There are companies where you can clearly say "Wow, Company X is under the insane delusion that $SOMETHING$ is the future, all evidence to the contrary, and damn are they ever stubbornly shoveling that something into the utter indifference of the marketplace!" This isn't a compliment, exactly; but being a high-functioning delusive beats being a dysfunctional one.

Blackberry, though? The greatest compliment you can pay to their earlier years, and the greatest condemnation of their later ones, is that they seemed frozen in time, only worse. They weren't quite frozen (had they been, you'd at least be able to read your text-only communications and basic voice for a zillion hours with modern battery and silicon tech); but they never went anywhere. Their OS just got slower and more confusing as it mutated toward no particular goal, battery-sapping quasi-smart features were grafted on, cargo-cult style, to a system that never really made anything of them.

Why would you be surprised that someone buying an entry level ($800, your number) DSLR would be a beginner?

When they spend $3000 or $5000 or more on the camera -- plus perhaps as much on lenses -- and they don't know how to use any of it, now we're talking smile-into-your-napkin time. Even so, there's nothing saying they won't learn how to use it eventually.

After all, it's a lot more fun learning to play guitar on a Martin dreadnaught than it is on some cheap box from the low price specials category of Musician's Friend. You dig?

Google it? It's dpreview.com, man. Were you trying to be cute or something?

No, no. This is being cute.

Not only that, but the thesis that one can take "good" photos varies hugely with the definition of what a "good photo" is. It's one thing for social media; perhaps another for family; another for marketing; another for deep space; another for stacked macros and stacked low light; another for historical archives; another for forensic analysis; another for HDR; another for sports and other rapid-motion incorporating shots; another for time lapse; another for journalism... you get the idea.

DSLRs are to point and shoots what high end sports cars are to volkswagons. They have a great deal more potential, said potential rather easily tapped by one with expertise in hand, but getting that potential out of them requires more than picking them up and pushing a button without some supporting knowledge.

The biggest upside, at least in my opinion, is that if you decide to go for a DSLR, all that's between you and expertise is your learning capacity and available time. Truly invest the one in the other and you'll never, ever consider going back to a point and shoot.

Just saying... kay?

Oh, people do that sort of thing all the time, just not often enough that you can safely assume it about everyone in just about any class of people. Some norms are more normative than others; but you can usually find people who are rationalizing and people who are sincerely unbothered.

Or you and they actually have differing positions on the timeline for the onset of moral personhood... It's one of the universe's great injustices; but sometimes people who apparently disagree with you actually do, rather than living in secret, guilt-wracked, recognition that you were right all along.

In a shocking and atypical display of foresight (notably absent in, say, chronically underfunded "Pension funds", back when those existed), the NRC actually requires plant operators to sock away enough money to decommission the plant when they are finished with it, even if they become insolvent.

I assume that they didn't really want to be stuck with a bunch of glow-in-the-dark superfund sites....

Unfortunately, litigation to internalize externalities tends to be the finest in tragicomedy about how easy it is for the guy with deeper pockets to stall, obstruct, and just plain outlast would-be challengers. People have certainly tried litigating against polluters who damage their persons or property, on occasion they even win; but the process is pretty brutal.

"Costs" has a fairly common definition when you get to the section in ye econ book about 'externalities' and the various mechanisms for internalizing them.

Did you actually just suggest that people have abortions because they are confused about what fetuses are going to turn into, rather than because they know exactly what fetuses turn into?

True, true. I really should have said that Apple is the owner; but makes it very difficult for its vassals to enforce any restrictions on their vassals. Everyone is supposed to be a direct vassal of Apple, with only the most token support given to situations where somebody wants to farm out a large quantity of iPads to people under their organizational control.

Umm, this article is about 'gas' as in 'natural gas', not as in 'gasoline'.

And, as it happens, one of the things that utilities like about combined cycle gas turbine units is that (by power plant standards) you can knock 'em together extremely quickly and cheaply, and once constructed, you can ramp them up and down very quickly indeed.

It's kind of nuts that natural gas is cheap enough that these things would be competing with base-load units; but natural gas plants have been the peaking-load choice for years.

It sounds like the school districts (either because their IT staff are monumental idiots, or, probably more likely, because nobody budgeted in anything for "device management" because 'Hey, iPads are easy!') were just using Exchange activesync restrictions, which are... more or less worth what you pay. Delete the (probably boring) school email account, and away you go. By Fucking Design.

The various Apple-blessed 'MDM' services (either 3rd party contract types, or in-house on the ridiculous hardware that Apple calls 'servers' these days) are incrementally more robust; but iPads are fundamentally aimed at 'user-is-owner' scenarios, with Apple occasionally throwing a crumb and a contemptuous sneer in the direction of anything else.

(Incidentally, that's one thing that surprises me about 'WinRT'. Microsoft, fuck man, You Could Have Had The Tablet With Native Active Directory Support. But you didn't. You voluntarily removed that feature. Are you totally insane? That's one area, at least, where you could have blown the pitiful excuses for 'device management' in the competing ecosystems to hell and back; but no. Not a default, not even an option you can buy... What were you thinking?)

I see 'Wall Street analysts' and 'meltdown' in the same sentence. I should probably just bend over and subsidize somebody, to get it over with, right?

Who's it going to be this time?