Then again if you are fully aware with the situation and buy the device knowing its limitations then more power to you.
And. If you are an idiot who spends money on things with no information other than "It looked cool and all my friends have it."
Then you got what you deserved.

While I wouldn't call people idiots I think this is the key point. Right now you either are saavy enough to know what you're getting and not buy an iPhone/iPad if it doesnt fit your needs or not techy enough that you'll never miss what you don't have.

I also think ever since the early days of video games we've let this into our lives repeatedly. If I wanted to play Sonic, I needed a Sega. If I liked Mario Bros more, I bought NES.

In my experience, the decision was basically similar to this. I got an iPhone because it did what I wanted and had a large and established app store. I knew it wouldn't have everything but nothing does. If the value of having something not availble though Apple is high enough, I can switch phones.

How is this different from what any store does? If I go to Sears I may not be able to buy the same stuff I can get at Target. Walmart may choose not to stock albums by certain groups or NC-17 videos. In a slightly closer model, I can't get all the xbox arcade games I want to play on my WII or even my PC.

Given that there are other smartphones out there with other stores, in what way is Apple's behavior different from any retailer. They choose what they stock. If you don't like it, go somewhere else.

The other side of this is, because blue ray isn't ubiquitous, a lot of those discs are "combo pacs" with several discs in multiple formats. I've bought a few movies that have a blue ray disc, another DVD, and a third "digital copy" for itunes. In a lot of cases, I've given the DVD away to friends or families and kept the blue ray disc myself.

That saddens me. They're no artists, street performers, or entrepreneurs with really hair brained ideas.

You're correct here in that while artists, street performers, and people getting advanced degrees in specialities without high demand are taking a risk doing things they love regardless of potential reward, only the grad students (and the crazier entrepreneurs) are paying tens of thousands of dollars to do it.

In America, we're taught that the more education you get the better. We're taught that we should follow our passions and ever thing will be great.

Sadly, that's not true for 99% of us.

Nor has it ever been. Pursuing your intellectual passions whether or not anyone wants to keep you in food and shelter while doing it has forever been the domain of the idle rich. For most people you'll need to balance what you want to do with what you need to do to support yourself. This might involve turning your passion into a hobby intead of a career, living a frugal life to pursue your dream or (as many who wanted to grow up to be rocks stars or pro-atheletes have found) giving up on your dreams.

If you've been taught that just following your passions will lead to everything being great then I'm sorry you were mislead. People trying to be nice spared you from the reality that, even in America, the choice to follow your dreams without consideration of how you'll stay alive while doing it has historically always been funded by daddy's deep pockets.

Aww, now I do feel kinda bad. To be fair, the screenshots did look very nice and polished but next time you may want to keep the announcements simple and link to all the details. I probably won't use this but I wish him luck.

The next time someone tells me the only reason why [productx] is so popular is due to marketing I'm sending them a link to this summary as an example of why that really really does matter.

Trisquel Slaine with Gwibber is cool and all but all the cool kids have already moved on to Aljaeguhn Tyabha with Florn.

Now with 75% more Styhanb.

They're our a lot better things to test then spelling. Know, with modern technology, kids can relay on computers to pick up on spelling mistakes and tests can concecrate on learning what students really NO

It's not laziness, it's that the password system of authentication is fundamentally broken. You tell a person that they have to remember a long, unique, random string of characters that has no connection to anything they've done or anything about them in real life. They have to use a different one of these for each place they go to that requires a password and they have to change them frequently every few weeks/months. If you've got 10 sites you belong to and you change your password every month that's 120 random strings over the course of a year.

Remembering random strings that frequently change isn't something the human mind is made for. It's something computers are great at. It's a bad design decision that forces people to do a task that they aren't made to do. People are better (though still not great) at keeping physical tokens like keys and credit cards secure. Write you passwords on a card and keep it in your wallet. And don't bother using anything more secure that "password" or "12345" for sites like Gawker where the information you stand to lose is so low as to not be worth protecting.

Ironically, the most valuable thing most people lost in the Gawker hack was their passwords.

symptoms that appear only... on weekdays, not on weekends at home.

The symptoms, which also include memory loss, trouble concentrating, skin rashes, hyperactivity, night sweats and insomnia

Oh damn! I think we have that where I work. I'll forward this on to my boss to explain why I won't be there on Monday.

If you think it's important and it should be changed get up off your ass and do something about it. Is changing laws, culture and government easy? No, but considering in America both women and African Americans managed to change all of those things without the right to vote I don't have much sympathy for the "I want to download Avatar for free" crowd.

Either get off your ass and do something or shut the fuck up. Bitching on the internet that change is hard is LITERALLY the least you can do.

I get the history, but in the 200+ years since then the legal views around jury nullification have radically changed (see the wikipedia article linked above) in part because we realized that nullification would also be used to excuse clearly illegal and immoral acts (lynching in the South) that were somehow OK with a community. Currently, assuming the wikipedia article is accurate, it appears that the current state of jury nullification has moved from a necessary part of justice to a tolerated but not encouraged practice to now (and with precedent set in 2 federal circuits) something that will lead to your dismissal as a juror. Times have changed.

Just because we thought something was a good idea at the time of the revolution doesn't mean it's something we still do today. We let the girls vote and we count black people as more than 2/3 of a person now too.

You mean that thing that's been explicitely limited in 2 federal circuit courts and curtailed for over the past 100 years? Try reading more than the title of the article next time.

Recent court rulings have contributed to the prevention of jury nullification. A 1969 Fourth Circuit decision, U.S. v. Moylan, affirmed the right of jury nullification, but also upheld the power of the court to refuse to permit an instruction to the jury to this effect.[33] In 1972, in United States v. Dougherty, 473 F.2d 1113, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a ruling similar to Moylan that affirmed the de facto power of a jury to nullify the law but upheld the denial of the defense's chance to instruct the jury about the power to nullify.[34] In 1988, the Sixth Circuit upheld a jury instruction that "There is no such thing as valid jury nullification."[35] In 1997, the Second Circuit ruled that jurors can be removed if there is evidence that they intend to nullify the law, under Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure 23(b).[36] The Supreme Court has not recently confronted the issue of jury nullification.

Arguing for jury nullification is like arguing that you don't have to pay taxes because they printed your name in all caps or you don't have to go to court because the flag has a fringe on it.

This is not to say you aren't justified in wanting more, especially from someone new and unproven but just to show that the open source community has at least the cost and trust issues to deal with if it wants to attract good designers.

damn fast typing

Those studies cost money. For a comparative study you want probably a minimum of 12 users and you probably won't get them in a room for an hour for less than a $20 incentive. If you want them to be at all representative you're also looking at either buying access to an existing list of pre-screened users from a research company or spending a good 100 hours on the phone doing surveys. Think another few hundred minimum. A cheap comparative study, starting from scratch could maybe be done for $1000 but more likely is about $2500. You can do friends and family studies and pay nothing but you can never be sure about the data. In my experience developers also tend to want much larger sample sizes to "trust" results (think 1000-3000, political poll sample size). Not saying this is you but it shows how far the gap is between what some developers expect to see in user research and what user research does.

Aside from the costs of research, in the corporate world as a designer I don't have to do a study to justify every design decision to the developers. I understand why you want more than "because I told you so" but showing my stuff will work takes a lot more time and money than showing yours will so it's cheaper and faster if you can work on trust for some things. This is not to say you aren't justified in wanting more, especially from someone new and unproven but just to show that the open source community has at least the cost and trust issues if it wants to attract good designers.

There's also an incentive thing. If you want to make your name as a programmer open source experience can demonstrate skills, wide interests and passion to potential employers. If a young designer wants to design software and demonstrate skills, wide interests and passion they can do something in print, create a web site or small app by themselves. Something that will show off their design as they intended. "I got the XXXX team to agree to make slight changes to their configuration UI to make it easier to understand" may actually be a more useful and relevant skill to show in an interview but the poster, web site, or flash app you did will probably do more to get you hired.