Apple's iron grip on their ecosystem is what allows them to position their device as "premium" and charge so much for it.

So how does Samsung get away with selling BlingPhones at the same price as Apple's BlingPhones? The same reason BMW and Porsche can sell so many BlingCars; they sell them to people with lots of money and little self-esteem, people who tie a person's worth to the size of their credit card bill.

Meanwhile my $100 Android will do what your $800 Blingphone will and my thirteen year old Chrysler will get me to the store just as quickly and comfortably as your $90k BlingCar.

High-end phones, cars, jewelry, everything is for folks with more dollars than sense.

Anyone who identifies a dupe can be moderated +6 awesome for 7 days.
Anyone who submits a dupe is automatically modded -1 for 7 days.

So, I submit a story and you submit a story. Mine is accepted in five minutes, yours in two hours and they're both the same story. Why should you be penalized for submitting a story? However, I've tagged dupes in the firehose before, how about of you spot a dupe you get mod points (to moderate others) as a reward?

Yeah, I have. The first Nobots chapter was 2009... the next one shouldn't take so long, since after February I'll have a lot more time to write. I haven't worked on the new one for a few weeks, too busy trying to get this one in print.

I'll probably have Paxil Diaries in print in a few months.

Which are?

Bugs unfound by their pathetic QA. A vulnerable OS is a poorly written OS.

Oh, on this we certainly agree,

I was sure of that, I just needed to beat my dead horse again, that lazy bastard...

I'm going a different direction with my book. Electronic versions will be free, you'll only have to pay for paper versions (even though paper comes out before electrons).

Oh, and there aren't any zombies or vampires. There are ghosts in chapter chapter 21 but they're not really ghosts. It's science fiction, not horror.

Shit, it's halloween, sorry. The bad guys are ghouls (at least that's what the Martians call them).

Am I on topic yet? Damn...

Saw your comment metamoderating (left it at 3, not changing it) but I wasn't aware that other companies except Apple were pulling that crap.

Is it because I don't buy expensive phones? My Kyocera edge was about a hundred bucks (no contract). If I bought a phone that I couldn't change the battery I'd send it back. Fuck that! WTF??

BlingPhones: more money, less value I guess.

I believe he was making a reference to otherOS, a backhanded way of saying "You would believe a Sony FAQ???"

Sony has a long history of FAQing its customers over. I'll not be a customer again.

(mods, I'll agree with the overrated but I don't think the parent was trolling)

Ebert argues that unlike movies, video games can never really be considered works of art.

That's what I always liked about his reviews, I could depend on them. If he gave a movie two thumbs up I knew it was going to be a bore, and two thumbs down meant it was probably science fiction and/or really rocked. Ans yes, I wholeheartedly disagree with him about video games, too. They're not all art of course, but I've seen some that certainly are.

Charles Broussard disagrees with me on this, we had some interesting online conversations about this a little over a decade ago. Michelangelo didn't consider himself an artist, either.

Just encode them as illiterate, incoherent, childish ramblings and post them to Slashdot.

That's impossible, illiterates can't write at all. I will agree that there seems to be a whole lot of aliterates here, though. "There car's are over they're." Aliterate.

"The man who doesn't read has no advantage over a man who can't read." -- Twain (Clemons)

If I had mod points you'd get some. An illiterate can't read at all, an aliterate has to sound the words out. Ambiguity is easy to avoid for the literate writer who doesn't sound words out when he reads as long as he's proofread what he's written. The aliterate can't understand this, not realizing that the literate not only don't hear the words unless they're in quotes, they don't see them -- they see and hear what the words convey rather than the words themselves.

The spoken word is indeed ambiguous. Did the Beatles sing "Lets all get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born, though she was born a long long time ago. Your mother should know" or did they sing "Lets all get up and dance to a song. That was a hippie four. Your mother was born, though she was born a long long time ago. Your mother should, no?"

The written word can be ambiguous (like the title, and like a lot of headlines in mainstream newspapers) but it doesn't have to be if properly edited.

I got a yahoo mail address a decade ago because I was tired of changing email addresses every time I changed ISPs, and kept it for the same reason I got it, I hate changing email addresses. If you send mail to my mcgrewbooks.com domain, it gets forwarded to my regular email (or will, it's a new domain and I haven't set up mail forwarding yet).

The US? You think we in the US actually LIKE that horse shit commercialism? It's not US, it's the very rich who run the entire world. They don't give two shits about America, they just use it for their own evil ends.

America pretends to be a Christian nation when most worship at the Church of Mammon on Wall Street. The Muslims really fucked up when they gave the Mammonites 3000 martyrs. Morons. Giving a rival religion martyrs is stupid.

the thing with american holidays is that most are relatively new and based on some other culture's ancient celebration

Well, the country itself is relatively new, only two centuries old. It's a toddler compared to European and Asian countries.