Begs the question whether Apple is afraid that overly-powerful WebApps might cut into regular iOS apps? We already know that Apple is looking to services to fuel its next leg of growth, services like their App Store.

WebApps require no App Store, no 30% tax, no approvals, no platform-dependent implementation, no Mac-based development hardware, no iOS developers, no...

Or maybe they're worried that the browser will become THE operating system, making the underlying platform irrelevant. No wonder Google is pushing for this.

If Apple were truly concerned about privacy, I can easily envisage policies designed to limit access to, say, the NFC reader without out-and-out banning access to all comers.

The difference between Netflix and Basecamp is that Apple *has* to fully support Netflix and other marquee brands. All parties concerned well know that Apple needs Netflix/FB/Amazon/etc more than they need Apple. A phone without Netflix?! Apple had to back down after mumbling some vague BS when the majors refused to pay the tax.

But, things are different for Basecamp and the rest of the long tail. Fly, meet swatter.

This all makes a certain twisted sense in the framework where us customers are corporate property. That's baked in deep to corp culture. In any room with a conference table, they (probably you) talk about us with possessive pronouns and mindset. If you're Netflix, Apple surely calculate that "It's a fair swap, our peeps for their peeps. We get access to their property and they get access to ours. We bring the food, they bring the booze." For smaller apps, the thinking is that they must pay rent to fish on Apple's private estate.

Fair? Unfair? Settled precedent. This has been going on for a long time, just for example in shopping centers: the large "anchor" stores get a big break on rent because they attract customers to the center, the small fry pay full rent to get a shot at the customers who came for the anchors and/or the center's overall "curated" collection of shops.

Many in the biz would say that anything less than 50% profit for a small software-driven startup is on the knife edge of disaster. Also, the economics of software/services are different than physical products: once you reach breakeven, every single incremental sale is almost all profit except for the cost of advertising, etc to acquire the customer. I'll take 100 customers @$70 profit over 50 @$100 any day.

Cost of customer acquisition is key in any business. Realize that the Apple Store is a form of advertising, payable only for actual sales (i.e. CPA advertising). If you've ever done any Google, etc. advertising, you'll know that 30% advertising cost to acquire an actual customer is pretty darned good!

If you're going to anonymously call the cops on your loud neighbors, don't try to talk to the neighbors first. They'll know it was you and not one of the other neighbors. Basecamp have cut off any possibility of a clever separate product by shooting off their mouths. Apple will now be watching them extra-carefully and will warily look at any "premium" offering with the presumption that it's a ruse to dodge their TOS.

In any event, $99 is a major price point. Psychologically even just $100 will encounter significantly higher price resistance, let alone $140. You can't dodge that. ("Price point" is a different concept than "price," marketing vs. economics. $99 and $100 are the same price, but very different price points. Silly, but that's people for ya.)

Parenthetically, some other commenters seem to feel that charging a % of the sale is somehow problematic, yet that's effectively the way that advertising prices work out IRL. Advertisers with higher-priced offerings can naturally afford to pay more $ to acquire customers and bid up ad prices in their niche accordingly. It's amazing how much a single Google AdWords click costs for life insurance. Or major military hardware.

Brave words. If I were on Basecamp's board, I'd point out that Hey's objectives are to make money and enhance privacy. Getting into some kind of tangential social justice war with Apple seems like extreme mission creep, the kind that ultimately kills projects. Just pay the tax and keep moving. Get the best deal you can, but keep your eye on the prize!

In this case, Apple is holding the high card: time to market. Hey only has limited time to either succeed or fail, and it'll be hard for Hey to catch fire without properly supporting iPhone. Apple can drag things out for a loooong time in case of legal action. And does Heinemeier Hansson really have time for the distraction of war with Apple?

Fair? Since Basecamp is actually a business, the real question is whether they can make money at $70/year. Fairness and justice are nice ideals, but you can't take 'em to the bank. Business is all about what you can realistically get, and what you can get away with.

Granted $99 would be nice, but CAN THEY MAKE MONEY at $70? I'd venture to say that if $70 isn't profitable, then $99 is very iffy at best. Matter of fact, if you can afford to blow off Apple you're either wildly profitable or are willing to take a big loss, especially since the people willing to shell out $99/year are often the people who have expensive iPhones.

Oh yeah, don't forget that in any business profit margin isn't uniform across all products and versions. Some are more profitable than others, some are (gasp!) money losers. Often you're forced to sell less-profitable ones to round out the product line so that you offer a complete solution. Imagine a hardware store that only stocked the most profitable 4 sizes of screws -- would you head over there when starting a project? What about an email system that only worked on a select few platforms?

Amazon would swallow most other e-commerce sites even if postage rates "only" doubled, laughing all the way. Higher rates make Amazon's competitors significantly less competitive, don't hurt Amazon because they've built their own delivery network. They still do ship some stuff USPS, but that seems to be coming to an end. Other merchants are competing with "free" 1- or 2-day Prime shipping, and the going gets tougher every time shipping rates go up or service expectations go down. Delivery time/cost is e-commerce's #1 limitation, which is why Amazon built their network. It's a unique competitive weapon.

USPS is actually good value for what it is. It's the only relatively affordable, pretty-reliable game in town for most of us e-merchants without our own delivery networks. Most wouldn't be in business if we shipped UPS/FedEx. They're too slow and/or expensive. Quadrupling package rates like the president wants would add $10++ hard cost to every order, killing most of us. Couldn't compete. Just stand in any post office lobby toward the end of the day; you'll see a procession of small e-merchants dropping off large bundles of outgoing parcels with eBay, Etsy, etc logos on the shipping labels.

Prohibitively raising rates would in turn finish off USPS since they depend on package revenue to subsidize their other operations.

Sure enough, unfamiliar music is a distraction. Unfamiliar anything is a distraction.
OTOH familiar music doesn't demand your attention, but it does cover external noise and provides a rhythm to work by.
Most everyone I know who listens to music at work uses familiar playlists. Even letting YouTube, etc. chose the music will play familiar music.

More booby-trapped packages in general might dissuade casual thieves. Ditto for law enforcement.

Meanwhile, thanks for doing the hard work and getting the publicity, Mark. Now, all I have to do to discourage theft is to put up a sign that says "Warning: packages may explode" with suitable graphic.

Seriously, what happened to the police's "broken windows" policy? I thought they were now supposed to investigate and prosecute small offenses like this to a) create a culture of obeying the law, and b) make citizens feel like the cops have their backs so they don't go vigilante. Which is what happened in this case.

Big banks & financial firms develop tons of cutting-edge tech as a platform to support their core business. Not to mention governments.

Does that mean banks and the gov't are tech companies?

(Open sourcing is an unrelated matter. Note that plenty of true "tech" companies don't open source anything, but the US government does so big-time.)

Thanks for the design help, guys. 'Coz us engineers have no idea how to design computers.

Amdahl used to help its prospects pull the same maneuver on IBM, way back. They made IBM-compatible mainframes, back when mainframes were really expensive and IBM owned the market. Cheaper and faster drop-in replacements, but most IT execs didn't take them seriously.

An Amdahl sales team would worm their way into getting a meeting when they got wind that someone was eyeing a new mainframe, knowing they didn't stand a chance. They'd leave the IT manager an Amdahl-logo coffee mug worth a million dollars. "How can this be worth more than $10!?" he prospects would ask. "It's magic. Make sure it's on your desk the next time IBM comes around. Just watch what happens!" Sure enough, the IBM rep would come calling and notice the mug. He'd get nervous, excuse himself to make a phone call to HQ, and within minutes offer a $million discount on an IBM mainframe!

Seeing that, the customers would conclude that IBM clearly took Amdahl very seriously... and maybe they should too. Maybe Amdahl got that sale, maybe they didn't, but they definitely got invited to bid on the next one.

Junk science. The wording of the conclusion makes it obvious that this "study" is just blatant organic boosterism. In effect, the conclusion is saying "eat organic to reduce cancer risk big time," something not at all supported by the study.

"reduction" is a loaded word that hints at causality.

It also talks about risk, which is incorrect. The study studied incidence of cancer which is not by itself the same thing. Risk reduction is not at all demonstrated since that would require proving causality.

"Significant" (not statistically significant; here, it's used to mean "big") in a conclusion is also a red-flag judgemental adjective that has no place in a real paper's conclusion.

A more responsible wording would be "high consumers of organic food were observed to have a lower incidence of cancer [insert confidence interval here]."

Chastity is the only honest way to go. However, you'll notice that requirement seriously interferes with recruitment in the modern world.

All similar codes I've seen pretend to be something else by forbidding unwanted sexual advances. "Unwanted" sounds oh-so reasonable, but the problem is: how do you know if an advance is unwanted if you don't try your luck? Communication between people is fragile at best. If you advance is accepted, then it was desired. Otherwise, you're a posteriori guilty of an unwanted advance and are a creep because You Should Have Known Better.

Ergo, the only sane solution is to say that all advances are unwanted in that community, which is called chastity.

Either the community is a place where one of the side-benefits is the possibility of romance/sex and where related behavior is sanctioned, or sex and romance are 100% off the menu.

The app's name isn't mentioned, not even in original article!

Hear that folks? The article says Firefox isn't a 3rd-class netizen anymore. Party's over: No more testing on just Chrome!