" Since they invoke the word 'university' (which, like doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc, is not something you can just call yourself in an official capacity"

I think you should send an emergency e-mail to McDonald's warning them that they can't just call their training program Hamburger University.

The free market doesn't work that way. What would happen is that some private equity firm would start a deal to sell new taxicabs to any schmuck who thinks he can make a living driving a cab. Once the contract is signed, the new owner/entrepreneur is locked in. If the market shows less demand for cabs, he can't quit. Well actually he can, but the payments continue. Then they foreclose on his cab, drive him nuts for the next few years with a deficiency judgment, and sell the cab to the next schmuck who didn't hear what happened to the first guy.

The free market is a great system as long as you keep your gonads out of the hands of the kleptcrats.

The original idea was badly stated and your response was clueless. When the police catch a burglar, on of the things they do is to take every open case in their file cabinet and blame it on the guy they caught. It improves their solved case average even if there is no way the guy is to blame for the other stuff.

Actually FDR provoked the Japanese into attacking. This does not mean that the Japanese were the good guys. There were a lot of reasons why FDR wanted a war - some of them valid, but as barbaric as the Rape of Nanking was, these were not things that directly affected the US. Most US citizens were strongly against any kind of war.

Under Roosevelt, we seized Japanese bank accounts and placed a military blockade against oil shipments to Japan. We were shutting down their economy, and there is no way the Japanese were going to put up with this. There is no way that we were surprised - there had to be some kind of response.

Once the Japanese attacked, in view of the damage at Pearl Harbor, there was no way the US was going to admit their responsibility for provoking the attack, so for seventy or so years it's been "Pearl Harbor" sneak attack..

That used to be true. Today I get the government someone else pays for.

Not really. But I'm curious why you bothered to respond when you had no ideas and no rebuttal to bring to the table. Thirty years ago, the scientists and mathematicians who knew what they were talking about were shouted down by twits with opinions. I didn't really expect that anything wold change over the years.

No one want's to hear it, and it's about 20-30 years too late, but the effects of secondary smoke were "proved" through bogus statistics and flat out lying.

The EPA examined about 12 studies on the effects of second-hand smoke, most of them from Europe (as I remember). Of the dozen or so studies, almost all of them showed no measurable effect on health from secondary smoke. Two of them showed a very slight negative effect, and one of them showed that secondary smoke was good for you.

The EPA then turned to something called a "meta study" which was supposed to be a way of reviewing an experiment which did not give your the results you expected/wanted. The meta study was supposed to identify information that was not gathered or incorrectly measured or classified. The objective of a meta-study was to design a new study that would be more accurate. Then you were supposed to go back and do the research again, using what you had learned.

Instead, the EPA declared that the meta-study "proved" what they wanted - that secondary smoke was bad for your health. A number of scientists and mathematicians objected and were shouted down and ignored. Once this became established scientific doctrine, every researcher suddenly found very strong negative effects from secondary smoke, even though the honest studies prior to the EPA ruling showed no such effect.

A similar meta-study was recently performed at Stanford, regarding the health effects of an all organic diet - so it now appears that if you can't prove something, it's considered scientifically valid to used a meta-study to prove whatever you want.

Prior to the bogus EPA report, a lot of people disliked smoking simply because they found smoke offensive. This had no effect on public policy. Once people were told that secondary smoke was a personal issue, the anti-smoking nazi's suddenly had something to work with.

But what can you expect. Our laws are made by a generation of people whose parents did not believe that LSD causes chromosome damage.

Actually, there is no "look and feel" currently, but years ago, Lotus won a lawsuit against Borland for exactly that. It took a number of years to get the verdict reversed, and in the interim, Borland was pretty much crippled. They couldn't obtain new investors. They couldn't even find anyone to buy the company. Despite this they still developed products like Delphi that were significantly better than anything M$ developed. Eventually the verdict was overturned.

The final result of the financial squeeze was the firing of Philippe Kahn and the takeover of Borland by the bean counters. It was all downhill from there. The Lotus case proved that a crappy lawsuit can actually destroy a company over a period of years.

Back in the US railroad days there was a tycoon named Collis Huntington. He was known to be ruthless and greedy - kind of the same OCD type as Steve Jobs. Huntington is quoted as saying (more or less):

        All I want is what's mine. Whatever is not nailed down is mine. If I can pry it loose, it was not nailed down.

In many ways, it hasn't changed tin the last fifty or so years. In the 1960's, about 5% of engineering graduates actually got to do any engineering. The other 95% were engaged in 'highly skilled" activities such as finding the cheapest resistor/capacitor combination to build the gizmo that one of the 5% got to design. And because the defense industries were operating in a system where their bids got extra brownie points for the number of BAs MAs and Phds in the company, the companies were willing to hire a graduate engineer to push a broom. It improved their chances of getting the next contract.

It was similar in programming. About 5% got to work on the unique innovative stuff. The rest were assigned to program maintenance. At one point, Johns Mannville corporation almost self destructed because they hired an entire IT department of brilliant talented software engineers. Corporate politics takes on a whole new dimension when 95 really smart guys are all fighting to position themselves to be in charge of one of the two or three really interesting new projects schedules for the following year. And no, doing a really good job on your current project didn't count - (see Dilbert for guidance.)

There may be a simple solution: Form a corporation whose sole purpose is to own "intellectual property" and purchase all digital music (or whatever else makes sense) in the name of the corporation. Since a corporation never dies, you can pass on ownership to whoever you please.

You could have even more fun if you set up a "MERS" like registry to keep track of who owns the corporation. At a click of a few keys, you could transfer ownership of the corporation a dozen times a day.

The other benefit of a corporation is that it's difficult for Apple or anyone else to attack a corporation - because Corporate America regards it as an infringement of their right to do as they damn well please.

Nice in theory. How many times can you redevelop your app (due to rejection by Apple) before you are broke and out of business. It's not like you can ask Apple in advance whether your bright idea is acceptable to the ghost of Steve.

Personally, I might use an app store of some kind, but if I can't download the app directly from my own site, I don't want to deal with the maker of that platform.

Apple almost lost it 30 years ago. And over 30 years Steve Jobs never learned a thing about treating customers properly.. His successors apparently only learned what he taught them.A year or two from now, Apple will once again be a minority player with at best 20% of the market. And I bet that they still won't learn a damn thing.

Byt when Steve Jobs wanted the Next to appear as an exact cube, it wasn't shit because he was the boss. Similarly, his Mac developer rules were not shit because he was the boss. And it wasn't shit when many developers and some of his more brilliant employees quietly walked away without crying,

When Apple wound up with a 10% market share and almost went out of business, it wasn't shit, it was just Jobs.

Without laws, society is defined by who has the biggest club - kid of like our current legal system.

Jobs sunk Apple back in the early 1980s due to his anal-retentive approach to marketing. Large numbers of potential developers took one look at the developers agreement of the time and decide to become IBM PC developers.

If it weren't for Apples superior graphics, the probably would have lost everyone. Similarly, the end-user market rejected Apple because you couldn't install a third-party hard drive. If Apple didn't offer it, you couldn't get it.

There is nothing irrational about refusing to do business with this kind of company. Jobs saved their butt with a truly creative product design - and then proved that in thirty years, he hadn't learned a damn thing. In two years, Android has taken over half the market. In five years, Apple will be back to being a marginal player with about 10% market share. .

Supporting this kind of company demonstrates a kind of mental deficiency. The intelligent rational people will avoid Apple products until we see that Apple has finally learned something and changed it's evil ways.