Interesting math there - a sales total of 1.693%. How exactly does that work?

Considering that 0.993% of first week pirates "eventually" bought the app and currently 50% of his user base legally acquired the app, then there is a potential sales impact of less than 2% over the long-term. I would concur that it didn't impact his sales by much.

The PBS article below expands on the details of the case. Prior to publishing her "letter to the editor" the paper was fully aware that it was a post from Myspace, not a true letter to the editor. In fact, the editor was the person who added her name to the letter, not the principal as stated in the /. piece. The author was made aware that her now deleted rant would be published as a letter to the editor. The author was assured by the paper that the "letter" would not run, but then they ran it anyway.

I think this is a prime "what not to do" example of journalistic ethics.

Media Shift @ PBS

"Macs are over priced, but people pay that premium because they want an Apple product."

Your statement seems to contradict itself. If something were overpriced then it would cost more than the market would pay for it, slowly leading to the demise of the manufacturer. But as you note, Apple products seem sell reasonably well, even at a perceived price premium. That would lead me to conclude that, from a market perspective, their products are not truly overpriced.

If a company offers a product that the market percieves as superior, people will pay more for it. This applies to everything from dairy products to automobiles to consumer electronics. The fact that Apple is able to sell products for a reasonable profit isn't really much of an argument against them or their products.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to drive my over-priced Honda home and watch my trendy, over-priced and fashionable Sony HDTV. (no, not really)

I recently overheard a web developer raving about this new online classifieds website he was launching in a few months. From what I could tell, it was solely focused on competing with Cragislist and they were going to achieve this by having very slick, graphical interface and unlimited sub-categorization. They were spending big money on this website and it was going to show!

Right then and there I knew their website, whatever it was called, was doomed to fail because they had missed the point. People neither need nor want a graphically slick, over-produced, banner-ad infested place to trade their toaster for a case of panty hose.

To boil your post (and maybe mine) down to a Han Solo quote "She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid."

Most of that is OSX, not the hardware. I have 2 seemingly ancient G4 Macs that are running Leopard quite nicely. Any Intel Mac would kill them on video encoding and the like, but for basic day-to-day tasks they are plenty fast.

In the end, the whole "price" argument against Macs is getting a little long in the tooth. Similar Nike's cost more than Starbury's. Sony TV's cost more than Olevia's for the same size/features. A house in one area is cheaper than the same house 5 miles away.

Every day millions of people spend slightly more for an item that they perceive to be superior/more popular/cooler than a similar item. I have a feeling this has been going on since the dawn of mankind.

And you forgot about the Tennessee Board of Regents budget cuts that are sending state universities and even downstream community colleges scrambling to cut programs and raise tuitions to cover the gap.

I suspect the folks who will end up paying for this are the very students that are being policed. They can just slip it into the "Technology Access Fee" or some such nonesense that students are already forced to pay even if they don't access any technologies.

Seriously guys, great job on such wonderfully timed legislation. I expect in the next 2 years we'll be seeing more embarassing stories like this about the Tennessee State Legislature given the direction it went in the last election.