And get this -- when Apple sells you a "new" drive to replace the broken one, at 1.5 times what it would cost mail order, how much you want to bet it's someone else's broken hard drive that they got for free.
Cars are replaceable. A few years ago I bought a Toyota. Then I got tired of it so I bought a BMW. No one has me locked in, I'm free to switch. So they have to compete to keep me as a customer (or in the case of BMW to get me back, I was a former BMW driver).
You are out of your fricking mind -- buy the wifi SD card and the keyboard or -- buy a netbook and get a CPU, hard drive, screen, battery, etc thrown in for free.
LOL, @indiginous welcome to HN. You will find that comments such as this just won't fly with the community. Get a better argument or attitude. (By the way, I didn't down-vote your comment, someone else did, as the original commenter cannot down-vote replies made to his/her comment)
I will entertain your reply for just a short moment.
1. Nothing is "thrown in for free" There are always cost associations. Some food for thought, that also goes for software. - A comment such as that will make your credibility for intelligent conversation go down the drain.
2. You are missing the real point of my comment above.
That's funny -- I've been reading HN for a long time and am aware that most comments are left by lonely idiots with super low IQs. I've tried to adjust for that, but even so your position is even more inane than most. Keep trying. :-)
What was the email about? Do you have a pointer? Why didn't you want it published? Did you say in the email it was private? Was it in response to something public? Was it abusive?
It was about the broader issues illuminated by an AGIS/Conxion peering conflict that prevented a number of people from accessing his web site in October 1997.
I didn't want it published "as is" since it wasn't written for public consumption. There were personal details that detracted from the message, adjustments I wanted to tone down some of the rhetoric and some people (sources) who I referred to who needed better credit and/or real links.
I didn't say it was private, but in some of it I was "talking" directly to him. And it was certainly netiquette at the time that email was by default private; he said that was "crap", that he'd gone over this issue "countless times", that "off the record" was a privilege that had to be negotiated ahead of time and that he was "being very generous" in offering to delete it.
That message from him left a rather bad taste in my mouth.
It wasn't abusive, although it was harsh on some bad players of the era, like UUNET, e.g. their actions prompted the editor of Boardwatch to commission a cover depicting the head of UUNET planting blue barrels of ANFO in MAE-East and I think MAE-West, referring to the OK City bombing a couple of years earlier.
The general issue of the day as I put it in my email:
"[T]he ISPs that are refusing to peer with others on equal terms are basically no longer offering Internet connectivity, but are instead offering a private network that happens to be connected to parts of the Internet. As I like to describe it, their unique selling proposition is "sign up with us, and we'll connect you to a steadily smaller portion of the Internet"."
UUNET's dominance at that time allowed them to play this sort of game and we still see it occasionally when a low cost provider irritates another. The end result of these power plays as I said at the time was "paying customers of the disconnecting ISP demand full connectivity or take their business elsewhere", although obviously that was a lot easier in the dialup era.
Actually they telegraphed the change long before that, but the problem is that OAuth changed in the interim and is now a moving target. So any developer that got on board and implemented OAuth is getting burned twice.
And get this -- when Apple sells you a "new" drive to replace the broken one, at 1.5 times what it would cost mail order, how much you want to bet it's someone else's broken hard drive that they got for free.