Is the Move Away From Artist to AI a Repeat of the Industrial Revolution?

Is the move away from artist to AI a repeat of the industrial revolution? Progress, through innovation, is a hard force to stop.

The industrial revolution is when the master/apprentice system of building was replaced by product cloning. This era shifted us away from a time when unique crafts were built by a master and taught to an apprentice. [These craftsmen may have called themselves artists – but their work was not the purest form of art. Art with function is actually design.]

Keep in mind that art may seem “unneeded”… it might be easy to dismiss art. “Why do we need the David or the Mona Lisa? Who needs a particular song?" What if we got something equally as artistic, but different? Would anyone miss it?

Alas…Think you don’t need art? Try to get through a pandemic without the artists’ creativity to fill your mind. The artist will take you from deep in their soul to a world away.

The medium and methods may keep changing – sometimes drastically – but the artist will always be there to awe and entertain us. And we will evolve to adapt. We have an excellent track record for surviving unprecedented times. But we can't always beat the odds. The house always wins. So, we must skeptically embrace transformational ideas. A new, good idea ineffectively adopted is a bad a idea.

Endnote: This is my first blog post using custom generated AI images to accompany a piece.

Jesta.io: Like Uber for Dining at a Restaurant

Today, I had lunch with the founders of Jesta. I have been wanting a restaurant customer experience like Jesta for years. It's like Uber for dining in at a restaurant. 

I simply pointed my iPhone at the QR code on the table and the Jesta app displayed the current menu for the restaurant, with photos of the items I could order. I tapped on each item and then sent my order to the kitchen, along with my payment and tip.

The best part is there was no need for me to wave down the food server when I was done eating. I could simply leave since my bill was already settled. Simple!

It all worked exactly expected. Jesta is in about half a dozen restaurants in San Diego, and growing. I hope they're able to raise a round of funding to put them over the top for marketing. Innovation at its best.

Unsavable Photos on the Internet

Imagine if you could send a photo to someone else that couldn't simply be captured or saved. In other words, a screen capture wouldn't work and neither would taking a photo of the screen with another camera. One of the first Java applets I wrote solved this problem. But, since then, I haven't seen this technique used anywhere (which probably means there's not much demand for it).

I still think there's a market for displaying photos that can't be captured. But this technique is only a feature... there's not enough for an entire business. I'm just surprised I haven't seen it used. I thought, with the advent of disappearing photos on SnapChat, that it would resurface. My technique for this is still one of my favorite hacks.

Two Funny Bird Stories

Tiny Bird Nest

Bird is a dockless electric scooter-sharing company that's been around just over. In 2018, Time magazine listed Bird as one of its 50 Genius Companies. 

Bird has an innovated business model by paying most anyone to recharge the scooters. Once they're recharged, Bird directs where the scooters should be dropped off, called a Bird Nest.

I spoke with one person who tried to use a Bird scooter, for the first time, but couldn't figure out where to insert the money. That's funny once you realize that the Bird process is exactly the same as Lyft and Uber in that you use an app to begin, end, and pay for a ride (Bird charges $1 to unlock the scooter and 15¢/minute).

Another person told me an interesting situation she ended up in when the battery died on the smartphone that was used to start the ride. The smartphone app is how a scooter ride begins and ends, so, with a dead smartphone there was no way to end the ride. Solution: Load the the Bird into a car, drive home, recharge the phone, and end the ride. 

My Favorite Technical Hacks

Hacks are simple shortcuts that increase productivity. They can be inelegant, but they solve a problem quickly. Hacks may be brittle, solving a problem under specific conditions, or they can require a few extra steps to realize the effective solution. An ideal hack is an innovation or design pattern that works so well it becomes a feature. My favorite non-technical hack (life hack) is one I use after hunting for a parking spot when they're scarce. In the past, I've parked my car and rushed off to my destination without paying attention to where I parked. This has happened to me a couple time in La Jolla and Pacific Beach. So, one life hack I use to remember where I've parked is to open up the Maps app on my iPhone and take a screen shot as soon as I am parked.

I've come across a few computer hacks that stick out in my mind. Computer hacks are harder to explain than life hacks because one has to have an interest in software engineering. But, here goes...

1. Preventing JPG "Theft"

Java was the hot new language when I first started working at Apple. In order to get up to speed I coded as much Java as I could, especially applets since that seemed to be the future of the Web. (It turns out that Java became everything Ada wanted to be, and JavaScript became everything that Java applets wanted to be.)

One area that I focused on was coming up with a way to prevent JPG images from being "stolen" from a webpage. Once an image is displayed on a screen (computer, smartphone, etc), there's no simple way to keep someone from taking a screen shot. My Java applet solution got around this by taking the thumbnail of the image and blowing it up to the full size image so that it was pixelated (blurry). Then, as the user moused over the image in the applet, a small portion would come into focus. This allowed the user to see the entire image at full resolution, but only in parts (one-sixteenth, to be exact). While it was possible to take 16 screen shots and piece them together into a single, full resolution image, that was far from practical.

The full size image was encrypted on the web server to keep a user from downloading it directly from the server. The encrypted image was then sent to the user's web browser and decrypted in pieces, while in memory, inside the client's applet as they moused over the image. 

2. Facebook encrypted UDP

Awhile back, I heard about a brilliantly simple trick that Facebook uses to speed up their site. When a Facebook user logs into their account, their data is fetched from a database. While fetching the data, the user has to wait. The amount of wait time could be imperceptible to the user, or it could be a noticeably long time if the website is under a heavy load. "Heavy load" is a relative term, but Facebook serves more than two billion active users per month, so saving any amount of time makes a noticeable difference at that scale.

Wouldn't it be great if Facebook's servers knew what data a user needed before the user formally requested it? Well, that's effectively what Facebook's done with their little trick that simply involves sending an encrypted UDP (datagram) ahead of the formal TCP/IP request. UDP requests are fire-and-forget, meaning there's a small chance they might not arrive at their destination, but, if they do arrive (and they usually do) then they'll reach Facebook's servers sooner than a TCP/IP request. There's more overhead with TCP/IP since it guarantees delivery (or notice of a failed delivery). TCP/IP is the reason that webpages render perfectly compared to the BBS's of the 1980s that used unreliable dial-up modems where static and interference would be misinterpreted as data and displayed as garbled text.

So, the UDP datagram arrives ahead of the TCP/IP request which enables Facebook's servers to pre-fetch the data and load it in its cache before the formal TCP/IP request arrives. This hack is a simple, yet elegant, way to optimize a website for speed simply by "priming the pump."

3. Safari DNS and Pre-loading

DNS: Safari speeds up webpage load times by looking at all the host names on a webpage, once it's loaded, and then performing a DNS lookup. This saves time, later, when a user clicks on a link since the DNS lookup has already been completed. The time savings might go unnoticed or it can save a few seconds. (There's even an HTML tag to help DNS prefetching.)

Pre-loading: Although I haven't read about this hack, I noticed it when I was monitoring my web server's logs in real-time. As I started typing my own domain name in Safari it came up with an autocomplete suggestion before I finished typing. At the exact moment that the autocomplete suggestion came up in Safari, I noticed an http request for that autocomplete suggestion hitting my web server and showing up in my web server logs. In other words, Safari was loading a webpage before I hit enter. There's not much harm in doing this even if I never formally requested that URL. This is why some webpages load in a flash, especially when I'm on a fast Internet connection and the web server is using a content deliver network (CDN) like Akamai or CloudFront.

4. Keeping iOS Apps Running in the Background

For nearly four years I lead the San Diego Kickstarter Meetup where I mentored entrepreneurs on crowdfunding their products. (At one point, we had six live crowdfunding campaigns.) A couple of the entrepreneurs had iOS apps that accompanied their product which needed to continue running in the background; but iOS doesn't like to keep an app running in the background because it drains the battery. One of the most interesting hacks to keep an app running in the background was to simply play a silent MP3 file which kept the app "alive," even when it was in the background. The downside was that you couldn't play music from another app, but for some situations that was fine. 

5. Timestamping Race Photos

In the late 1990s, I started going to races (5Ks, 10Ks, marathons, etc), snapping race photos at the finish line, and then selling them either at the race or online. The challenge was finding a runner's photo among thousands – bib numbers had to be entered manually, which would take many hours. I came up with a solution that worked great which, to my surprise, no other race photography had implemented. (Nowadays, RFID chips attached to the racer's running shoes solves this problem.)

My solution was to simply synchronize the time on my digital camera to the race clock where midnight (00:00 on a 24 hour clock) was the start of the race. If a runner finished a race in 23 minutes and 30 seconds then they could simply start looking for their race photo around 00:23:15 (23 minutes and 15 seconds after midnight) since the photos were taken about ten seconds before the runner crossed the finish line.

Not all hacking is bad. 🖥

This is so Easy

Earlier this month, my octogenarian mother had to give up her defunct decade-old MacBook that she inherited from my father. Before 2007, she had never sent or received an e-mail – so high tech is still new to her. My sister and I were a little hesitant to move her from her laptop to an iPad due to the UX change, but it's working out better than expected.

Today, she called me asking about the Epley Maneuver on YouTube. She called on a POTS line and then I switched the call over to a FaceTime video call, which she enjoyed. After I told her how to watch the YouTube video that I sent her ("Simply click the link in the e-mail, mom.") I then told her how to hang up and she enthusiastically said, "This is soooo easy." There was almost a hit of "why didn't you switch me to an iPad sooner" in her voice.

Innovation is something that reduces the cost of a transaction in terms of time or money. And that's exactly what the iPad has done for my mother.

Hacks and Tricks of the Trade at Facebook

Software engineers love hacks that become tricks of the trade.

A hack is regarded as something that gets the job done in a clever way, but it's usually brittle. It's an inelegant, but effective, solution to a computing problem, sometimes referred to as a kludge or jury rig.

Any software engineer who's coded on a daily basis has written a hack. Every so often, a hack rises to the level of innovative breakthrough and is recognized by a prominent person in the industry.

As I've said before, innovation is anything that reduces the cost of a transaction in terms of time or money. The best hacks are the ones that already use the current infrastructure in an innovative way.

Until a decade ago, most every time a website served up a webpage it would go to the database to refetch data. For example, an e-commerce store would look up the products that are on sale each time a user requested that page. The problem was that many pages were served up at the same time, with redundant hits to the database. After all, the list of items on sale isn't going to change from one minute to the next.

About ten years ago, as servers needed to handle more load, there was a rise in open source caching technologies to minimize the number of trips to a database. This was a big gain for read only data, which doesn't change often. Storing data in memory (as a cache does) reduces the overhead of interacting with a database. A database's job is to ensure data reliability by running many checks, formally know as ACID properties. But many of these checks are unnecessary if the data doesn't change very often. So, rather than make a trip to the database, the data is simply stored in memory so it's retrieved much faster.

Facebook Tricks

I recently heard about a brilliantly simple trick that Facebook uses to speed up their site. When a Facebook user logs into their account, their data is fetched from the database. While fetching the data, the user has to wait. The amount of wait time could be imperceptible to the user, or it could be a noticeably long time if the website is under a heavy load. "Heavy load" is a relative term, but Facebook services more than one billion users per day, so saving any amount of time makes a noticeable difference.

Wouldn't it be great if Facebook's servers knew what data a user needed before the user formally requested it? Well, that's effectively what Facebook's done with their little trick that simply involves sending an encrypted UDP (datagram) ahead of the formal TCP/IP request. UDP requests are fire-and-forget, meaning there's a small chance they might not arrive at their destination. TCP/IP, on the other hand, guarantees delivery (or notice of a failed delivery). TCP/IP is the reason that webpages render perfectly compared to the BBS's of the 1980s that used unreliable dial-up modems where static and interference would be misinterpreted as data and displayed as garbage text.

So, the UDP datagram arrives well ahead of the TCP/IP request which enables Facebook's servers to pre-fetch the data and load it in its cache before the formal TCP/IP request arrives. A simple yet elegant way to optimize a website for speed.

Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation, Part II

How do you innovate on a book? Sure, you can update the content, but it's still a book. You could always make a coffee table book about coffee tables that turns into a coffee table, but that's fiction, not fact.

About a year and a half ago I reviewed a beautiful book, ICONIC: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation. The author, Jonathan Zufi, who is also the creator of The Shrine of Apple has published a collection of over 650 unique Apple photos. His book included not only virtually every Apple product, but prototypes and packaging too. Zufi recently republished an updated book with more than a dozen new pages and photos. But that, alone, wouldn't be enough to make it innovative. His latest edition is ICONIC: The Ultimate Edition. This magnum opus is delivered in a clamshell case with a custom printed circuit board (PCB) designed to pulse an LED embedded inside the case. The result is that the LED in the case cover respirates like a sleeping Apple computer when the book case is picked up.

What makes life interesting is the story behind the story. In the case of The Ultimate Edition, it's the elegantly designed and incorporated PCB that makes it uniquely interesting. Unique in the truest sense of the word.

The circuit is powered by the high-performance, low-power Atmel 8-bit AVR RISC-based microcontroller which combines 1KB in-system programming flash memory, 32B SRAM, 4 general purpose I/O lines, 16 general purpose working registers, a 16-bit timer/counter with two pulse-width modulation channels, internal and external interrupts, programmable watchdog timer with internal oscillator, an internal calibrated oscillator, and 4 software selectable power saving modes.

In true fashion, ICONIC: The Ultimate Edition is designed with the tender loving care and attention to detail only seen in Apple products.

Innovation Chasm

Hard copy print out of the Internet with yesterday's news.

As companies grow, seemingly small changes become difficult. Change is even more difficult when companies have been around for a long time. Most companies think in terms of what they do rather than focusing on the benefits they provide. It's hard for many companies to recognize they could be left behind when technology changes. The classic example is the ice trade of the 1800s. More recently, we saw it in the newspaper industry over the past decade.

One clear example of this is SMS. It is a shrinking technology. Since 2005, the cost of sending a single text message rose steadily from 5¢ to 25¢ over the next few years. This falls under category #3 of the The Good, The Great, and The Bad Business Models.

Rarely do people send SMS text messages through their computer. It would be a simple feature, but the carriers didn't implement it. Other companies have stepped in because the wireless carries didn't innovate SMS. It was Grand Central that brought texting via computer to the masses. Apple has taken this one step further with Messages. Messages strongly encrypts the content and deliveries it to multiple devices at the same time at no cost.

The markets are bigger than any one person or company. A company can fight change by controlling or cornering the market, but that won't last forever in high tech. The companies that tend to fight it and succeed for long stretches of time tend to be oligopolies (Think: Big, as in Big Media, etc). It lasts for a while, but what companies truly last for centuries?

Aero Glass Augmenting the Cockpit with Google Glass

From time to time we see true technological innovation. As I've said before, innovation is anything that can reduce the cost of a transaction, either in terms of time or money. Revolutionary technology doesn't necessarily need to be disruptive, but, ideally, if a new technology (i.e. iPhone) can replace multiple, older, technologies, (camera, iPod, phone, maps, etc), then it's a game changer.

At last night's San Diego Startup Week VC after-party, I had a long talk with the VP of business development at Aero Glass (glass.aero). I had a clear idea of the augmented reality benefits of using Google Glass as a HUD in the cockpit. But, I didn't fully grasp the checklist benefits until I watched their demo video. Pilots, quite literally, live and die by their checklists. If I forget to turn on my carb heat when landing on a cold humid day I could get ice built up in the engine. Also, a surprisingly common mistake made by private pilots is that they forget to put down their landing gear, even with an audio alarm beeping in their ear. Most importantly, during an emergency, a checklist displayed on a personal HUD will keep the pilot focused.

The Aero Glass features in this video, below, will become very common place in the cockpit. It's just a matter of when; and, from the looks of it, it'll be very soon since Aero Glass will be attending "Oshkosh" in six weeks. Their business will definitely get some attention there.

Webification with Web-ins™

Webification is the process of converting content so it can be viewed on the Web. It's a big deal to simplify a technical process or protocol by overlaying a human readable Web interface. Hotmail did it for SMTP/POP (e-mail), Blogger did it for FTP, RSS did it for XML, and then Twitter took it one step further and did it for RSS.

Google's search results for CNN.

A friend, who runs a green website, created what she calls web-ins™. What she's done, without realizing it, is webified the XML sitemap.

Sitemaps help search engines understand the hierarchical structure of websites. When I google "CNN" I see that the search engine returns more than a simple summary and link to the cnn.com homepage. With the help of CNN's sitemap.xml the search engine deep links me directly to the content I'm looking for rather than me needing to first visit the CNN homepage followed by clicking through to the content.

Each web-in™ is manually created depending on the destination website. Different areas of a web-in™ link to different parts of a website:

Sample live web-in™

KISS

Web-ins™ are nothing more than HTML area and map tags. It's such a simple solution it could easily go unnoticed. But, then again, Twitter is nothing more than 140 characters of text without markup.

The next step in standardizing web-ins™ is to have webmasters create their own for third parties to display on their websites in place of simple links to home pages. Webmasters could provide web-in™in sizes that conform to IAB guidelines as either static HTML or, even better, as a Javascript that implements an iframe whose content would be maintained by the content provider instead of the third party.

There's an elegant beauty in simplicity.

Revolutionary Innovation: Hockey Stick, Curve Jumping Ideas

Innovation is anything that reduces the cost of a transaction. Revolutionary innovation is a curve jumping idea that looks like a hockey stick graph in a growing market. 

There are incremental improvements and then there are revolutionary improvements. The latter are improvements that aren't only twice as good, rather they're ten times better. It's a paradigm shift that disrupts markets. 

The ice trade is a perfect example of revolutionary technological improvements. In the late 1700s, only the rich had ice since it had to be harvested in the winter and then shipped like granite or marble and stored with a short shelf life. Frederic Tudor was Boston's "Ice King" who made his fortune by harvesting and shipping ice to places that would not have otherwise had it such as the Caribbean and India.

Innovation during Ice 1.0 revolved around making sharper saws to cut the ice and inventing insulation, other than hay, to keep it from melting.

With the advent of electricity, ice harvesting was no longer necessary. In Ice 2.0, warehouses could make ice anytime and send it out for local delivery. This is, in its truest sense, a curve jumping disruptive technology. If you worked in the ice business in the late 1800s you needed to pay attention when refrigeration technology came along otherwise you'd be left out in the cold. 

Looking back, it's obvious that Ice 3.0 was the invention of the personal ice maker, AKA: our home refrigerator. If warehouse refrigeration and ice delivery companies didn't start making home refrigerators in the first half of the 20th Century then they were left behind.

Getting Rid of Things

Eight devices in one.

The key purpose of consumer technology is to get rid of things. If new product D does nothing to get rid of products A, B, and C, then it won't gain a lot of traction.

The iPhone replaced the phone, still and video camera, music and video player, photo album, game console, GPS nav system, laptop, stop watch, alarm clock, book library, calculator, e-mail client, web browser, word processor, day planner etc. While it's not a perfect replacement, it's good enough.

Before bringing a new product to the consumer, first ask, "What will this get rid of?" and "Is it simple?" because there's little that's more frustrating than when technology doesn't work as expected. And never forget that innovation is anything which reduces the cost of a transaction.

Iconic: A Photographic Tribute to Apple Innovation

Jonathan Zufi sent me a copy of his new coffee table book, Iconic. This magnum opus is as much about Apple's artistic design as it is about innovation. Turning the pages and seeing Apple's products so finely photographed brings nostalgic memories like flipping through a yearbook and seeing old, familiar, faces. For me, many of these products have a deeply personal story behind them.

As a former Apple employee, whom this book is dedicated to, I feel a special connection to every product that was released when I worked at the company. It feels more like a part of me – a personal experience – than simply a look back in history. These products were and are an important part of my life and a day doesn't go by when I don't experience an Apple product. Everything of worth that I've created in the past 15 years started with one of these products from designing web apps to selling digital photos; from creating playlists to making movies; from publishing articles to writing code.

Iconic is an Apple museum, up close and personal. OS X Server and WebObjects, Aperture and iPods, Mac minis and even packaging and prototypes – they're all in there. Iconic is to printed books as Apple products are to electronics: simple beauty.

Bread and Water

When I was a Midshipman at the Naval Academy I took a Law for the Junior Officer course. It covered the procedures, processes, and punishments of military law and the UCMJ.

Our instructor was a JAG Navy commander. He earned a Bronze Star during Desert Storm by monitoring radio networks and preventing a fratricide incident in the heat of battle.

He taught us a great lesson in creativity that he learned when he was a legal advisor to an aircraft carrier captain.

A Navy ship's captain, who is the commanding officer of the ship, can hold legal proceedings and dish out punishment. One punishment that's still on the books in the U.S. Navy is bread and water. To receive this punishment, a prisoner's first certified as healthy by the ship's doctor before confined to the brig.

My law professor told us that the bread and water punishment didn't work out as well as expected. The delinquents ended up bragging, after their incarceration, about how they survived the "old man's" most severe punishment allowed by law. Instead of a punishment, it became a point of pride.

What to do?

My professor had his ship's legal team take a closer look at the bread and water regulation:

(A) if imposed upon a person attached to or embarked in a vessel, confinement on bread and water or diminished rations for not more than three consecutive days;

A light bulb went off when they read, "diminished rations." Instead of serving bread and water, the prisoner was now fed baby food. Same caloric content, just a different medium.

Telling shipmates they survived three days on baby food ended the bravado.

Author: Joe Moreno

Aviation Innovation Through Simplicity

Instead of trying to solve every possible problem when developing new technology, start with the simplest solution for the most important use case.

Apple

Apple is king at accomplishing this through design and UX. Instead of trying to boil the ocean, Apple focuses on the clean and simple solution that will account for the vast majority of use cases.

Amazon and eBay

Two of the biggest dot com success stories of 1990s were Amazon and eBay.

Amazon started off selling only books - instead of everything under the sun. Why books? Because, other than a few specialized products such as jewelry, books are some of the most valuable items/volume that consumers purchase regularly.

When eBay launched their website, they didn't attempt to solve the clearing house problem dealing with the small amount of fraudulent buyers or sellers who failed to deliver the goods or funds, as agreed. There are courts and people's reputations to solve bad service issues.

First in Aviation

The Wright brothers were the first to make a controlled, human flight, in a heavier-than-air powered machine at Kitty Hawk, NC.

How was it possible that two bicycle mechanics were able to invent the airplane where others, before them such Langley and Chanute, had failed? The answer is straightforward, they simplified the problem.

Langley and Chanute tried to solve two key aspects of aviation at once: flight and inherent stability. Inherent stability is a key feature of boats. As a boat rocks back and forth due to wind or waves, it inherently rights itself (so long as it's not flipped or flooded).

The Wright brothers decided to forgo the inherent stability problem of flight and they took a simpler approach to solving the aviation challenge by borrowing from their experience as bicycle mechanics. A bicycle - the most efficient human powered machine - is inherently unstable. It cannot stand up, on its own two wheels, if you let it go.

A bicycle's stability comes from two key principles: the rider continuously shifting balance and the bicycle's movement (centrifugal and gyroscopic forces created by the spinning wheels). Keep your center of gravity over the two wheels while moving and all is well.

Whereas Langley and Chanute wanted inherent stability in their airplane's design, the Wright brothers solved for something simpler in their flying machine. The Wright brothers only wanted lift. They believed that stability would come from the pilot as he shifted his weight and manipulated control surfaces. In other words, the Wright brothers wanted absolute control and they made no concessions to built-in stability.

The Wright brothers were able to solve the airplane challenge first because they solved a simpler problem basing their solution on a bicycle's principle of instability over that of a boats inherent stability.

While simpler doesn't guarantee success in tech or business it's usually a good starting point.

The Good, The Great, and The Bad Business Models

Lately, there's been a lot of complaining about AT&T because they "streamlined" their text messaging plans. In other words, they removed their cheapest plan thereby raising the rates for the casual "texter."

There are three basic business models when it comes to pricing technology over time:

1. Good: Lower your prices as your technology costs decrease like Amazon Web Services (pass along the savings).

2. Great: Keep your prices the same, but add new features like Apple (innovation).

3. Bad: Increase your prices, even as your costs decrease, without adding new features like AT&T (elasticity and conversion costs).

A college buddy, who worked for a large telecommunications company, explained the wireless carrier's business model best: Squeeze every possible penny out of every single customer.

It reminds me of the last time I ordered a home land line. The cost for caller ID was $7.99/month, but, the operator told me that this feature would be increasing to $9.99/month, for all customers, in two months. Seriously? A 25% increase just to display a 10 digit number on my phone?

From 2005 to 2009, as the costs for delivering text messages decreased, the wireless carrier oligopoly raised the prices to send or receive a single 160 character text message from 5¢ to 25¢. No new features were added – the wireless carriers simply realized that they could keep upping their prices without adding new features.

It was the iPhone that brought visual voice mail to market and it was when Google Voice relaunched Grand Central that we had the ability to send and receive free text messages using both our phone and computer. These two simple features could have been implemented by the wireless carriers years earlier.

Continually raising prices to see what the market will bear is a perfectly legitimate business model, but it really ticks off the customer. Like a big, faceless, bank, you almost hope that these companies will fail. I say almost, because any punishment, fine, or bankruptcy will be passed along to the customer.

We hate these businesses only as long as poetic justice doesn't come out of our own pocket.