Letters to the Editor
Rayon Fog
Published Letters: 188 Editor's Choice: 7
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Oxymoron has it wrong...
[Read the article: Is "American Idol" meaner?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sure they have to sit through a lot of crap. But they also said that 17 Minneapolis people made it through to the next round. By my recollection, Fox only showed 5 or 6 of those people that were deemed worthy enough to move "on to Hollywood" (Glendale, really). It was surely less than half.
I don't blame the judges as much as I blame Simon Fuller and whoever is making the editing decisions. By the show's own admission, they had enough material to make better choices.
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Bringing the privacy to you...
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It looks like JAL has provided a personal orange-capped toilet for its first-class travelers. Top this, Singapore Girl.
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Give us the option to pay more.
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Someone earlier brought up a good point. It would be nice if an airline stepped up and provided a level of service that was somewhere between coach and business. The fact that I can pay $700 for a round trip ticket from LAX to Frankfurt is one thing, but if I want to get up to the next level of service, I have to pay more than ten times that? That's ridiculous. I'd gladly pay $2k - $3k for business-like service for the same flight.
I imagine that we'll start seeing more specialized service in the near future. United's PS, SilverJet, MaxJet and others that provide exclusively premium service are hopefully able to pull off what the much-missed MGM Grand Air was not. There will always be those who want to pay $200 to get from Phoenix to Atlanta, and they'll get what they pay for. But there are many others like me who would be willing to pay a little extra for better service and more comfort. Seems to me airlines might even maximize their dollar by creating flights between major destinations that are one class of service - ie. a flight from LAX-NYC that is all lowest economy and another that is all premium.
As to regulation: Call me a simpleton, but I never understood why it was a bad thing to regulate any industry that's in the business of providing a service to a large group of consumers. Ask Californians if utility deregulation was such a great thing (thanks Pete). Many other industries (someone said insurance) operate under strict regulation and they manage to succeed - airlines should be no different. And we all know what happens when you ask an industry to regulate itself.
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More excuses
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]<<I’m not sure a passenger’s bill of rights would have helped this situation much.>>
BS. An article in todays LA Times illustrates how much sway airlines have over the airports they serve. If a passenger's bill of rights is in place that potentially effects the airlines where it counts, you can bet that the major carriers that service JFK will put pressure on the port authority to do something about the poor layout. Not enough space? BS. Those 3 airports are ancient, so perhaps a new location is in order. In any event, there are solutions to all of these problems, but don't count on the US airline industry to address any of them voluntarily. LAX is faced with losing a significant number of international flights to SFO or Las Vegas due to the aging Bradley terminal and their slowness in adapting gates for the A380. We'll see how quickly the Airport Authority finally does something to stem reduction when they see how much revenue they are losing as a result of those lost arrivals. The major airports in Europe seem to have figured this out for the most part, so why can't we do it here?
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Off base
[Read the article: Steve Jobs' iTunes dance]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This argument holds water only if ITMS is the ony place to get your desired music. Clearly, it is not. I see no problem with limiting playback of ITMS-purchased music to Apple-licensed products. Don't like it? Then don't buy from ITMS. Heck, I wouldn't even have a problem if Apple limited the iPod to playing only music purchased from ITMS. I just wouldn't buy (another) iPod if that were the case. We all have choices. This argument is kinda like buying a cassette album and then bitching that it doesn't play on an 8-track player. But Apple smartly made the iPod compatible with just about every codec and file format under the sun. If you can basically fir it on the iPod's drive, the iPod will play it. I am a music engineer by trade, so I care about fidelity. I drive a MINI Cooper with the iPod interface, which is fed by an old 3G iPod with a 40GB hard drive loaded with higher-fidelity (and much larger) AIFF files. Again, we have choices. Nobody is forcing us to do any of this.
Also, I know it's been brought up before, but you can absolutely back up music from an iPod to another computer or hard drive (of course playing back is another story if you have ITMS-purchased music and you've exceeded your authorization count). Doctorow and others need to learn the system before devoting so much ink to that claim.