[Quote:]

Look, let the Macalope show you how this is done.

WRONG: Roger Kay’s Microsoft-sponsored “Apple tax” analysis is out of line! Let me show you a detailed analysis of how he pads and distorts the costs!

RIGHT: Microsoft has boxed itself into a corner of expensive, nonsensical and uncompelling upgrade paths and is behaving like a spoiled child because its customers have started realizing they don’t have to use Windows. They know it and Roger Kay knows it. If they spent half the time they spend filling out fake tax forms and paying actresses to buy their products actually making a good user experience, they might be able to speak about value with an iota of credibility. But probably not.

See the difference?

[Quote:]

Do you see why it is a mistake to attack outdoor advertising on aesthetic grounds? The row then becomes a matter of comparative beauty and one can go on haggling about that forever. In a sense the garden clubs have led us down the garden path. For when the girls insist that they shall never see a billboard as lovely as a tree it then becomes legitimate to consider all the things a billboard is lovely as. There are quite a few: ramshackle barns, flophouses, poolrooms, cheap lodgings for ancient ladies with orange-tinted hair. Since the world is absolutely stiff with arguably uglier objects it may be some time before the billboards come down; presumably the last billboard will stand on top of the last shack.

The other thing wrong with the aesthetic line of attack is its utter irrelevancy. It is like arguing that mice should be kept out of the kitchen because they don’t match the Formica. What a billboard looks like has nothing to do with whether it ought to be there. Nor does the fact that it carries advertising have anything to do with it, either. It would be the same thing if it were devoted exclusively to reproductions of the old masters; just as the open range would have been the same thing if they had only run peacocks on it. The real question is: has outdoor advertising the right to exist at all?

…

Outdoor advertising is peddling a commodity it does not own and without the owner’s permission: your field of vision. Possibly you have never thought to consider your rights in the matter. Nations put the utmost importance on unintentional violations of their air space. The individual’s air space is intentionally violated by billboards every day of the year.