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Friday 9th November 2007
The week in your words: Printers, Radiohead and iPhones 4:06PM, Friday 9th November 2007
This week came the shocking news that staff occasionally steal things from work, specifically ink.

Half of people surveyed by Kodak admitted to using the office printer for personal use because home printers are too expensive to run. Is it an acceptable perk of an office job, or outright stealing?

"Expensive ink is just today's weak excuse... using a company's consumables remains an offence," says stasi47, taking the moral high ground.

Others, such as belchingmatt, think it's fine in moderation. "The printers in my office are frequently used for personal use but it is never taken too far."

But what's the solution? More technology, claims jonlumb. "In my last job I did a spot of analysis and worked out that if we gave all of the researchers dual monitor setups, then we could cut our printing bills to almost nothing." Problem solved.

Radiohead woes?

Radiohead's innovative experiment in online music distribution (or cynical marketing scheme, depending on your point of view) netted the band just £1 per download.

Were people being stingy, or just taking the opportunity to pay a fair price for music for once? "Radiohead might be wealthy enough, but it's just cheap of people to pay nothing for music they want to listen to," says bubbles15.

"Hardly a 'win' for the music industry," thinks Revforty. "It
 
 
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proves that music has been vastly overpriced for years and the music industry has done nothing to remedy it."

The band did have costs to cover though, despite the savings inherent in online distribution. Isn't letting people pick their own price risky?
"I can see an amusing situation where, say, the bandwidth costs of downloading the album cost the band 5p per download, and therefore people paying 1p for the album are actually costing the band money," suggests Jahbulon23.

In any case, with so much of the profit going straight to the band and not to many layers of middlemen, isn't any amount of profit a success? "I'm amazed anyone considers this a bad result, it is much better than I would have predicted! With distribution costs essentially zero, what does it matter if there was one download paying £1.5m or 1.5m downloads paying £1?" argues JohnAHind.

iPhone frenzy

This was also the week that saw the UK launch of the iPhone. We all want one, but some of us apparently want one considerably more than others, and queued in the wind and rain outside the Apple store for 36 hours. The problem is they aren't going to sell out, so why not waltz in at your leisure and buy one?

"No family, clearly no important work to go to, all they have to cling to is a desire to impress people whose opinions aren't worth anything with a self-validating crutch of a consumer toy," taunts Tablot_Avenger. "Either that or they were paid."

"Who fell out of the cynical tree this morning? They are no different from the people who queued up for some other product," retorts Amnesia10, who may be slightly biased - he has an Apple logo as his profile picture.

"Very true," agrees SmokeyMcPotHead. "This just makes them all complete pillocks."

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Tim Danton puts his safety at risk by standing between the internet bullies and Microsoft. › See full Opinion