And this is why arguing about the morality of spam is stupid.
Instead, talk about the morality of people hijacking millions of computers. Each one being, you know, a felony.
I swear, this is like someone set up an illegal mail carrier service in competition with the US postal service, and we're talking about the morality of the government monopoly of letter carrying...
...while ignoring the fact they're running their mail carrier trucks though a public malls and elementary school playgrounds and driving over and killing everyone.
'Spam' is a misdemeanor. It is a trivial crime.
Spamming almost always involved committing hundreds of thousands of felonies to accomplish that misdemeanor. It is very surreal to talk about that misdemeanor in any sort of abstract sense, or about the morality of that misdemeanor, or the constitutionality of laws against it.
And you can stop delivery of any specific mail anyway, by asking the Post Office.
But, more important, postal crap doesn't hijack random people's houses to get them to spew out mail.
Spamming, at this point, doesn't need to be illegal. What we need to do is lock every single spammer up for the hundreds of thousands of felonies they commit by hijacking computers to send spam. Forget the 'spam sending'.
Perhaps you should actually read that article and notice that using the sentence 'This makes international calls much cheaper, by allowing you to dial a local number, then connecting internationally to over 50 countries. '.
That isn't VoIP over 3g. That isn't VoIP on the iPhone at all. That's dialing a local number that lets you get cheap long distance.
If you actually try to make VoIP call over 3G, using Nimbuzz, you get the message that you can't make a VoIP call becuase you're on wifi. I know this because I actually have Nimbuzz on my iPhone, and actually make calls using it, whereas you apparently can just use a google search but don't appear to have any reading comprehension skills.
Yeah, for good pictures, either you need a cell phone thicker than people want, or you need some sort mechanically moving lens that flips in places or extrudes from the camera and thus can break. (OTOH, they have those flip keyboard phones, and they seem to work.)
They're trying to solve the problem in software right now, but there's only so much software correction you can do to an image.
I keep waiting for them to line the camera up endwise on the phone.
Also, good cameras need a flash. Poor cameras really need a flash. Flashes suck batteries.
I don't know why you're presenting conflict between the radio receiver and camera as insurmountable.
Most people would notice if their radio reception went to crap for the fraction of a second it takes to record the light. Most people aren't actually talking on the phone when taking a picture. (In fact, many phones can't even do that.)
Consoles tend to beat PCs at the moment they come out. Everyone's all 'Oh, look at the amazing graphics!' and whatnot.
But then...consoles don't change. For years. The PS3 just hit two. The XBox 360 is three and a half. (The Wii, of course, isn't trying to compete on graphics, but instead kicking everyone's ass by simply being more fun.)
In an industry where new CPUs and graphics cards show up every few months, this means, on average, console and PC purchased for the cost of the console are about the same.
The entire line of video cards I have, nVidia 9 series, is newer than a PS3. My entire gaming computer is faster, CPU(1) and GPU, than a PS3. And cheaper. Same amount of video memory, four times as much system memory.
Go back in time to the launch of a PS3, a PS3 was the cheapest you could get that much graphical processing power. It really wasn't a year later. (And part of that cheapness is the fact that console makers cheat and eat some of the cost of the console.)
1) Well, trying to objectively compare CPUs to the PS3's cell CPU is hard, but whatever. Mine is a triple core 2.1Ghz AMD, vs. the PS3 single core 3.2Ghz and seven async cell processors. My computer is, at least, not much slower.
The theory that consoles would kill off PC gaming is exactly backwards what's happening with cell phones.
Cell phones are subsuming other, standalone devices. The equivalent theory would be that PCs will eventually kills off consoles.
But PCs are not as good a gaming platform as consoles in a lot of ways. Despite what people think, they've got as much CPU, on average. (Consoles beat them when the console first comes out, but two years later, the newest PC will win while the console is still the same.)
But they don't play as well on the big screen, or with multiplayer, and people don't have them in their living room.
Note all those are changing with HTPCs, and it's entirely possible as more and more people have HTPCs, consoles will vanish. Or, in fact, consoles will turn into HTPCs, which is the same thing...dedicated computers hooked to TVs for just playing games will stop existing, and now people will have computers designed to be hooked to TVs but able to do anything.
Whether that device will be running something by Microsoft or by a console maker is unknown. (And rather blurry in the case of Xbox.) I'm hoping the platform won't be locked down like consoles are, so I hope that the console makers 'lose', or at least their paradigm of control loses, and these devices are more like general purpose computers. But, either way, it's the same thing.
Which will also subsume DVRs and DVD players. (Consoles already are doing that to DVD players.)
I find it rather hilarious on Smallville that there are working phone booths.
I'm willing to buy working 'phone booths' in the lobby of the Daily Planet, which are really just enclosed pay phone you can sit down to use, but there's one or two glass-enclosed booths outside, too. And they not only work, they can receive incoming calls.
In some very strange technological anachronism, they're calls from disposable cell phones! Phone booths, especially ones that could receiving incoming calls, stopped existing almost a decade before disposable cell phones, so it break suspension of disbelief even if we pretend the stories aren't really in 'modern day'.
Of course, in the other direction of implausibility, Clark's cell phone apparently continues to work as he superspeeds and near-instantly switches between a good dozen cell towers. No, I don't think so. Towers can only hand calls over to the nearby tower, not one halfway across the state. That call would get dropped as the towers freaked out, or at the least take four or five seconds to renegotiate.
...as long as they are better than the multi-tool.
As has been pointed out, try finding a dedicated typewriter. Yes, some people still use them, if by 'some people' we mean 0.001% of the population that types things.
Or try finding a digital voice recorder. You won't find them, as that functionality is build into mp3 players now. Granted, there are some devices that as marketed a recorder that also play mp3s, instead of as an mp3 player that also record voice, but the point is, it's one device.
People will use standalone digital cameras and video cameras, as long as they want higher quality than their cellphone provides. When their cell phone provides enough quality, they will stop. That's how it works.
Incidentally, my phone is an iPod. And hell, before I had an iPhone, I used my previous phone for music. And the phone before that, come to think of it.
Considering that cell phones have wireless stereo headsets support built in, they're actually better mp3 players than most of the mp3 players out there.
The only reason people are using dedicated music players at this point is that they're not to used to using their cell phone. As cell phone manufacturers have started using 'players multimedia' as a selling point, the changeover is happening pretty rapidly.
A VCR is a device that allows people to record sounds and videos from records, laserdiscs, and reel-to-reel tape and put them on a physical media (See: physical media) to play them elsewhere.
It stored in the sound, and optionally video, in an analog (See: analog) wave on a strip of magnetic ribbon which was then wound around two spindles and put in a 'cassette', which is a word meaning 'tiny case'.
These cassette tapes could be played in cars (See: private automobile), early analog cell phones (See: walkman), and on televisions. (See: broadcast television) People would also be able to bring VCR recording equipment into concerts and movie events and record the events in violation of copyright law. (See: copyright law)
Because of these devices stored video and sound using the magnetic orientation of particles, no recordings survived the Pole Flip.
-Retrieved from 20th.History.wiki/VCR, January 13, 2284.
This might be the only good point in this whole rant. But my car has an accurate clock and it IS separate from the radio and "always on" (even when the ignition is off--- even when the battery is too dead to start the car).
Actually, it's not a very good point. Most cell phone laws prohibit making calls while driving, hence it would be entirely legal to use a cell phone to tell time while driving. Which is why they've having to go back and prohibit texting also.(1)
I can't think of anywhere where it's illegal to use cell phones at all while driving, except places like Maine, where it's illegal to drive distracted at all...which would mean, duh, if looking at a cell phone is distracting, so is looking at a watch.
I'd actually like to see a law under which looking at a cell phone is illegal and looking at a watch isn't. (Strangely enough, the other way around accidentally possible...sometimes it's illegal to hold things in your hand, but not to mount things. So if you had your cellphone docked, you can look at it, but as your watch is on your arm, it might actually count as 'holding' it.)
1) What they need to do is prohibit using any device that requires looking at it a total of three seconds to do what you're trying to do, and disallow holding any device for the same amount of time.
This would allow things like pushing the unlock button to get the lock screen on the iPhone, or opening your clam phone up by touch, and then glancing at it for the time. Or glancing at your car radio. Or pushing a programmed station button.
But it would forbid things like texting or watching TV or tuning your radio. It would be a general principle that then the other laws can be based off of, and something to get people for if they invent some new use that isn't covered yet...if it requires a total of looking away for several seconds, it is not allowed.
Women learn very quickly as a teenager if they have a nickel allergy as cheapo earrings have nickel in them, and earrings are in continual contact with their skin. (I know a few who have such an allergy.)
Men usually have to wait to learn they have a nickel allergy until they start wearing a watch with nickel in it (Which cheap kid watches don't have.), and even then it takes longer as the watch is in less contact and moves around.
I wouldn't be surprised if the phone manufacturers know that they can get away with using crappy crystal oscillators and just re-syncing the time regularly.
Well, yes, but they already get a packet from the tower every minute or so, which already has the time in it.
I suspect most of the inaccuracy in your phone is, in fact, inaccuracy in cell towers.
Yes, the non-standard interface was 'deliberately put there to restrict access'...which is why the library provided by Apple to access the device, um...expressly provides functions for copying files off it.
As opposed to, you know, it not providing those functions, which would at least require people to write their own library or hack something like 'read in the file using the library's file reading functions and write it out somewhere else'.
Apple: Providing the worst DRM in existence. You can hack it about 30 seconds with their tools.
Hell, as I mentioned elsewhere, you can hack it 'accidentally'. I use fb2k with foo_fileops, which allows you to copy files within fb2k, and foo_dop, which provides iPhone access by loading Apple's mobile device library, and apparently the mobile library provides enough 'file access' that foo_fileopts will just magically let you copy files off the iPhone without it even knowing they're on the iPhone or it having any iPhone support.
It's apparently the shittiest non-working DRM in existence.
No. A device having a non-standard interface does not make it DRM. A non-standard interface does not restrict what you can do with files on a device. Copy them on, copy them off, it works without any DRM at all. It just requires you to do it with a computer that supports that interface. Same as everything else.
Perhaps you can in your universe, where a press release stating they will allow VoIP over 3G means that apps that do VoIP over 3G are already in their store.
They aren't, you idiot. They aren't getting approved. (Despite several already being approved for wifi, and thus all they need to do is take out the test for that.)
However the phone itself prevents users from using a iPhone to copy music using syncing.
No it doesn't.
iTunes stops the user from copying music using syncing, I think. (I don't even vaguely pretend to understand how iTunes dysfunctions.)
However, any third party app that can put music on the iPhone has the technological ability to copy it back off.
Whether or not that actually is an option in the program is up to the programmer, but any program that uses Apple's Mobile device support library can use it to get the file off.
I just tested the program I use to put music on my iPhone, foobar 2000 w/foo_dop. It easily copied files back off using the foo_fileopts menu. (foo_fileopts is just a fb2k extension that just lets you move, copy, and delete files within foobar 2000.) Right there, on my desktop, I have an album I just copied off my iPhone using fb2k. It even let me rename them based on tags instead of the silly number plus three char names they had on the iPhone.
That isn't even some special feature. fb2k, and any program with the Apple's Mobile device support library, reads mp3s on the iPod and iPhone like any other file. It can even play them from my iPhone! I suspect foo_fileopts has absolutely no 'support' for the iPhone, it just transparently treated files on it like any other file. 'Okay, here's the file, now I will write it over there.'
Any third party program can easily just copy files, period. (And rename them to something intelligible using the tags, hopefully.) No only can you do it, you can do using Apple's own library, it's not some hack. Just don't use stupid-ass iTunes for it.
Once you get the files off, you can, of course, put them in iTunes if you want.
Of course, if they had DRM on them, they'll still have DRM on them, and won't actually play anywhere, no matter how you copy them around. (The iPhone itself, or even the library, might block copying files off the phone if they have DRM, I have no idea and no way to test it. But that's not what's under discussion here.)
You can, in fact, copy music files back off the iPhone all you want. There is no 'DRM' on them whatsoever. Or, rather, the iPhone doesn't put DRM on them...they either came with it, or they didn't.
Now, you need a special program to put them on or off, you can't use the standard USB drive interface to do that. There are plenty of such programs, from the iTune program to third party software. (You, of course, can't play them if they started with DRM, but you can copy them off.)
Yeah, if I was considering buying something that cost more than $10 I'd probably try to find a pirated copy of it...if there was no trial version.
There's really no excuse for not providing trial versions of apps. Except that it's sucky.
I haven't actually purchased anything over $10, though. At that point it stops being an unimportant purchase and becomes something I have to think about. $10 is like my entire iPhone app budget for the money.
Yeah, same here. Jail broken phone, don't pirate anything. Probably wouldn't even if I knew where to get them, because, duh, iPhones don't have virus protection.
It's unfortunate that the truly talented musicians are giving lessons and performing at parties for less then A$500 a night.
The problem there isn't that those musicians are underpaid. $500 a night for 5 hours of work and maybe 20 hours of practice, a week, is entirely reasonable. Plenty of us make half that for an actual 40 hour week.
I'm not trying to compare the hours worked, musicians usually can't work 'more' and hence a couple of hours a week of performance does need to pay for their living expensive, but the numbers you just mentioned are fine, at least if they can pull $500 every week, or even every other week.
They only seem bad when you compare them to the absurdly overpaid famous 'musicians', many of whom are not musicians at all.
If you want people to conserve scarce resources then quit regulating the size of my shower head or television and remove, or at least raise, the price ceilings on electricity so that people don't waste it because the underlying commodity is too cheap to care.
Right. Don't regulate, just slowly raise the taxes on electricity so that people will start buying more efficient stuff, and also require that all devices sold that use energy actually state, on the side, the average use in various circumstances.
With different 'average' defined for each type of device, so that you can easily compare, say, computer monitors. There might be different averages, like 'Using monitor for eight hour, with the screen cutting off every hour for ten minutes, and then remaining off the rest of the day'. Three or four patterns that estimate different usages of each category of device.
Appliances, for some reason, have this, or at least one number. Nothing else does.
Also, some of California's law makes sense. For example, it's completely absurd that some televisions don't use less than one watt when off. I don't know if we need to make that illegal, but it certainly should be in nice big letters on the box. (In fact, one of the 'averages' should be 'average energy used each day when you don't actually use the device at all'.)
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And this is why arguing about the morality of spam is stupid.
Instead, talk about the morality of people hijacking millions of computers. Each one being, you know, a felony.
I swear, this is like someone set up an illegal mail carrier service in competition with the US postal service, and we're talking about the morality of the government monopoly of letter carrying...
'Spam' is a misdemeanor. It is a trivial crime.
Spamming almost always involved committing hundreds of thousands of felonies to accomplish that misdemeanor. It is very surreal to talk about that misdemeanor in any sort of abstract sense, or about the morality of that misdemeanor, or the constitutionality of laws against it.
And you can stop delivery of any specific mail anyway, by asking the Post Office.
But, more important, postal crap doesn't hijack random people's houses to get them to spew out mail.
Spamming, at this point, doesn't need to be illegal. What we need to do is lock every single spammer up for the hundreds of thousands of felonies they commit by hijacking computers to send spam. Forget the 'spam sending'.
Perhaps you should actually read that article and notice that using the sentence 'This makes international calls much cheaper, by allowing you to dial a local number, then connecting internationally to over 50 countries. '.
That isn't VoIP over 3g. That isn't VoIP on the iPhone at all. That's dialing a local number that lets you get cheap long distance.
If you actually try to make VoIP call over 3G, using Nimbuzz, you get the message that you can't make a VoIP call becuase you're on wifi. I know this because I actually have Nimbuzz on my iPhone, and actually make calls using it, whereas you apparently can just use a google search but don't appear to have any reading comprehension skills.
How did your bathroom sink have a Bulova Marine Star?
Or did you mean your cat used a Bulova Marine Star to push the crystal off the bathroom sink?
And how was the crystal on your bathroom sink and the Seiko Helmet at the same time?
Is your bathroom sink a watch, or does it have a watch?)
I'm so confused.
Yeah, for good pictures, either you need a cell phone thicker than people want, or you need some sort mechanically moving lens that flips in places or extrudes from the camera and thus can break. (OTOH, they have those flip keyboard phones, and they seem to work.)
They're trying to solve the problem in software right now, but there's only so much software correction you can do to an image.
I keep waiting for them to line the camera up endwise on the phone.
Also, good cameras need a flash. Poor cameras really need a flash. Flashes suck batteries.
I don't know why you're presenting conflict between the radio receiver and camera as insurmountable.
Most people would notice if their radio reception went to crap for the fraction of a second it takes to record the light. Most people aren't actually talking on the phone when taking a picture. (In fact, many phones can't even do that.)
Exactly.
Consoles tend to beat PCs at the moment they come out. Everyone's all 'Oh, look at the amazing graphics!' and whatnot.
But then...consoles don't change. For years. The PS3 just hit two. The XBox 360 is three and a half. (The Wii, of course, isn't trying to compete on graphics, but instead kicking everyone's ass by simply being more fun.)
In an industry where new CPUs and graphics cards show up every few months, this means, on average, console and PC purchased for the cost of the console are about the same.
The entire line of video cards I have, nVidia 9 series, is newer than a PS3. My entire gaming computer is faster, CPU(1) and GPU, than a PS3. And cheaper. Same amount of video memory, four times as much system memory.
Go back in time to the launch of a PS3, a PS3 was the cheapest you could get that much graphical processing power. It really wasn't a year later. (And part of that cheapness is the fact that console makers cheat and eat some of the cost of the console.)
1) Well, trying to objectively compare CPUs to the PS3's cell CPU is hard, but whatever. Mine is a triple core 2.1Ghz AMD, vs. the PS3 single core 3.2Ghz and seven async cell processors. My computer is, at least, not much slower.
The theory that consoles would kill off PC gaming is exactly backwards what's happening with cell phones.
Cell phones are subsuming other, standalone devices. The equivalent theory would be that PCs will eventually kills off consoles.
But PCs are not as good a gaming platform as consoles in a lot of ways. Despite what people think, they've got as much CPU, on average. (Consoles beat them when the console first comes out, but two years later, the newest PC will win while the console is still the same.)
But they don't play as well on the big screen, or with multiplayer, and people don't have them in their living room.
Note all those are changing with HTPCs, and it's entirely possible as more and more people have HTPCs, consoles will vanish. Or, in fact, consoles will turn into HTPCs, which is the same thing...dedicated computers hooked to TVs for just playing games will stop existing, and now people will have computers designed to be hooked to TVs but able to do anything.
Whether that device will be running something by Microsoft or by a console maker is unknown. (And rather blurry in the case of Xbox.) I'm hoping the platform won't be locked down like consoles are, so I hope that the console makers 'lose', or at least their paradigm of control loses, and these devices are more like general purpose computers. But, either way, it's the same thing.
Which will also subsume DVRs and DVD players. (Consoles already are doing that to DVD players.)
I find it rather hilarious on Smallville that there are working phone booths.
I'm willing to buy working 'phone booths' in the lobby of the Daily Planet, which are really just enclosed pay phone you can sit down to use, but there's one or two glass-enclosed booths outside, too. And they not only work, they can receive incoming calls.
In some very strange technological anachronism, they're calls from disposable cell phones! Phone booths, especially ones that could receiving incoming calls, stopped existing almost a decade before disposable cell phones, so it break suspension of disbelief even if we pretend the stories aren't really in 'modern day'.
Of course, in the other direction of implausibility, Clark's cell phone apparently continues to work as he superspeeds and near-instantly switches between a good dozen cell towers. No, I don't think so. Towers can only hand calls over to the nearby tower, not one halfway across the state. That call would get dropped as the towers freaked out, or at the least take four or five seconds to renegotiate.
insecure realtor or con-artist.
Wait, that confused me.
There will always be dedicated tools.
As has been pointed out, try finding a dedicated typewriter. Yes, some people still use them, if by 'some people' we mean 0.001% of the population that types things.
Or try finding a digital voice recorder. You won't find them, as that functionality is build into mp3 players now. Granted, there are some devices that as marketed a recorder that also play mp3s, instead of as an mp3 player that also record voice, but the point is, it's one device.
People will use standalone digital cameras and video cameras, as long as they want higher quality than their cellphone provides. When their cell phone provides enough quality, they will stop. That's how it works.
Incidentally, my phone is an iPod. And hell, before I had an iPhone, I used my previous phone for music. And the phone before that, come to think of it.
Considering that cell phones have wireless stereo headsets support built in, they're actually better mp3 players than most of the mp3 players out there.
The only reason people are using dedicated music players at this point is that they're not to used to using their cell phone. As cell phone manufacturers have started using 'players multimedia' as a selling point, the changeover is happening pretty rapidly.
A VCR is a device that allows people to record sounds and videos from records, laserdiscs, and reel-to-reel tape and put them on a physical media (See: physical media) to play them elsewhere.
It stored in the sound, and optionally video, in an analog (See: analog) wave on a strip of magnetic ribbon which was then wound around two spindles and put in a 'cassette', which is a word meaning 'tiny case'.
These cassette tapes could be played in cars (See: private automobile), early analog cell phones (See: walkman), and on televisions. (See: broadcast television) People would also be able to bring VCR recording equipment into concerts and movie events and record the events in violation of copyright law. (See: copyright law)
Because of these devices stored video and sound using the magnetic orientation of particles, no recordings survived the Pole Flip.
-Retrieved from 20th.History.wiki/VCR, January 13, 2284.
It's legal to look at my watch while driving.
This might be the only good point in this whole rant. But my car has an accurate clock and it IS separate from the radio and "always on" (even when the ignition is off--- even when the battery is too dead to start the car).
Actually, it's not a very good point. Most cell phone laws prohibit making calls while driving, hence it would be entirely legal to use a cell phone to tell time while driving. Which is why they've having to go back and prohibit texting also.(1)
I can't think of anywhere where it's illegal to use cell phones at all while driving, except places like Maine, where it's illegal to drive distracted at all...which would mean, duh, if looking at a cell phone is distracting, so is looking at a watch.
I'd actually like to see a law under which looking at a cell phone is illegal and looking at a watch isn't. (Strangely enough, the other way around accidentally possible...sometimes it's illegal to hold things in your hand, but not to mount things. So if you had your cellphone docked, you can look at it, but as your watch is on your arm, it might actually count as 'holding' it.)
1) What they need to do is prohibit using any device that requires looking at it a total of three seconds to do what you're trying to do, and disallow holding any device for the same amount of time.
This would allow things like pushing the unlock button to get the lock screen on the iPhone, or opening your clam phone up by touch, and then glancing at it for the time. Or glancing at your car radio. Or pushing a programmed station button.
But it would forbid things like texting or watching TV or tuning your radio. It would be a general principle that then the other laws can be based off of, and something to get people for if they invent some new use that isn't covered yet...if it requires a total of looking away for several seconds, it is not allowed.
Yup, that it. Also, you're a man.
Women learn very quickly as a teenager if they have a nickel allergy as cheapo earrings have nickel in them, and earrings are in continual contact with their skin. (I know a few who have such an allergy.)
Men usually have to wait to learn they have a nickel allergy until they start wearing a watch with nickel in it (Which cheap kid watches don't have.), and even then it takes longer as the watch is in less contact and moves around.
What cars are you in that they don't have a clock in the dashboard?
I used to drive an old Ford S-10 that didn't have one, but I went and bought a stick-on one for it.
I wouldn't be surprised if the phone manufacturers know that they can get away with using crappy crystal oscillators and just re-syncing the time regularly.
Well, yes, but they already get a packet from the tower every minute or so, which already has the time in it.
I suspect most of the inaccuracy in your phone is, in fact, inaccuracy in cell towers.
Yes, the non-standard interface was 'deliberately put there to restrict access'...which is why the library provided by Apple to access the device, um...expressly provides functions for copying files off it.
As opposed to, you know, it not providing those functions, which would at least require people to write their own library or hack something like 'read in the file using the library's file reading functions and write it out somewhere else'.
Apple: Providing the worst DRM in existence. You can hack it about 30 seconds with their tools.
Hell, as I mentioned elsewhere, you can hack it 'accidentally'. I use fb2k with foo_fileops, which allows you to copy files within fb2k, and foo_dop, which provides iPhone access by loading Apple's mobile device library, and apparently the mobile library provides enough 'file access' that foo_fileopts will just magically let you copy files off the iPhone without it even knowing they're on the iPhone or it having any iPhone support.
It's apparently the shittiest non-working DRM in existence.
No. A device having a non-standard interface does not make it DRM. A non-standard interface does not restrict what you can do with files on a device. Copy them on, copy them off, it works without any DRM at all. It just requires you to do it with a computer that supports that interface. Same as everything else.
Perhaps you can in your universe, where a press release stating they will allow VoIP over 3G means that apps that do VoIP over 3G are already in their store.
They aren't, you idiot. They aren't getting approved. (Despite several already being approved for wifi, and thus all they need to do is take out the test for that.)
Yes, but it only works on wifi.
Unless you have a jailbroken phone, of course, then you can download the package that tricks your phone into always thinking it's on wifi.
However the phone itself prevents users from using a iPhone to copy music using syncing.
No it doesn't.
iTunes stops the user from copying music using syncing, I think. (I don't even vaguely pretend to understand how iTunes dysfunctions.)
However, any third party app that can put music on the iPhone has the technological ability to copy it back off.
Whether or not that actually is an option in the program is up to the programmer, but any program that uses Apple's Mobile device support library can use it to get the file off.
I just tested the program I use to put music on my iPhone, foobar 2000 w/foo_dop. It easily copied files back off using the foo_fileopts menu. (foo_fileopts is just a fb2k extension that just lets you move, copy, and delete files within foobar 2000.) Right there, on my desktop, I have an album I just copied off my iPhone using fb2k. It even let me rename them based on tags instead of the silly number plus three char names they had on the iPhone.
That isn't even some special feature. fb2k, and any program with the Apple's Mobile device support library, reads mp3s on the iPod and iPhone like any other file. It can even play them from my iPhone! I suspect foo_fileopts has absolutely no 'support' for the iPhone, it just transparently treated files on it like any other file. 'Okay, here's the file, now I will write it over there.'
Any third party program can easily just copy files, period. (And rename them to something intelligible using the tags, hopefully.) No only can you do it, you can do using Apple's own library, it's not some hack. Just don't use stupid-ass iTunes for it.
Once you get the files off, you can, of course, put them in iTunes if you want.
Of course, if they had DRM on them, they'll still have DRM on them, and won't actually play anywhere, no matter how you copy them around. (The iPhone itself, or even the library, might block copying files off the phone if they have DRM, I have no idea and no way to test it. But that's not what's under discussion here.)
Um, you're an idiot.
You can, in fact, copy music files back off the iPhone all you want. There is no 'DRM' on them whatsoever. Or, rather, the iPhone doesn't put DRM on them...they either came with it, or they didn't.
Now, you need a special program to put them on or off, you can't use the standard USB drive interface to do that. There are plenty of such programs, from the iTune program to third party software. (You, of course, can't play them if they started with DRM, but you can copy them off.)
But 'non-standard interface' does not equal DRM.
Yeah, if I was considering buying something that cost more than $10 I'd probably try to find a pirated copy of it...if there was no trial version.
There's really no excuse for not providing trial versions of apps. Except that it's sucky.
I haven't actually purchased anything over $10, though. At that point it stops being an unimportant purchase and becomes something I have to think about. $10 is like my entire iPhone app budget for the money.
Yeah, same here. Jail broken phone, don't pirate anything. Probably wouldn't even if I knew where to get them, because, duh, iPhones don't have virus protection.
It's unfortunate that the truly talented musicians are giving lessons and performing at parties for less then A$500 a night.
The problem there isn't that those musicians are underpaid. $500 a night for 5 hours of work and maybe 20 hours of practice, a week, is entirely reasonable. Plenty of us make half that for an actual 40 hour week.
I'm not trying to compare the hours worked, musicians usually can't work 'more' and hence a couple of hours a week of performance does need to pay for their living expensive, but the numbers you just mentioned are fine, at least if they can pull $500 every week, or even every other week.
They only seem bad when you compare them to the absurdly overpaid famous 'musicians', many of whom are not musicians at all.
If you want people to conserve scarce resources then quit regulating the size of my shower head or television and remove, or at least raise, the price ceilings on electricity so that people don't waste it because the underlying commodity is too cheap to care.
Right. Don't regulate, just slowly raise the taxes on electricity so that people will start buying more efficient stuff, and also require that all devices sold that use energy actually state, on the side, the average use in various circumstances.
With different 'average' defined for each type of device, so that you can easily compare, say, computer monitors. There might be different averages, like 'Using monitor for eight hour, with the screen cutting off every hour for ten minutes, and then remaining off the rest of the day'. Three or four patterns that estimate different usages of each category of device.
Appliances, for some reason, have this, or at least one number. Nothing else does.
Also, some of California's law makes sense. For example, it's completely absurd that some televisions don't use less than one watt when off. I don't know if we need to make that illegal, but it certainly should be in nice big letters on the box. (In fact, one of the 'averages' should be 'average energy used each day when you don't actually use the device at all'.)