Yeah, that would make sense if paying the 'unsubsidized' $400 didn't extend the contract by 2 years. I have an iPhone 3G with a broken screen, but I'm not paying $400 and giving AT&T my nutsack as well
Go buy an unsubsidized iPhone somewhere.
Take out the SIM from your broken iPhone.
Put it in the new iPhone.
Congratulations! You have a new phone without an extension on your contract.
They banned a product from their store and then release the same product later
No, they did not. The banned a product that allowed tethering even if it was against your contract with your carrier. Later, they release their own tethering product that takes into account the rules of the carrier. That's a quite different product.
For non-qualified customers, including existing AT&T customers who want to upgrade from another phone or replace an iPhone 3G
That is poorly worded. It makes it sound like existing customers who want to upgrade from another phone are automatically non-qualified, which is not true. I have an iPhone that is in month 18 of its contract. I qualify for the $99/$199/$299 price.
The article points out the full buses (such as during rush hour) are more efficient than mostly empty buses during off-peak hours. Unfortunately, that kind of analysis tends to be misused, leading people into looking at individual bus routes and trips on those routes when allocating resources, rather than thinking about the system as a whole.
What they overlook is that a bus saves nothing over my car if I'm taking my car, not the bus. To entice my out of my car regularly, I must be able to rely on the bus. If I take the bus, say, to go out to dinner, and then decide on a whim to catch a movie afterward, I need to be able to know, without having to stop and study a bunch of schedules, that I will be able to get a bus home shortly after the movie lets out. I need to be able to know that I can go to this corner near the theater, and within 15 minutes catch a bus home, without worrying that someone decided when I wasn't paying attention that the routes after 11pm were not cost effective and cut them.
Only by committing to a regular schedule that does not cut trips--even if a particular run of a particular route gets poor ridership for months or years--can a bus system become a real alternative to cars.
The best analysis is the one run in the real world, in real time, called the market
Utter nonsense. Markets provably do not find the best solution, because they don't take into account externalities. (Also for the reasons Planesdragon pointed out).
implies either a monochrome e-ink display or something with enough backlighting to overcome skylight
What about actual paper, using something like this? If we applied modern technology to that, we could probably get it down to a size that could be used with a laptop.
Re:This makes Unix 15 years older than Tetris
on
Unix Turns 40
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· Score: 1
Unix just turned 40, and Tetris just turned 25 [slashdot.org]. What do they have in common other than closely spaced birthdays? They were both first developed on PDP-11 hardware (Unix on a PDP-11, Tetris on a Russian clone)
Unix was first developed on the PDP-7. The PDP-11 wasn't even available when Unix development started--the 11 came out a year later.
Ubuntu would not be a "digital good" under the bill, but it would be a "digital automated service" perhaps, due to the updates. I think that's how the state would look at it. That's the position state auditors have been taking when trying to tax Washington software companies currently, and this bill is essentially meant to codify the position of those auditors.
However, digital goods and services acquired for free by the end user are explicitly exempted from this bill, so Ubuntu would be safe, even if classified as a service.
So if I were to download Ubuntu, would I have to pay taxes based on Windows Vista or Windows 7? Ultimate? Professional? Home starter?
No, you would pay $0. This is clearly stated in the bill, in plain English, absolutely unambiguously. The people who write the article at Techdirt didn't bother to actually read the bill (although some of their readers did, and this is covered in the comments there).
I agreed with your analysis otherwise, but this battle is just starting... We haven't seen usable preinstalled linux netbooks yet
Huh? The EEE, the Cloudbook, the Wind, and most of the others were preinstalled Linux from the start, only adding preinstalled Windows as an option months after they came out. Are you implying that these were not usable?
Texas? You mean the state of Marshall, TX [overlawyered.com] where Microsoft (and everyone else who wants to win) holds all of its prosecuting patent cases? I do believe Microsoft may be getting a taste of its own medicine
What do you mean by "all of its"? Do you know how many software patent cases Microsoft has been the plaintiff in before the TomTom case? Zero. (And BTW, Texas was convenient for TomTom, as that's where they have filed many of their suits against competing GPS companies).
Oh, and defendants have been winning more than plaintiffs in the Eastern District of Texas since early 2007.
I don't know a lot about Gates' role, but Jobs had absolutely nothing to do with almost all of those patents other than being CEO at the time they were submitted, and in most cases having the opportunity to torpedo the invention but choosing not to do so.
You are almost certainly wrong, as the patent attorneys who drew up the patents would not have put Jobs on them unless he in fact made a significant inventive contribution. Patent law requires that a patent list all of the actual inventors, and only the actual inventors. List someone who wasn't a real inventor, or leave a real inventor out, and your patent is invalid.
If Apple ever has to sue someone over one of those patents, the defendant will get to depose Jobs, and will ask him under oath exactly what his contribution was, and if all he can say was "I was CEO", that suit will go nowhere.
He may not be the main inventory, or contributed to all the things claimed on the patents, but you can be sure there will be something in that patent that really was contributed by him.
Asus is just doing this to make a buck selling the EE PCs that have Windows on them. They'll still sell the Linux ones but they're expanding the market to Windows-only people who are afraid of Linux
ODF 1.1 was a very simple standard to follow. It was only one page. In fact, it's only one sentence: "Do whatever OpenOffice does." Is that your idea of a "reference implementation"?
If that was the case, sure since OO is open source and well documented code. That isn't that case though.
Right. It was StarOffice, not OpenOffice, and of course, it's not one page. But the gist is right. There were people in OASIS that tried to get things into ODF that would allow full fidelity representation of imported documents from other formats (Office formats, WordPerfect formats, etc), so that legacy documents could be fully and completely brought forward. Sun shot them down, stating that ODF was meant to contain exactly what is needed to support StarOffice-nothing more, nothing less.
Go read the terms under which Sun gave OASIS permission to use Sun's intellectual property. Sun retains an option to withdraw at any time if they don't like the direction OASIS goes, and that terminates the license to the IP for any subsequent ODF versions. This means Sun has veto power--if they don't like the way a vote goes, they can threaten to leave OASIS.
Um, the difference is Office 2007 formats aren't a standard. OOXML is, but even MS's own implementation doesn't match up to the specs
Office documents come closer to validating against the OOXML spec than OO documents come to validating against the ODF spec. In both cases, there are minor errors in the documents. The Office errors are due to tags and attributes whose names were changed late in the standardization process. For example, they changed the value for boolean attributes from "1" to "true" (or the other way--I forget which direction it went).
Also see his later post on 1+2. Office and Lotus agree it is 3, but OpenOffice thinks it is 1 in some cases.
Here's what is really going on: for the first time, someone is actually using ODF who cares about consistency with existing documents, and making predictable behavior. Since ODF currently is ridiculously underspecified, this is revealing a lot of problems with how prior implements interpreted things.
ODF 1.2 will nail down many of these areas--and significantly increase the size of the ODF spec. When eventually the ODF spec is actually somewhat complete, so that independent implementations can be reasonably interoperable without requiring implementors to look at the OpenOffice code to find the "real" spec, it's going to be in the ballpark of the size of the OOXML spec.
Some will--but most won't. And the ones that won't, and so get their news from the world or unchecked rumor and innuendo that is rampant among blog-based psuedo-news sites, get an equal say in the voting booth.
Because when a war is not over, making a game about it can get people killed.
A gaming laptop loaded with a game about Fallujah would be a terrific tools for the people that go to poor villages to recruit suicide bombers. Show it to young men there (most of whom have never played a video game), and say that the Americans treat killing Muslims as a game to amuse their rich children.
Free versions of things help to bring you to your audience. It's more likely to increase sales rather than hinder them - more people will be exposed to your book than would otherwise have been the case
That might have validity for music, but it's nonsense for books, due to the differences in how music and books are used.
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations! You have a new phone without an extension on your contract.
You are provably wrong. I have a current iPhone. My contract runs out in November. I was given the discount when I ordered a 3GS phone today.
No, they did not. The banned a product that allowed tethering even if it was against your contract with your carrier. Later, they release their own tethering product that takes into account the rules of the carrier. That's a quite different product.
That is poorly worded. It makes it sound like existing customers who want to upgrade from another phone are automatically non-qualified, which is not true. I have an iPhone that is in month 18 of its contract. I qualify for the $99/$199/$299 price.
I see you posted the identical troll on Digg. Gonna hit Reddit, too?
The article points out the full buses (such as during rush hour) are more efficient than mostly empty buses during off-peak hours. Unfortunately, that kind of analysis tends to be misused, leading people into looking at individual bus routes and trips on those routes when allocating resources, rather than thinking about the system as a whole.
What they overlook is that a bus saves nothing over my car if I'm taking my car, not the bus. To entice my out of my car regularly, I must be able to rely on the bus. If I take the bus, say, to go out to dinner, and then decide on a whim to catch a movie afterward, I need to be able to know, without having to stop and study a bunch of schedules, that I will be able to get a bus home shortly after the movie lets out. I need to be able to know that I can go to this corner near the theater, and within 15 minutes catch a bus home, without worrying that someone decided when I wasn't paying attention that the routes after 11pm were not cost effective and cut them.
Only by committing to a regular schedule that does not cut trips--even if a particular run of a particular route gets poor ridership for months or years--can a bus system become a real alternative to cars.
Utter nonsense. Markets provably do not find the best solution, because they don't take into account externalities. (Also for the reasons Planesdragon pointed out).
What about actual paper, using something like this? If we applied modern technology to that, we could probably get it down to a size that could be used with a laptop.
Unix was first developed on the PDP-7. The PDP-11 wasn't even available when Unix development started--the 11 came out a year later.
Ubuntu would not be a "digital good" under the bill, but it would be a "digital automated service" perhaps, due to the updates. I think that's how the state would look at it. That's the position state auditors have been taking when trying to tax Washington software companies currently, and this bill is essentially meant to codify the position of those auditors.
However, digital goods and services acquired for free by the end user are explicitly exempted from this bill, so Ubuntu would be safe, even if classified as a service.
No, you would pay $0. This is clearly stated in the bill, in plain English, absolutely unambiguously. The people who write the article at Techdirt didn't bother to actually read the bill (although some of their readers did, and this is covered in the comments there).
TFA is wrong. TFB (the fucking bill) says there is no tax on digital goods an end user receives for free
Huh? The EEE, the Cloudbook, the Wind, and most of the others were preinstalled Linux from the start, only adding preinstalled Windows as an option months after they came out. Are you implying that these were not usable?
What do you mean by "all of its"? Do you know how many software patent cases Microsoft has been the plaintiff in before the TomTom case? Zero. (And BTW, Texas was convenient for TomTom, as that's where they have filed many of their suits against competing GPS companies).
Oh, and defendants have been winning more than plaintiffs in the Eastern District of Texas since early 2007.
You are almost certainly wrong, as the patent attorneys who drew up the patents would not have put Jobs on them unless he in fact made a significant inventive contribution. Patent law requires that a patent list all of the actual inventors, and only the actual inventors. List someone who wasn't a real inventor, or leave a real inventor out, and your patent is invalid.
If Apple ever has to sue someone over one of those patents, the defendant will get to depose Jobs, and will ask him under oath exactly what his contribution was, and if all he can say was "I was CEO", that suit will go nowhere.
He may not be the main inventory, or contributed to all the things claimed on the patents, but you can be sure there will be something in that patent that really was contributed by him.
No, they've said they are likely to be phasing out Linux on their netbooks. Only 5% of their current netbooks ship with Linux.
Right. It was StarOffice, not OpenOffice, and of course, it's not one page. But the gist is right. There were people in OASIS that tried to get things into ODF that would allow full fidelity representation of imported documents from other formats (Office formats, WordPerfect formats, etc), so that legacy documents could be fully and completely brought forward. Sun shot them down, stating that ODF was meant to contain exactly what is needed to support StarOffice-nothing more, nothing less.
Go read the terms under which Sun gave OASIS permission to use Sun's intellectual property. Sun retains an option to withdraw at any time if they don't like the direction OASIS goes, and that terminates the license to the IP for any subsequent ODF versions. This means Sun has veto power--if they don't like the way a vote goes, they can threaten to leave OASIS.
Office documents come closer to validating against the OOXML spec than OO documents come to validating against the ODF spec. In both cases, there are minor errors in the documents. The Office errors are due to tags and attributes whose names were changed late in the standardization process. For example, they changed the value for boolean attributes from "1" to "true" (or the other way--I forget which direction it went).
Doesn't seems strange to you that only Microsoft handle it very differently?
It isn't just Microsoft. IBM's Lotus is also incompatible with OpenOffice. That post explains in detail why MS made the choices they made.
Also see his later post on 1+2. Office and Lotus agree it is 3, but OpenOffice thinks it is 1 in some cases.
Here's what is really going on: for the first time, someone is actually using ODF who cares about consistency with existing documents, and making predictable behavior. Since ODF currently is ridiculously underspecified, this is revealing a lot of problems with how prior implements interpreted things.
ODF 1.2 will nail down many of these areas--and significantly increase the size of the ODF spec. When eventually the ODF spec is actually somewhat complete, so that independent implementations can be reasonably interoperable without requiring implementors to look at the OpenOffice code to find the "real" spec, it's going to be in the ballpark of the size of the OOXML spec.
Irrelevant, since Toshiba is not patent trolling. You should probably learn what that term means before you use it.
Some will--but most won't. And the ones that won't, and so get their news from the world or unchecked rumor and innuendo that is rampant among blog-based psuedo-news sites, get an equal say in the voting booth.
He used "american" correctly. Maybe you should check a dictionary before calling others illiterate.
OK, that avoids trouble with EMI. But won't John Cage's estate go after him over this?
Because when a war is not over, making a game about it can get people killed.
A gaming laptop loaded with a game about Fallujah would be a terrific tools for the people that go to poor villages to recruit suicide bombers. Show it to young men there (most of whom have never played a video game), and say that the Americans treat killing Muslims as a game to amuse their rich children.
That might have validity for music, but it's nonsense for books, due to the differences in how music and books are used.