Yes, the App Store is a billboard, but Apple's not the only "billboard seller" out there.
It might be the only one with halogen lighting, say, but there's another billboard just down the block that uses LEDs (in this analogy, Android Market). The halogen billboard is prominent, readable, and displays a single ad, but the LEDs are just as functional and readable most of the time and the LED boards also can post more than one ad at a time, which enables it to be cheaper and more widespread.
People want to get on the halogen-lit board because of its premium "location" and its easy appeal. That doesn't stop "advertisers" from boycotting the halogen-lit boards in favour of the LED boards, but clearly they want to play by the rules because of the cachet it gives them.
You're basically saying someone else should be able to post their own bills on the halogen-lit boards' poles. Some have found a way to do it, but that doesn't mean it's legal.
Probably have now flogged the analogy to death, but the thing you have to remember is that Apple will always be able to argue "if you don't want to play by our rules, go elsewhere." Corporations are allowed to do that, unfortunately, until such time as doing that harms the greater public interest.
That's forcing people to use your particular billboard and qualifies as censorship.
If you're going to use a... billboard analogy, it's more like having the most prominent billboards and refusing to post certain types of ads. Not sure how illegal that is. Furthermore, censorship is usually the domain of the government, not corporations - while there's a right to free speech, I'm not so sure there's an obligation/responsibility to carry/transmit/enable said speech. It's the old "you can go elsewhere" argument - short of the iPhone/iPad ecosystem becoming a dominant monopoly - owning every billboard in town worth owning - it's unlikely to draw the ire of government with any force.
In fact, they've also claimed that jailbreaking is illegal. Another example of how they don't allow us to do whatever we want with our devices.
Technically, circumventing protection measures is in violation of the DMCA, so it is the jailbreaking that is in a legal grey area, not the subsequent use of your own applications. (that on the other hand is likely to be in violation of the licence and terms of use of the device, so you're violating a contract).
(Note: I'm not saying I agree with Apple/Jobs' actions, just pointing out the legal ground isn't quite so clear cut as it's made out to be. Not a lawyer, however.)
I was taking issue at the argument that "you cannot provide more heating power than the sun does", because I would say that it's clearly possible to do so, as long as you're talking about a specific and limited heating. You are of course right in saying that heating would require an energy source, but you're also using a model whereby the batteries aren't taken into account, because you dismiss them as short term - it's not like Spirit and Opportunity's batteries haven't held out for this many years.
How about this for a hypothetical: model it on hibernation. The probe is sent with extra battery capacity. During the Martian summer, when (let's say) more energy is generated than used, extra capacity is stored in a spare battery.
During the Martian autumn, operations are wound down gradually in order to maximise the stored power and minimise drain.
Once winter sets in, all operations barring the de-ice circuit and the charge circuit are switched off. There will be periods where the battery is drained more than charged, but the lack of (or minimisation of) ice will ensure some charge is still gained during the Martian winter - net drain, sure. When the spring arrives, increasing charge can slowly switch on additional circuits, such as additional heating coils to clear off more of the panels & quicker. By the summer you'd be back to 100% operation and charging up for next winter.
I'm not a rocket scientist or anything, so I don't know what the pay-off point would be in terms of panel size, coil size, battery size, and total weight of the upgraded package. But don't write off the idea that more heating than the sun provides can be achieved.
By your logic, there's no point having defrosting wires on Earth, either. Or indeed there's no point cooking with anything other than a solar stove.
The sun provides the energy, true, but its energy is spread and available for a limited time - the defrosting wires would provide heating in a specific place and the idea posed above would be to use stored energy to extend the life.
Other practical considerations may have gotten in the way, but your logic is faulty.
Where the hell are you shopping? You can get a 16GB drive for ~$40 over at deal extreme, and they'll drop it as you order more. Yeah, it's not in the 4c/GB range, but the read-write ability and form factor outweighs DVD-Rs for a number of uses.
... I did not know that. How utterly insane - did someone at FEMA go "Yeah no corporate-induced crisis is ever gonna cost more than $75m to clean up..."? yeesh.
Yes, sure, the government doesn't enter into the equation directly. But the government is the one undersigning your money, enforcing the laws that allow such private services to operate freely, the electricity that powers all the services, and of course the whole defence side of the equation.
Now I'm not saying that transactions such as those should be taxed - if it had occurred as a straight barter or cash-for-goods in "the real world", it'd be absurd to suggest it. But just consider for a minute that the government is not so far removed as you might suppose.
Finally, joke about Windows all you want... if you do a default installation of Windows and you don't install any additional drivers or software, it is extremely stable and will just sit there for ages happy to do nothing but tick away.
Let me just OT for a moment here: if you didn't install any drivers or software... it'd just sit there, period, and you wouldn't be too happy about this slightly warm expensive paperweight you just bought. What on earth is the point of a computer without additional software?
Sony presents their bottom line as one fat number, so clearly all of those companies are part of the same corporation, and thus controlled by the same group of assholes.
If you've ever worked for a mildly large company, you'll realise those assholes at the top frequently have little to no idea about what is being done at the coalface to implement their "vision". I'd be surprised if the management had heard of rootkits before it blew up in their face.
Well, they paid for it, I guess.
Sony, Toshiba and IBM co-developed the chip.
As it has turned out, though, the Cell is going to be an evolutionary dead end. Sony has just killed it for low-cost scientific computing, and low-cost is what drives today's market, especially with a return to clustering.
Hardly; the Cell processor wasn't initially targeted at the low-cost scientific computing market, and I don't find it wrong that Sony doesn't want to participate in a low-margin market.
Instead of having to manage data flow through a PowerPC and to and from six vector coprocessors which you have to stuff with their own code AND data and which have altogether too little memory directly connected, you get three symmetric CPUs and a graphics processor.
Given the design of the Xenon core in the Xbox 360, developed by IBM, a Cell partner, is based on the PPE from the Cell, I'd hardly call it an evolutionary dead end or a significant failure; furthermore, this, and the growth of ARM at the other end of the market, would suggest that the "thousand" cores of x86-64 is hardly the only way to go.
Uh, Sony is evil.
Get a sense of fucking perspective. You could claim tobacco companies are evil for selling products that they know kill their customers, or claim Union Carbide was evil. Sony sells consumer electronics that, through bumbling or a misguided strategy of protecting IP, have occasionally been hostile to their own customers' economic interests. No-one died or was otherwise harmed by them.
To claim Sony (or Microsoft) is evil is pure hyperbole.
Maybe you are, since the rootkit issue happened in 2005 and was born of the Sony BMG division, and the subsequent litigation sorted that out then too. The electronics division, the computer entertainment division and the computing devices divisions are in many ways entirely separate in how they go about their business.
I'm not saying Sony are angels or that there's no cross-divisional chatter by any means, but to tar the whole company with that broad a brush is hardly considering present circumstances. I'll at least credit the fact that they're starting to move away from their own proprietary formats, such as the adoption of SD over Memory Sticks. Sony's still driving technological innovation with the Cell chip, optical technology in Blu-ray and with OLED TVs, though it's sad to see the inventors of the Walkman fall so far by the wayside in the portable music player market.
Yeah they screwed up, but companies do that. It doesn't make them forever "evil".
Note: only Sony device I own is a Handycam, a tape Walkman and a previous Sony Ericsson phone, so I'm not an apologist by any means. I would like to see them driving innovation though.
For some reason this has got me thinking of a Sci-fi book I read when I was a kid - Virus, by Molly Brown which talks about AIs that have an organic "logic" core and are susceptible to biological viruses. Good SF for young readers.
Because those "known unknowns" aren't currently factored into the oil price - though you can guess they soon will be with BP footing the bill for this disaster.
"If a private enterprise fails, it typically goes bankrupt and a small group of investors lose their money. Everyone goes back to the drawing board and tries again."
Uh, banks?
In Capitalist America, failing banks bankrupt you!
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If 5G is anything like the demonstration of "true 4G" mentioned here in Wikipedia, I'll gladly take that incremental kick up.
Yes, the App Store is a billboard, but Apple's not the only "billboard seller" out there.
It might be the only one with halogen lighting, say, but there's another billboard just down the block that uses LEDs (in this analogy, Android Market). The halogen billboard is prominent, readable, and displays a single ad, but the LEDs are just as functional and readable most of the time and the LED boards also can post more than one ad at a time, which enables it to be cheaper and more widespread.
People want to get on the halogen-lit board because of its premium "location" and its easy appeal. That doesn't stop "advertisers" from boycotting the halogen-lit boards in favour of the LED boards, but clearly they want to play by the rules because of the cachet it gives them.
You're basically saying someone else should be able to post their own bills on the halogen-lit boards' poles. Some have found a way to do it, but that doesn't mean it's legal.
Probably have now flogged the analogy to death, but the thing you have to remember is that Apple will always be able to argue "if you don't want to play by our rules, go elsewhere." Corporations are allowed to do that, unfortunately, until such time as doing that harms the greater public interest.
I think the point is that it's not been available over 3G.
That's forcing people to use your particular billboard and qualifies as censorship.
If you're going to use a ... billboard analogy, it's more like having the most prominent billboards and refusing to post certain types of ads. Not sure how illegal that is. Furthermore, censorship is usually the domain of the government, not corporations - while there's a right to free speech, I'm not so sure there's an obligation/responsibility to carry/transmit/enable said speech. It's the old "you can go elsewhere" argument - short of the iPhone/iPad ecosystem becoming a dominant monopoly - owning every billboard in town worth owning - it's unlikely to draw the ire of government with any force.
In fact, they've also claimed that jailbreaking is illegal. Another example of how they don't allow us to do whatever we want with our devices.
Technically, circumventing protection measures is in violation of the DMCA, so it is the jailbreaking that is in a legal grey area, not the subsequent use of your own applications. (that on the other hand is likely to be in violation of the licence and terms of use of the device, so you're violating a contract).
(Note: I'm not saying I agree with Apple/Jobs' actions, just pointing out the legal ground isn't quite so clear cut as it's made out to be. Not a lawyer, however.)
I was taking issue at the argument that "you cannot provide more heating power than the sun does", because I would say that it's clearly possible to do so, as long as you're talking about a specific and limited heating. You are of course right in saying that heating would require an energy source, but you're also using a model whereby the batteries aren't taken into account, because you dismiss them as short term - it's not like Spirit and Opportunity's batteries haven't held out for this many years.
How about this for a hypothetical: model it on hibernation. The probe is sent with extra battery capacity. During the Martian summer, when (let's say) more energy is generated than used, extra capacity is stored in a spare battery.
During the Martian autumn, operations are wound down gradually in order to maximise the stored power and minimise drain.
Once winter sets in, all operations barring the de-ice circuit and the charge circuit are switched off. There will be periods where the battery is drained more than charged, but the lack of (or minimisation of) ice will ensure some charge is still gained during the Martian winter - net drain, sure. When the spring arrives, increasing charge can slowly switch on additional circuits, such as additional heating coils to clear off more of the panels & quicker. By the summer you'd be back to 100% operation and charging up for next winter.
I'm not a rocket scientist or anything, so I don't know what the pay-off point would be in terms of panel size, coil size, battery size, and total weight of the upgraded package. But don't write off the idea that more heating than the sun provides can be achieved.
By your logic, there's no point having defrosting wires on Earth, either. Or indeed there's no point cooking with anything other than a solar stove.
The sun provides the energy, true, but its energy is spread and available for a limited time - the defrosting wires would provide heating in a specific place and the idea posed above would be to use stored energy to extend the life.
Other practical considerations may have gotten in the way, but your logic is faulty.
Where the hell are you shopping? You can get a 16GB drive for ~$40 over at deal extreme, and they'll drop it as you order more. Yeah, it's not in the 4c/GB range, but the read-write ability and form factor outweighs DVD-Rs for a number of uses.
Upside = billions. Downside = 75m. No contest.
... I did not know that. How utterly insane - did someone at FEMA go "Yeah no corporate-induced crisis is ever gonna cost more than $75m to clean up..."? yeesh.
Yes, sure, the government doesn't enter into the equation directly. But the government is the one undersigning your money, enforcing the laws that allow such private services to operate freely, the electricity that powers all the services, and of course the whole defence side of the equation.
Now I'm not saying that transactions such as those should be taxed - if it had occurred as a straight barter or cash-for-goods in "the real world", it'd be absurd to suggest it. But just consider for a minute that the government is not so far removed as you might suppose.
Multiply the miles figure by 8x8x8 to get your cubic furlong volume.
What a pity they weren't forced to have some sort of fail-safe system that actually worked.
Or to put it another way for all the absolute-free-marketers: this oil spill sure ain't providing profits to the shareholders.
Finally, joke about Windows all you want ... if you do a default installation of Windows and you don't install any additional drivers or software, it is extremely stable and will just sit there for ages happy to do nothing but tick away.
Let me just OT for a moment here: if you didn't install any drivers or software... it'd just sit there, period, and you wouldn't be too happy about this slightly warm expensive paperweight you just bought. What on earth is the point of a computer without additional software?
the Outback Steakhouse Aussie Cheese Fries with Ranch Dressing..
... fuck me, do you guys really think we Aussies eat something like that? Yikes...
P.T. Barnum would be proud.
"They did it first!" is not an acceptable excuse.
Not much chance it'll be reigned in any time soon, though.
Sony presents their bottom line as one fat number, so clearly all of those companies are part of the same corporation, and thus controlled by the same group of assholes.
If you've ever worked for a mildly large company, you'll realise those assholes at the top frequently have little to no idea about what is being done at the coalface to implement their "vision". I'd be surprised if the management had heard of rootkits before it blew up in their face.
Well, they paid for it, I guess.
Sony, Toshiba and IBM co-developed the chip.
As it has turned out, though, the Cell is going to be an evolutionary dead end. Sony has just killed it for low-cost scientific computing, and low-cost is what drives today's market, especially with a return to clustering.
Hardly; the Cell processor wasn't initially targeted at the low-cost scientific computing market, and I don't find it wrong that Sony doesn't want to participate in a low-margin market.
Instead of having to manage data flow through a PowerPC and to and from six vector coprocessors which you have to stuff with their own code AND data and which have altogether too little memory directly connected, you get three symmetric CPUs and a graphics processor.
Given the design of the Xenon core in the Xbox 360, developed by IBM, a Cell partner, is based on the PPE from the Cell, I'd hardly call it an evolutionary dead end or a significant failure; furthermore, this, and the growth of ARM at the other end of the market, would suggest that the "thousand" cores of x86-64 is hardly the only way to go.
Uh, Sony is evil.
Get a sense of fucking perspective. You could claim tobacco companies are evil for selling products that they know kill their customers, or claim Union Carbide was evil. Sony sells consumer electronics that, through bumbling or a misguided strategy of protecting IP, have occasionally been hostile to their own customers' economic interests. No-one died or was otherwise harmed by them.
To claim Sony (or Microsoft) is evil is pure hyperbole.
Maybe you are, since the rootkit issue happened in 2005 and was born of the Sony BMG division, and the subsequent litigation sorted that out then too. The electronics division, the computer entertainment division and the computing devices divisions are in many ways entirely separate in how they go about their business.
I'm not saying Sony are angels or that there's no cross-divisional chatter by any means, but to tar the whole company with that broad a brush is hardly considering present circumstances. I'll at least credit the fact that they're starting to move away from their own proprietary formats, such as the adoption of SD over Memory Sticks. Sony's still driving technological innovation with the Cell chip, optical technology in Blu-ray and with OLED TVs, though it's sad to see the inventors of the Walkman fall so far by the wayside in the portable music player market.
Yeah they screwed up, but companies do that. It doesn't make them forever "evil".
Note: only Sony device I own is a Handycam, a tape Walkman and a previous Sony Ericsson phone, so I'm not an apologist by any means. I would like to see them driving innovation though.
Look up the Ford Model T. I hear it sold a few units and changed a few business models.
For some reason this has got me thinking of a Sci-fi book I read when I was a kid - Virus, by Molly Brown which talks about AIs that have an organic "logic" core and are susceptible to biological viruses. Good SF for young readers.
you can receive American Idol and Survivor for free from digital over the air broadcasts
... and then we'll have the cable guys lining up for a bailout.
Because those "known unknowns" aren't currently factored into the oil price - though you can guess they soon will be with BP footing the bill for this disaster.
I'm sorry, Yo Mama jokes with $variables just don't work.
"If a private enterprise fails, it typically goes bankrupt and a small group of investors lose their money. Everyone goes back to the drawing board and tries again."
Uh, banks?
In Capitalist America, failing banks bankrupt you!
(thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week...)
Nah that's only in tornados, with the spin cycle.