I'd be much more worried if this wasn't going to best cloud provider in the market which Amazon is. And Amazon's pricing is reasonable, some things could be cheaper but overall things are priced competitively. Seems like the only people complaining are Microsoft and Oracle, both stellar examples of fine businesses.
Free for 20 years and then requiring a renewal fee would solve 90% of the copyright's problems. The fee bit is critical since it achieves two purposes, it solves the orphan work problem and it removes copyright protection from all of the non economically viable works. Plus it creates a database of exactly what is under copyright. I'm fine with 20 year renewal periods, but it would be for an escalating fee on each renewal. This model allows extremely costly works like big budget movies to maintain copyright indefinitely while simultaneously pushing all of the minor items that make up our culture into the public domain.
I'll fully support their actions when we go back to a 20 year copyright instead of the ridiculous 140 years under the current system. It is obscene that photos and recordings of WWII won't be freely available until generations that haven't even been born yet are adults.
Those prepaid phones in the supermarket have carrier subsidies on them, that is not the actual price of the phone. They are locked onto their prepaid carrier. A tech person can unlock some of them but you will be vulnerable to an OTA update relocking them (and carriers will definitely do that with increased locking security). The subsidies on prepaid phones can be up to $100.
I have one. It is good phone for $100. For sure it is not a flagship, but those are 5x more $$$. It is way, way better than a Nokia 1 which I also have. It is not as good as my Google Pixel.
There is one bug with it, they have broken Android Auto with their USB-C support. They are supposed to be fixing it; they are definitely aware it is broken.
$50 is too little to pay for a phone. You can't assemble a BOM of parts to make a decent $50 phone. A key problem right now is the upward movement in the prices of DRAM and flash. However, it is possible to make a decent phone at the $100 price point. It is similar to saying why can't you manufacture a car for $1000? It just isn't possible to do it and end up with something decent. Steel, silicon, glass, lithium, plastic all cost money.
Personally I think it is utterly amazing that we can make something the complexity of a smart phone and sell it for $100. Manufacturing capabilities today would seem like magic fifty years ago.
With Umidigi A1 one of the SIM slots takes your choice of 2nd SIM or SD Card. Battery is not user replaceable. 1.5Ghz quad core A53.
I have an A1 and it is an excellent phone for the price. Just a few complaints, it is a little heavy at 173g. And the fit/finish is not perfect, you can easily feel the joints with your finger, but put it in a case and you can't tell. Plus I wish the rear camera was not directly over the fingerprint sensor.
Verizon did this with FIOS a few years ago and cause me to cancel when my contract expired. They arbitrarily raised the rental fee of the mandatory STB $3 to $5 per month depending on model. Of course consumers got squat for this price increase. What pissed me off was seeing the CEO on the financial news networks crowing over and over about the new RECORD profits in the FIOS group. I knew exactly how those profits were achieved.
We might be better off with three strong carriers than with two strong ones and two weak ones. It's not like Sprint was much of a competitor for Verizon/AT&T.
Also don't discount that a fourth carrier may reappear. Comcast has recently entered the wireless business as a MVNO. Comcast is sitting on a big chunk of spectrum that can be used for wireless if they choose to build it out.
Verizon, AT&T, T-sprint, Comcast is probably a better set of four competitors.
Another part of this may be people turning their TV off and leaving the cable box on. Newer cable TV boxes can use HDMI-CEC and know if the TV is off, but millions of cable boxes don't support CEC. I read that Neilson is relying much more heavily now on data from cable boxes than diaries.
Are people really watching 8hrs a day or is the TV simply on? We leave ours on all of the time when not at home because the dogs like hearing the voices and they don't misbehave.
Alternatives would come onto the market if you banned fossil fuels. They simply aren't on the market currently since few to no people will buy them since they are much more expensive.
So tax them. It is the lawsuit that is ridiculous. Just like the tobacco lawsuits were totally corrupt. $10B to the lawyers. If we had simply taxed the tobacco companies that $10B would be in the US Treasury. Pass a $5/barrel refining tax on the refinery inside the city limits.
So get rid of this silly lawsuit and pass a city wide $5 a gallon gas tax. The city can do that tomorrow, no need to mess with a decade long lawsuit and billions in legal fees. If a gas tax doesn't work pass a $1000/car vehicle tax on gasoline engines.
If this lawsuit is going to succeed you will need to successfully demonstrate that you have been deceived into using a product that if you had known the full story on you would not have used. For example tobacco users were deceived into smoking because they were told it was harmless to their heath, if they had been provided with full information on the dangers of tobacco they would never have smoked. Plus smoking is a physical addiction and thus they were unable to stop smoking during the tobacco trials.
This lawsuit fails on many counts: 1) The citizens of the city are not physically addicted to oil. Once they became aware of the climate impact they continued using the products. 2) The city claims full awareness of the evils of oil, yet they have not voted to ban hydrocarbon use within their city limits. 3) The city can not demonstrate that people were deceived into choosing oil over cleaner alternatives since for the most part those cleaner alternatives are not available. For example, try and buy a piece of steel that was made without using carbon based fuel, it isn't possible to do so.
For this suit to have any merit the city needs to immediately enact a law banning all use of hydrocarbons.
There are no laws requiring the oil companies to provide you with a brochure explaining the the pros and cons of climate change every time you fill your gas tank up. Before you convict this company, make sure it is a real crime that you are accusing them of doing.
Personally I am not a supporter of the tobacco lawsuits either. It was utter corruption to hand out over $10B in legal fees to the lawyers involved in those lawsuits. I drive by the $55M ocean front house of one of those lawyers on my way to work. The correct solution was to simply tax the tobacco companies which was totally within the government power to do so, it was lunatic allowing private lawyers to collect $10B in fees. But wait -- the number one largest donor to the Democratic party -- trial lawyers! That $10B belonged in the US Treasury.
And don't say we had to find the tobacco companies guilty before taxing them. The government can tax anyone they vote to do so, no conviction required. Remember that check you have to send in every year? They didn't have to convict you of anything first. The government can vote in a 50% hydrocarbon tax tomorrow if they can pass the legislation.
The cities have already lost this simply because their citizen continue to burn fuel. If you are going to make a case for this the very first thing the cities should do is ban all burning of hydrocarbons within their city limits. If they don't do that then they are just as guilty as anyone else.
Of course juries like to stick it to companies whether they are guilty or not. And then that results in decades of appeals to more sensible forums.
In the first court case Alsop ruled correctly the APIs were purely functional expressions and could not be copyrighted. Oracle appealed this to a bunch of Luddite judges on the Appellate court who overruled Alsop and declared that API could be copyright. In the second court cast Alsop/Google were forced to accept the ruling that APIs were copyright. The new (and correct) decision by a Federal jury was that if APIs are copyright, then it is Fair Use to clone them. Oracle appealed this to another set of Luddite judges who have now ruled that it is not Fair Use to copy an API.
This is going to end up in the US Supreme Court. On one side with have greedy Larry, and on the other side with have the potential collapse of the entire US computer industry. It is disgusting that Ellison will risk destroying the entire computer industry in a quest to get another $8B to add to his current $57B net worth.
The only part of Oracle Java that Google copied is the function signatures. It has been unequivocally proven over the years that nothing else was copied. And of course Google copied the function signatures (ie the API) sincethere is no way to make software compatible without copying the function signatures.
Since the only possible avenue to cloning is by copying the function signatures, Alsop and the jury rules this fair use.
Oracle's current case hinges on making it a copyright violation to clone the function signatures. And the problem with doing that is if they win suddenly every cloned API in the history of computing is going to turn into a copyright infringement. And the lawyers of the world will declare a week of celebration before they all become billionaires.
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Fleets of on-demand, self-driving electric cars are the future.
I'd be much more worried if this wasn't going to best cloud provider in the market which Amazon is. And Amazon's pricing is reasonable, some things could be cheaper but overall things are priced competitively. Seems like the only people complaining are Microsoft and Oracle, both stellar examples of fine businesses.
Free for 20 years and then requiring a renewal fee would solve 90% of the copyright's problems. The fee bit is critical since it achieves two purposes, it solves the orphan work problem and it removes copyright protection from all of the non economically viable works. Plus it creates a database of exactly what is under copyright. I'm fine with 20 year renewal periods, but it would be for an escalating fee on each renewal. This model allows extremely costly works like big budget movies to maintain copyright indefinitely while simultaneously pushing all of the minor items that make up our culture into the public domain.
I'll fully support their actions when we go back to a 20 year copyright instead of the ridiculous 140 years under the current system. It is obscene that photos and recordings of WWII won't be freely available until generations that haven't even been born yet are adults.
Current equivalent is the Alcatel 1X for $115. But check the specs, the Umidigi is a better deal.
Those prepaid phones in the supermarket have carrier subsidies on them, that is not the actual price of the phone. They are locked onto their prepaid carrier. A tech person can unlock some of them but you will be vulnerable to an OTA update relocking them (and carriers will definitely do that with increased locking security). The subsidies on prepaid phones can be up to $100.
I have one. It is good phone for $100. For sure it is not a flagship, but those are 5x more $$$. It is way, way better than a Nokia 1 which I also have. It is not as good as my Google Pixel.
There is one bug with it, they have broken Android Auto with their USB-C support. They are supposed to be fixing it; they are definitely aware it is broken.
$50 is too little to pay for a phone. You can't assemble a BOM of parts to make a decent $50 phone. A key problem right now is the upward movement in the prices of DRAM and flash. However, it is possible to make a decent phone at the $100 price point. It is similar to saying why can't you manufacture a car for $1000? It just isn't possible to do it and end up with something decent. Steel, silicon, glass, lithium, plastic all cost money.
Personally I think it is utterly amazing that we can make something the complexity of a smart phone and sell it for $100. Manufacturing capabilities today would seem like magic fifty years ago.
With Umidigi A1 one of the SIM slots takes your choice of 2nd SIM or SD Card. Battery is not user replaceable. 1.5Ghz quad core A53.
I have an A1 and it is an excellent phone for the price. Just a few complaints, it is a little heavy at 173g. And the fit/finish is not perfect, you can easily feel the joints with your finger, but put it in a case and you can't tell. Plus I wish the rear camera was not directly over the fingerprint sensor.
For $100 you can get a pretty decent phone. The mistake is in buying a $60 phone.
http://www.dx.com/p/umidigi-a1...
Oreo 8.1 , 5.5in screen, 13MP camera, international 4G bands, quad core, 3GB RAM, dual SIM, etc..
Verizon did this with FIOS a few years ago and cause me to cancel when my contract expired. They arbitrarily raised the rental fee of the mandatory STB $3 to $5 per month depending on model. Of course consumers got squat for this price increase. What pissed me off was seeing the CEO on the financial news networks crowing over and over about the new RECORD profits in the FIOS group. I knew exactly how those profits were achieved.
We might be better off with three strong carriers than with two strong ones and two weak ones. It's not like Sprint was much of a competitor for Verizon/AT&T.
Also don't discount that a fourth carrier may reappear. Comcast has recently entered the wireless business as a MVNO. Comcast is sitting on a big chunk of spectrum that can be used for wireless if they choose to build it out.
Verizon, AT&T, T-sprint, Comcast is probably a better set of four competitors.
Another part of this may be people turning their TV off and leaving the cable box on. Newer cable TV boxes can use HDMI-CEC and know if the TV is off, but millions of cable boxes don't support CEC. I read that Neilson is relying much more heavily now on data from cable boxes than diaries.
Are people really watching 8hrs a day or is the TV simply on? We leave ours on all of the time when not at home because the dogs like hearing the voices and they don't misbehave.
Alternatives would come onto the market if you banned fossil fuels. They simply aren't on the market currently since few to no people will buy them since they are much more expensive.
Which is why this is going nowhere.
So tax them. It is the lawsuit that is ridiculous. Just like the tobacco lawsuits were totally corrupt. $10B to the lawyers. If we had simply taxed the tobacco companies that $10B would be in the US Treasury. Pass a $5/barrel refining tax on the refinery inside the city limits.
So get rid of this silly lawsuit and pass a city wide $5 a gallon gas tax. The city can do that tomorrow, no need to mess with a decade long lawsuit and billions in legal fees. If a gas tax doesn't work pass a $1000/car vehicle tax on gasoline engines.
If this lawsuit is going to succeed you will need to successfully demonstrate that you have been deceived into using a product that if you had known the full story on you would not have used. For example tobacco users were deceived into smoking because they were told it was harmless to their heath, if they had been provided with full information on the dangers of tobacco they would never have smoked. Plus smoking is a physical addiction and thus they were unable to stop smoking during the tobacco trials.
This lawsuit fails on many counts:
1) The citizens of the city are not physically addicted to oil. Once they became aware of the climate impact they continued using the products.
2) The city claims full awareness of the evils of oil, yet they have not voted to ban hydrocarbon use within their city limits.
3) The city can not demonstrate that people were deceived into choosing oil over cleaner alternatives since for the most part those cleaner alternatives are not available. For example, try and buy a piece of steel that was made without using carbon based fuel, it isn't possible to do so.
For this suit to have any merit the city needs to immediately enact a law banning all use of hydrocarbons.
There are no laws requiring the oil companies to provide you with a brochure explaining the the pros and cons of climate change every time you fill your gas tank up. Before you convict this company, make sure it is a real crime that you are accusing them of doing.
Personally I am not a supporter of the tobacco lawsuits either. It was utter corruption to hand out over $10B in legal fees to the lawyers involved in those lawsuits. I drive by the $55M ocean front house of one of those lawyers on my way to work. The correct solution was to simply tax the tobacco companies which was totally within the government power to do so, it was lunatic allowing private lawyers to collect $10B in fees. But wait -- the number one largest donor to the Democratic party -- trial lawyers! That $10B belonged in the US Treasury.
And don't say we had to find the tobacco companies guilty before taxing them. The government can tax anyone they vote to do so, no conviction required. Remember that check you have to send in every year? They didn't have to convict you of anything first. The government can vote in a 50% hydrocarbon tax tomorrow if they can pass the legislation.
Smoker is claiming he has been tricked into physical addiction, good luck claiming physical addiction to fossil fuels.
The cities have already lost this simply because their citizen continue to burn fuel. If you are going to make a case for this the very first thing the cities should do is ban all burning of hydrocarbons within their city limits. If they don't do that then they are just as guilty as anyone else.
Of course juries like to stick it to companies whether they are guilty or not. And then that results in decades of appeals to more sensible forums.
And being familiar to programmers is not a form of compatibility?
And it is also fair use to modify the copyright work as in satire.
That was about compatible electrical connections -- like the PCI bus with have now, but way older. It did not involve software.
In the first court case Alsop ruled correctly the APIs were purely functional expressions and could not be copyrighted. Oracle appealed this to a bunch of Luddite judges on the Appellate court who overruled Alsop and declared that API could be copyright. In the second court cast Alsop/Google were forced to accept the ruling that APIs were copyright. The new (and correct) decision by a Federal jury was that if APIs are copyright, then it is Fair Use to clone them. Oracle appealed this to another set of Luddite judges who have now ruled that it is not Fair Use to copy an API.
This is going to end up in the US Supreme Court. On one side with have greedy Larry, and on the other side with have the potential collapse of the entire US computer industry. It is disgusting that Ellison will risk destroying the entire computer industry in a quest to get another $8B to add to his current $57B net worth.
The only part of Oracle Java that Google copied is the function signatures. It has been unequivocally proven over the years that nothing else was copied. And of course Google copied the function signatures (ie the API) sincethere is no way to make software compatible without copying the function signatures.
Since the only possible avenue to cloning is by copying the function signatures, Alsop and the jury rules this fair use.
Oracle's current case hinges on making it a copyright violation to clone the function signatures. And the problem with doing that is if they win suddenly every cloned API in the history of computing is going to turn into a copyright infringement. And the lawyers of the world will declare a week of celebration before they all become billionaires.