Wouldn't Microsoft's new service, to remain legal, have to verify that the purchase was in fact made from iTunes, and that the purchase was made by that subscription holder and not another? To do this, wouldn't Microsoft need the purchase data and information from Apple, or at least a mechanism for obtaining it?
Perhaps they can get it from the iTunes client. Assuming the iTunes client is present on the machine, Microsoft simply taps into the iTunes data and finds out what you've purchased, then offers that to you in their own format.
Of course, what's hilarious to me is that a smart consumer would then just buy all his music from iTunes and use the MSN store to unlock all tracks in another format. So this move actually provides even more incentive to buy from Apple.
Since it now turns out that Dvorak was apparently not smoking crack when he predicted the Apple move, could he be right on this one too?"
Oh, please. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The man predicted this move four years ago, long before even Apple knew this would happen, and his reasons for it happening were ALL WRONG. That's not precognition, it's dumb luck.
I'm curious... would 'C' be seen as a Common Carrier in this case, much like ISPs ? If not... could they be 'liable' for any of the more shady/outright illicit material passing through them from B to A as they've willingly and knowingly become part of this Rodi thing ?
How much you wanna bet that C will get sued no matter what? The traffic still goes through him, so his participation could be argued as contributory. This isn't anonymity -- it's a way to make everyone in the chain liable for something one person does.
She finds it ironic that the First Ammendment is carved in the building in which she taught? I find it ironic that she was supposed to be teaching ethics.
Well said. I actually once worked with Elaine, when she was writing TV and movie reviews for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. "Full of herself," as another poster here put it, doesn't even begin to describe her. Just read her last column for a taste.
She left the Caller-Times to take a job as media critic for the Toledo Blade. She was gone from there in less than a year -- it seems Toledo saw her for what she was.
She hasn't had a steady gig since. No wonder she's angling for a movie deal. Something tells me she'll fit right in with the sharks of Hollywood.
Please do. Because though he's not 100% right, I do think McVoy has a point, and the two projects you mention are not so overwhelming as to prove him completely wrong. For all our talk of innovation, very little open source software is innovative -- much of it exists to mimic some proprietary alternative. Even the linux kernel was created as a project to get a unix-like system on x86 hardware. Firefox, though built from the ashes of Netscape, was mainly driven as an alternative to I.E. -- it just had new and innovative features added along the way. But that's no different from the "embrace and extend" that we give MS so much hassle for.
I use open source software on a daily basis, and I love the freedom it provides, but McVoy is right that it is very hard to monetize. Labors of love don't pay the bills. That doesn't mean it's impossible, and McVoy's opinion has obviously taken a ridiculously extreme conclusion, but there is a grain of truth in his words.
I can't believe the parent post got modded as a Troll. The article is poor -- incredibly so -- not only grammatically, but factually as well. Anyone who is familiar with Macintosh history (and if you aren't, I suggest you check out folklore.org) knows that Jef Raskin's involvement in the project was quite limited, and that Burrell Smith was the man who designed the system, not Raskin.
While it's true that the Lisa and the Apple III were terrible failures, this article doesn't really do the story justice.
This article claims some rather outlandish things I'd never heard:
1. That iTunes was created as an attempt to mimic P2P software. 2. That the makers of Kazaa sued Apple, and settled out of court for a rather large amount of money. 3. That ESR did much of the programming on iTMS. 4. That ESR is the one who suggested putting DRM on the files, a prospect that hadn't occurred to Jobs or the music industry. 5. That the music industry had to convince Apple to loosen the DRM restrictions because they were afraid people wouldn't buy otherwise.
I almost want to say this sounds like an early April Fool's joke. Are they serious? Does anybody buy this?
You make an excellent point. I didn't think Napster's service would fly because, on the whole, if I'm going to spend money on music, I want to be able to keep it.
But folks are reporting that Napster's service is great when you're willing to try out a bunch of new stuff. It's practically on-demand radio. So I can see value in it. And the DRM, in this case, makes sense, because nobody goes into the deal expecting complete control over the media.
Ynetnews has learned that 18-year-olds who tell recruiters they play the popular fantasy game are automatically given low security clearance.
Then, later:
"One of the tests we do, either by asking soldiers directly or through information provided us, is to ask whether they take part in the game," he says. "If a soldier answers in the affirmative, he is sent to a professional for an evaluation, usually a psychologist."
More than half of the soldiers sent for evaluation receive low security clearances, thus preventing them from serving in sensitive IDF positions, he says.
Half of the soldiers being given low security clearances after being sent for psychological evaluation isn't the same thing as "automatic." Which one is it, Ynet?
Yes, but the argument is being made that these people don't recieve protection from the shield law because they aren't "Journalists".
The first amendment essentially grants "Journalist" rights to every citizen.
You're missing the point. The Constitution has nothing to do with it. It says nothing about confidentiality of sources. The shield law does. And though the Constitution extends its protection to all citizens, the shield law clearly does not - especially since it's a state law and not a federal one. The Constitution is not the end-all be-all of legality.
P.S. - By the way, the Constitution does not "grant" or even enumerate rights -- it restricts Congress from creating certain kinds of laws. There is a huge difference. If the Constitution were to enumerate the rights of the people, then the people would have no additional rights. Instead, the Constitution assumes that people have the right to do anything not specifically outlawed by Congress, and restricts Congress from outlawing certain things.
Nowhere in the constitution does it say that a member of the press cannot be required to divulge their sources, either. Once again, Slashdotters are lecturing others on the first amendment without, apparently, reading it themselves. The constitution says:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
That is, Congress can't make a law denying the press the right to print information. Nowhere in the Constitution does it explicitly say anything about a reporter's ability to keep sources confidential in the face of a court subpoena. This is why 31 states feel the need to have shield laws that provide that very protection.
So ultimately, it will be California's shield law, not the U.S. Constitution, that determines whether or not the proprietors of the websites in question are part of the "press," and whether or not they can be forced to divulge sources. If you want to read up on the specifics, check out this site.
I wish I could mod you higher than 5. I'm still sitting on the fence as to whether or not this guy should be considered a journalist, but you present a very well thought out argument as to why he should not -- I had been leaning the other direction, and now I'm not so sure. Kudos.:)
Woz was not a Mac developer. He wasn't even on the original development team. He was rarely involved with projects outside the Apple and Apple II.
On top of that, the legal fund that Woz is contributing to is not related to this case at all -- it's an entirely different case involving the bittorrent distribution of a pre-release build of Tiger, the next version of OS X.
Freedom of the press is redundant. They have no special status not afforded to everyone by freedom of speech. Get it? NO SPECIAL PROTECTIONS EXIST.
You are making the foolish assumption that "the press" is a group of people. The law doesn't work that way. Freedom of the press is specific to the act of publishing a work. How thoroughly that act is defined is what determines who is protected.
This isn't about "print journalists" vs. "internet journalists." It's about "print journalism" vs. "internet journalism." It's about whether the latter constitutes a work of the press or not. There are a lot of people who believe that it is not. And they have a good argument.
I'm not saying they're right. I'm saying that if you disagree, then you need to fight them with a better argument. You can assume that it's redundant all you want, but that's EXACTLY how your rights get taken away.
Fascinating ethical principle, there.
It's not ethics, it's pragmatism. We may have built a civilized society in which freedom is ideally assured, but we still live in a survival-of-the-fittest world which knows no civilized mores. There will always be someone willing to take away your freedom for his own personal gain. If you don't stand up to him, then your rights aren't worth the paper they're written on.
Yeah, but you're losing your rights because you're not willing to fight for them.
Thirty years ago, Lenny Bruce fought tooth and nail against indecency laws, though it cost him everything he had. He died bankrupt. But thanks to him, other entertainers enjoy a lot of freedom.
The RIAA is pushing people around in lawsuits that would substantially hurt those individuals financially if they were to fight. None of those cases are going to court because it's cheaper to settle.
To quote Parker and Stone, freedom isn't free. It is hard won, and costs people their reputations, their standing, their money, their careers, and even their lives in extreme circumstances. If you want to keep your freedom, you have to be willing to sacrifice for it.
Otherwise, you're just bitching until someone else pays the price for you.
You need to stop assuming that everything published on the internet is part of the press. The article specifically states that there is an exemption for the press that is not being extended to things like blogs, mainly because a good number of people don't believe that blogs and the press are the same thing. These people don't believe that they're taking away your freedom of the press because they don't believe it was ever extended to you in the first place. In their eyes, the same rules apply, only now they're being enforced.
If you think otherwise, then you need to start making a real argument as to WHY anything published on the internet should fall under the same protections as distributed print media. That's the only way to make people understand your point of view. If you can't adequately defend your rights, then you deserve to lose them.
"Better than nothing" isn't much of a selling point, except for very small values of nothing.
That's bull. "Better than nothing" is the only selling point, for any application. A Cisco PIX firewall isn't perfect, either, but it's better than nothing.
The entire issue at hand is the fact that most Windows users are clueless enough to be connected to the internet without any sort of firewall protection. SP2 will install a firewall that by default blocks all incoming new connections, which is what you want a firewall to do in almost all general cases. "Better than nothing," particularly in this instance, is a huge leap from "nothing."
Compatibility be damned, I say it's nice to see Microsoft making a decision to break compatibility for the sake of security, for once.
Sports programs in schools provide two very important functions. First of all, they are a source of income. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but tickets to football games aren't free, at least not to non-students.
On top of that, sports programs teach a kind of discipline, competition, drive, and even problem-solving that cannot be taught elsewhere. Those are skills that translate very well into the business world -- even into computer science and programming fields. In fact, they are skills that can arguably make up for a lack of knowledge in any other area. I was never involved in sports, but I knew guys who were, and every one of them gained from it. I sometimes wish I had gone out for some sort of sport as well.
So you can gag if you like, but whether you believe it or not, you've missed the point entirely.
Unless IBM is working on an even smaller version of the current 90nm G5 to be released this year, I think it's much more likely that the H2 2005 will bring us Freescale's dual-core G4 chip, and that Apple will call it the G5M.
Yet another boring "girl gamer" article...
on
Getting the Girl
·
· Score: 2
Oh, God, yet another ponderous article on "Women In Video Games." Doesn't anyone find the use of words like "empowering" and "disenfranchises" the least bit ironic? Doesn't this kind of overanalysis take the fun out of video games? And doesn't ascribing this sort of importance to them lend credence to the arguments of those want to restrict/ban certain titles?
What's more, the article is embarassing to read. This is little more than a female journalist injecting gender politics into everything she sees. It reeks of self-importance and psych 101. I don't disagree with many of the statements and conclusions throughout the article, but they are largely redundant and do not bear repeating.
The only thing that needs to be stated here is that if/when females constitute enough of a demographic for the industry to address, they will help determine the industry's direction when it comes to content and subject matter. Sometimes, they already do. This isn't rocket science.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't Microsoft's new service, to remain legal, have to verify that the purchase was in fact made from iTunes, and that the purchase was made by that subscription holder and not another? To do this, wouldn't Microsoft need the purchase data and information from Apple, or at least a mechanism for obtaining it?
Perhaps they can get it from the iTunes client. Assuming the iTunes client is present on the machine, Microsoft simply taps into the iTunes data and finds out what you've purchased, then offers that to you in their own format.
Of course, what's hilarious to me is that a smart consumer would then just buy all his music from iTunes and use the MSN store to unlock all tracks in another format. So this move actually provides even more incentive to buy from Apple.
Since it now turns out that Dvorak was apparently not smoking crack when he predicted the Apple move, could he be right on this one too?"
Oh, please. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The man predicted this move four years ago, long before even Apple knew this would happen, and his reasons for it happening were ALL WRONG. That's not precognition, it's dumb luck.
I'm curious... would 'C' be seen as a Common Carrier in this case, much like ISPs ? If not... could they be 'liable' for any of the more shady/outright illicit material passing through them from B to A as they've willingly and knowingly become part of this Rodi thing ?
How much you wanna bet that C will get sued no matter what? The traffic still goes through him, so his participation could be argued as contributory. This isn't anonymity -- it's a way to make everyone in the chain liable for something one person does.
She finds it ironic that the First Ammendment is carved in the building in which she taught? I find it ironic that she was supposed to be teaching ethics.
Well said. I actually once worked with Elaine, when she was writing TV and movie reviews for the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. "Full of herself," as another poster here put it, doesn't even begin to describe her. Just read her last column for a taste.
She left the Caller-Times to take a job as media critic for the Toledo Blade. She was gone from there in less than a year -- it seems Toledo saw her for what she was.
She hasn't had a steady gig since. No wonder she's angling for a movie deal. Something tells me she'll fit right in with the sharks of Hollywood.
Napster was free, but it was NEVER open source.
I'll allow replies to provide more examples.
Please do. Because though he's not 100% right, I do think McVoy has a point, and the two projects you mention are not so overwhelming as to prove him completely wrong. For all our talk of innovation, very little open source software is innovative -- much of it exists to mimic some proprietary alternative. Even the linux kernel was created as a project to get a unix-like system on x86 hardware. Firefox, though built from the ashes of Netscape, was mainly driven as an alternative to I.E. -- it just had new and innovative features added along the way. But that's no different from the "embrace and extend" that we give MS so much hassle for.
I use open source software on a daily basis, and I love the freedom it provides, but McVoy is right that it is very hard to monetize. Labors of love don't pay the bills. That doesn't mean it's impossible, and McVoy's opinion has obviously taken a ridiculously extreme conclusion, but there is a grain of truth in his words.
I can't believe the parent post got modded as a Troll. The article is poor -- incredibly so -- not only grammatically, but factually as well. Anyone who is familiar with Macintosh history (and if you aren't, I suggest you check out folklore.org) knows that Jef Raskin's involvement in the project was quite limited, and that Burrell Smith was the man who designed the system, not Raskin.
While it's true that the Lisa and the Apple III were terrible failures, this article doesn't really do the story justice.
I wonder how many people will file reports on Bram Cohen?
it takes an average of four months to watch the latest episodes of top-rated shows like... Desperate Housewives.
I can vouch for that. I watched an episode of that network soap-opera schlock here in the U.S. and it seemed like a goddamn eternity.
This article claims some rather outlandish things I'd never heard:
1. That iTunes was created as an attempt to mimic P2P software.
2. That the makers of Kazaa sued Apple, and settled out of court for a rather large amount of money.
3. That ESR did much of the programming on iTMS.
4. That ESR is the one who suggested putting DRM on the files, a prospect that hadn't occurred to Jobs or the music industry.
5. That the music industry had to convince Apple to loosen the DRM restrictions because they were afraid people wouldn't buy otherwise.
I almost want to say this sounds like an early April Fool's joke. Are they serious? Does anybody buy this?
You make an excellent point. I didn't think Napster's service would fly because, on the whole, if I'm going to spend money on music, I want to be able to keep it.
But folks are reporting that Napster's service is great when you're willing to try out a bunch of new stuff. It's practically on-demand radio. So I can see value in it. And the DRM, in this case, makes sense, because nobody goes into the deal expecting complete control over the media.
From the article:
Ynetnews has learned that 18-year-olds who tell recruiters they play the popular fantasy game are automatically given low security clearance.
Then, later:
"One of the tests we do, either by asking soldiers directly or through information provided us, is to ask whether they take part in the game," he says. "If a soldier answers in the affirmative, he is sent to a professional for an evaluation, usually a psychologist."
More than half of the soldiers sent for evaluation receive low security clearances, thus preventing them from serving in sensitive IDF positions, he says.
Half of the soldiers being given low security clearances after being sent for psychological evaluation isn't the same thing as "automatic." Which one is it, Ynet?
Yes, but the argument is being made that these people don't recieve protection from the shield law because they aren't "Journalists".
The first amendment essentially grants "Journalist" rights to every citizen.
You're missing the point. The Constitution has nothing to do with it. It says nothing about confidentiality of sources. The shield law does. And though the Constitution extends its protection to all citizens, the shield law clearly does not - especially since it's a state law and not a federal one. The Constitution is not the end-all be-all of legality.
P.S. - By the way, the Constitution does not "grant" or even enumerate rights -- it restricts Congress from creating certain kinds of laws. There is a huge difference. If the Constitution were to enumerate the rights of the people, then the people would have no additional rights. Instead, the Constitution assumes that people have the right to do anything not specifically outlawed by Congress, and restricts Congress from outlawing certain things.
Nowhere in the constitution does it say that a member of the press cannot be required to divulge their sources, either. Once again, Slashdotters are lecturing others on the first amendment without, apparently, reading it themselves. The constitution says:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
That is, Congress can't make a law denying the press the right to print information. Nowhere in the Constitution does it explicitly say anything about a reporter's ability to keep sources confidential in the face of a court subpoena. This is why 31 states feel the need to have shield laws that provide that very protection.
So ultimately, it will be California's shield law, not the U.S. Constitution, that determines whether or not the proprietors of the websites in question are part of the "press," and whether or not they can be forced to divulge sources. If you want to read up on the specifics, check out this site.
I wish I could mod you higher than 5. I'm still sitting on the fence as to whether or not this guy should be considered a journalist, but you present a very well thought out argument as to why he should not -- I had been leaning the other direction, and now I'm not so sure. Kudos. :)
Woz was not a Mac developer. He wasn't even on the original development team. He was rarely involved with projects outside the Apple and Apple II.
On top of that, the legal fund that Woz is contributing to is not related to this case at all -- it's an entirely different case involving the bittorrent distribution of a pre-release build of Tiger, the next version of OS X.
Freedom of the press is redundant. They have no special status not afforded to everyone by freedom of speech. Get it? NO SPECIAL PROTECTIONS EXIST.
You are making the foolish assumption that "the press" is a group of people. The law doesn't work that way. Freedom of the press is specific to the act of publishing a work. How thoroughly that act is defined is what determines who is protected.
This isn't about "print journalists" vs. "internet journalists." It's about "print journalism" vs. "internet journalism." It's about whether the latter constitutes a work of the press or not. There are a lot of people who believe that it is not. And they have a good argument.
I'm not saying they're right. I'm saying that if you disagree, then you need to fight them with a better argument. You can assume that it's redundant all you want, but that's EXACTLY how your rights get taken away.
Fascinating ethical principle, there.
It's not ethics, it's pragmatism. We may have built a civilized society in which freedom is ideally assured, but we still live in a survival-of-the-fittest world which knows no civilized mores. There will always be someone willing to take away your freedom for his own personal gain. If you don't stand up to him, then your rights aren't worth the paper they're written on.
Yeah, but you're losing your rights because you're not willing to fight for them.
Thirty years ago, Lenny Bruce fought tooth and nail against indecency laws, though it cost him everything he had. He died bankrupt. But thanks to him, other entertainers enjoy a lot of freedom.
The RIAA is pushing people around in lawsuits that would substantially hurt those individuals financially if they were to fight. None of those cases are going to court because it's cheaper to settle.
To quote Parker and Stone, freedom isn't free. It is hard won, and costs people their reputations, their standing, their money, their careers, and even their lives in extreme circumstances. If you want to keep your freedom, you have to be willing to sacrifice for it.
Otherwise, you're just bitching until someone else pays the price for you.
You need to stop assuming that everything published on the internet is part of the press. The article specifically states that there is an exemption for the press that is not being extended to things like blogs, mainly because a good number of people don't believe that blogs and the press are the same thing. These people don't believe that they're taking away your freedom of the press because they don't believe it was ever extended to you in the first place. In their eyes, the same rules apply, only now they're being enforced.
If you think otherwise, then you need to start making a real argument as to WHY anything published on the internet should fall under the same protections as distributed print media. That's the only way to make people understand your point of view. If you can't adequately defend your rights, then you deserve to lose them.
So they're advertising a space opera on a soap opera. Perhaps "Tommy" by the Who will be on the show's soundtrack?
"Better than nothing" isn't much of a selling point, except for very small values of nothing.
That's bull. "Better than nothing" is the only selling point, for any application. A Cisco PIX firewall isn't perfect, either, but it's better than nothing. The entire issue at hand is the fact that most Windows users are clueless enough to be connected to the internet without any sort of firewall protection. SP2 will install a firewall that by default blocks all incoming new connections, which is what you want a firewall to do in almost all general cases. "Better than nothing," particularly in this instance, is a huge leap from "nothing." Compatibility be damned, I say it's nice to see Microsoft making a decision to break compatibility for the sake of security, for once.Sports programs in schools provide two very important functions. First of all, they are a source of income. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but tickets to football games aren't free, at least not to non-students.
On top of that, sports programs teach a kind of discipline, competition, drive, and even problem-solving that cannot be taught elsewhere. Those are skills that translate very well into the business world -- even into computer science and programming fields. In fact, they are skills that can arguably make up for a lack of knowledge in any other area. I was never involved in sports, but I knew guys who were, and every one of them gained from it. I sometimes wish I had gone out for some sort of sport as well.
So you can gag if you like, but whether you believe it or not, you've missed the point entirely.
"Yes, Ted, that was the joke."
-- Family Guy
Unless IBM is working on an even smaller version of the current 90nm G5 to be released this year, I think it's much more likely that the H2 2005 will bring us Freescale's dual-core G4 chip, and that Apple will call it the G5M.
Oh, God, yet another ponderous article on "Women In Video Games." Doesn't anyone find the use of words like "empowering" and "disenfranchises" the least bit ironic? Doesn't this kind of overanalysis take the fun out of video games? And doesn't ascribing this sort of importance to them lend credence to the arguments of those want to restrict/ban certain titles?
What's more, the article is embarassing to read. This is little more than a female journalist injecting gender politics into everything she sees. It reeks of self-importance and psych 101. I don't disagree with many of the statements and conclusions throughout the article, but they are largely redundant and do not bear repeating.
The only thing that needs to be stated here is that if/when females constitute enough of a demographic for the industry to address, they will help determine the industry's direction when it comes to content and subject matter. Sometimes, they already do. This isn't rocket science.