There is no copyright protecting hardware (which should be the major IP protector for software)... You do realize you're posting this on Slashdot? Anyway, reverse engineering software isn't any harder and in fact, it's usually easier.
Doctor Who airs in 16:9 HDTV, not PAL. I'm guessing BBCA does pan-and-scan. I think the SciFi channel letterboxes it, but then they edit it down to make room for more commercials.
They probably do have a traditional radio in order to communicate with civilian aircraft and aircraft control when necessary. Plus, I would assume they have a battery-powered hand-held radio for emergency situations just like this. From the CNN story says the tankers were trying to help solve the problem, which indicates to me that the pilots were at least able to communicate what had happened.
Any video checked once and cleared by an auditor would have the reporting disabled. Trusted director accounts would be exempt from the copyright reporting entirely. Auditors would devote their time to videos viewed frequently and reported the most, so the most egregious violations get taken care of first. Once people realize that popularizing a copyrighted video only increases its chances of getting banned, there would be very little incentive to post them.
It's not completely impossible. You just need an army to enforce this kind of thing. The mistake people make is that you need to pay that army. I look at Wikipedia, which does a pretty good job of removing copyrighted work and fairly quickly. Just put a big link next to each video to report it as a copyright violation. If enough people report it, a paid worker (or perhaps even a trusted unpaid user, ala Wikipedia's admins) takes two minutes to review the video and assess its copyright, which should be plainly obvious in 95% of cases.
There are enough people out there willing to tattle on copyrighted videos for various reasons. I know I'd report all the stupid Family Guy clips on digg's front page. You're always going to have copyrighted videos, but they can only get so popular before someone reports it and it gets banned. The only videos that survive will be the ones no one is watching anyway.
Yes, they are comparable. Remember comparable means "able to be compared" not "exactly identical". People will look at both and decide what's more important: having an integrated cellphone-PDA-whatsit or more space.
In general, when comparing two possible product prices, there are two groups to balance: 1) Those who would buy it at either the higher price or the lower price. 2) Those who would buy it only at the lower price.
If the second group is sufficiently large, the increased sales volume will offset the decrease in marginal profit. That's where people get this idea that a lower price is in Apple's interests. Except there's actually a third group: 3) Those who would buy an iPod instead if the the iPhone costs too much.
If Apple can convert 2s into 3s, they'll have the large sales volume and the high marginal profit on the iPhone. Undoubtedly, the press blitz for the iPhone will spillover into iPod sales. On top of that, I'd wager that Apple will release a new iPod shortly after the iPhone, probably with the same touchscreen/widescreen interface. If they do that, they will cover all their bases and make more money.
If I don't use my phone, my monthly phone bill is less than Vonage. Just like NetFlix, Vonage is only cost-effective if you use the service frequently. It seems the real problem you have is not the pricing model, but the price. I don't think you or anyone else is going to opt for per-use service if it ends up being more expensive than the flat-rate. If you normally rent a lot of movies, NetFlix is actually a pretty good deal.
It took two years and the much cheaper iPod Mini before Apple sold even a million units. The Mini and Nano are still the most popular by units sold. In comparison, Jobs expects to sell 10 million iPhones in the first year of the iPhone.
I'll hold out the possibility that the next generation iPhone might sell better, but this first one is going to sell much like the 1G iPod. Certain market segments (Slashdot users, rich teenage girls) will indeed flock to the iPhone initially and think nothing of the expense. Unfortunately, once they've exhausted that small pool of inelastic demand, no one else is going to buy it.
If they drop the price that low, it'll put the iPhone into direct competition with the high-end iPod (currently $350). Since the iPhone has more features, a cheap iPhone has the potential to cannibalize iPod sales. That's no good for Apple because lowering the price means lowering the iPhone's profit margin at the expense of high profit iPods.
All signs indicate Apple's trying to position the iPhone a step-up from the iPod, not a replacement. I really doubt it will ever drop below the price of the most expensive iPod, even with a contract.
According to your blog, you recently switched to Vonage and gave it high marks. How is their pricing model any different than NetFlix? Don't you get a monthly bill from them even if you don't make any calls? Surely you can go to your local mini mart and pick up a prepaid calling card or even a pay-as-you-go cell phone.
Whaaa? That seems a bit unlikely. Cisco sells directly competing products as Linksys. Yes, they'd make some money by rebranding Linksys products in Apple's name, but they'd make more money if they didn't have to give Apple a share.
That being said, this isn't really about the home user market -- that's peanuts to Cisco. Consumer devices have long been a commodity market so they don't get the same profit margins that they do on enterprise and infrastructure equipment. Cisco bought Scientific Atlanta and Linksys not as profit centers in themselves, but rather as the end points to a much larger IP-based network running Cisco equipment. They don't care about selling wireless routers for 35 bucks a pop, they want to sell the backbone equipment for thousands of dollars with a huge profit margin.
Some of it developed that way, but by no means all. "pr0n" is perhaps the better example of what you're talking about. I really doubt "h4x0r" came about the way you say because I've never heard of a word ban on "hacker". In my experience, a lot of "leet" speak was actually developed by people who were making fun of the supposed stereotype of wannabe hacker. The original spellings were just derived from common typos and such, but over time people added little bits to make it more and more absurd. There's always been this stereotype of an inexperienced users who can't type and abbreviate or misspell everything. ("were r u?" etc.) The "l33t h4x0r" was the mostly hypothetical notion of such a person attempting to become a hacker.
Actual leet speak, it seems to me, is/was used more so by people invoking the stereotype as an insult or in a comical/self-deprecating sense: "Who designed your web site, your l33t h4x0r little brother?" "I got the VCR to stop blinking. ph34r m3h."
Cisco doesn't make the hardware components that go into their VoIP devices or anyone else's. They do sell VoIP phones, both in the consumer market as Linksys and in the enterprise market. But really Cisco regards VoIP as just another application that increases demand for their real products, the big-iron infrastructure needed to support it all. Cisco wants to turn the iPhone into an application on top of Cisco's infrastructure. It seems likely that future versions of the iPhone will have VoIP support, so Cisco wants to ensure that the iPhone will be compatible with their infrastructure. The scenario is that you can walk into work, connect to the corporate WiFi and use the iPhone like your desk phone. Certain Nokia phones have apparently had this ability for about a year. More information here.
The specific details are confidential. You really think Cisco would have taken the settlement if all it had was Apple's empty promise to explore opportunities? Quite likely, the actual deal covers specific partnerships in the future that neither company wants to get out. I suspect very strongly that it has to do with future VOIP capability in the iPhone, which Cisco wants to ensure will be compatible with their enterprise VOIP equipment. Apple has a big reason not to discuss that publicly, because their cellular partners (eg, Cingular) don't want to encourage VOIP.
I'm going to step in with a third-party perspective and say that you have indeed missed his point.
It's not about whether the incandescent ban will produce a net benefit for society. Likely, it will. However, the ban is only a poor approximation for what you're actually trying to regulate -- carbon emissions -- when it would be much simpler to tax the emissions directly. If you do that, then things like large houses or cars are taxed alongside incandescent bulbs, not because they're inherently bad, but because of the real, measurable effects they have on the environment. You could come up with a laundry list of banned things that cause too much pollution, but it would be very complicated and would likely avoid banning anything particularly popular. There are also many legitimate reasons why people should be allowed to have incandescent bulbs, large houses, and even gas-guzzling SUVs. You could carve out a thousand exceptions, but that too would get very complicated, not to mention rather inconvenient for those who really need them.
Instead, if you set a tax on the actual emissions produced by these various activities, there will be an incentive to buy the CFL bulb, live in an energy-efficient home, and drive a fuel-efficient vehicle simply because there's an incentive to reduce your emissions, period. And if you have a legitimate need for one of those things, you can get it without bothering to get an OK from the government. If you happen to want one just because you like it, then you can have it too if you're willing to offset the damage you cause by paying the tax.
I don't know who you think is advocating a "wait and see" approach. It could be implemented immediately with a tax on energy as a function of the actual carbon emissions of the plant that produces that energy. There's no need to pick out incandescent bulbs in particular, because things like a big screen TV or a heated outdoor pool are just as wasteful. As far as cars go, I could see a two-tier tax: a per-gallon tax at the pump based on average emissions and a yearly tax (or refund) based on model. The EPA already collects figures on vehicle emissions, so there's no need to wait to measure the impact. Executed properly, these kinds of things would effect a much greater change in actual carbon emissions than simply banning light bulbs.
While I don't have problems with such retouching, I do think that it makes it tough to consider films and photographs that have been doctored genuine art forms anymore. What, something has to be photo-realistic to be art? Isn't there something creative and artistic about crafting the image you want, regardless of how you do it? Classical painters have "photoshopped" their subjects for centuries, selectively tweaking real life to accomplish the effect they want. Even art photographers are incredibly particular about composition, lighting, and camera settings to really create a scenario and a picture.
Before the 80's, if you saw a buxom, beautiful woman (or man, for you ladies out there), you could be much more certain that her hair color, bust size, and other features tied to "beauty" were more or less genuine. In the 1580s, the buxom beautiful woman on stage at a Shakespeare play would have been a buxom beautiful man (for the ladies out there, apparently).
That is neither a problem nor something unique to Wikipedia. It is however the same thing I told you nearly two weeks ago. I'm sorry it took you so long to grasp the concept.
3.) What if I want to do something no one's ever thought to do before?
You can conceivably develop a DRM system that will enable most of the features of a DRM-free format, but never all of them. If you're tied to a DRM format, you can only do the things that have been previously allowed. On top of that, certain uses that aren't allowed in some contexts are completely legal in others, but the DRM system has to disable them all because it has no way to tell the difference.
No, it's not quite as convenient as iTunes, but it's not so hard once you figure it out. Plus when you're done, the music is in a format that makes actually playing the song much more convenient. A DRM'd song is a pain in the butt for as long as you have it, which might not be too long if Apple decides to stop supporting it. MP3s are pretty much guaranteed to be compatible with every device far into the future.
I've purchased music from AllOfMp3 before which was pretty painless. The only major problem was jumping through the hoops to buy a cash card because the record companies have deliberately made it as hard as possible. Even the cash card doesn't work anymore. I honestly wouldn't care if they raised the prices to iTunes' level to pay off the record companies, so long as I could get high quality MP3s. On the other hand, if Jobs is really serious about getting rid of DRM, then I probably wouldn't bother with AllOfMp3.
You must realize, though it may seem like your hometown is crawling with people that whom you have a history, those people are actually a very small percentage of the total population, even if you know a lot of people and even if your town is pretty small. The people we're in contact with daily are chosen by habit as much as location. People travel halfway across the globe to escape bad relationships when really moving few blocks away would have sufficed. Getting a new job, taking up a new hobby, or even changing where you shop will introduce you to new people and limit your contact with others you'd rather leave in the past. There is large variety of life available almost anywhere.
The original article actually devotes some thought to this when it discusses the "horizon of social interaction", settling on a population large enough to ensure a variety of human interaction over a lifetime.
...in fact, Fluidics is a very important field of study that is widely used in aerospace or mission-critical applications, where electronic control devices don't offer the reliability of cannot support the environment. Also, military technologies use Fluidics in order to prevent malfunction in a nuclear war, when electric devices cease to work.
However, the idea was not to send people to space or to control missiles, but rather make a device that could help people build computation with their own hands - and demystifing the computer. I would assume that this is simply his personal write up of the project for a general audience. If it was submitted as a research project, I imagine it would be accompanied by a more thorough report which would have likely discussed the background of Fluidics with appropriate references.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, only a few minutes after posting that, I just caught the tail end of a Doctor Who episode on BBCA and it's actually letterboxed.
Doctor Who airs in 16:9 HDTV, not PAL. I'm guessing BBCA does pan-and-scan. I think the SciFi channel letterboxes it, but then they edit it down to make room for more commercials.
They probably do have a traditional radio in order to communicate with civilian aircraft and aircraft control when necessary. Plus, I would assume they have a battery-powered hand-held radio for emergency situations just like this. From the CNN story says the tankers were trying to help solve the problem, which indicates to me that the pilots were at least able to communicate what had happened.
Any video checked once and cleared by an auditor would have the reporting disabled. Trusted director accounts would be exempt from the copyright reporting entirely. Auditors would devote their time to videos viewed frequently and reported the most, so the most egregious violations get taken care of first. Once people realize that popularizing a copyrighted video only increases its chances of getting banned, there would be very little incentive to post them.
It's not completely impossible. You just need an army to enforce this kind of thing. The mistake people make is that you need to pay that army. I look at Wikipedia, which does a pretty good job of removing copyrighted work and fairly quickly. Just put a big link next to each video to report it as a copyright violation. If enough people report it, a paid worker (or perhaps even a trusted unpaid user, ala Wikipedia's admins) takes two minutes to review the video and assess its copyright, which should be plainly obvious in 95% of cases.
There are enough people out there willing to tattle on copyrighted videos for various reasons. I know I'd report all the stupid Family Guy clips on digg's front page. You're always going to have copyrighted videos, but they can only get so popular before someone reports it and it gets banned. The only videos that survive will be the ones no one is watching anyway.
Yes, they are comparable. Remember comparable means "able to be compared" not "exactly identical". People will look at both and decide what's more important: having an integrated cellphone-PDA-whatsit or more space.
In general, when comparing two possible product prices, there are two groups to balance:
1) Those who would buy it at either the higher price or the lower price.
2) Those who would buy it only at the lower price.
If the second group is sufficiently large, the increased sales volume will offset the decrease in marginal profit. That's where people get this idea that a lower price is in Apple's interests. Except there's actually a third group:
3) Those who would buy an iPod instead if the the iPhone costs too much.
If Apple can convert 2s into 3s, they'll have the large sales volume and the high marginal profit on the iPhone. Undoubtedly, the press blitz for the iPhone will spillover into iPod sales. On top of that, I'd wager that Apple will release a new iPod shortly after the iPhone, probably with the same touchscreen/widescreen interface. If they do that, they will cover all their bases and make more money.
If I don't use my phone, my monthly phone bill is less than Vonage. Just like NetFlix, Vonage is only cost-effective if you use the service frequently. It seems the real problem you have is not the pricing model, but the price. I don't think you or anyone else is going to opt for per-use service if it ends up being more expensive than the flat-rate. If you normally rent a lot of movies, NetFlix is actually a pretty good deal.
It took two years and the much cheaper iPod Mini before Apple sold even a million units. The Mini and Nano are still the most popular by units sold. In comparison, Jobs expects to sell 10 million iPhones in the first year of the iPhone.
I'll hold out the possibility that the next generation iPhone might sell better, but this first one is going to sell much like the 1G iPod. Certain market segments (Slashdot users, rich teenage girls) will indeed flock to the iPhone initially and think nothing of the expense. Unfortunately, once they've exhausted that small pool of inelastic demand, no one else is going to buy it.
If they drop the price that low, it'll put the iPhone into direct competition with the high-end iPod (currently $350). Since the iPhone has more features, a cheap iPhone has the potential to cannibalize iPod sales. That's no good for Apple because lowering the price means lowering the iPhone's profit margin at the expense of high profit iPods.
All signs indicate Apple's trying to position the iPhone a step-up from the iPod, not a replacement. I really doubt it will ever drop below the price of the most expensive iPod, even with a contract.
According to your blog, you recently switched to Vonage and gave it high marks. How is their pricing model any different than NetFlix? Don't you get a monthly bill from them even if you don't make any calls? Surely you can go to your local mini mart and pick up a prepaid calling card or even a pay-as-you-go cell phone.
Whaaa? That seems a bit unlikely. Cisco sells directly competing products as Linksys. Yes, they'd make some money by rebranding Linksys products in Apple's name, but they'd make more money if they didn't have to give Apple a share.
That being said, this isn't really about the home user market -- that's peanuts to Cisco. Consumer devices have long been a commodity market so they don't get the same profit margins that they do on enterprise and infrastructure equipment. Cisco bought Scientific Atlanta and Linksys not as profit centers in themselves, but rather as the end points to a much larger IP-based network running Cisco equipment. They don't care about selling wireless routers for 35 bucks a pop, they want to sell the backbone equipment for thousands of dollars with a huge profit margin.
Some of it developed that way, but by no means all. "pr0n" is perhaps the better example of what you're talking about. I really doubt "h4x0r" came about the way you say because I've never heard of a word ban on "hacker". In my experience, a lot of "leet" speak was actually developed by people who were making fun of the supposed stereotype of wannabe hacker. The original spellings were just derived from common typos and such, but over time people added little bits to make it more and more absurd. There's always been this stereotype of an inexperienced users who can't type and abbreviate or misspell everything. ("were r u?" etc.) The "l33t h4x0r" was the mostly hypothetical notion of such a person attempting to become a hacker.
Actual leet speak, it seems to me, is/was used more so by people invoking the stereotype as an insult or in a comical/self-deprecating sense:
"Who designed your web site, your l33t h4x0r little brother?"
"I got the VCR to stop blinking. ph34r m3h."
Cisco doesn't make the hardware components that go into their VoIP devices or anyone else's. They do sell VoIP phones, both in the consumer market as Linksys and in the enterprise market. But really Cisco regards VoIP as just another application that increases demand for their real products, the big-iron infrastructure needed to support it all. Cisco wants to turn the iPhone into an application on top of Cisco's infrastructure. It seems likely that future versions of the iPhone will have VoIP support, so Cisco wants to ensure that the iPhone will be compatible with their infrastructure. The scenario is that you can walk into work, connect to the corporate WiFi and use the iPhone like your desk phone. Certain Nokia phones have apparently had this ability for about a year. More information here.
The specific details are confidential. You really think Cisco would have taken the settlement if all it had was Apple's empty promise to explore opportunities? Quite likely, the actual deal covers specific partnerships in the future that neither company wants to get out. I suspect very strongly that it has to do with future VOIP capability in the iPhone, which Cisco wants to ensure will be compatible with their enterprise VOIP equipment. Apple has a big reason not to discuss that publicly, because their cellular partners (eg, Cingular) don't want to encourage VOIP.
Yeah. Wikipedia sucks. Only an idiot would cite it.
Seems likely some of the people on the place would be coming back from the same conference and probably just as tech-savvy as this guy.
I'm going to step in with a third-party perspective and say that you have indeed missed his point.
It's not about whether the incandescent ban will produce a net benefit for society. Likely, it will. However, the ban is only a poor approximation for what you're actually trying to regulate -- carbon emissions -- when it would be much simpler to tax the emissions directly. If you do that, then things like large houses or cars are taxed alongside incandescent bulbs, not because they're inherently bad, but because of the real, measurable effects they have on the environment. You could come up with a laundry list of banned things that cause too much pollution, but it would be very complicated and would likely avoid banning anything particularly popular. There are also many legitimate reasons why people should be allowed to have incandescent bulbs, large houses, and even gas-guzzling SUVs. You could carve out a thousand exceptions, but that too would get very complicated, not to mention rather inconvenient for those who really need them.
Instead, if you set a tax on the actual emissions produced by these various activities, there will be an incentive to buy the CFL bulb, live in an energy-efficient home, and drive a fuel-efficient vehicle simply because there's an incentive to reduce your emissions, period. And if you have a legitimate need for one of those things, you can get it without bothering to get an OK from the government. If you happen to want one just because you like it, then you can have it too if you're willing to offset the damage you cause by paying the tax.
I don't know who you think is advocating a "wait and see" approach. It could be implemented immediately with a tax on energy as a function of the actual carbon emissions of the plant that produces that energy. There's no need to pick out incandescent bulbs in particular, because things like a big screen TV or a heated outdoor pool are just as wasteful. As far as cars go, I could see a two-tier tax: a per-gallon tax at the pump based on average emissions and a yearly tax (or refund) based on model. The EPA already collects figures on vehicle emissions, so there's no need to wait to measure the impact. Executed properly, these kinds of things would effect a much greater change in actual carbon emissions than simply banning light bulbs.
That is neither a problem nor something unique to Wikipedia. It is however the same thing I told you nearly two weeks ago. I'm sorry it took you so long to grasp the concept.
3.) What if I want to do something no one's ever thought to do before?
You can conceivably develop a DRM system that will enable most of the features of a DRM-free format, but never all of them. If you're tied to a DRM format, you can only do the things that have been previously allowed. On top of that, certain uses that aren't allowed in some contexts are completely legal in others, but the DRM system has to disable them all because it has no way to tell the difference.
No, it's not quite as convenient as iTunes, but it's not so hard once you figure it out. Plus when you're done, the music is in a format that makes actually playing the song much more convenient. A DRM'd song is a pain in the butt for as long as you have it, which might not be too long if Apple decides to stop supporting it. MP3s are pretty much guaranteed to be compatible with every device far into the future.
I've purchased music from AllOfMp3 before which was pretty painless. The only major problem was jumping through the hoops to buy a cash card because the record companies have deliberately made it as hard as possible. Even the cash card doesn't work anymore. I honestly wouldn't care if they raised the prices to iTunes' level to pay off the record companies, so long as I could get high quality MP3s. On the other hand, if Jobs is really serious about getting rid of DRM, then I probably wouldn't bother with AllOfMp3.
You must realize, though it may seem like your hometown is crawling with people that whom you have a history, those people are actually a very small percentage of the total population, even if you know a lot of people and even if your town is pretty small. The people we're in contact with daily are chosen by habit as much as location. People travel halfway across the globe to escape bad relationships when really moving few blocks away would have sufficed. Getting a new job, taking up a new hobby, or even changing where you shop will introduce you to new people and limit your contact with others you'd rather leave in the past. There is large variety of life available almost anywhere.
The original article actually devotes some thought to this when it discusses the "horizon of social interaction", settling on a population large enough to ensure a variety of human interaction over a lifetime.
...in fact, Fluidics is a very important field of study that is widely used in aerospace or mission-critical applications, where electronic control devices don't offer the reliability of cannot support the environment. Also, military technologies use Fluidics in order to prevent malfunction in a nuclear war, when electric devices cease to work.However, the idea was not to send people to space or to control missiles, but rather make a device that could help people build computation with their own hands - and demystifing the computer. I would assume that this is simply his personal write up of the project for a general audience. If it was submitted as a research project, I imagine it would be accompanied by a more thorough report which would have likely discussed the background of Fluidics with appropriate references.
They want to price the iPhone as a step up from the iPod, not a replacement.