As an antidisestablishmenterianist Apple iPologist, I actually agree with you. On one hand, I think the features in iOS5 are pretty impressive. While it is unavailable for the 3G I currently have, and will be pre-installed on the 4S that I will soon have, the news is moot to me. But even if I had a 4, there is plenty of general media and tech blog coverage, let alone the PR coming straight from Apple itself that you'd have to be living under a rock to not know about iOS5 already. Especially if you are the type to read slashdot.
My understanding is that usury has to do with unreasonable interest rates, not the amount of principal lent. Perhaps there was usury and other predatory lending going on, but what turned it into a financial crisis that affected everyone was the fraud behind the reselling of the loans, rather than the loans themselves. As far as I know, (IANAL) there isn't a law simply against giving out high risk loans, which is what the GP was trying to say.
And yes, there was probably lots of illegal predatory lending going on, but that is just between the lenders and the borrowers. But it was the subsequent illegal deception to downstream investors as to the risk of that lending that destroyed the economy. And it is that crime that heads should roll for.
There's no real crime in giving bad loans. Nothing is stopping me from giving you all the money you want. It's just a really really stupid business decision on my part. I should have known that you probably won't be able to pay me back and you will probably end up declaring bankruptcy, thus legally preventing me from making you pay me back.
No, the real crime was in the fraud when the banks took what they knew to be very high risk mortgages, and hid and misrepresented that risk when they repackaged and sold them as mortgage backed securities.
Apple's stock has always taken a dip the day of a big announcement, when the fanboys are disappointed that the hyped up rumors they believed in turned out to be false regardless of how good the announced product really is. But the stock always rebounds and grows once the market realizes that what was released was actually pretty good and forgets about the unrealistic promises from the rumor mill.
And Apple has always taken a 'less is more' approach rather than a 'cram in all the cutting edge features any geek has ever heard of'' approach. And it has worked pretty well for them as the features they do chose to include they can take time to polish.
Thing is, Apple didn't do anything to set up expectations, unless you believe the conspiracy theories that all the rumors are planted by Apple PR. Remember, no Apple product exists until Steve or now Tim announces it on stage. Anything before that is merely speculation, and unrealistic expectations are created in the rumor mill echo chamber. It's a trade off really, as Apple has chosen historically to not tip their hand as to what products they are working on. So the rumor mill fills in the blanks with wild speculation. So it's either let everybody know what you're working on and risk competitors beating you to market, or keep quiet and risk disappointment among the fans when their hyped up assumptions prove wrong.
The whole "4G" thing is such a joke. First, there's what the official standards body is calling 4G, which is about 100 times faster than the existing 3G networks, but completely unrealistic to get working in the next decade. So since consumers no longer saw 3G as cutting edge, the networks had to release something called 4G to satisfy the masses. Sprint was the first of the US carriers, using WiMax. Verizon followed by using LTE. Both WiMax and LTE were supposed to be really freaky fast, but in the real world weren't nearly as fast as advertised. So T-Mobile and AT&T realized that they just needed to do a little upgrade to their existing 3G networks to get the same speeds the other two were advertising as 4G, by using HSPA+. So for now, HSPA+ is just as good as LTE or WiMax, any of the 3 technologies can be called 4G since 4G is a meaningless marketing term now anyway, and the iPhone 4S supports HSPA+ and is therefore technically a "4G" phone but without the godawful battery drain that WiMax and LTE cause.
Actually, I'm not surprised at all, and kind of wish the fanboys who are raging that the new phone doesn't shit rainbows and have a '5' in its name would sell off more of their stock and depress the value even more so that I can afford to buy some AAPL for myself.
Businesses deciding to shut down divisions that make steadily increasing amounts of *profit* every quarter, including record profits during recessions, is kinda beyond stupid to even suggest.
The real question is why aren't there equivalent apps for Android? Android has apps too. I don't know about the economist, but if Netflix was accessible through vanilla HTML5, it would be the perfect vector for piracy. Regardless of where you stand on file sharing, Netflix has to play by the studios' rules in order to be able to legally provide subscriptions to tv shows and movies. That means Apps. I understand that Netflix does have an Android app, but it is only available on certain devices because it depends on hardware support for the necessary encryption.
I think this is a deficiency in English, actually. On one hand, you have a word "size", which is defined to mean an object's physical dimensions. On the other hand, there is a linguistic need for a word generically meaning "how much of it there is" without specifying which measurement is meant. To the casual non-physicist, it doesn't matter if an object has a comparable diameter to Jupiter, or a comparable mass to Jupiter. All they care about is that it is comparable to Jupiter - i.e. "pretty damn big, but not like star big, more like Jupiter big". The word closest to this concept is "size". So until a new word is coined that generically means "how big", then I maintain that "same size as Jupiter" is correct in this case.
Let's face it Apple's bread and butter is their iPhone
And before that, their bread and butter was the iPod. Before that, the Mac.
And pretty soon, their bread and butter will be the iPad. That's too bad that it doesn't support one feature that you feel is a show stopper (USB without an adapter. You know the iPad does support USB with an adapter), but to millions of normal people out there, that doesn't seem to be such a big deal.
I can't wait to see what Apple's next innovative and genre defining product will be. And I cant wait to laugh at all the Apple haters who claim that that new revolutionary product is worthless crap because it doesn't support X feature.
That's weird, I believe Woz made the world better.
Yes, Woz is an amazing engineer, and Jobs is a sales guy. But Jobs had the vision that Woz lacked. If Jobs hadn't convinced Woz to join him in founding Apple, Woz would have remained just another engineer at HP or wherever. The truth is that everything that Apple has done has been the vision of Jobs (except during the exile years when Apple had no vision). Jobs just needed a good engineer to implement his vision of what personal computing should be. In the beginning, that was Woz. In Apple 2.0, that has been various people, mostly the team he brought with him from NeXT, as well as Jonny Ive who could implement his aesthetic vision for technology.
The hope is that this team that could implement Jobs' vision can have its own vision that is just as visionary.
There is no reason that snow on the roof should melt any more than snow on the ground. Both are equally exposed to the sun. If snow is melting off of your roof, and not off of the ground, you might want to check your roof insulation because that snow melt is coming straight from your heating bill.
And having lived in Minnesota my entire life, I can say that your average roof truss can hold up quite a bit of snow weight. The only time I have seen a roof collapse due to snow weight was on a barn after a major ice storm, and even then, the only part that collapsed was shoddily constructed in the first place.
I know this is/., but the lack of TFA reading comprehension for this article is crazy even for slashdot standards.
The PDF never claims that the spinning heat sink eliminates the boundary layer. They only claim that spinning the heat sink reduces the boundary layer thickness by several orders of magnitude. And it makes sense, as the speed of air over the impeller blades moving at several thousand RPM is quite a bit faster than the speed of air that can be pushed over a static heat sink by a traditional fan. The faster the airflow, the smaller the boundary layer. The only way to get air moving that fast over a static heat sink is with a jet, and establishing such a jet in a computer enclosure environment exceeds reasonable power requirements.
... I fail to see how anything they did should be illegal or otherwise worthy of any sort of lawsuit.
Please do a little reading on civil vs. criminal law. Civil cases deal with liability, not with criminality. You are right, there is nothing illegal about changing content on wikipedia. But it is very possible to damage someone monetarily, reputation wise, etc. by what you add or remove to wikipedia, and you would be liable for those damages should you do said edit. And that is why this was a civil case, not a criminal case.
I would argue that rights fall into two general categories - active rights, and passive rights. Active rights give you the right to do something (e.g. right to freedom of speech, right to bear arms, right to smoke a cigarette, etc.), and passive rights give you the right to not have something done to you (e.g. right to not be searched without a warrant, right to live, right to not breathe polluted air, etc.). In general, I believe (my opinion as I am not a constitutional law expert) that you may exercise any of your active rights, as long as they do not infringe on any other person's passive rights. Therefore, it is your right to smoke a cigarette as long as you don't infringe on somebody else's right to not breathe polluted air. Their choosing to breathe clean air doesn't infringe your right to smoke a cigarette, as they are not "not breathing polluted air at you" as that makes no sense. Not breathing polluted air is a passive action. Likewise, it is your free speech right to yell fire unless it will result in infringing others' right to not be trampled to death, whereas peoples' right to not be trampled to death does not infringe your free speech right to yell fire. And it is the right of the person dying of renal failure to receive a kidney transplant unless it infringes your right to make decisions regarding your own body. Now, if there were perfectly good spare kidneys just lying around not being used by anyone, it would then be infringing the renal patient their right to life to deny them one of those kidneys 'just because'.
Another interesting thing about active vs. passive rights, is that it is a passive action to not exercise an active right (it is clearly not true that every patron of the theatre makes a conscious decision not to yell 'fire' every time they attend a show), but it is an active action to not exercise a passive right. One could, for example, choose to allow yourself to be searched without a warrant. Perhaps because you have nothing to hide, and wish to discredit an accuser in a 'turn the other cheek' sort of civil disobedience. But the point is, you have to make the decision to let them search you for it to not be infringing.
Apple doesn't need to detect iTunes purchases in your library, as they already have a record of those purchases on the iTunes servers. And that's not even what this is about. Parent is just talking about differentiating all of the sources OTHER than iTunes purchases, which is what matters. There is no way to reliably differentiate between an mp3 downloaded from Amazon, ripped from a CD you own, or obtained in any other way. The important thing, and why we are even talking about this, is that Apple is providing this service for all of your music that isn't purchased from iTunes as well as for your iTunes purchases.
I replicated my car because it was the only way to get the type of car I wanted. The local car dealerships don't stock non-mainstream cars, so when a traveler passing through my town was driving the car I wanted, I used my matter replicator to create a copy of it. If the car companies wanted to prevent car theft, they would have built a car dealership in my town.
FTFY.
That's the only way for the car analogy to really apply to music sharing. As many others have said, when you pirate a track, the original still exists.
It gets started by the (accurate) report that the captain was not in the cockpit when the situation started, as determined by the cockpit voice recorder. The rumors just speculated on the reason he was not in the cockpit.
Why so many people fail to grasp the difference between "first to do X" and "first to do X well" I will never understand. Yes, they innovate by taking concepts that others have thought of (tables, mp3 players, etc.) and merge them with a true forward-thinking vision to make something that people want.
I agree completely. The Marvin from the movie looks exactly like I'd imagine Sirius Cybernetics would design something to look. He looks like he was supposed to be happy and bubbly like Eddie (the ship's computer), which makes the depression that much funnier.
Yet there is no proof that the current state of affairs is the only way things can be. NIMBY politics have prevented development of safer plant technologies. Yes, the liability of continuing to run 70s era reactors is huge, but so is the amount of energy that can be generated by them. If nuclear in general wasn't economical, all the nuke plants would have been shut down and replaced by coal years ago. Nobody is forcing them to stay open and operational.
Slashdot Mirror
As an antidisestablishmenterianist Apple iPologist, I actually agree with you. On one hand, I think the features in iOS5 are pretty impressive. While it is unavailable for the 3G I currently have, and will be pre-installed on the 4S that I will soon have, the news is moot to me. But even if I had a 4, there is plenty of general media and tech blog coverage, let alone the PR coming straight from Apple itself that you'd have to be living under a rock to not know about iOS5 already. Especially if you are the type to read slashdot.
My understanding is that usury has to do with unreasonable interest rates, not the amount of principal lent. Perhaps there was usury and other predatory lending going on, but what turned it into a financial crisis that affected everyone was the fraud behind the reselling of the loans, rather than the loans themselves. As far as I know, (IANAL) there isn't a law simply against giving out high risk loans, which is what the GP was trying to say.
And yes, there was probably lots of illegal predatory lending going on, but that is just between the lenders and the borrowers. But it was the subsequent illegal deception to downstream investors as to the risk of that lending that destroyed the economy. And it is that crime that heads should roll for.
There's no real crime in giving bad loans. Nothing is stopping me from giving you all the money you want. It's just a really really stupid business decision on my part. I should have known that you probably won't be able to pay me back and you will probably end up declaring bankruptcy, thus legally preventing me from making you pay me back.
No, the real crime was in the fraud when the banks took what they knew to be very high risk mortgages, and hid and misrepresented that risk when they repackaged and sold them as mortgage backed securities.
If a particle has mass, its velocity will be less than C. If a particle has no mass, its velocity will equal C.
Apple's stock has always taken a dip the day of a big announcement, when the fanboys are disappointed that the hyped up rumors they believed in turned out to be false regardless of how good the announced product really is. But the stock always rebounds and grows once the market realizes that what was released was actually pretty good and forgets about the unrealistic promises from the rumor mill.
And Apple has always taken a 'less is more' approach rather than a 'cram in all the cutting edge features any geek has ever heard of'' approach. And it has worked pretty well for them as the features they do chose to include they can take time to polish.
Thing is, Apple didn't do anything to set up expectations, unless you believe the conspiracy theories that all the rumors are planted by Apple PR. Remember, no Apple product exists until Steve or now Tim announces it on stage. Anything before that is merely speculation, and unrealistic expectations are created in the rumor mill echo chamber. It's a trade off really, as Apple has chosen historically to not tip their hand as to what products they are working on. So the rumor mill fills in the blanks with wild speculation. So it's either let everybody know what you're working on and risk competitors beating you to market, or keep quiet and risk disappointment among the fans when their hyped up assumptions prove wrong.
The whole "4G" thing is such a joke. First, there's what the official standards body is calling 4G, which is about 100 times faster than the existing 3G networks, but completely unrealistic to get working in the next decade. So since consumers no longer saw 3G as cutting edge, the networks had to release something called 4G to satisfy the masses. Sprint was the first of the US carriers, using WiMax. Verizon followed by using LTE. Both WiMax and LTE were supposed to be really freaky fast, but in the real world weren't nearly as fast as advertised. So T-Mobile and AT&T realized that they just needed to do a little upgrade to their existing 3G networks to get the same speeds the other two were advertising as 4G, by using HSPA+. So for now, HSPA+ is just as good as LTE or WiMax, any of the 3 technologies can be called 4G since 4G is a meaningless marketing term now anyway, and the iPhone 4S supports HSPA+ and is therefore technically a "4G" phone but without the godawful battery drain that WiMax and LTE cause.
Actually, I'm not surprised at all, and kind of wish the fanboys who are raging that the new phone doesn't shit rainbows and have a '5' in its name would sell off more of their stock and depress the value even more so that I can afford to buy some AAPL for myself.
Businesses deciding to shut down divisions that make steadily increasing amounts of *profit* every quarter, including record profits during recessions, is kinda beyond stupid to even suggest.
Like HP?
The real question is why aren't there equivalent apps for Android? Android has apps too. I don't know about the economist, but if Netflix was accessible through vanilla HTML5, it would be the perfect vector for piracy. Regardless of where you stand on file sharing, Netflix has to play by the studios' rules in order to be able to legally provide subscriptions to tv shows and movies. That means Apps. I understand that Netflix does have an Android app, but it is only available on certain devices because it depends on hardware support for the necessary encryption.
I think this is a deficiency in English, actually. On one hand, you have a word "size", which is defined to mean an object's physical dimensions. On the other hand, there is a linguistic need for a word generically meaning "how much of it there is" without specifying which measurement is meant. To the casual non-physicist, it doesn't matter if an object has a comparable diameter to Jupiter, or a comparable mass to Jupiter. All they care about is that it is comparable to Jupiter - i.e. "pretty damn big, but not like star big, more like Jupiter big". The word closest to this concept is "size". So until a new word is coined that generically means "how big", then I maintain that "same size as Jupiter" is correct in this case.
Let's face it Apple's bread and butter is their iPhone
And before that, their bread and butter was the iPod. Before that, the Mac.
And pretty soon, their bread and butter will be the iPad. That's too bad that it doesn't support one feature that you feel is a show stopper (USB without an adapter. You know the iPad does support USB with an adapter), but to millions of normal people out there, that doesn't seem to be such a big deal.
I can't wait to see what Apple's next innovative and genre defining product will be. And I cant wait to laugh at all the Apple haters who claim that that new revolutionary product is worthless crap because it doesn't support X feature.
That's weird, I believe Woz made the world better.
Yes, Woz is an amazing engineer, and Jobs is a sales guy. But Jobs had the vision that Woz lacked. If Jobs hadn't convinced Woz to join him in founding Apple, Woz would have remained just another engineer at HP or wherever. The truth is that everything that Apple has done has been the vision of Jobs (except during the exile years when Apple had no vision). Jobs just needed a good engineer to implement his vision of what personal computing should be. In the beginning, that was Woz. In Apple 2.0, that has been various people, mostly the team he brought with him from NeXT, as well as Jonny Ive who could implement his aesthetic vision for technology.
The hope is that this team that could implement Jobs' vision can have its own vision that is just as visionary.
There is no reason that snow on the roof should melt any more than snow on the ground. Both are equally exposed to the sun. If snow is melting off of your roof, and not off of the ground, you might want to check your roof insulation because that snow melt is coming straight from your heating bill.
And having lived in Minnesota my entire life, I can say that your average roof truss can hold up quite a bit of snow weight. The only time I have seen a roof collapse due to snow weight was on a barn after a major ice storm, and even then, the only part that collapsed was shoddily constructed in the first place.
I know this is /., but the lack of TFA reading comprehension for this article is crazy even for slashdot standards.
The PDF never claims that the spinning heat sink eliminates the boundary layer. They only claim that spinning the heat sink reduces the boundary layer thickness by several orders of magnitude. And it makes sense, as the speed of air over the impeller blades moving at several thousand RPM is quite a bit faster than the speed of air that can be pushed over a static heat sink by a traditional fan. The faster the airflow, the smaller the boundary layer. The only way to get air moving that fast over a static heat sink is with a jet, and establishing such a jet in a computer enclosure environment exceeds reasonable power requirements.
... I fail to see how anything they did should be illegal or otherwise worthy of any sort of lawsuit.
Please do a little reading on civil vs. criminal law. Civil cases deal with liability, not with criminality. You are right, there is nothing illegal about changing content on wikipedia. But it is very possible to damage someone monetarily, reputation wise, etc. by what you add or remove to wikipedia, and you would be liable for those damages should you do said edit. And that is why this was a civil case, not a criminal case.
I would argue that rights fall into two general categories - active rights, and passive rights. Active rights give you the right to do something (e.g. right to freedom of speech, right to bear arms, right to smoke a cigarette, etc.), and passive rights give you the right to not have something done to you (e.g. right to not be searched without a warrant, right to live, right to not breathe polluted air, etc.). In general, I believe (my opinion as I am not a constitutional law expert) that you may exercise any of your active rights, as long as they do not infringe on any other person's passive rights. Therefore, it is your right to smoke a cigarette as long as you don't infringe on somebody else's right to not breathe polluted air. Their choosing to breathe clean air doesn't infringe your right to smoke a cigarette, as they are not "not breathing polluted air at you" as that makes no sense. Not breathing polluted air is a passive action. Likewise, it is your free speech right to yell fire unless it will result in infringing others' right to not be trampled to death, whereas peoples' right to not be trampled to death does not infringe your free speech right to yell fire. And it is the right of the person dying of renal failure to receive a kidney transplant unless it infringes your right to make decisions regarding your own body. Now, if there were perfectly good spare kidneys just lying around not being used by anyone, it would then be infringing the renal patient their right to life to deny them one of those kidneys 'just because'.
Another interesting thing about active vs. passive rights, is that it is a passive action to not exercise an active right (it is clearly not true that every patron of the theatre makes a conscious decision not to yell 'fire' every time they attend a show), but it is an active action to not exercise a passive right. One could, for example, choose to allow yourself to be searched without a warrant. Perhaps because you have nothing to hide, and wish to discredit an accuser in a 'turn the other cheek' sort of civil disobedience. But the point is, you have to make the decision to let them search you for it to not be infringing.
Apple doesn't need to detect iTunes purchases in your library, as they already have a record of those purchases on the iTunes servers. And that's not even what this is about. Parent is just talking about differentiating all of the sources OTHER than iTunes purchases, which is what matters. There is no way to reliably differentiate between an mp3 downloaded from Amazon, ripped from a CD you own, or obtained in any other way. The important thing, and why we are even talking about this, is that Apple is providing this service for all of your music that isn't purchased from iTunes as well as for your iTunes purchases.
I replicated my car because it was the only way to get the type of car I wanted. The local car dealerships don't stock non-mainstream cars, so when a traveler passing through my town was driving the car I wanted, I used my matter replicator to create a copy of it. If the car companies wanted to prevent car theft, they would have built a car dealership in my town.
FTFY.
That's the only way for the car analogy to really apply to music sharing. As many others have said, when you pirate a track, the original still exists.
Do you know what an API is?
Or are you suggesting that Apple implemented bird throwing routines in iOS, and then hid them, just to be mean to the Angry Birds developers?
It gets started by the (accurate) report that the captain was not in the cockpit when the situation started, as determined by the cockpit voice recorder. The rumors just speculated on the reason he was not in the cockpit.
Why so many people fail to grasp the difference between "first to do X" and "first to do X well" I will never understand. Yes, they innovate by taking concepts that others have thought of (tables, mp3 players, etc.) and merge them with a true forward-thinking vision to make something that people want.
I agree completely. The Marvin from the movie looks exactly like I'd imagine Sirius Cybernetics would design something to look. He looks like he was supposed to be happy and bubbly like Eddie (the ship's computer), which makes the depression that much funnier.
But yes, the movie's Zaphod was horrible.
And SpaceX will be launching a deep space exploration craft from the Bigelow Space Station long before the MPCV gets a single test flight.
Yet there is no proof that the current state of affairs is the only way things can be. NIMBY politics have prevented development of safer plant technologies. Yes, the liability of continuing to run 70s era reactors is huge, but so is the amount of energy that can be generated by them. If nuclear in general wasn't economical, all the nuke plants would have been shut down and replaced by coal years ago. Nobody is forcing them to stay open and operational.